Meditation has been the most unexpected resource in my life. It can be the best thing you ever do for yourself. The daily practice, the discipline it requires to sit with your mind everyday can be a fulcrum of change in your life. It’s the most elegant and simple step towards self improvement available to us as humans. Breath and observe it all. If you can’t just sit and observe, what power do you have over your mind at all? But if it’s so simple, why doesn’t everyone do it? How do we overcome the resistance to start a meditation practice? The concept of meditating always made me cringe, but that all changed when my father in law received a terminal diagnoses.

After my father in law was diagnosed with stage 4 glioblastoma my wife and I took a long look at our live’s trajectory. Terminal diagnoses will tend to have that effect. We had been losing weight and working on ourselves for about a year before, but his diagnosis gave new gravity to the importance of health and finding happiness in the here and now. We had just moved cities and the stress of my father-in-law’s fight with cancer ate up all of our emotional capacities, leaving us with no energy to make new friends. Tony Robbins says you are the average of your 5 closest friends. I didn’t feel like making any, so instead I collected the smartest, most motivated, curious people I could find. I found these role models by listening to backlogs of podcasts, reading mountains of books and watching countless videos. It was a constant stream of motivation. I listened to Tim Ferriss analyze top performer’s routines and habits while scrubbing toilets at my job first thing every morning. I listened to Joe DeSena dissect what motivates elite athletes and CEO’s while I mopped. I read countless books on the bus ride to and from work. From How to Win Friends and Influence People to Siddartha, War of Art, Waking Up and many more. I reread and re-listened to the most impactful ones again with my wife, pausing often to tear apart and analyze the whole thing, wringing out every lesson we could. Our lives had taken some difficult turns and we were desperate to recover, be stronger and better prepared for the next challenge.

Watching one of the most influential men in my life get sick and pass away made me face my own mortality vividly each day. Surprisingly, I love my in-laws and felt more accepted by them than my own family. For obvious reasons though, my grief had to come second to my wife’s. Reading and listening to these improvement based podcasts, books and videos not only helped me stay motivated to be physically healthy, but also gave me more emotional room to help my wife through her grief. It improved my mental health, I found more efficiency in my thought processes and learned to better appreciate the short time I have here. As I started applying the principles most common among my sources I saw immediate and dramatic change. I saw many noticeable improvements in all of the relationships in my life. It gave me a new perspective and new tools to help deal with my grief. But there was one piece of advice I kept hearing and ignoring from my makeshift circle of friends: the importance of developing a meditation practice. It made me cringe every time I heard it but it was consistently touted. Still I resisted.

Meditation is a heavy phrase. I remember when I was young I associated it with things of the occult. Not the scary occult stuff, like voodoo, but the soft stuff, like ouija boards and palm reading. My impression of it was just a vague notion of a person trying to make their brain develop superpowers or something like that. As I started getting older I got incredibly interested in anything Asian thanks to ninjas (starting of course with the adolescent, mutated, amphibian variety). Here I learned that meditation had something to do with trying to become one with the universe and achieving enlightenment, whatever that is supposed to mean. A little older, a little smarter, or so I hoped, meditation somehow became something that was tied into soccer moms and their spiritual auras. A way of getting in touch with your inner goddess or some dripping bullshit like that. But I love challenging assumptions so I thought I’d dig in and see what I could find.

So began the process of obsession I refer to as research. I didn’t know anything about meditating other than it had something to do with finding enlightenment or becoming one with the universe or some hippy-dippy crap like that. I had a lot of assumptions about meditating but as I listened to these podcasts no one used any religious or woo-woo-y language to describe what they were doing. As they spoke I got more of the impression they were in a gym than on a cushion. They used words like “focus” and “practice” and not like “chakras” or “enlightenment.” Meditation wasn’t about some spiritual intangibility or the musings of an isolated monk. It was a tool that sharpened many of the finest minds the world has known. And finally this quote from Joseph Goldstein knocked me upside the head: “if you want to understand your mind, sit down and observe it.” That’s all it took. The hook was in. I was intrigued.

Looking around online you will come across a lot of new-agey descriptions of meditation ranging from trying to achieve enlightenment to opening up your chakras. Mediation was mostly brought to the American public by Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, the Beatles’ guru, and ever since then it has been linked to Indian mysticism. But meditation itself is doesn’t have to be mystical. You can certainly tie any religion you please into meditation, but it doesn’t make it a religious practice. Just like juggling doesn’t necessarily mean you are a clown, it’s only a skill until you dress it up properly. Meditation is primarily about gaining control and perspective over your mind and body.

While researching I also found many scientific studies showing a vast array of benefits from meditating. One hour of meditation training has been shown to reduce pain by 40%! That’s huge! To put that into context morphine reduces pain by a mere 25%. A drug that people ruin their lives over, is 15% less effective at pain relief than meditating for one hour! Meditation also increases the grey matter concentration in areas of your brain involved in learning, memory and emotional regulation. It can even make structural changes to your brain. It also reduces heart rate, blood pressure and harmful inflammation. It increases immunity and memory. It can even make you live longer while reversing age-related brain degeneration. There far too many benefits to list them all.

Live longer? Be healthier? Better than morphine? With data like that, I was compelled test it out myself. But still, I felt weird about it. You just want me to close my eyes and breath? And magic happens? Promise? But the science was there and I had too many role models saying it’s crucial. I decided it was time to present my findings to my sounding board, my wife. It was uncomfortable to talk about, even with the person I share everything with. I felt like I was telling her the Easter Bunny was real, but she was very receptive. She told me that she had come across meditation a lot on her own as well, and she had the same apprehensions as I did. We spun it around for a while, and finally returned to the fact that there was nothing else to do but give it a try.

The first time we meditated I was incredibly self conscious. I couldn’t settle down. This is approximately what it sounded like in my head while I did my absolute best not to think about anything except my breath:

Ok, breathing in and out. How are you supposed to hold your hands? Is this how I breath naturally? Am I sitting right? Why does my back hurt so much? Why can’t I stop thinking about Rafiki from The Lion King? Ok settle down, pay attention to your breath. Concentrate on your breath. Ok, easy enough. Breathing in and breathing out, in and out, this is too easy. I should be doing something else, right? Is something supposed to be happening? Why don’t I feel anything? Where’s that magic I was promised? Oh crap I’m slouching already. Does my back have no strength at all? Why would it? I never worked on it. I only cared about biceps and pectorals when I was younger. Psh, glamour muscles. Who knew I would ever need back muscles to meditate? Shit, I’m supposed to be thinking about my breath! Breathing in and out. Calm. In and out. Why is it so hard to pull air in? Slouching again! Clearly you need to work on better posture if you can’t even support yourself for 5 minutes. 5 minutes of concentration. Oh right my breath. In and out….in and out…in and out….what was that noise?….

And so it continued until the time ran out. I opened my eyes and a deep, relaxed feeling spread through my body. I felt very content. As the gears started reengaging and my brain readjusted to my surroundings, I realized I spent more time lost in thought than concentrating on my breath. Suddenly I was aware of how out of control my brain was. If I couldn’t make my brain concentrate on something as simple as breathing for 5 minutes, then clearly I wasn’t in charge of what was happening in my own head; a terrifying prospect for someone that values rationality and logic. The implications weighed on me. I had been running on autopilot for my entire life, letting whatever thought or emotion that springs up dictate my actions and state of mind. How could I possibly say I am in charge of who I am, if I don’t have much say in my actions and my mood? I had to seize control, to gain my sovereignty over my identity.

I began to meditate every day. Just for 5 minutes at first until it felt like it was ending sooner than I’d like. Then I add 5 minutes, gradually gaining more control over mind. I continued this way until I found a time I was happy with consistently. I settled on 20 minutes a day. Almost as soon as I began my meditation practice I saw improvements everywhere that persist and grow even today. My patience has increased exponentially, I am able to control my emotions on a much deeper level. I am able to stop most of those repeating, destructive, incessant thoughts from running around and dictating my attitude. I am able to sort through productive and unproductive thoughts and let go of the things that I don’t have control over. I can now observe emotions as they build and decide whether to engage with them, or simply let them fade away on their own. I am able now to find the intrinsic happiness of just simply being alive anytime that I need it. And of course the ability to calm my mind has increased exponentially. On an ideal day all of these are working and everything is beautiful, but even on my worst days I still have a enough healthy mechanisms that one of them catches me before I spin out of control.

Bad days just aren’t as bad, and average days are exceptionally better than they’ve ever been before. Of course it’s never perfect and there’s always something more to work on. That’s just life, you can’t control it, but meditating gives you control over your responses. And it has so many intangible but deeply felt effects. I suspect that’s sometimes why it’s so quickly linked with mysticism. People lack the vocabulary to describe what they experience so they use descriptive metaphors that eventually get taken literally. I don’t mean to invalidate all spirituality tied to mediation, but I do think people reach for it too quickly most of the time. To illustrate here is my attempt to describe what I literally experienced in one of my deeper meditations. I am trying to give you the truest sense of what I experience when I can maintain deep, relaxed concentration on my breath without any extra woo-wooy stuff added in, just what I observe.

I hold my focus in my sinuses feeling the cool air entering, every moment getting cooler and cooler the longer I inhale. My inhale dissolves into an exhale and my sinuses start to feel the heat from the smoldering hearth in my body as I expel the bad stuff. My entire world shrinks down to the cooling and warming of my sinuses, and the expanding and contracting of my body. The crisp, refreshing inhale like a cold drink on a hot day. The transition from pulling and consuming to releasing and contracting is hypnotic. And the exhale, letting go of all the tension in my body as I melt into my seat. Then comes the tranquility of the stillness in the natural pause between breaths, like untouched, freshly fallen snow. Finally taking in a new rejuvenating breath of air, in and out, ad infinitum.

In and out, cleansing and releasing. The pattern is familiar. Consuming and expelling. Expanding and contracting. I feel my lungs open up, the sound of my breathing deepens and slows. Ritardando. Suddenly I’m aware it’s not just my lungs expanding and contracting, it’s my entire body. I feel my body grow and shrink in time with the sound of the wind tunnel that is my lungs. The edges that define my body start to become pixilated and hazy as I examine every aspect of the sinusoidal rhythm. I no longer can tell where my body ends and the room around me begins. In fact, the more I examine it the more sure I am that there’s no defining line between the myself and the room. None of it is separate at all. It’s not only my body that’s expanding and contracting, it’s the entire room. I can feel the walls push out as my diaphragm expandes, then bow in as I push my lungs empty. I realize just as there’s no discrete boundary to the outside of an atom, there’s no defining end or beginning to me. I’m as much a part of my apartment as my arm is a part of my body. And just as I’m not separate from my apartment, my apartment is not separate from the building around it. It’s included inside the building as a part of the building, not separate from the other apartments positioned next to, on top of or below me. And my building is not a separate building but a single piece of the puzzle that makes up the block, and the block is a part of the neighborhood, and the neighborhood part of the city. This realization continues to cascade in this direction pulling out further and further. I feel a pull like I’m a fish on a hook. I begin to see how everything on this planet is just part of one living biosphere and nothing can live without affecting everything surrounding it. The hook pulls harder. I’m dragged out of my apartment to a place much more profound, like being rocketed into space. The pull so powerful and sudden that it elicits a deep panic. The pull becomes a sharp acceleration, like going to warp speed. It’s too much and too fast. I let the fear take hold of me and my eyes fly open. I take a breath and calm myself back down.



Words just cannot express where the mind can take you when you remove stimulus. Every time I go into one of these deeper, meditative states, the time flies by in a flash. I feel so calm and relaxed that I could swear I was high. I don’t always get into these deeper states. Sometimes I’ll begin to feel the room swell with me again, but as the anticipation of that deeper place builds, I lose concentration and fall out of that heightened state. Just like the classic cartoon mistake, I look down and realize I’m off the edge of the cliff, and gravity takes over. I may have dipped my toe into the elusive enlightened state Eastern thought speaks of or, it may have been a construct of my mind. There really isn’t a difference and that’s exactly the crux of the matter. When we are talking about meditation, we are speaking of an extremely subjective experience unique to your mind. Without some kind of stimulus as a reference point, reality and imagination aren’t separated easily. When you close your eyes and sink into your mind, things that seem ridiculous normally can become very real. Without stimulation your imagination will run wild, and it doesn’t take very long to forget that it’s not real. Or is it? That’s an answer I’m not sure I have, but either way this is where the woo-wooy stuff comes from.

I decided early on in my meditation practice, despite most suggestions, I was going to work on my horrific posture at the same time as I learned to meditate. Most advise to sit comfortably, using back support if needed to create less distraction from your meditation. I’m sure my meditation practice would be further along if I had chosen to listen to this advice. I realized, though, if I didn’t sit with the straightest posture I could manage, my breathing was constricted and it brought me out of my meditation. Simultaneously, I decided that pain was just another distraction to overcome. Pain is felt in the brain, and meditation is about controlling the responses you have to the stimulation your brain automatically provides to you. You don’t have to chose to suffer just because you are in pain, and your body will eventually get stronger. So I decided it would be a mindfulness test to fix my posture. It definitely proved to be a huge distraction at first, but now I can sit with a straight back for 20 minutes without much complaining from my body. In hind sight, I would have listened to the advice I initially ignored, and to try to get the habit of meditating established before worrying about correcting my posture. After you have learned how to be mindful it will be easier to accept the discomfort of correcting your posture.

Once I find a stable sitting position I let myself settle. I take a minute and let my body and my mind relax. There are studies that show holding an expression on your face will eventually trick your brain into thinking you are experiencing the mood you are portraying. So I make use of this principal and hold a smile on my lips and an expression of tranquility on my face. After I get settled in my seat, I take 3-5 very slow, deliberate breaths trying to concentrate on every subtle sensation. I fill my lungs as completely as I can and then let out the breath slowly, feeling my entire body relax with the release. Once I feel calm and focused I return my breathing pattern back to normal and just watch. The experience from here can vary based on my state of mind. When I find myself distracted I gently remind myself to return my attention to my breath.

The muscles you are working when you hit the mindfulness gym is your ability to return back to focus from distraction without getting angry, upset or frustrated at yourself for being distracted. As you develop those muscles, you can call on them in your daily life as needed to find calm and focus where you would normally be overwhelmed. But as you begin to work on reacting less to all of the distractions that spring up in your mind, you will find yourself trying to restrain a struggling toddler. If you fight his every movement and chase his every whim, you will lose sight of your goal through all the tiny fists and legs being thrown from every direction. And if you strike out at your mind in frustration, or try to restrain it by force, you will just end up bruised and battered having made no progress. But if you gently and lovingly guide it, your mental muscles get stronger and you develop more and more control. Are you stronger and more patient than a toddler? Than you can be mindful.

When meditating I most often focus only on my breath, referred to commonly as mindfulness meditation, but that is not your only option. I enjoy the quiet serenity it brings me in the morning to focus on just my breathing. You can also chose to meditate on an object like a statue or a candle. Some meditations are about focusing on a mental or emotional goal; more confidence, kindness, forgiveness; less anxiety, fear, anger, or whatever you need to work on. I will use these focused meditations to calm myself down or to work on some place that could use improving. I will use an app that provides guided meditations for these times. These guided meditations are incredibly effective tools at inciting change in daily life and are perfect for developing positive momentum.

As you progress more with meditating you realize every action and reaction is a choice you make. You don’t originate your thoughts. Your brain automatically presents them to you based on patterns and habits established from your life, based on how you’ve trained your brain to react. Through meditation you can develop the ability to decide whether or not to engage with the thoughts your brain plays for you. All of them. It takes time to reprogram the brain to not offer up the old patterns you programed into it, but you can immediately gain control by simply not engaging with the unproductive ones. Experience them and watch them fade.

We all use language that reflects how very little control of our own actions we feel we have. “Look what you made me do!” “I had no choice but to retaliate!” “I didn’t mean to yell but it was the last straw!” “I’m so stressed out, I can’t get out from under it all!” These are all choices that we make for ourselves. You decide when you’ve had enough. You don’t cross some cosmic line that says, “no more!” It’s completely your choice. No one can have any effect on us that we don’t allow. We allow stress build up, we let the anger take over because we are tired, we strike out at someone because we are hurting. You don’t have to be caught like a victim in the crashing waves of your emotions. They will come and go on their own. As Sam Harris points out in his podcasts, you cannot remain in a negative emotional state without constantly engaging with those emotions, perpetuating them in your head. If you were angry all day about something, it was because you chose to continue to turn it over in your head, reigniting your anger over and over. Anger only lasts moments by itself. The fire burns out if you stop injecting fuel. Most people assume that they don’t have the ability to turn off those incessant thoughts. But when you practice returning your mind to a state of calm and peace, you can call on the muscles you’ve built to quiet the incessant thoughts, to put the breaks on the train of thought before you lose control.

I struggled with insomnia for most of my life. Throughout the years I have tried countless methods for getting to sleep from reading to working myself exhausted to muscle relaxation exercises. I was even prescribed sleeping pills in high school, which I ended up refusing to take. Taking them knocked me out, but gave me no rest. It was awful. At times I went 3-4 days straight without a single moment of sleep. It affected everything in my life. Every time I went to lay down my mind would start racing. I could never get it to slow down. It was like trying to stop a locomotive; there was too much momentum to have a fighting chance. What kept me awake was always fluctuating. Sometimes it was depression, sometimes anxiety, sometimes loneliness, sometimes just mundane thoughts repeating on loop incessantly. And it wasn’t only trouble falling asleep, when I could sleep I would wake up over and over again, sometimes never finding sleep again. I’ve always been a light sleeper easily woken by any noise, and I suffered from incredibly vivid nightmares. After high school the intensity of my insomnia went down to a much more manageable level, but I was still struggling with sleep about half of the nights. And that’s how I expected it to always be. I accepted being tired and unable to rest as just a fact of my life. It continued that way until I began meditating. I have found the calm state I reach after meditating for 5-10 minutes is close to identical to the feeling I get right before I drop off to sleep. So on nights where I have an extra hard time slowing myself down, I just take a few minutes to meditate and I’m asleep almost right away. To someone who has struggled with sleep for most of their life, it genuinely feels like having a super power.

Meditation has been has been a dark horse of positive influence for me. At a time in when I felt stretched to my absolute limit, it became a refuge from all the calamity. Developing a daily meditation practice is the smallest, easiest thing you can do in your life to receive exponentially large benefits. It can improve every aspect of your health: physically, mentally and emotionally. It will even make you live longer. There is no excuse. It’s free and hardly requires any time at all to feel the benefits. It’s accessible to anyone. Test it out for yourself and see. Meditation will improve anyone’s life who puts in the time.