I started meditating on August 29, 2019. I haven’t missed a day since. That’s over five years — almost 2,000 days — of sitting with my eyes closed for at least five minutes, usually 15, without fail.
I originally started meditating for two reasons. First, I felt called out when I heard Naval Ravikant say in an interview that meditation is “one of those things that everybody says they do, but nobody actually does.” I was already a mindful, self-aware person — but noticing is not the same as processing. Instead of just realizing that I was, say, biting my nails, I wanted to feel calm and present enough to actively stop, too.
Second, in that same interview, Naval actually provided a doable way to meditate. “It is literally the art of doing nothing,” he said. “All you need to do for meditation is to sit down, close your eyes, comfortable position, whatever happens happens. If you think, you think. If you don’t think, you don’t think. Don’t put effort into it, don’t put effort against it.” Freed from all the gurus, gadgets, and distractions of what has since become a $5 billion industry, I could finally start meditating right then and there, without complications or expectations. So I did.
After my first, intense week of meditating for an hour each day, I wrote down some initial lessons. Then, as my habit became smaller but stayed consistent, I reflected some more on day 800. Since then, I’ve shared the occasional, individual insight on my daily blog.
For my five-year anniversary, I figured why not round up all lessons, organize them, and present them in a way that makes sense? So that’s exactly what I’ve done. This way, you can get a comprehensive overview in one post but also dive deeper into any particular idea that interests you.
Here are 28 lessons from five years of meditating every day.
- Your brain is fuller than you’ve ever imagined. Your subconscious is an endless, always-on fountain. Meditation is the practice of deliberately sitting there for a while and watching what it sends to the surface.
- Despite your mind being fuller than you can comprehend, it’s still never completely full. This paradox is one of life’s great mysteries, but it also makes the brain the world’s most powerful computer in a special way.
- Meditation is cleaning your brain in real time. Even if you don’t “do” anything with the thoughts that bubble up, you’re still processing them, and that’s useful. In my very first week, I noticed that, occasionally, “it’s as if a wave of cold water runs down my head.” This is a good analogy.
- Rinsing your mind with water is a decent image to practice the real-time cleaning aspect of meditation. Bruce Lee’s daughter Shannon offers a great visualization to do so.
- Similarly, you might consider your thoughts as an endless stream of raindrops. There’ll always be more of them, and not a single one is magical.
- As you sit there in a rain shower of your own thoughts, you’ll realize these thoughts are not the same as your urges. Every impulse has a thought attached to it, and it is only when you jump on the thought that the impulse will sweep you away. The physical sensation of a growling stomach is not the same as the thought, “I am hungry.” If you can allow the thought to pass, the impulse will fade.
- Thoughts that follow impulses can be laden with emotion. Meditation is not about becoming emotionless but about developing what Bruce Lee called “a mind that is not sticky,” which easily detaches from emotions.
- Even when the impulse is easy to fix — when your first cup of coffee is only moments away — you should stay in the present. That’s also what meditation is for: to learn to live in the now instead of the future.
- Accepting reality as it is will, with time, help you let go of your urges and their associated thoughts more naturally. There’ll be less self-negotiating. The right choices will be more obvious and easier to make.
- At the same time, the good decisions you do make will become larger, the bad ones smaller.
- In a way, you can think of meditation as endurance training. Physically. Emotionally. The forced acceptance of sitting around will teach you tolerance, and tolerance is a superpower.
- Besides waiting, staying, and accepting, another way to handle your impetuses is to lean into what irks you. Instead of only tolerating the annoying sounds or physical itches, become them. Sync your mind with the hum of your fridge or the honking cars outside, and you’ll see: What’s poking you is just another, natural part of life.
- When you meditate regularly, especially during longer sessions, you will get glimpses of nothingness. At some point, the fountain, the raindrops, even the impulses and emotions themselves: It will all run out. Your brain tries to pull on the next thread, but suddenly, it only grasps air. That feeling is wonderful and refreshing, but it never lasts — just enjoy it while it does.
- That brings me to a theory I’ve developed: Inside of you, there are actually four different selves. There’s the Talker, the Listener, and the Observer. The first two usually fight to be in charge, but when the third one shows up, which he or she rarely does by default, the bickering instantly stops. The fourth self, the “Be-er,” is the fully reality-integrated, pure-flow, nirvana-esque version of you. That one is as rare as a unicorn, and we can’t force it out of hiding.
- While you can’t enter blissful emptiness on command, you can create a sanctuary (or two, or three) for yourself. Carve out some visually vivid, cherished spaces in your mind. Most of mine come from video games. They are usually bright, endless rooms full of light. Even just imagining yourself hanging out there will make you feel at peace.
- On a related note, meditating regularly will make you crave more external quiet, yet it will also build an internal kind of quiet no amount of money can buy. But remember:
- It’s okay to think. If you turn meditation into a game of chasing emptiness like a drug, you’ll miss the point entirely. Being the Observer more frequently is already a great success. It’s about noticing more so than “disappearing” — because if that’s all you wanted to do, you might as well take a nap instead.
- Usually, our main problem with thinking is that we simply go beyond what’s necessary: We think just to think.
- It is, however, better to do nothing than nonsense. The hard part is sitting with the boredom and converting the void into inner peace.
- You have a right to do nothing, by the way. It’s easy to forget this. We rarely remember it by default, but we should. After all…
- You don’t need to think to exist. You prove this to yourself every time you are asleep.
- You don’t need to think to be valuable. We don’t ask babies to contribute to society, yet we value them all the same — because every human life has inherent, imperishable value, whether mind is running or not.
- You don’t have to think any particular thought. Once you become the Observer more regularly, you realize: You can get off any train of thought at any time. You can replace it with another or start from scratch. As the Observer, you…
- Sit by the river of your thoughts. Beyond standing in the rain and washing your brain, you can sit next to the whole show and just watch it. There’s no need to grab any one thought, but at any time, you can…
- Hold on to great ideas. Sometimes, a creative breakthrough is absolutely worth jumping into the river. Usually, the gestation during meditation is more passive, but it can be active, too. That’s why…
- You should meditate with the door open. You never know who’ll come visit, but if you want fresh air and ideas, an open door is the only way.
- Creative boost or not, whenever you’re done meditating, you’ll have more energy.
- Ultimately, meditation is not a solution to the problem that is your impulses, thoughts, and emotions — because those phenomena are not a problem to begin with. You are not broken, and there’s nothing to fix. Mindfulness is only the practice of making room, a room to host your impulses, thoughts, and emotions for however long they need to stay before continuing on with their own journey. It’s about learning to differentiate what’s meant to linger for a while from what’s just passing through — and then improving at getting out of the way.
Unlike what some gurus might have you believe, meditating every day for five years has neither made me rich nor turned me into a zen monk. Don’t get me wrong: It sure has tangible benefits. On most days, I’m either calmer, less anxious, slightly more level-headed, slightly less emotionally reactive, or, if I’m lucky, all of those things.
After my first week of meditating, I concluded that “meditation won’t solve all your problems, but it’ll solve the fact that you’re not dealing with your problems.” In a way, I still believe that’s true — but I now realize that “dealing with our problems” mainly means stopping to see them as problems. We don’t solve our problems — we dissolve them. We accept that everyone has challenges, we sit with our own for the day, and then we calmly go out and face them. Life is more enjoyable that way.
In the end, perhaps that is meditation’s greatest benefit: A few minutes of the ultimate, uncompromised me-time to ensure you’ll not just notice but process your life in real-time. Five years later, that benefit still weighs heavy for me every day, and so my final plea to you remains the same: I hope you’ll give it an honest try.