Attend a Party in Your Own Head

Good thoughts bring you happiness; bad thoughts poison you with anxiety and pain.

Our brain is invaded by thoughts nonstop. In fact, invaded does not correctly describe this, because it implies that thoughts are foreign entities and not occupants of our brain to begin with. The reality, as strange as it sounds, is that we are a guest in our brain. Yes, we are a guest at the party of thoughts that is happening nonstop in our own head. Though we believe we have control over what we think, we really do not. Most of the time we are not even aware of what we are thinking.

This brings us to meditation. It allows us to mindfully attend this party and, like a well-intentioned chaperone, examine all the guests (thoughts) and their intentions.

There are many meditation techniques. The one I’ve been practicing is mindfulness.

I sit in a comfortable position and focus on my breath. I am attempting to have no thoughts other than the awareness of my breath moving through my body. When I catch myself thinking about something other than my breath, I lightly acknowledge that thought without judgment, and poof, it disappears.

This technique is called “noting.”

My goal is to become a calm, reliable observer of my thoughts. There is a significant hurdle to clear here – and to keep on clearing: I’ll fail to focus only on my breathing. The first time I attempted to practice meditation I gave up after only a few weeks. I got frustrated with my inability to “not think.” I was constantly interrupted by thoughts barging in. I felt I had failed at meditation. It took me awhile to understand that this “failing” is not a bug but a feature of meditation.

The benefits of meditation

I did not understand the true benefits of meditation until I started meditating again, after the first failed attempt. I thought it was just something you do to calm down, but I was wrong. Though it will calm you down, it is so much more than this.

Here are some benefits I’ve discovered.

Meditation reduces suffering. The poisonous, negative thoughts are either reevaluations (judgments) of our past or worries about the future. Our thoughts are chronically stuck in the past or the future, but ironically, life happens in between – in the now.

It is difficult for us to sustain negative emotions. Dwelling on them adds fuel to flames that would have died out otherwise. By meditating, we can identify these negative thoughts, and by “noting” and recognizing them, we cut off the fuel to the smoldering fire.

Sam Harris, meditation guru, sums it up perfectly: People who don’t meditate experience unnecessary suffering. Imagine reducing your (unnecessary) suffering from days or hours to less than two minutes.

Meditation focuses on the present. Meditation transports us back to the present, interrupting our habitual tendency to be either in the past or the future. Meditation trains our brain to be right here. I have found that being present is – wonder of wonders! – starting to spill into my daily life.

Here is an example. I’ve been working out with a personal trainer for almost three years. I have a complex relationship with working out. I don’t always look forward to it. But I am always happy when it is over. I do it purely for health reasons and because I get to spend time with my brother Alex – we work out together.

Before I started meditating, with every exercise I was impatiently waiting for the torture to be over. My mind was always counting down towards the future. However, after a few months of mindfulness practice, I noticed that while weightlifting I was much more in the moment. As I lifted the weight, my mind was following the tension in each and every muscle in the same way it had got used to following my breathing as I meditate.

Living in the future was a default setting for me, and not only with regard to things I hated.

My father and I were in Vienna in 2010. He remarked to me one afternoon as we were walking down the street, “You always want to be in the next place.” He was right. Whenever we’d get to a museum or some other attraction, I was in a hurry to go to the next one. Inhaling the moment was not my default setting.

Now, being present, not goal-focused, has become my goal. (Yes, I do get the irony of this sentence.) Meditation has helped me with that. I have been inhaling life more lately – be it as I walk in the park, or spend time with my kids.

I keep reminding myself what Master Oogway teaches in Kung Fu Panda:

“Yesterday is history, tomorrow is a mystery, and today is a gift… that’s why they call it the present.”

Meditation increases emotional intelligence. It’s about those few extra seconds. You know, those few seconds that you need in order to take a deep breath before you respond to a stressful event. Meditation gives them to you.

One of my employees called me to say that he had unintentionally deleted a database that, at the time, I was unsure we had backed up. I vividly remember the anger rising in me. But then I found myself the dispassionate observer of that emotion. This bought me a few seconds, and thus my response was,

“Well, let’s figure out a solution.” Since I had noticed the negative emotion, it was difficult to stay angry; and surprisingly, just a few minutes later, I found myself laughing.

Part of daily life

I wish I had started meditating 30 years ago. I think my perception of meditation was ruined by a poster. A beautiful, trim woman with a ponytail was sitting in a yoga posture with her eyes closed at the edge of a cliff overlooking a gorgeous mountain landscape, the sun’s gentle rays bathing her perfect skin. That is what meditation was to me – and it didn’t work.

But what I have discovered since is that meditation is probably the least space- and environment-demanding exercise you can do. I don’t have to get up at 4 a.m. and drive to the mountains to meditate. I can literally do it anywhere.

I have linked my meditation to my walks. I usually do it at the end of my walk in the park, on my favorite bench. But I’ve also meditated in my office, hotel lobbies, my back yard, and lying in bed (though this one knocks me out very quickly). I am new at this and need quiet to succeed, but I have read that it is possible to meditate to the noise of a jackhammer or people chattering. Here is the key: Meditation is an exercise for your brain, and just like any exercise it requires consistency.

Everyone I know who meditates does it daily. I do, too. I am at it for ten minutes once or twice a day, and am starting to experiment with 20-minute meditations. I use an app: Waking Up, created by Sam Harris. There are other good apps, too. At some point, as I get more experience, I may be able to meditate without training wheels. There are meditation sessions you can listen to on YouTube or Spotify.

When I meditate during my daily walk, after I am done with the meditation itself, I sit on the bench and listen to classical music, gaze at the trees, and try to hear and follow the sound of each instrument and every note and try to “not think.” This type of meditative listening changes music from background noise into a compelling immersive experience.

I have a dear friend who I thought would benefit from meditating. I sent him a draft of this essay. His reaction was, “Meditation sounds like a magic fix-it-all tool. I hope it is as helpful for me as it was for you.” Mulling over his remark, I realized that meditation requires faith and patience. Yes, faith. Faith in your own mind. Faith that by gently spending time alone with it, you’ll be better able to harness and direct the power that is already there.

During meditation we are rewiring our brain, each ten- or 20-minute session at a time. Your brain, my friend’s brain, and my brain are different from each other. We have different personalities and so the process of learning to meditate will be different for each of us. Set expectations low – that way you won’t be disappointed.

Meditation requires patience, too. Meditation practice (key word here) is not unlike going to the gym and lifting weights. Even if you and I lift the same weight the same number of reps, we have different bodies and so our results will differ. One thing is guaranteed: When we lift weights, we are going to experience some pain from muscles breaking down before we grow them bigger and stronger. It’s much the same with meditation. We must put in the work, and be patient about it, if we want to grow. Again, faith is important here. Some people enjoy feeling that pain more than others. (Yours truly is on the less side.) How much should you meditate?

In “I Don’t Eat Pork,” I discussed minimum measuring units (MMU). My

MMU for meditation when I tried it the first time was not to have thoughts

– a set-up for failure. Today when I do a ten- or 20-minute meditation, I am aiming for a perfect minute. At the very end of a meditation, the Waking Up app alerts you that this is the last minute. I try to make this minute as good as I can. I still cannot not think for a minute, but I am improving a millisecond at a time. I don’t really have a destination; my goal is to enjoy the journey.

Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor, neuroanatomist, in her book Stroke of Insight, discussed what became known as the 90-second rule: “When a person has a reaction to something in their environment, there’s a 90-second chemical process that happens in the body; after that, any remaining emotional response is just the person choosing to stay in that emotional loop.”

There are a lot of other benefits of meditation that I have yet to observe in myself. Harvard conducted a study, “Eight weeks to a better brain,” and discovered that an “eight-week mindfulness meditation program appears to make measurable changes in brain regions associated with memory, sense of self, empathy, and stress. … Participant-reported reductions in stress also were correlated with decreased gray-matter density in the amygdala, which is known to play an important role in anxiety and stress.” In other words, after eight weeks of meditating an average of 27 minutes a day, participants’ brains had become rewired for the better. Other studies have shown similar results.

In an interview, movie director David Lynch mentioned that he has a notepad near him when he meditates. (He has been meditating daily for 47 years.) It’s part of his daily fishing expedition for new creative ideas. He calls it “catching big fish.” When ideas come to him, he writes them down and then goes back to meditating. Yes, some of the stray thoughts that wander in during meditation may be worth remembering! If anything worthwhile comes to me as I meditate, I write it down in the notes app on my phone.