First – I don’t know the answer to my question. As a dedicated and enthusiastic meditator, I struggle to understand. Having seen and felt the benefits firsthand, it actually seems a little crazy to me. However, just as I can’t put myself in the shoes of a person who doesn’t think mental training is important or even legitimate, those folks not doing it can’t see the benefits that can be so obvious to those who practice daily. Let’s explore why this might be, and why everybody isn’t doing it.
Reason #1 – It’s Hard Work!!
Meditation isn’t easy. One misconception is that it should be relaxing, and yet for many it can be anything but, especially when just starting out. And while most people start noticing very real benefits within days or weeks of practice – that’s still a real commitment, and it’s a lot of effort! Of course other self-improvement efforts, like working out at the gym, involve hard work too, but with meditation you don’t break a sweat and get that immediate burn that tells you it’s working. Meditation takes time, and it requires diligent, prolonged effort. And the effort involves sitting still, which is both difficult in it’s own right, and more so because the busy, overwhelmed part of us is likely to see sitting still and not doing anything (a misconception about meditation actually) as wasting precious time that we don’t have. This is because the effects (which are often cumulative and incremental) may not be noticeable to the untrained mind right away.
“Meditation is not a quick fix – but it’s a deep fix.” – Shinzen Young
So it’s hard work, and in the beginning, you may come away from sessions without noticing any impact. As American master teacher Shinzen Young puts it, however, “meditation is not a quick fix – but it’s a deep fix.”
Reason #2 – The Measuring Stick
What if I gave you a measuring stick and then told you I wasn’t sure that it was accurate? In fact, what if I told you it was wildly inaccurate and was measuring things all wrong? How would you confirm that? How could you check without something with which to compare it? Perhaps you’d ask for another measuring stick?
This is the problem with training the brain – the only measuring capacity we have lies in the very organ we are trying to measure. (As an aside, I could just as well be saying the mind, but we’ll save that discussion/distinction for another day.) So how can a person subjectively measure or know how well their own brain works? I would submit that the answer is – not well. Since the ability to measure anything relies on the use of our grey matter, how are we supposed to measure how well that grey matter is functioning? Now this may sound like an oversimplification, but in the case of meditation I think it is completely apt. Ironically, the very skills we would need to really notice how well our brain is working (bare attention to our perceptions, thoughts, and behaviors) are those skills which the untrained mind lacks, and are the very skills that meditation develops.
As such, the sad irony is that when a person starts out, because they are very poor at paying attention, they can’t notice easily when they start improving. It is not until they develop a decent level of mindful awareness that they can start to see how they are improving and how the practice is beneficial.
On a related note, a widely-publicized study by Microsoft showed that the average American has an attention span of around 8 seconds, which is less than that of a goldfish. Want to do better than that? I’d suggest you sit down and start training your attention!
Reason #3 – Meditation’s PR Problem
Because contemplative practice has been used throughout history by nearly every religion, there remains a very strong association, at least in the West, between meditation and concepts of faith, mysticism, God, and the occult. While there is no debate about how the practice has been developed within these frameworks, it does not rely on them. In fact, the Western explosion of popular interest in meditation in recent decades has come largely from efforts to extract the mental training exercises from the their spiritual roots. Systems such as MBSR (Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction, created by Jon Kabat-Zinn) have largely removed references to religion, and have shown the mental training to be extremely effective on its own. Still, in popular culture today, meditation can conjure in people visions of burning sage, crystals, mystical gurus and the like. It can be a turn-off to science-minded skeptics.
Reason #4 – I Can’t Stop Thinking
One of the most common misconceptions is that meditation involves stopping thought. This leads beginners to thinking that they can’t meditate, or that they are bad at meditating. Both are nonsense. First, meditation is fundamentally about observing one’s experience, not controlling it. Second, judging yourself to be bad at meditating actually means you’re succeeding to some degree – you’ve pulled yourself away from your thoughts enough to observe them. Meditation teachers will often say that the only bad meditation is one you didn’t do. (OK by that measure I suppose non-meditators can accurately say they are bad at meditating!) And while it is true that advanced meditators may get to a point where they can largely quiet the mind and observe how it works, mental silence is not the goal. Some have said that waiting to start practicing meditation until thoughts cease is like waiting for the waves to disappear before learning to swim in the ocean.
Just jump in. It’s nice in here!
