Meditation. I don’t get it.

Sometimes when you hear about meditation it’s hard to understand what people are talking about. 

You understand the words. Words like attention, awareness, and presence. And you have some sense of what that might be about. But the experience of it and the significance of it….that’s not so clear. 

From one perspective this is to be expected. How can you know what something is really like until you have experienced it? Try it and you will see. That’s the thinking. 

Fair enough. 

Except learning meditation takes time and energy. And most of us feel like we don’t have enough time and energy. 

So how do you decide if it’s worth investing your time and energy to learn this if you have no idea what people are talking about?

Let’s try another way of describing meditation. A way that parallels with something most people already know about. 

Exercise.

I know this isn’t that exciting. It’s also far from a perfect analogy. But it’s good enough and most of us have experience with exercise and physical activity. Even if we aren’t into it ourselves we have seen other people doing it. From sports to the Olympics, to the gym, to yoga, we get what this is about. 

If we think of exercise as something we do to build physical strength, we can think of meditation as something we do to build our inner strengths. Strengths like clarity, calm and compassion. 

Why grow inner strengths?

Two reasons.

One, because they feel good.

And two, because inner strengths let you do stuff you care about. Like take care of your relationships. And do good work. 

There’s more to be said about how you do this and how you navigate the challenges that come up. But hopefully, if you’ve been interested in meditation but confused about what it’s about, this will help you take the next step.