Today I’d like to talk about Meditation. About a week ago, I had the good fortune to take a job with a company called Calm.com which makes an app that helps people meditate. So meditation has once again taken a forefront in my life. I’ve gone back to attending a few meditation groups that I haven’t been to in many, many months, and I’ve started meditating myself. My boss also gave me a book - 10% Happier by Dan Harris - which I finished this weekend. So it’s been on my mind.
I’ve always enjoyed meditation. There’s no question that it’s good for me. In all the ways that others say, it’s definitely helped me become less reactive, more compassionate, and generally helped me stay on an even keel.
But one question keeps pushing its way to the top, like a nagging younger sibling:
Why aren’t meditators happier?
There are, of course, as many different kinds of meditators as there are different kinds of people. In San Francisco, though, we have a unique subculture of people - call them Meditators, with a capital “M”. People Who Meditate. The Meditaterati. And, almost universally, I’ve noticed something: they’re generally not people you’d want to spend a night at a bar with. Now, there are exceptions, of course. But if you walk into a meditation meeting, you may notice a certain lack of joie de vivre. Dan Harris, in his book, talks about this. He’s an ex-skeptic who worked for years as a news anchor, one of the least meditative disciplines I can think of. And he talks about how, after meditating for a while, he lost a certain amount of his edge. He became passive. And he had to fight through that to the other side, rediscover his love of life.
I have a new theory about meditation which may not amuse the more hardcore Buddhists among us, but it matches my experience in life, and it’s based on a quote my Dad always used to say about money: “Money can’t make you happy,” he’d say, “but being broke sure is miserable.” Well, I have a new quote about meditation: “Mindfulness can’t make you happy, but being mindless sure is miserable.” That is, meditation to me seems like a necessary part of the equation - but not the full picture. Meditation is a bit like cleaning your room, or working out at the gym - it brushes away the cobwebs of the unexamined life and leaves room and space for you to fill it back up with what you really *want* to put there, instead of just leftover furniture or whatever happened to be lying around. If you don’t become aware of your thought stream whizzing past, you have no hope of organizing your life. But if you become aware of it and just leave it at that - well, you just have a clean room, or a toned midsection. What are you going to *do* with those things?
That’s step two.