The Key To Meditation — This Simple Shift Changes Everything

Are you busy trying to clear your mind when you sit to meditate? Working really hard to find peace and calm? Annoyed by all those busy thoughts distracting you and bringing you stress!?

Well if so, I've got great news for you…

You're doing it wrong!

It’s great news because there’s a simple shift I'll teach you how to make in this article that brings the peace you’re seeking.

And before you beat yourself up about doing it wrong, don’t…it’s not your fault. Most people teach it wrong, too. Chances are the ideas you’ve gotten about meditation from your yoga studio — and definitely the ones you’ve gotten from pop culture — are misinformed. It’s great there’s more awareness around meditation these days…and…all these misconceptions keep me employed 🙃!

The fundamental insight is, the stress of a busy mind is not from the thinking. It is from the not wanting of the thinking.

Meditation is not a practice of stilling or pacifying thoughts. Minds wander! It's what they do.

Meditation is a practice of making peace with the natural busyness of the mind. And then guess what happens in this peace…the mind becomes more still! But only in that order. Trying to make it still precludes this peace and will only make it busier 💡.

Read the last three paragraphs again. This point cannot be overstated.

I've taught hundreds of people to meditate, and it wasn't until the high two hundreds, that I met the first person who's natural response to thinking was a skillful, “oh, the mind's wandering...back to the breath.” She casually noticed it and let it go. No surprise, she grew up in Asia.

See, most of us who grow up in the west, in Judeo-Christian societies, we're judged and taught from birth to judge. To judge ourselves. To judge others. It's literally written into the story of the Garden of Eden. Hell, it's probably in our DNA at this point!

Now when I’m talking about meditation, I’m referring to vipassana, also known as insight or mindfulness meditation. There are other types of meditation, and I’m going to admit, I’m super biased for most of us in the west. We’re already wired to try so damn hard. We don’t need to strengthen the trying harder muscle (trying to concentrate). Quite the opposite. Our path is to learn to love ourselves as we are, to be more gentle with ourselves, to be softer. There are exceptions — for about 5% of my clients, I recommend a practice with more concentration. And. ZERO of those are founders, executives, etc. It’s basically required to have this tightness to “earn” one of these titles. And we can appreciate that tightness — it’s brought us lots of nice things, recognition, etc. And, it probably no longer serves.

When I say I’m biased, more accurately I should say I’ve tried so many modalities. And this is the one that brings me home. Yes, we’re all different. And. If you’re reading this, you’re probably a bit more like me in these ways than not.

So, the affirmative action for this tight mindset is breaking down mindfulness into two wings — awareness, and compassion. See, awareness comes to us quickly. And almost instantly behind, judgment. Which is an umbrella term for anything like — irritation, frustration, annoyance, fatigue, criticism, wanting it to be different, etc. — basically any emotion.

The Tibetans would tell you that Awareness is naturally non-judgmental.

But I like to think we're wired just a little...mmm...differently 🙃.

The Dalai Lama was once meeting with a group of psychologists and meditation teachers when someone in the group asked how to support clients with self-hatred. There was a several minute exchanbe between His Holiness and the translator, and he finally responded to the tune of, “Self-hatred? What is this?”

So, we need advanced instructions!

The most important thing to learn about mindfulness meditation is the thinking never stops. It's not supposed to. It never will. All we're doing is practicing becoming familiar with, Gom, the Tibetan word for meditation, with this mind that naturally thinks. And we want thinking. It's how we've evolved so amazingly. If we didn't have it, we wouldn't be human. We learn to accept this thinking, to allow it.

And...unpracticed...it leads to...well, take a look at the world around us — climate change, war. So, this is why we practice.

With meditation, you're better off thinking of it as a process where it's expected for the mind to become distracted, and all you're learning is to be more gentle with yourself when you realize the distraction that's inevitable.

Compassion is calling a truce, stopping the war. Letting it be. Letting the discomfort be. Releasing the notion of trying, striving, self-improvement, growth, becoming “better”. You’re freaking great just like you are! That's all growth is, realizing this. Coming to peace with you exactly as you are. Without changing a damn thing. Only in this place, do things have the freedom to ever change.

To emphasize this, I often teach counting the number of times you smile after realizing the mind wanders in meditation. Because when you realize the mind has wandered, you're in the present...so, celebrate! You’re practicing celebrating the present vs. judging the past. Thich Nhat Hanh says, “Sometimes your joy is the source of your smile, but sometimes your smile can be the source of your joy.” While I generally don't encourage striving, you can stive for this number, and see what happens 🙃.

It's kind of like that difficult uncle who shows up over the holidays. We welcome him to our table and practice allowing him as he is.

With enough skillful reps, the aversion can subside. And then guess what, with less tension, the thinking can subside. But not the other way around. The mind letting go is the effect, not the cause. You see, "enlightenment is an accident; meditation makes us accident prone" (Shunryū Suzuki). Put another way, aversion to thinking is thinking, and this thinking about thinking is the bulk of the volume of total thinking...and the bulk of the unpleasant parts of thinking.

It's like if I say, “don't think about a purple elephant, don't think about a purple elephant"..what are you thinking about? The mind has a way of latching onto a thing when we consider it; it doesn't have such great respect for boundaries, maybe a bit like that uncle! So, don't waste your energy; that just fuels it. Instead, may I make peace with this? May I allow this? Exactly as it is...without changing a thing?

In other forms of meditation, it is very possible to eventually learn to “clear” the mind and find some peace. And. Guess what happens when you open your eyes and get off the cushion? Life! Life happens. Stuff you can’t control. Super unpleasant stuff, like there is a lot of these days. What if instead you’d been practicing coming to peace with things as they are? Which kind of peace do you think might be more enduring?

And to be clear, with this peace, we don’t sit idly. What we do is we take action. And that is good, because only action rooted in peace has the capacity to be skillful.