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What Meditation Isn’t

The first thing worth mentioning is that meditation is not a productivity hack. If that’s your goal, you’re better off getting some exercise, sleeping enough, and installing one of those apps that blocks distracting websites. This isn’t to say that meditation can’t or won’t help with productivity. Part of meditating is strengthening your focus—choosing your “meditation object” and then bringing your attention back to it, again and again (and again), when it inevitably drifts away. Building that capacity clearly helps when you’ve got an unengaging task in front of you.

But “building focus” isn’t why Buddhism puts so much weight on meditation, just as “increasing your deadlift” isn’t why we value building our strength. Instead, both are means to an end, and constituent parts of our goal. Remember, the aim of Buddhism is the end of dukkha—or stress, dis-ease, or suffering. The source of dukkha is a mistaken perspective we have about ourselves and our world, one bound up in clinging, aversion, and ignorance. 

This means that the way you end suffering, according to Buddhism, is by changing your perspective. It’s about seeing and understanding the world, and yourself, differently than habit has you doing. It’s about, then, gaining and understanding insight. You see the world, and yourself, as they really are, and accept that. This will undo the mental habits and reactive responses that cause you (and others) stress, dis-ease, and suffering.

This is why it’s not a productivity hack. Not because it can’t help, but because that’s not the proper aim. In fact, a regular meditation practice could well make you less productive, in the way we think about that in the West. You’ll come to discover that lasting happiness isn’t found in getting the most done, accumulating the most wealth, or rising up the ranks. All of those are transitory and unreliable sources of happiness. Meditation won’t turn you into a slacker, but if you practice seriously for some time, you’ll notice that a lot of what we think makes us happy really doesn’t.

Meditation as Discovery

If the purpose of meditation is to change our perspective on ourselves and our world, how does sitting serenely achieve that? Recall that the Eightfold Path, which is the method Buddhism presents for bringing an end to our suffering, divides into three parts: ethics, wisdom, and mental discipline. Mediation is the method for achieving all three.

By practicing meditation, we calm our minds and train ourselves to be less reactive. This helps us to be more ethical, by giving us tools to better notice when we’re about to behave unethically, and the demeanor and control needed to not give into the temptation to behave poorly. By developing focus, we are able to maintain that awareness, but also turn our attention inward to study the nature of our own minds. This helps us to develop wisdom about the causes of suffering. Finally, the practice of meditation requires discipline to stick with it and to take it seriously enough to progress. As this discipline grows, it strengthens the tools we use to develop and maintain ethical behavior and expand our understanding.

This is why meditation is so powerful. It isn’t just about finding calm, and it isn’t just about developing focus. Rather, it gives us a means to build those, while also cultivating the mental tools needed for the broader project of bringing an end to our stress, dissatisfaction, and dis-ease, and achieving lasting happiness—and all in a way where every feature and development feeds into and strengthens the rest.

Next time, we’ll talk about a few different meditation methods you can try, and how to approach beginning a practice.

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