I feel like I've known about meditation for forever now and have heard about its numerous mental and physical benefits and have even had multiple attempts at trying to make it a habit. I'd try meditating for 5 minutes in the morning or sit on my pillow and meditate before sleeping, but the habit would never stick. There would be the occasional session where I'd feel relaxed and be able to focus on my breath for a few uninterrupted minutes, but most sessions resulted in constant distraction and discomfort in my lower back and neck, and I'd just get annoyed and frustrated and stop.
This past week, I've once again taken up the challenge of building a meditation habit, and while it's only been a week, this time feels different. It's not like I've become enlightened or am a changed person -- my week was actually way more mundane and less satisfying than I had hoped. But due partly to a medical issue motivating me more than ever, partly to a book I was reading, and partly to just having more time, I feel like I've come to a better understanding of how meditation works, seen some of its positive effects, and want to synthesize and share what I've learned.
To start, I should share a bit about where I am in my life as it's impacted my approach to meditation quite a bit. For the past year, I've been dealing with a medical issue that's caused me frequent headaches and discomfort. After a few iterations of taking off and returning to work without significant health improvements, I decided to quit my job last month to focus fully on recovery. This means that I've had ample time to explore meditation as well as heightened motivation to find a way to cure, or at least improve, my headaches.
Given these conditions as well as my previous failed attempts at adopting meditation, the approach I decided to take was to do a "Meditation Week" where I would spend a majority of each day meditating or learning about meditation. I'd be immersing myself in an at-home meditation retreat to give myself a better chance at seeing some benefits of meditation and determining if it's something I want to continue after Meditation Week.
I started Meditation Week by opening Jon Kabat-Zinn's "Full Catastrophe Living" - a book about using meditation for patients with illness and chronic pain, a book that I'd normally roll my eyes over for its cheesy subtitle and ancient-looking cover, but given my chronic headaches, it felt like the right place to start.
Before opening the book, my notion of meditation went like this: you sit down somewhere and focus on your breath. If you get distracted, re-focus your attention on your breath. Repeat until you achieve enlightenment or until your timer is up. These instructions I still feel are solid, but I've learned that the intentions behind them and how you perform them are nuanced and is where most of the work lies. There are a few key points that I want to cover, but it'll be easier to explain if we go through a sample meditation session.
One of the first things the book describes is breathing through your belly as it promotes relaxation and is easier to focus on than the chest or face, where the airflow is less stable. So you breathe in... Then out... In... Out... Then you wake up some time later and realize you've been thinking about what you'll do in the afternoon and how excited you are to try a new game you just bought... Oops, ok, back to the breath... In... Out... In... But man, the graphics just look so amazing in the trailer...
I've learned that getting distracted by your thoughts is unavoidable and does not mean you've failed or are meditating poorly. In fact, dealing with these thoughts is actually a key part of meditation and is what leads to all those meditation benefits we hear about.
Basically, whenever you have a thought spawn, you can try to acknowledge it and then sit with it until it leaves. Not push it away or become annoyed at the intrusion, but neutrally welcome the thought into your mind without diverting your attention away from your breath. Thoughts are like people knocking on your house of attention. You don't need to open the door and engage with them, you can just wave out the window and wait for them to leave.
The book talks about how after engaging in this process for a while, their patients come to the realization that they are not their thoughts. That thoughts pop in from seemingly nowhere and it's up to the conscious mind to decide if and which thoughts deserve attention.
Meditation truly feels like the perfect tool to re-tune this balance. Focusing your attention on the breath is like boosting the volume for the conscious mind. Sitting with your thoughts but not letting them grab hold of your attention is like turning down the static noise. Carrying this analogy even further, waiting for certain thoughts to leave while consciously choosing which thoughts deserve your attention is like tuning the radio to hear one channel clearly.
Going back to the part about the conscious mind being able to change engrained thoughts and behaviors, I finally made the connection on how to actually start walking down this path. Instead of letting myself run on autopilot with the occasional burst of consciousness, I can practice meditation to improve the consistency at which I can catch my thoughts and present them to my conscious mind to steer the ship towards or away from certain thinking patterns and behaviors.
Throughout my Meditation Week, I often found myself in pockets of consciousness. Sometimes when I started thinking about embarrassing high school memories, I would realize that I was thinking about embarrassing high school memories and decide to sit with it and not engage. Sometimes when I thought about my schedule, I would realize it and then continue thinking about my schedule. Sometimes after lunch, when I felt the urge to reach for a piece of chocolate, I would catch myself -- and then struggle for a bit before reaching for it. For some reason this chocolate urge felt different and more difficult to let go of than dealing with a plain thought. There was something about it that felt more urgent and demanding and like at any moment my body would just override my conscious mind.
In... Out... In... Hey remember that time in high school when you got called on and couldn't answer that chemistry question?... Out... In... Out... Hm, my back is pretty uncomfortable... In... Out... It's starting to hurt now, let me move a little... In... Ok better... Out... In... Nose is itchy...
My arch nemesis in my past attempts to meditate was the physical discomfort from sitting in the same position for long periods of time, and often even short periods of time. Many sessions consisted of constant shifting, searching for a comfortable position so that I could actually focus. Little did I know that physical discomfort was also a key part of meditation.
When you feel your lower back straining, or you want to air out your sweaty pits, or worst of all, your nose starts itching, you're supposed to acknowledge these signals and sit with them while maintaining attention on your breath. Sounds masochistic, but this is essentially the same process for handling stray thoughts, just on hard mode.
Compared to thoughts, physical discomfort felt significantly more raw and urgent. I'd often automatically scratch my nose and catch myself in the act. While it's easy to view this as a failure in my focus, my body would literally move without any conscious input. I think the idea is that when you practice catching yourself enough times, you'll be able to catch the action earlier and earlier until you can catch the impulse itself, and then decide whether or not to act on it.
When I first read about this, I felt both vindicated that there was a solution to my biggest meditation problem, but also skeptical. Was I really supposed to sit there with my back crying in pain and power through it and potentially injure myself? Turns out that meditation is not an extreme sport. Just like you can catch thoughts and decide what gets your attention, you can also decide which physical urges to act on.
Learning about this process made me excited to meditate. Knowing that discomfort was not something to avoid but actually embrace made meditation easier and harder. It made it more approachable since I didn't have to worry about finding the perfect sitting position, but if you've ever tried running or swimming, you know just how painful sustained discomfort can be.
But I also realized that this can be seen as another feature instead of a bug. This part gets a little nerdy, but there's emerging research about how willpower correlates with the size of your anterior midcingulate cortex. To build this brain region, you need to do difficult things like taking cold showers or doing extra reps while working out, activities where you are challenged to override your immediate impulse towards comfort. This sounds a lot like trying to meditate without scratching your nose, and I'd argue that meditating with discomfort is the purest form of willpower training. It strips away everything except your breath, an impulse to get comfortable, and which of these you decide to give your attention to.
People often talk about meditation as going to the gym for your brain, and now I fully agree. Sitting with your thoughts trains your attention while sitting with discomfort trains your ability to consistently apply that attention. I've actually been feeling the benefits of this training while I've been writing this article -- the random thoughts and the urges to check my phone are being noticed and not acted upon. For the most part, at least. I couldn't say the same during my Meditation Week.
I went monk mode at the start of Meditation Week. I was meditating for a few hours each day spread across 5-30 minute sessions and was starting to have entire 10+ minute sessions where I felt like I was in control of my thoughts and urges. My attention was being trained, willpower being built, things were going swimmingly.
Then Prime Day started. I had been wanting to build a PC for my brother's graduation gift and was waiting to buy the parts on sale, and Prime Day just happened to overlap completely with my meditation week. I grudgingly (but also excitedly) browsed the sales and researched a part list for the PC. Possibly due to my lower baseline of dopamine / activity from Meditation Week, I became obsessed over this project.
Meditation became difficult. The pull of the perfect mini-itx build kept distracting me and held my attention hostage. I kept debating which set of PC fans to buy instead of focusing on my breath. While I still forced myself to meditate for a couple hours each of the following days, I never got to the levels of focus and attention that I had during those first 2 days.
But that's just part of the journey. There will be ups and downs, and the important thing is to stick to it. I'm proud that I forced myself to stick with the meditation when I almost assuredly would have quit before. I feel like the latter half of my Meditation Week is more representative of what meditation will feel like as I'm starting my journey, especially once I start working again or when other life obligations appear.
Just like with going to the gym, seeing consistent benefits from meditation will likely take months or years. It'll be a difficult and distraction-filled journey, but I just need to take it one breath at a time. But why is it always about the breath? Will it ever get boring just focusing on the breath? Turns out, you can make almost anything into a meditation.
Meditation is about directing and redirecting your attention. You could technically meditate and just focus on nothing at all, but you'd almost immediately start thinking about something. The breath acts as a natural anchor point for your attention -- it's always available, is subtle enough to require enough attention, is automatic but can be influenced, reflects your mental state, and is neutral and rhythmic. But you can focus your attention on other things too, even if they're harder to focus on right?
Full Catastrophe Living has a sample program that they use for their clinic, and this program actually doesn't start with the normal sitting meditation. It starts with 45-minute body scans, where you lie down and focus your attention on different parts of your body. I found the tape that they use and tried it myself everyday for Meditation Week. I ended up doing it twice on most days because I kept falling asleep, which was helpful because my nighttime sleep was not great, and the deep relaxation the body scans induced in me felt very restful. But ideally the sessions are done when awake so you can practice holding your attention.
I've still been practicing body scans everyday with the tape and still fall asleep almost every time, but I think it's fine as my body needs to sleep to recover from my medical issues. 45 minutes is a long time to be lying still in bed in the middle of the day, but the book eventually transitions the patients off body scans to sitting meditation and yoga.
Yoga is something that I have not tried but would like to once my body is recovered and able to stretch. I've instead been doing tai chi every morning with my dad and have substituted this in for yoga. Tai chi movements remind me of yoga but the movements are slower and more constant, emphasizing balance and strength. Tai chi has become one of my favorite ways to meditate as the circular movements just feels so smooth and satisfying.
Next, mindful eating. My favorite story from the book was how they gave each patient 3 raisins and told them to mindfully eat them. They were to first look at the raisin and see its curves and features. Then to pick it up and feel the ridges and slight stickiness. Then to bring the raisin towards their mouth, feeling their arm rise. Then to slowly chew and taste the raisin. Many participants reported feeling that this was the first time they truly tasted a raisin.
I love this idea and while I didn't have any raisins on hand, I started eating my lunches mindfully. It was slow. And difficult. And not as glamorous as the story made it seem. I struggled to slow my chewing and kept feeling a strong urge to clamp my jaw down at a normal speed. My 15-minute lunches were turning into 30 minute ordeals, and I was only eating a quarter of the meal mindfully. But even with how slow and sluggish the process was, I felt immense satisfaction in truly tasting my food and appreciating all the different flavors and effort that went into making it. Even just biting through chunks of soft yet snappy potatoes gave me so much joy, and using my tongue to feel individual grains of rice made me awe in how much work it takes to produce even the simplest meals.
Doing mindful meals was already difficult, but it became especially so with other people. My family tends to eat pretty quickly and we also talk, and I just didn't feel like explaining mindful eating to them, let alone to friends who come over. A sustainable approach that I think I'll take in the future is to mindfully eat the first few bites of a meal, then let loose on the pace but still try to be mindful throughout the meal.
What better activity to do after a meal than a walk? Mindful walking is another form of meditation mentioned in the book where you, well, walk mindfully. You feel the floor on your feet, your arms swinging, your body walking. It sounds nice, but this wasn't for me. I just didn't enjoy walking slowly. Maybe I was spoiled by the satisfying, flowy movements in tai chi, but walking back and forth in a room just didn't do it for me. Don't get me wrong, I love walking and enjoy mindfully walking outdoors where I can focus on the plants and weather and thoroughly enjoy the feeling of walking there, but it was just hard for me to isolate the walking and focus just on that.
On top of walking, eating, and doing body scans, you can do pretty much anything mindfully. I'm not going to get into the semantics of the difference between doing something mindfully and meditation, but here's the way I like to think about it: playing beach volleyball with friends is fun and technically strengthens your muscles, but it's quite different from doing pushups. Mindfully engaging in everyday activities is important and helps you apply what you learn through meditation, but it's not a substitute for the raw reps you get through sitting meditation. Maybe it CAN become a substitute, but from the perspective of a beginner, it definitely feels like I need to focus on the basics first.
I did try doing some other activities in my life more mindfully though. One of my favorite activities was petting and playing with our cat. I used to dream about having a cat and being able to hang out with it and pet it whenever I wanted, and then our family actually got a cat half a year ago. Now that I can pet a cat whenever I want, it feels like I've lost some of that joy and marvel I once had. But paying attention to how soft her fur is and the different shades it carries made me appreciate her so much more. This is another aspect that meditation levels up: gratitude.
After experimenting with these different forms of meditation, I now understand why focusing on the breath is so important and universal. It's the foundation of mindfulness practice, and the skills you build through it benefit all parts of your life. Suddenly, you'll be marveling at how soft yet crunchy potatoes can be while also wondering when your cat's fur became so silky. With risk of sounding too corny, mindfulness lets you peer into life's nooks and crannies and discover their secrets.
The thing that originally motivated my Meditation Week were my chronic headaches that started almost a year ago. For context, I had a lumbar puncture which led to a CSF leak that wasn't properly treated. This resulted in positional symptoms where I would feel discomfort and aching and pain in my head if my body was upright for too long.
Over the past year, I've been able to remain upright for a little longer every couple of months, but the symptoms have been feeling more random in occurrence and severity, and it's become harder to pinpoint the cause of my headaches. On top of this, the severity of my symptoms vary wildly from day to day, week to week, and even the weather feels like it has an impact. I had originally thought everything would be fixed in a month. That estimate quickly changed to 2 months. Then 4. And now I have no idea when it'll be better. All this uncertainty made me feel like I was at the whims of my body and nature, and I just felt a complete lack of autonomy over my recovery.
Meditating for a week did not magically cure my headaches. Nor did it make me feel in control of my headaches. What meditation DID do was start me on the path of embracing my headaches and coming to terms with the current me. This sounds a little woo woo, but basically, the way I viewed my headaches was changing. When I felt the discomfort coming on, instead of cringing at myself for having stood too long and then lying in bed to wait out the headaches, I tried just sitting with the discomfort. I tried getting to know it without my preconceived notions of what I thought it should feel like.
Sometimes it felt like a sharp pain in one part of my head. Other times it was a general dull ache. Other times, it would actually dissipate, like it just wanted my attention and was satisfied after I acknowledged it. The headaches didn't feel as hostile as they used to. They felt familiar, even friendly, like we were both struggling through this medical journey together.
It might sound like I'm personifying the headaches a bit much, but this is 1) how I was actually starting to view my headaches, and 2) quite healthy. There's ample research that I won't get into about how positive mindsets (especially towards one's body) can not only lower the person's perceived pain, but also boost the body's recovery systems. Depressed people take longer to recover and feel worse while doing it than motivated people.
And so this is where I am now. I feel a little more autonomy in my medical situation because although I can't choose to get better or to not feel the pain, I CAN choose whether to accept and meditate in the discomfort, and I can choose how I want to perceive and think about my headaches. Ironically enough, embracing the headaches has made them feel less present in my life.
Meditation is a lot of things. It's a mental gym to workout your mind. It's an activity to reconnect with the grayed out parts of your life. It's a way to find autonomy in seemingly hopeless situations.
For me, it's become all these things and more. Meditation has become a chance. A chance to center my uncertain life. A chance to show myself that I can stick to a difficult hobby. A chance to bring back and invigorate a soul that's been languishing away in a bed. A bit dramatic, yes, but this is what meditation promises. And at the same time, it promises nothing. None of these things happen if you go into meditation expecting things to happen. Being open minded and wholeheartedly naive on what meditation can do for you is how you gain the most from it.
But also, I've only done one week of meditation, only taken the first step of a journey with no destination. Meditation truly seems like the most transformative hobby one can partake in, and all you have to do is sit there and do nothing. This has been the first step in my attempt to sit and do nothing. Thanks for reading. Now, I can finally go scratch my nose.