Jeremy Mohler

Writer and meditation teacher

What it actually feels like to meditate

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I’ve meditated every day for five years now, and every time is still a roller coaster ride.

But the payoff is worth the ride. In fact, it’s the ride itself that pays.

For at least the first ten minutes, sometimes even 15, my mind jumps from thought to thought. I worry about what I’ve got planned for the day. I often replay things that happened the day before, usually conversations that made me feel vulnerable.

Did I sound stupid? Did I say too much? Does she like me? I’m just destined to be lonely.

This is my mind’s default state — unsettled, questioning myself, meandering in the past or the future.

It wouldn’t be so bad if all I did was daydream. What I really like to do is find patterns, to create meaning, to tell stories.

These stories are like looking up symptoms on WebMD. A cough can mean bronchitis or lung cancer or adenoidal hypertrophy. They spiral out of control into assumptions stacked on assumptions, until I’m wracked by anxiety about something that either didn’t happen or hasn’t happened yet or may never happen at all.

Before I started meditating, the stories were in the background all day long. They’d die down if I was really engaged in something, but that something had to be really engaging — say, a good TV show or a close friend who really listens.

But during meditation, after ten or 15 minutes of this frantic thinking something shifts. My body seems to unclench deep inside. My shoulders relax back and down, my stomach muscles release, my face eases, my breath falls into a comfortable rhythm.

It’s like I’d been swimming against the current and finally let the waves just take me.

My mind lets go of whatever I was thinking about and starts to notice more, as if I took a step backwards to witness the present moment. I hear the rain falling outside. I feel the warmth of the room. I smell my roommate’s coffee brewing downstairs. I notice that I’ve slumped over and sit up straight.

Time flows by as an unbroken chain of sensations rather than something to be measured or planned or worried about.

But, sure enough, as soon as I settle into this newfound awareness — known as “mindfulness” — another story rips me away. Planning that email I need to send narrows my focus and stops the flow. A few more minutes pass as I’m lost in thought.

Then some part of me notices that my mind is wandering, and I bring my attention back to the sensations in my body. I hear the sounds in the room. I’m back! I open to the flow until, inevitably, my mind takes me away again.

The bell rings, and I bring this mindfulness off of the cushion, to breakfast, work, and whatever the day has in store.

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Listen to the podcast version

My podcast, Meditation for the Masses, is mindfulness for the 99 percent. Listen to it on Apple Podcasts, Google Play, and everywhere podcasts are available. Stream this episode below.

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Making big life decisions involves being confused. And meditation can help.

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There’s this counterintuitive thing about meditation that’s one of its biggest benefits.

While it helps you stay present — not lost in thinking about the past or future — it can also help you come to deep insights. And sometimes these insights are about your intentions, which are informed by the past and impact the future.

During a seven-day silent meditation retreat last year, I outlined two book ideas and finally settled on a design for my first tattoo — which I got tattooed on my arm an hour after leaving the retreat center.

All that silence and meditation had turned down the volume on my surface level thinking. It soothed my worrying, planning, ruminating, reminiscing, etc. until those thoughts were less interesting than how my body felt breathing and what the meditation room sounded like.

This allowed deeper thoughts to bubble to the surface, thoughts that felt so true I couldn’t deny them. Some of these thoughts were intentions.

What do I mean by intentions?

I used to work in the tech industry helping IT companies win business with the federal government. I hated it from the beginning, but I got pretty good at suppressing what I felt in exchange for the job’s benefits. I could afford living in Washington, D.C., during the 2008–10 recession, felt smart and productive, seemed “normal,” and was making my parents proud.

I always knew I would leave someday but couldn’t figure out what I really wanted to do and how to make the switch.

I slowly realized those questions didn’t matter so much. What was holding me back from leaving where the whys. Why was I still working there? Why did I want to leave? Why did I spend most of my free time writing, meditating, and being an activist?

As I began to explore these questions — truly sit with them, without pretending I had the answers — the job became even less attractive. The pointless emails seemed more pointless. A white colleague’s casual racism towards our Muslim CEO began to bother me. What really bothered me, though, was that I didn’t say anything to him about it.

I was finally admitting that who I was at the office and who I was after work were very different people. I was getting in touch with my intentions, which shone a 1,000-watt spotlight on the fact that my job wasn’t aligned with my values.

By then, I had started meditating regularly. I slowly saw that I was working a corporate job because it made other people happy for me. That was my intention for being there.

Around the same time, I was offered a job in the labor movement helping working people fight corporate power. When my new boss called me with the offer, I barely noticed that I was about to take a $20,000 a year pay cut. My anxious thoughts sounded like a kid upset about not getting ice cream and having to settle for cake. They were surface-level, easy to tune out.

Big life decisions — if we’re lucky enough to be in the position to make them — can be years in the making. But you have to be willing to sit with the questions without thinking you know the answers.

You have to be willing to be confused. You have to be willing to admit: I don’t know.

There’s an ancient Russian tale about an old woman named Baba Yaga that illustrates this point. She lives in a hut deep in a forest where she stirs a pot waiting to tell the truth to whoever visits her.

In the story, three people visit.

The first visitor, a young man encouraged to visit by his parents, knocks on Baba Yaga’s door.

“Are you on your own errand or are you sent by another?” she asks.

“I am sent by my father,” the young man says. Baba Yaga throws him into the pot and cooks him.

The second visitor is a young woman who entered the forest on her on. Again, Baba Yaga asks, “Are you on your own errand or are you sent by another?”

“I am on my own errand,” the young woman answers. Baba Yaga throws her into the pot.

The third visitor, a young woman confused about the world, approaches.

“Are you on your own errand or are you sent by another?” Baba Yaga asks.

The young woman says, “In large part I’m on my own errand, but in large part I also come because of others. And in large part I have come because you are here, and because of the forest, and something I have forgotten, and in large part I know not why I come.”

Baba Yaga says, “You’ll do,” and invites her into the hut.

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Do you think too much? That’s exactly why you should meditate.

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As a new meditation teacher, I’m evangelical about the practice, asking just about everyone whether they’ve tried it.

“No, I think too much,” is the most common answer. Or something like, “I gave up because I couldn’t clear my mind.”

I want to grab their shoulders and shake them — but that wouldn’t be so on-brand of me, would it?

By judging their experience, they’re missing the exact point of meditation — that it helps you accept whatever state your mind is in, whether it’s ruminating, worrying, planning, reminiscing, etc.

That’s the practice: accepting that your mind never stops and gently guiding your attention back to the present moment, over and over again.

Notice. Accept. Come back. Notice. Accept. Come back. That’s it.

After a few minutes of this, your mind will begin to wander less. You’ll be able to keep your attention for longer periods of time on your breath, noises around you, and sensations in the body. You’ll be a little more mindful. Your mind won’t be clear but full — of feelings, sounds, smells, and tastes.

But meditation isn’t just about enjoying your senses.

Neuroscientific research is revealing that meditation produces structural changes in the brain. Studies have found that regular meditators can experience thickening in areas related to cognitive processing. There’s also evidence that meditation can shrink the amygdala, the “fight or flight” part of the brain that processes emotions like anxiety, fear, and aggression.

That accepting part of the practice has an additional benefit: you learn that you don’t necessarily have to believe your thoughts.

Some thoughts are useful, most aren’t. You’re planning what to make for dinner and the thought of grilled chicken reminds you of what your husband ate at Denise’s birthday dinner last weekend, which reminds you of that awkward conversation you had with Denise’s new boyfriend, which makes you think that you’re a socially awkward person, which…

We spend so much time glued to the movie screen in our head, believing whatever we think — not as truth, necessarily, but as if it were real.

I remember the first time I realized that I could choose whether to believe the movie. It was in my mid-20s, just as I was starting to become curious about meditation.

My girlfriend at the time invited me to a class led by psychologist Tara Brach. She was joined by a Buddhist monk from Nepal named Tsoknye Rinpoche, a short, surprisingly young man with thin, metal-rimmed glasses and a fresh buzzcut.

Rinpoche guided us through a 20-minute meditation and then talked about how mindfulness can help calm overwhelming emotions. I noticed myself tune out right as he finished his first sentence with the words “essence love.”

Judgements flooded my mind: I’m better than these people. I don’t need this hippie stuff. I’m normal.

But then he cracked a joke: “If you want to go to India, either stay in the cheapest hotel or a five-star hotel. Because the cheapest hotel is also no good.”

I wrote that night on a personal blog I had been keeping: “His stories and ideas lulled me into pondering large questions, and then, with his humor, he shook me out of that thinking before I could get comfortable. He didn’t let me tune out in my normal way of believing I am bigger or deeper than the situation I am in.”

Looking back, it wasn’t so much about what Rinpoche had said. This new experience — being able to notice when I was leaving the present moment by thinking — likely had more to do with that I had just meditated.

For the first time, I had a sense that I could choose whether to believe what was on the movie screen, or as Brach calls it, a “trance.”

“Our conditioning is to pull away and avoid direct contact with raw feelings,” she says. “The result is a trance — we are split off from the wholeness of our aliveness, intelligence, and capacity to love.”

No wonder you feel so scatterbrained, unable to focus on work, your relationship, friends, all the things that matter to you.

You get so wrapped up in the movie that you forget to breathe fully, feel your body, and pay attention to what’s around you. You go on autopilot, leaning into the future, which gives you a never-ending sense that something is wrong, missing, incomplete.

Working out, drinking, deep conversation, sex, etc. can give you focus — but only for a few minutes or a couple hours at best. Your mind’s wandering ways come roaring back in a flash.

You think, I can’t stop thinking, which is yet another judgment that takes you away from the present moment.

Then you sit down to meditate for the first time, and the movie doesn’t stop. You try to focus on your breath, relax, bliss out, but the thoughts keep coming. You think, why can’t I just relax? Maybe this meditation thing isn’t for me. I think too much.

Tragically, you fail to see these judgements are simply more thoughts. Instead, you believe them as if they were part of the movie, 100 percent real.

Ready to get serious about meditation?

Sign up for my weekly email on how to bring mindfulness to the stuff that matters most — work, relationships, and, especially, politics.

Listen to the podcast version

My podcast, Meditation for the Masses, is mindfulness for the 99 percent. Listen to it on Apple Podcasts, Google Play, and everywhere podcasts are available. Stream this episode below.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Android | Google Podcasts | RSS | More