The Secret to Success with Meditation

Lately, I’ve been chatting with a lot of people in the clinic about meditation. We all know that it is good for us - it relieves stress, improves your mental health and gives your brain a boost, it can reduce inflammation and pain and can even enhance your immune system. With all those benefits, why wouldn’t you want to have a meditation practice?

Well, the most common reason I am hearing is because it is hard. So, I ask what is hard about it, and the response is most often “because I can’t keep my mind empty - I just keep having thoughts.” And therein lies the problem. Somehow, we have come to believe that the point of meditation is to have an empty mind. That we should be able to sit down and empty it, spend some time like that and then be done. 

But it’s the act of returning the thinking brain back to focus(or “emptying” it) that is where the magic really is. One of the best explanations for this that really changed the way I think about it is from the book “Search Inside Yourself: The Unexpected Path to Achieving Success, Happiness (and World Peace)” by Chade-Meng Tan. Yep, quite a title and quite a book - the author was one of google’s first engineers, and his goal is "to enlighten minds, open hearts and create world peace."

In the book, he explains that it isn’t the empty brain that is what benefits us, it’s the practice of bringing it back to that emptiness/focus. He says each time you bring your mind back to focus, it’s like doing a bicep curl for your brain. That’s right - it’s the act of re-focusing that builds your meditation muscle. So every time I find my brain wandering during meditation, I think “great! Another rep!”

With that in mind (no pun intended), how do you feel about giving it a chance? Are you ready for some mindfulness reps? Let me know how it goes!