Meditation Does Something: Reflections on Beginning a Lifetime of Practice
I was invited to teach a beginning meditation class, so I spent some time considering the most fundamental thing I could say to a complete beginner about meditation and why they might want to practice at all. Drawing from about a decade of teaching, I arrived at an underwhelming conclusion: meditation does something.
I was not on drugs when I came up with this idea, though a younger version of myself might have hoped I was. If this was the most fundamental thing I had to say about meditation after all those years of practice and teaching, then something must have gone wrong. The younger me would have preferred to hear, “Wrestle with your mind through this heroic journey called the meditative path, and it will eventually fix you.”
If only it were that simple. Suffering in hopes of arriving at the end of suffering comes naturally to me, and the motto “no pain, no gain” seems to be the consensus for success in the West. The application of that motto in meditation leads to intense self-dislike as a means of self-improvement, a practice that many of us, myself included, have inherited and tasted the rotten fruits of.
When I reflect on the students I work with, many of whom have been meditating for decades, I notice that most do not consider themselves enlightened. They still struggle with familiar habits and patterns of mind. And yet, they remain deeply committed to practice. This raises an obvious question: why do they still meditate?
As it happens, “Why meditate?” is one of my favorite questions to ask students. The answers are varied and tend to reflect what the student values most in their life. It is here that the statement “meditation does something” shifts from sounding boring to being inspiring. If I ask students to rate how important meditation is in their lives on a scale of 1 to 10, 7 is a low score. Most answers land somewhere between 8 and 11.
Over time, I have seen that striving toward a particular conscious state or imagined attainment leads to burnout and disappointment. In contrast, recognizing that daily practice reliably creates a felt sense of presence, steadiness, and intimacy reframes the practice. Showing up to the cushion each day becomes a wonderful use of time, not because it promises a future breakthrough, but because it tangibly shapes how the practitioner feels day to day. Paradoxically, those very qualities of presence and intimacy are often what give rise to the conscious states many strive to achieve.
In a practical sense, I also suggest to beginning meditators that in many moments, what arises in their mind is not fundamentally different from what arises in the mind of an experienced practitioner. The distinction is not in the content itself, but in how one relates to it.
For an experienced practitioner, much of what once felt compelling or urgent now appears impersonal and even gently interesting. Thoughts, emotions, and sensations still arise, but they are less gripping. For a newer practitioner, the same mental content often feels immediate, true, and filled with problems that demand resolution. It can be difficult to recognize that this sense of urgency is subjective, and, most of the time, it’s more useful to recognize the intensity itself than to get lost in the stories it projects.
With practice, the intuitive focal point shifts toward the broader context of experience. Advanced practitioners tend to notice the felt texture of urgency, reactivity, or desire rather than being pulled entirely into the narrative it carries. The content can still be there, and the alluring intensity can be too, but it is held within a wider field of awareness, one that allows for curiosity and care without losing perspective. Or, even if perspective is lost, there still seems to be a backseat driver of the mind that’s willing to speak up and say, “Something isn’t quite right here. This might not be the full picture.” As one Zen adage puts it, this is real, but it’s not the Truth.
At this point, it would be reasonable to ask, “But what about awakening or the cessation of suffering? Don’t those matter?” My answer is yes, they do. But they function poorly as direct aims. They describe outcomes rather than process, and they have little to say about the lived, uneven, and sometimes unremarkable process of daily practice. In that sense, they are best understood as byproducts of sustained and sincere engagement rather than the result of forceful pursuit.
Ultimately, I do not know what the outcome of anyone’s meditation practice will be. What I can say is that when practice aligns with an authentic purpose, especially one grounded in a felt sense of value and goodness, both life and practice tend to feel better and more meaningful over time.
One of my favorite ways to translate the word Dharma is “Truth.” We can look to the Dharma for a view of a universal or metaphysical truth, but I love a more poetic application: What is your truth? This Dharma is felt and subjective, best known and refined by continuing to look intently, with wonder, in every moment, no matter how mundane, and by asking the vulnerable question, “What is this?”
It is also this Dharma that brings meaning and inspiration. Meditation does something, and that something often aligns with what matters most to us. Finding that alignment is fulfilling and potentially the grounds from which liberation arises.
