Why Meditation Works - a thought :)

I was speaking with my friend’s 25 year old son Josh yesterday and it was an enlivened conversation.  (He reads my newsletter so he’ll be smiling now.)  You see my friend’s son believes meditation, yoga, etc. are hogwash. 

He believes that they are things people do when they don’t have anything better to do.  I love having conversations with people like him as it helps me to think about and remind myself of why I practice what I do.  Why do I dedicate so much of my time to training my mind and healing my body?

Well, Josh said if I could answer one question he would sit and meditate with me for an hour.  His question was, how do I know that meditation works.  At first, I took a deep breath and sat with the question, not because I wanted to find a clever answer, but because I wanted to see what my truth was for it in that moment.  In the past, I may have said something like ‘it brings one to a state of calm’ or ‘it forces one to go inward and see themselves rather than focus on the outside world’.  But I'd had a trying day and nothing that magical was coming to mind.

In that moment, a moment when I had too much on my plate to be very creative, what came to me was, when you practice meditation, you can’t be doing anything else.  

I know this sounds simple, but it really is an amazing fact of how our minds work and why training them helps you to think better.

You can’t focus on your breath and an unwanted thought at the same time.  You can’t focus on hate and love at the same time.  It’s like trying to focus on hugging someone and hitting them at the same time.  You just can’t do it and that is one of the gifts we have as humans.  Even when we multi-task, we still focus on one thing at a time in the mind – we just do it faster.

Consider it for a moment, what if you could train yourself to focus completely whenever you wanted to.  To be, as the new age movement likes to state, totally present to now not in a fleeting esoteric way but because you have trained your mind to be that one-pointed and through practice, it begins to do it naturally.  To me, that is one of the main benefits of meditation, clearer focus in the now.

Josh liked that answer and as we sat in silence together later that day, I thought to myself how blessed I was to have been offered that question.  Then I realized I was thinking and let the thought pass as I returned to my breath.  ;)

Om Shanti. Om Peace.