It goes like this:

You shut the door and dim the lights. Maybe you sit on the floor and fold your aching knees into painful geometric shapes. Maybe you even sit on an expensive ($30–$600 on Amazon) satin meditation pillow, which feels nice but doesn’t relieve the pressure from your lower back. Maybe you perch upon a chair with your back straight (for once)—which, by the way, hurts.

You prepare yourself for the ordeal to come. You comb through the many meditation apps you pay for but rarely use, looking for something appropriate to your current problem.

“Meditation for inner peace.”

“Guided self-love visualization.”

“Mantras for enlightenment.”

It all seems a bit much. 

Can twenty minutes of chanting induce enlightenment in a crowded, worldly mind like yours? Perhaps you promise yourself that one day, you will reach enlightenment. You will manage to rid yourself of all attachment by sitting cross-legged for ten, fifteen, thirty, sixty minutes a day, the life you seek to escape dissolving behind your eyes.

You take several deep breaths and press play. You follow instructions. You focus on your

breath. But focusing on your breath compels you to regulate your breathing. Have you always been this short of breath? You should quit smoking. You should exercise more. 

You restore your focus and return to the breath. It teases you. The echo of blood in your ears is distracting. A car stereo reverberates from somewhere right outside your house. Soon, you are thinking of repaving the driveway, feeding the stray cats, and the work that awaits you when you finish this compulsory ordeal. Your mind, it seems, has reared its ugly head in protest. It works to keep you tethered to the restless world. You will never reach enlightenment! You can’t even meditate correctly!

“I can’t meditate correctly,” you tell your therapist, coach, yoga partner, “it just doesn’t work for me. My mind can’t take it.”

As a mindfulness teacher, I hear some measure of protest from every client.  They cannot meditate because it is uncomfortable, because their neurons fire on overdrive, or because their legs are aflame in the absence of circulation. Besides, what is the point of sitting in silence for twenty minutes every day when the ceaseless demands of quotidian life lie in wait, doing pushups in the parking lot? And who is really capable of emptying their mind anyway?

For those brave enough to ask the question, I proffer the following answer:

No one.

No one can empty their mind, and I dread considering what such a person might be like. The point is moot, regardless. Meditation is not the cleansing, purifying process we so often think it is. We do not undertake meditation to scour the mind or eliminate the ego. We do not require stillness to cultivate meditation; we require meditation to cultivate stillness. The point of practice isn’t perfection but preparedness. Enlightenment is not the objective, and if you make it the objective, you can guarantee, given the stubborn nature of the spiritual experience, that it will not come. 

Those who wish most for encounters with the supernatural rarely receive them. Those who pursue silence are troubled by the slow roar of blood in their ears. Even in total sensory deprivation, there are always the mysterious, mechanical workings of the body, filling all available space with their relentless clanging and squeaking. 

There is no escaping the mind, and there is no escaping the ego. And meditation, if perceived as a means of escape, is no more valuable a habit than watching Netflix or shooting heroin. 

There are several misconceptions about meditation that, I think, prevent many from reaping its benefits. I will discuss four of the most prominent.

The expectation of benefit is the first fallacy of the spiritually curious. 

Meditation is not a mystical process. It does not introduce magic into our lives; it reveals what is already there. 

Meditation is not a portal into another world; it is a clearer picture of this one. It does not facilitate an encounter with the divine; it reveals the divine with which we are in perpetual communication. When we approach meditation intending to experience transcendence, we are no more elevated than the child discoursing with her imaginary friend, or the cat, captivated by an intangible laser beam. The doctrine, writes Alan Watts, is like a finger pointing at the moon, and one must not mistake the finger for the moon.

There is no god to be found in quiet contemplation. The divine does not hide from us. It is always around; we fail only to see it. The problem is not with the environment and all its attending distractions; the problem is within us. Meditation is then a practice of overcoming the limitations of the pattern-seeking mind. It is a means of peering through the wool we have passed over our own eyes. So long as we continue to expect to gain something from the process, it will be painful. For as every human knows, acquiring desires renders moot its pursuit.

The second misconception has to do with misunderstanding the immediate objective of meditation. Mainstream translations of Buddhist texts, for lack of better words (what a pitiful language: English), occasionally refer to enlightenment as “emptiness,” to the enlightened as one with “no mind—” a “no-body.” As a result, those incapable of reading dense religious Pali doctrine often emerge from our first encounter with meditation with the daunting conviction that finding freedom entails gutting oneself like a Thanksgiving turkey. We must, we believe,  clear the mind—and if we fail to do so, we aren’t meditating correctly. 

From this premise, the predictable conclusion many people draw upon their first “failed” attempts at meditation is that they are somehow different from the rest of us, which of course, is the antithesis of the core principle of mindfulness—that core principle being that the mind and all its attending claims over beliefs, values, and personality traits is a figment of the vivid human imagination. 

Our only task is to observe the mind long enough to distinguish it from everything else and in doing so, to realize there is no distinction at all. So to conclude that one’s overactive brain is unique or distinct in its inability to develop awareness is not only impossible but also quite pernicious.

It is not, however, an unreasonable deduction. After all, one’s first glimpse of the mind’s machinations is often a near-traumatizing experience. 

I speak from personal experience; my early meditation attempts convinced me that my neurodivergence prevented me from accessing the blissful state of self-transcendence that others seemed to experience.

But transcendence is not what we think it is.

It isn’t a means of escaping the present but of fully inhabiting it. What we are transcending is not reality but the mental garbage with which we obscure it.

Buddhist doctrine refers to this garbage as “the monkey mind.” The monkey mind is the ceaseless chatter, the nagging judgments and concerns that eclipse the open sky of awareness.

My clients often cite the mutterings of the monkey mind as evidence of their fundamental incompatibility with mindful awareness. 

“I was just sitting there totally overwhelmed by my thoughts,” they say.

“So you were aware that you were thinking them,” I suggest.

“Yes.”

“That’s meditation.”

This answer is hardly satisfactory. After all, few of us embark on a journey toward enlightenment in the interest of spending twenty minutes in utter agony as we are bombarded by one tangent after the next. But so it is for all of us. Mindfulness is awareness—nothing more. The sole purpose of meditation is to observe and notice. With mindful, non-attached attention, thoughts tend to dissipate, to shed their dimension. But they do not disappear. Even the Dalai Lama has thoughts—as many are shocked to discover. 

We cannot hope to rid ourselves of thoughts because we didn’t invite them in the first place. This is another disappointing (yet important) outcome of meditation; in observing the involuntary movements of our thoughts, we encounter the autonomy of mind-objects. They come and go as they please. We do not decide to wonder whether or not the cat has had dinner; the thought simply pops into our head like an unwelcome visitor. And just as we did not invite it in, we cannot compel it to leave. We exert no power over the invader itself—our only choice is the degree to which we accept its presence and pass the time in its company. Most of us chose resistance. But thoughts are like toddlers; the more you ignore them, the louder they scream. Only recognition quells the craving for attention. 

Some believe that the purpose of meditation is not only to exterminate thoughts but also to rid ourselves of the ego.

The ego has developed quite a negative reputation on context-averse, imposter-friendly social media platforms. There are those who claim that the ego is akin to the devil—a malevolent poltergeist that sabotages the efforts of the pure and innocent soul. Meditation thus becomes not a vehicle for peace but an act of war upon the ego.

The ego, however, is not the enemy—and even a glance at human history illustrates that declaring war is rarely a reasonable choice. 

The ego is a trickster, an unlovely creature, but it is, like all other weaknesses, a necessary social mechanism. To understand the consequences of “losing one’s ego,” we must consider the theoretical possibility of a human being with no ego. This is a hypothetical experiment since, to my understanding,  there has never been a person with no ego (though many claim the misplaced prestige). 

A person without ego would lack motivation, drive, and self-confidence. A person without ego would likely fail to uphold boundaries, neglect to protect herself, and display no sense of personal continuity. A person with no ego would lack the capacity to differentiate between herself and others. She would, therefore, be incapable of developing intimacy and navigating the fundamentally social human experience. A person without ego wouldn’t survive.

Let us abandon this thought experiment since it is pointless to consider that which is neither possible nor desirable. We give the ego far too much credibility. The ego is just another pattern generated by our pattern-loving minds. It is a means of organizing experiences, assessing data,  and integrating ideas. And while it is most certainly an illusion, it is necessary to function.

The problem is not with the ego but with our relationship to it. We manage the ego as we would a virulent parasite infecting our brains, an affliction from without. In doing so, we voluntarily surrender all power to it. The ego is perceived as malevolent because, by neglecting it, we allow it to behave malevolently. The solution lies not in exterminating the ego but in taming it. And to tame it, we must understand it.

In doing so, we find that we do not exist to serve the ego but that the ego exists to serve us. We understand that the ego’s only problem is that it believes itself to be absolute, fixed, and unchanging. We recognize that it is an illusion we maintain to navigate the fluid, flexible, and ever-changing reality of being alive. The ego has good intentions. We’ve merely allowed it to run riot. Just as we would not advocate for the extermination of a misbehaving child, we should not seek out to destroy the ego. It isn’t the ego’s fault; we have been neglectful parents. But there is always time to mend a relationship—which brings me to the most common objection to meditation: that sitting in silence is boring.

Why do so many of us hold such contentious relationships with the practice of meditation? We resent having to carve minutes out of our busy days to sit in silence and endure the chatter of our minds. We resent feeling as though we “aren’t good” at meditation and are thus being made to practice something we are embarrassingly inept at. I am reminded of high school gym class, which I skipped to avoid confronting my pitiable lack of hand-eye coordination.

We resent meditation because we think we aren’t good at it, when what is really happening is that we’ve misunderstood the rules of the game. We have misunderstood the nature of mindfulness practice, believing that the point of it all is to get really good at sitting still for a set amount of time every day. We have misplaced our reverence in gurus and spiritual leaders, admiring them for their ability to sit for hours on end and transcend the physical body, for their kitshy, ostentatious party tricks—swallowing fire, walking across hot coals, wearing hair shirts.

Astral projecting is not the achievement some think it is. But show me one who can undertake quotidian activities with open awareness, and I am impressed. But tell me that you have managed to extend non-judgmental awareness into every facet of your life and I will prostrate myself at your feet.

The monks, the priests, the gurus in ascetic seclusion—they are often as tethered to their environments as we are. Surely we would all get quite “good” at meditation in a monastery. Surely we can all manage to sit for hours a day if our live depended on it. Training the body to withstand hot coals (or any other measure of superficial spirituality) is not evidence of divinity. But training the mind to accept the pain is.

Thankfully, we need not subject ourselves to unimaginable pain to achieve open awareness. We need not sit for hours on end or achieve nirvana. We need not force our legs into lotus position until they no longer function.

We have confused the practice of meditation with the process of mindfulness. The two are not the same.

Because meditation is just that: a practice, and we do not practice for perfection: we practice to make progress.

Meditation is just a warm-up—life is the performance. We meditate to acquaint ourselves with the experience of mindfulness such that we can replicate it elsewhere. We meditate to practice the skill in isolation as a boxer practices on a bag so we can leverage it in the arena of life. 

“But,” my clients inevitably protest, “what if I’m not practicing right?”

We worry about posture, atmosphere, and music. We worry about the app we’re using, the credentials of the person reading the script, the quality of the cushion, the frequency of disruptions. But none of these things matter—at all. You can meditate on a pillow or a chair, on a bed, or in the car. You can meditate in lotus position or in a handstand, in rural solitude, or at a crowded concert. Meditation is nothing other than paying attention to the contents of one’s mind—and you can do that anywhere, any way you like. 

The discipline of mindfulness—and it has, unfortunately, hardened into dogma and discipline—is riddled with misconceptions, which is unsurprising given the nature of the task. Turn the mind upon itself, and reality begins to glitch, quiver, and dissipate behind your eyes. Turn your attention upon your attention, and, at first, you will not like what you see. As with all other spiritual matters, we frequently mistake allegory for truth and semantics for meaning. But words are no substitute for human experience, and the mind's chatter is no substitute for the sacred whispers of the soul. 

Life is slow to reveal herself. In meditation, as in all profound metaphysical experiences, enlightenment is less a spark and more a slow and steady burn. Awareness is simply the match, and you are the kindling. Watch with profound bliss as it consumes your fabricated self, leaving nothing behind but the world around you.