If you’re considering starting a meditation practice, you’ve probably run into an overwhelming amount of advice. Apps, retreats, techniques, traditions, cushions with ergonomic curves. The modern meditation landscape is vast and noisy, and most of it, while well-intentioned, misses the thing that actually matters.
After forty years of daily practice, the most useful thing I can tell you is this: the practice itself is simple. What makes it difficult is everything you bring to it. Your expectations, your impatience, your desire to do it right, your certainty that whatever just happened on the cushion was wrong.
Consistency over intensity
The single most important factor is regularity. Twenty minutes every morning will reshape your relationship with your own mind more than a ten-day retreat followed by months of nothing. I know this because I did the retreat-and-nothing pattern for several years in my twenties before I figured it out.
Choose a time. Choose a place. Sit every day. It sounds too simple to be the answer, and yet it is. Everything else is refinement.
Your mind will be noisy
The most common misconception about meditation, the one that stops more people than anything else, is that you’re supposed to stop your thoughts. You’re not. You can’t. Nobody can, and anyone who tells you they can is either confused or selling something.
What changes over time isn’t the volume of thinking. It’s your relationship to it. In the beginning, a thought arises and you’re immediately inside it, following it, arguing with it, elaborating on it. With practice, there’s a widening of the space around thought. A thought arises and you see it arise. You might still follow it for a while, but you come back sooner. Eventually the thoughts are still there but you’re less interested in them, the way traffic noise fades when you stop paying attention to it.
Noticing that you’ve been distracted is the practice. The moment you notice, you’re already back. I spent years not understanding this, thinking every distraction was a failure. It wasn’t. Each return is a small strengthening of the capacity to be present. The distractions are the reps.
Find a tradition, not just a technique
Techniques are useful as entry points, but a tradition gives you context, depth, and a lineage of practitioners who’ve walked the same ground before you. Whether it’s Advaita Vedānta, Nyingma Dzogchen, Zen, Vipassana, or another contemplative path, find one that speaks to you and go deep rather than wide.
I spent decades in two traditions, and what I learned is that depth in one reveals more than surface familiarity with many. There was a period in my thirties when I was reading everything, sampling everything, attending teachings in four different lineages. I was very well-informed and not getting anywhere. When I finally committed to going deep in one tradition, and then later a second, things started to move.
Don’t chase experiences
The desire for progress is natural. You sit down hoping something will happen: calm, insight, a sense of expansion. And sometimes it does, and it feels like proof that the practice is working. The trouble is that this creates a habit of evaluating each sitting, grading it, comparing it to yesterday’s. Before long, meditation becomes another performance.
The real changes are subtler and slower than any single sitting can show you. The gap between a stimulus and your reaction widens. The habit of narrating your experience before it has fully arrived weakens. A quiet stability appears that has nothing to do with circumstances. You notice these changes in retrospect, the way you notice a season has changed. Not all at once, but unmistakably.
What I wish someone had told me when I started
That the difficult periods are the practice, not interruptions to it. I spent years thinking the restless, agitated sittings were wasted time. They weren’t. They were where the most important work was happening, precisely because I couldn’t control them.
That boredom is one of the most productive things that can happen in meditation. We’re so conditioned to avoid boredom that when it shows up on the cushion, most people change what they’re doing. Don’t. Sit with the boredom. It’s covering something, and if you’re patient, the boredom will thin and you’ll see what’s underneath it.
And that what you’re looking for isn’t an experience. Every experience, no matter how luminous, arises and passes. What remains, after all of them have come and gone, is the awareness in which they appeared. That awareness was never missing. You don’t need to create it or find it or earn it. You just need to stop looking somewhere else for it.
I could have saved myself about ten years if someone had told me that clearly when I was twenty-five. But I probably wouldn’t have believed them.
For what a daily practice looks like after forty years, see What a Daily Meditation Practice Actually Looks Like. The full story is in Nothing in the Way.
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