What Meditation Taught Me About Suffering (And Joy!)
In March 2020, I was lying on the floor deep in an eight-hour guided meditation session. I had been meditating regularly for several years at this point, and while it did seem to help me relax, focus, and be a bit less reactive in my normal life, I wouldn’t have called it “life-changing” — until this day.
Around the five-hour mark of the session, I experienced a state of consciousness unlike any other I had felt before – one that I can only imagine was the state described by “enlightened” yogis and gurus. A sensation arose inside me, and I felt that the entire universe resided within me. While I was fully aware of the events occurring outside my body, I realized that the only thing to fear were my own thoughts, and I became conscious that they were the origin of my life experience. Recognizing this, I felt a new and profound sense of control over my life. It became clear that most of my life had been an exercise in trying to feel “enough,” a constant state of striving to earn my own self-respect. At that moment, I finally felt tremendous respect for myself and realized I no longer needed external validation to attain the self-love I had been seeking my entire life.
This “awakening” may have lasted about 10 minutes, but it felt like days. I was able to view nearly every decision I’d ever made through this new lens, and my whole life now made more sense — the decisions I’d made, the pain I’d felt, the goals I’d set. Realizing the power of this heightened level of consciousness, I couldn’t imagine how I would ever return to the person I had previously been. I was determined to exist in this state for the remainder of my life.
But, of course, real life swiftly intervened. I returned home to three teenagers homebound during a global pandemic, a chronically sore knee from two recent knee surgeries, a calendar of 10-hour days of back-to-back Zoom calls addressing the myriad COVID-induced work crises, and soon, utter exhaustion.
While I didn’t succeed in permanently remaining in this elevated state, I knew I had seen something I could never unsee, and I held an exciting new aim for my future meditations.
Why am I doing this?
I would compare my learning curve of practicing meditation to my arc of learning golf. When you first begin, it feels like the most useless and frustrating activity, and it’s difficult to understand why anyone would even bother trying it, much less suggest you try it, too. However, if you persist through this initial, frustration (which can last many months, sometimes years), you might hit one shot square and flush, compressing the ball and sending it effortlessly soaring. Similarly, with meditation, it’s possible to reach a moment of pure clarity and bliss — a brief glimpse of a place where everything makes sense. Then, in the very next session, you might shank your 7-iron or be unable to even remember ever being in the blissful state. Over time, with consistent practice, experiencing a state of elevated consciousness can become a more regular occurrence. Like hitting a drive flush, the feeling is intoxicating, and once you have a taste, it keeps you coming back for more.
Buddhism and Suffering
All of us share death as our ultimate destination. We will lose everything we have and everyone in our lives. We experience illness, our children growing up, friends and family passing away, our own aging and the inevitable changing of most things in our lives. These difficult experiences are inevitable. The more we are attached to the way things are, and the more we try to control things, the more we suffer. Although pain, loss, change and death are inevitable external forces over which we have no control, we do have the power within us to opt out of most of our suffering.
“Although pain, loss, change and death are inevitable external forces over which we have no control, we do have the power within us to opt out of most of our suffering. ”
The simplest way to alleviate suffering is to be present. This isn’t a novel idea — the concepts of presence and mindfulness have been a pillar of philosophy and Buddhism for thousands of years. It feels like today, the benefits of meditation are touted by nearly everyone, Buddhist or not, creating social pressure to practice it. I felt this pressure, too, and for a long time, I was not sure if meditating had any positive effects on my mental state. In full disclosure, I typically dreaded it.
Part of that dread was that I didn’t really understand why I was meditating. Claiming that “meditating makes you more present” is like saying “hard work makes you wealthy.” Both meditating and 12-hour work shifts are blunt instruments that can induce frustration while not bearing much fruit. I think a more precise “goal” of meditation, and a clearer path to becoming more present, is observing, connecting with, and understanding our thoughts.
The Enemy of Presence: Excessive Thinking
Outside of physical pain, suffering rarely occurs in the present moment. In most cases, suffering arises because we are agonizing over the past or worrying about the future.
Past-oriented suffering can include thoughts or feelings of regret, sadness, a wistful longing for the way things were (“the good old days”), constantly reliving painful memories, and clinging to anger or resentment toward someone or something.
“In most cases, suffering arises because we are agonizing over the past or worrying about the future.”
When I was younger, during times of stress, I often found escape in future-oriented thinking — imagining a better, more exciting life. I wished away much of my life, longing to be anywhere but trapped in my present circumstances. There is a fine line between delaying gratification (studying, exercising, foregoing that last drink) and being absent from the present moment. I was well-versed in the art of stepping over the place where I was. As life progressed and my once-lofty goals began to actually materialize, I was not rewarded with the satisfaction I expected to find. Most often, I was left with a sense of emptiness, still yearning for “the next big thing.”
As each of these “future” moments became my present reality, they looked and felt much like the other moments I had previously longed to quickly move past. As the Buddhist expression says, “Everywhere you go, there you are.” While hitting my goals was satisfying, the satisfaction was short-lived because, as I set new goals, I often repeated my pattern of escaping from the present. As Jim Carey said, “I wish everybody could get rich and famous and do everything they ever dreamed of so they can see that it’s not the answer.”
If suffering comes almost entirely from living outside the present moment, and the only thing that can take you out of the present moment are your own thoughts about the past or the future, then your thoughts themselves are the cause of your suffering.
This was the profound realization I experienced at the meditation retreat in 2020. But rather than understanding this concept intellectually, I knew it to be true deep within myself, and I finally understood how it shaped my entire life.
“If suffering comes almost entirely from living outside the present moment, and the only thing that can take you out of the present moment are your own thoughts about the past or the future, then your thoughts themselves are the cause of your suffering. ”
People new to meditating often feel like they’re failing when intrusive thoughts interrupt their concentration. But even monks who scrub monasteries with a toothbrush, eat one bowl of rice daily, and meditate 16 hours a day for 30 years can’t stop the process of automatic thoughts emerging from their subconscious. The goal of meditating is not to eliminate your thoughts — sadly, that’s impossible. (I tried!) Instead, the goal is simply to create awareness of them.
The more space you can create between your thoughts and your reaction to them, the more peace you will experience.
A real-time example: As I write this blog, I start to reach for my phone. “Wait, did this person text me back?” I watch that thought. I realize I have no need to interrupt my writing to check my phone — the text is not urgent. I’m just procrastinating. A few minutes later, another thought pops in, “What authority do you have to write about meditating? You’re not a guru, yogi, monk, or Buddha! Why does anyone care what you think about meditating?” I watch that thought. I know that voice. It’s the voice of my inner critic. I smile. I continue writing. An hour later, again, I find myself wondering why the person hasn’t texted me. “Are they mad at me? Did I say something wrong?” I watch those thoughts. I realize those thoughts are not serving me at all. It is almost certainly not personal, and my reaction is making me stressed or miserable. And I continue writing.
The more I observe my intrusive thoughts, the more I realize they rarely serve me. Let’s assume that roughly 1% of the random intrusive thoughts are helpful (“I just remembered to book my flight to San Francisco tomorrow.”). The other 99% distract me from the present moment and therefore cause suffering. Paying attention to intrusive thoughts is like picking up nickels in front of a moving train; the downside is horribly asymmetric. Rather than constantly paying attention — just in case one of those “helpful” thoughts happens to show up — a much better algorithm is to ignore them entirely and return to the present. I’ll gladly give up that occasional helpful thought for a more consistent experience of peace and presence. That helpful thought will show up when you need it. (And I have never forgotten to book a flight.)
Simply put, we are best served by behaving as though EVERY intrusive thought is a form of suffering. As James Nguyen says in his book, “Don’t Believe Everything You Think,” “It’s not what we’re thinking about that causes us suffering, but that we’re thinking at all.”
“Paying attention to intrusive thoughts is like picking up nickels in front of a moving train; the downside is horribly asymmetric.”
Through my study of Buddhism, meditation and personal experiences, I have come to realize:
Despite the eventual pain of loss of everything in our lives, there is rarely anything that causes suffering in the immediate present moment.
Our thoughts of the past or future are the source of our suffering.
Outside of illness and physical pain, our suffering comes from our thoughts.
The “goal” of meditating is to train yourself to notice your thoughts.
When you separate from your thoughts, you can choose to let them go.
We are better off letting ALL our intrusive thoughts go rather than giving them heed in case one might be helpful.
Meditating, for me, is simply the act of practicing these principles: Watching thoughts arise, letting them go, and bringing myself back to the present moment through my breath.
Choosing the Present Moment
“Real meditating” is not isolated to the 30 minutes in the morning when I sit with my eyes closed. Real meditating happens all day as I practice being fully present and engaging in my life.
That day in March, I shared my “enlightenment” experience with my meditation teacher. He smiled and understood exactly what I was describing. He had been meditating for hours at a time for 35 years and shared that he could stay in that state for weeks at a time on a retreat. I naturally (naively) asked him, “Why do you ever leave it?”
Although I am nowhere near his level of awareness, his answer was the same one I eventually realized for myself: Elevated consciousness is not a destination at which we can permanently arrive to escape the world around us. It is an experience that happens every day — sometimes for minutes, other times for hours — when we let go of our thoughts and are fully immersed in what’s happening in our lives.
We don’t need 30 years in a monastery to find ourselves. Enlightenment is right here, right now, all around us, all the time, in our lives exactly as they are. We just need to train ourselves to be present enough to experience and enjoy it.
“Whatever the present moment contains, accept it as if you had chosen it.” — Eckhart Tolle