Why Meditate?

I try to do a spot of meditation every day, and have done so since discovering the benefits of it when I was a teenager. Its effects are subtle and difficult to put into words, but it helps me feel more "together" and better able to concentrate on whatever I have to do during the day.

Being an essentially Eastern practice, it's something of an anathema to the popular Western mindset and most mainstream folk dismiss it as either middle-class pretension or delusory nonsense - what's the point of sitting in silence doing nothing for half an hour or more? Who's got the time, and besides, I can easily do nothing when I'm asleep! It goes directly against the grain of our Northern European work-ethic heritage and our Busy, Busy, Busy lives. If we're not working or getting stressed going to and from work, we feel we ought to spend every spare minute "enjoying" ourselves to make up for all the crap we have to put up with on a daily basis. Why add more constraint to an already overflowing life?

The answer is that meditation gives you more energy and focus, and so helps you deal so much better with every other aspect of life, de-stressing you and making you feel alot less pressed for time all round. You sacrifice 30 minutes (or whatever you can manage) to gain so much more than what watching half an hour's brain-curdling telly could give you.

A good analogy is personal hygiene. Everyone recognises the benefits of cleaning your teeth or showering every day, even people who work in a clean environment like an office. Imagine how your hands would look if you were a gardener who never washed, imagine how you'd smell if you were a binman who never showered, imagine the breath of a chef who never used a toothbrush! The need for maintaining the cleanliness of the human body goes without saying, yet we expose our minds to all sorts of crap and nonsense all the time but we're brought up (in our secular "Age of Enlightenment") to do absolutely nothing about it - it just accumulates and stagnates into a quagmire of churning attitudes and emotions. We absorb horror and scandal from the news, listen to gossip and lewd jokes from our friends, argue with our families, watch violent films and melodramatic soap operas, seethe at the stupidity of people we don't like, rail at politicians and get irritated by the thousand and one things that break down, go wrong or get in our way in the course of a week. Our minds simply aren't built to cope and deal with all this input, so is it any wonder Western Civilisation has so many endemic problems?

Meditation is like cleaning the mind. It calms it down, wipes away all the grime and persistent nagging thoughts and gives our conciousness a bit of time and space in which to rest, replenish and maintain itself. Sleep doesn't do the same job because the chemical balance of our brains is completely different when we're unconcious, and you don't empty a bin by shutting the lid on it! Just as your mouth feels a whole lot fresher after cleaning your teeth, so your mind feels fresher after a good session of meditation. It's maintenance for your brain and sustenance for your sanity and while I wouldn't claim it's an easy thing to get started on, I would claim meditation is something everyone would benefit from if they could be arsed to give it a go and stick with it.

At the very least, it's better than walking around with a stinky mind!