Bear with me, we’ll shortly dive into our first meditation session together. If you want to follow along right away, only make sure that you’ve got the time and the space to sit down quietly and undisturbed for a couple of minutes. Ideally, you’re in a spot with little external distractions, and where other people don’t immediately judge you if they see you you sitting still with your eyes closed.

But just to make that clear before we get started: There’s definitely no need for incense sticks or tea candles, there’s not going to be any chanting, and you don’t even have to fold yourself into the lotus position¹—unless, of course, you’re already familiar with that and like to sit in this way, in which case, be my guest! There are, in fact, quite good reasons why some contemplative traditions, for example Zen Buddhism², put a lot of emphasize on such minor details as how exactly you fold your legs or hold your hands. But for now, I don’t think that obsessing over these things would be helpful.

Did you notice that even when there’s nothing specific you wanted to think about, like just now, when you were only trying to focus on the breath, your mind is nevertheless creating new thoughts pretty much all the time? If you pay even closer attention, you’ll notice that these thoughts don’t actually come from anywhere. They just… appear, without you really being in charge of that process. But once a thought has sprung to life, the mind immediately picks up on it and your concentration gets lured away, or dragged “into” the thought itself, isn’t it? And, all of a sudden, you’re so absorbed by your daydreaming that you’re no longer paying attention, for example to the breath.

I don’t know about you. But for me, when I first witnessed this this basic truth about how the mind works, how thinking works, during meditation, that was a pretty profound realization! Because, as it turns out, that thing happens pretty much all the time, throughout every moment of life. Thoughts come and go, dragging our attention this way or that way.

On the one side, it was kind of scary to realize that most of the time, “I” wasn’t actually in charge of my attention. Often, it just drifts around or wanders without a conscious decision or my approval. Out there, in the real world, this can of course be tremendously dangerous: When driving a car, for example, even a split second of mind wandering can turn into a deadly accident.

But on the other side, understanding these mechanics of the mind also came with a feeling of liberation: Thoughts, sensations, emotions, intentions, they all arise in the mind moment by moment by moment. All on their own. Whether I want them to or not. But, if left alone, they also dissipate or fade away, almost just as quickly. And this insight can be freeing, because it means that whenever there is something that’s bothering you at this very moment—sadness, anger, frustration, whatever it may be—that thing also has a limited lifespan. It will, inevitably, also be gone soon and make room for something else again.

Now, let’s shift gears a little bit, and examine some additional, practical benefits that people often associate with meditation. But before we do that, let’s do another practice.

During this practice, it’s likely that two very interesting things happened: First, at some point after you lost concentration, you should then have become consciously aware of what your attention actually was point at—particularly, that it was no longer where you had intended it to be. And second, you managed to willfully guide your attention back to that sensation of the breath. It doesn’t matter that, probably, it didn’t stay there for long. What matter is that these two skills combined, mundane as they may seem, are already a kind of mental “superpower:” If you can apply this pattern of detecting where your attention is and gently guiding it to wherever you want it to be, in situations in your daily life—say, while driving your car down the highway, to stick with our previous example—that can make that life-or-death difference between being distracted by a daydream and being fully present—and thus, able to evade that truck which just pulled out in front of you.

Back to the point about the benefits of meditation: Exactly this kind of supercharged “attention management” is one major reason why many people today find value in meditation practice. It helps to strengthen your ability to concentrate, and to detect and counteract unhelpful mind-wandering, which furthermore can help you to break through such unproductive things as negative thought spirals, habitual negative thinking, and thus foster many other positive aspects of mental wellbeing. But more on that another time.

I hope that you’ve seen for yourself, with those two simple exercises, that the human mind is a lot quirkier that we might have hoped. But also, you may walk away from this with a more solid grasp on the fact that meditation practice can be useful to deal with them a bit more skillfully.

But beyond attention and concentration management, there are quite a few other benefits to a sustained meditation practice that I don’t want to withhold from you before I let you go for today.

• The first one is pure and simple relaxation. Though often considered more a side effect, rather than the point of meditation, most people do report that meditating regularly simply helps to reduce their subjectively experienced stress level. From a physiological standpoint, you can observe for yourself how your heart rate and your breathing are slowing down after you’ve just taken a few deep, mindful breaths, for example. And lab experiments demonstrated a significant reduction in blood cortisol levels in people who practiced meditation regularly over the course of a few weeks ³. But whether you meditate for 30 minutes every the morning, or just take two deep breaths before the start of an important meeting, once your mind is acquainted with the practice, it’ll settle into a calmer, more collected state more easily.
• The second aspect I’d like to highlight is often called “insight” and has a slightly philosophical touch to it: After our first meditation session, we had an interesting realization: We noticed, that our thoughts “come from nowhere.” This is an important piece of “insight” into how the human mind actually works. And the more you meditate, the more profound these “insights” can become. These kinds of insights are what philosophers in contemplative traditions, such as Buddhism, used as their first principles from which they built entire frameworks of morals and ethics out of—as opposed to superstitious beliefs, for example.
• The third, kind of related benefit is that meditation can provide you with an expanded perspective on life itself: The aforementioned insights can help you to develop a different, broader view of the human condition, and your life in particular. For example, you’ll come to realize that your mind has the tendency to instantly judge every experience every moment as “good” or “bad,” something that we’ll discuss in more detail in one of the upcoming chapters. But you’ll notice that those value judgements are not only often unhelpful, but that they usually lead to short-sighted and often just wrong conclusions and unhelpful actions. Once you’re becoming more aware of that, it gets a bit easier to take a step back, reflect, and willfully respond (rather than instinctively react) to whatever situation you find yourself in. Furthermore, appreciating that other’s minds work in just the same, quirky, and often unpredictable way can help to make you a bit more tolerant towards behavior that might irritate you. And thus, you, in return will become a bit more pleasant to be around.
• And the forth, and final, aspect I’d like to mention is a broad range of mental health benefits, that covers things such as resilience, impulse control, emotional stability, and much more: For me, the bottom line of all that we’ve discussed so far is that meditation can help you be more content and more satisfied with what’s going on in your life, equip you with the tools to understand what’s going on in your head, and allow you to respond more skillfully to the ups and downs in life. In the upcoming chapters, we’ll examine in more detail the scientific studies that have been done on meditation and the impact on human psychology and psychopathology ⁴. But for now, trust me that there’s a lot of good evidence that it can help to alleviate the suffering caused by mental disorders, but also be used for what’s often called “the betterment of well people.”

Let’s close this one off with another practice session.