I started meditating regularly about 4 months ago. I do 10 minutes per day every single day. Initially, when my roommate asked me to join him in his morning meditation I was not interested. I am someone who is most productive in the morning/early afternoon, so spending 10 min of that time sitting on a couch, eyes closed, doing nothing seemed irresponsible. However, after enough prodding from Jack, I eventually decided that I could spare 10 minutes to try it out. As I remember it, my first session wasn’t particularly groundbreaking. I honestly kept getting lost in thought, and frankly had a pretty difficult time disconnecting from the tasks I knew I had to complete later in the day. However, what made me come back for day two (and three and four and five etc.) was the fact that during the 10-minute session, even if it was just for a split second, I started focusing on parts of my mind and my body that I pretty much forgot existed. “Draw attention to your breath,” the instructor said “pick a very specific point on your body” (for me it was the tip of my left nostril) “and pay close attention to it. Observe whatever sensation appears at that point as the breath passes through it”.
Now, obviously, I know that I have a left nostril, I am reminded of that fact every time I look in a mirror; however, it’s very rare that I actually pay attention to it. Throughout my day my body is picking up so many different signals that my brain is forced to take the information and distill it down into what’s important. As a result, my conscious waking mind is only made aware of the most pressing information at any given moment (it’s freezing out, my arm is broken, the sun hurts my eyes, there is a fire truck coming, etc.). While this auto-filtering is probably good for the sake of remaining sane and not getting hit by fire trucks, it also means that I miss a lot of things on a daily basis. Hence the point of this article, and where everything starts to tie together. Meditating, and specifically the awareness I have gained from it, has made me realize that my mind is like any other machine: it wants to accomplish the task at hand (keeping me alive) as efficiently as possible. This means making a lot of assumptions based on past data (this mask is a crazy example that Michael Pollan references in his book How to Change your Mind), and in turn, missing a lot.
Being aware of the fact that my brain is intentionally missing so much has had several implications. For one thing, it has made me realize that my mind subconsciously fits the world into boxes that were created long ago. I learned the meaning of words like adult, boss, love, friend, health, success, etc. as a child, and I subconsciously created boxes for each of those terms. Nowadays, my mind can more or less run on autopilot categorizing experiences, people, feelings, etc into these pre-existing boxes so as to not consume too much energy. One fun way that I like to prove this to myself is by looking up at the sky. At any given moment if I look at a cloud my mind will try to assign the shape to a pre-existing box (“that one looks like a heart, that one looks like a rabbit”). While it can be fun to turn the daytime sky into a world of familiar shapes and structures, it’s also a good reminder that our brains sometimes prevent us from seeing what’s actually there. Similarly, every now and then when I’m standing on the sidewalk near where I live I’ll pause and look around. Almost without fail, every time I do this I see or experience something new. For instance, the last time I did it I noticed that the building I live across from has a fencing studio on the second floor. I also noticed that the stone in between the floors of my building has a series of very ornate carvings in it that I had never seen before. So while I would probably tell you that I know what my block looks like, in reality, I’m probably missing more than I’m seeing.
Alright so since I can’t be constantly examining every detail of every building on my block, what’s the practical takeaway here? For me, it’s that since my mind misses a lot I need to constantly be questioning the things I think are true. If I am at work or in a conversation with friends and am convinced that I am doing something the right way, that could be a sign that my mind is just taking the easy way out. After all, I missed the fencing studio across the street, who’s to say there aren’t other things getting filtered out?
P.S. Here is the meditation app that I am using. It’s got a 30 day free trial which is pretty awesome and got me absolutely hooked.
If this kind of awareness stuff interests you I would also recommend reading 1) Meditations by Marcus Aurelius and 2) How to Change Your Mind by Michael Pollan. The former is super short and something I’ll probably try to read twice a year going forward.