Meditation

The practice of meditation, or mindfulness, has been defined in so many ways. It has shifted from culture to culture, traditional to contemporary, authentic to trendy. For a lot of us, especially in Western cultures, there’s this focus on meditation as a practice of attention and emotional regulation. But traditionally, that’s never been the goal — they’re side effects.

The real goal of meditation is to unfold deep layers of experience in order to shift toward a state of pure awareness. Meditation is a process of deconstructing engrained habits of the mind, until most or all conceptual processing falls away. So you can think about the depth of meditation is equal to the degree to which the mind is engaged in conceptual thought. The more conceptual thought that is released, the deeper the state of meditation, the closer we get to that state of pure awareness, which has the side effect of attention and emotional regulation.

We evolved for survival, to be in a constant state of fight or flight mentality, based on our environment. But, these inherited tendencies no longer serve us in our current environments — we no longer need to fight for survival. Yet, the mentality has remained. The practice of meditation, or breathwork, even psychedelics or other mindfulness based practices, can offer a way of reprogramming those maladaptive tendencies, tendencies that not only no longer serve us, but harm us.

Traditional meditation practices are not about getting into altered states of mind — again, that’s the side effect. It’s about deep transformations in the ordinary ways that our consciousness already knows how to operate, and re-engineering the habits of the mind, developing altered traits rather than merely altered states.

It comes with great understanding that mindfulness practices like meditation and breathwork are not designed to make you happy — they’re designed to set you free.