Meditation

A few days ago, I hit a 100-day streak of meditating using the Ten Percent Happier app.

I was first introduced to the concept of meditation by my dear friend Olivia, who is a fount of such excellent advice as “Stop trying to win at relaxation” and “Trust everything George says”. She is also the one who persuaded me to engage with therapy, which is the most positively-impactful decision of my life.

Meditation and therapy share a curious property, an apparent contradiction¹ at their core of each of their practices. Meditation² asks you to let go of your own grasping desire for change, while implicitly acknowledging that this practice will cause you to change in desirable ways. Therapy often consists of “just” talking about your feelings with someone who is echoing your statementsback to you with probing questions, rather than providing fresh insights - and yet, the process can lead to astounding changes in perspective and real changes, despite the lack of any “real” actions.

In both practices, when a proposed approach seems nonsensical or contradictory to my default scientific mindset, I’ve adopted an attitude of humility - “ok, this makes no sense to me, but lots of other apparently-nonsensical things in this space have worked well in the past, and you can’t solve a problem from the same mindset that created it - just shut up and try it, what have you got to lose?”. I’ve rarely been disappointed. It feels similar to the practice of asking apparently-paradoxical-or-nonsensical questions - koans³ - in Zen Buddhist practice. The incongruity or unexpectedness of the presented approach is precisely what shocks the mind out of standard patterns and into unasking the question.

I’m very much still starting out on my meditation and mindfulness journey, and I’m excited to see where it leads.

• MentalHealth