Progress in Meditation

I could go over how I got into meditation and everything it has changed in my life, but we'll do that another time. It's a mistake I often make when I start a new site or a new notebook: wanting to "start from scratch" and explain how everything began. But I quickly get overwhelmed by the task and give up.

So let's talk about the present.

One real sign of progress I've noticed in my practice is recognizing more and more mental contents as thoughts.

You probably know that in meditation, you try to step aside so you can recognize that a particular anxiety, fear, or anger is "just a thought" that will pass the way clouds pass in the sky. That simple relabeling is enough to free you from it. When an existential anxiety is brought back to what it really is – a brain fart – it loses its power.

Except it doesn't always work.

While some worries are quickly recognized for what they are – intellectual constructions – others are more stubborn, more insidious. As if, in the game of recognizing thoughts, they didn't count. "That," we tell ourselves, "is reality."

But the thoughts we can't manage to label as thoughts are often the most intimate ones. The ones we're most used to, which we've been carrying around for years, sometimes since childhood. They're part of us, part of our mental patterns, of the way we react day to day. They're like wallpaper stuck to reality so tightly – and for so long – that we can't imagine the world without it.

Progress in meditation, for me, is the process that lets us question those things too.

Day after day, the frontier of awareness expands, and what we thought was the fabric of the world, the essence of things, fate (...) turns out to be just one more element of our inner world. Another brain fart.

Until the day when, torn by an anxiety so familiar we thought it was inescapable, we suddenly find ourselves able to say the magic words:

"That, too, is a thought."