TLDR:
The game of tennis: hitting a ball back and forth across a net to earn points
The goal of tennis: to capture the most points
Who wins the match: the best hitter
The game of meditation: recognizing and releasing thoughts
The goal of meditation: to be still and present, engaged with what's happening now
Who wins the match: the witness
Most of us go through our days with our minds awash in thoughts. And depending on what we think about, our emotions follow. When you think about ‘the one that got away’, you’ll have sad feelings. When you think about how embarrassed you felt after your colleague offered feedback in a scoldy, shamey way, you’ll experience the anger all over again.
If we aren’t aware of our thoughts, we get swept along in the dream. We imagine the contents of our thoughts to be real—as in, really happening right now.
"I gotta worry about this, 'cause it's REAL!" [says your mind, all day long]
Our bodies respond as though what we’re thinking about is alive and in motion all around us. This conjures emotions and more thoughts. In response, our brains release hormones that match our emotions.
Any time you’ve felt butterflies before speaking to a group, or felt your heart squeeze when you remember that your ex is never coming back, that’s evidence of your mind creating emotional responses in your body.
Our bodies are complex, beautiful machines. They do exactly what we tell them to…whether we mean to or not.
This is how the frustrated, irritable person gets heart disease. It’s not that they’re continually stimulated in the real world by things that infuriate them, but that they focus so much of their attention on events that have enraged them. They’ll replay that stupid conversation with their brother-in-law over and over, seething about how wrong the guy is. They’ll mentally draft a variety of scathing retorts to that idiot’s tweet. They’ll hold forth at the dinner table about how the mayor is ruining the city’s character by building all those useless bike lanes.
Swimming in its soup of angry thoughts, their brain continually issues the same command: Launch fight response! And their body obeys.
These folks’ adrenal glands stay busy much of the day, faithfully producing cortisol and leaking it back into the bloodstream in a continual flow. Over time, those high levels of cortisol lead to high blood pressure, high blood sugar and cholesterol, and more and more little blobs of plaque collecting on the walls of their arteries (which are rough and therefore more susceptible to plaque buildup because they're always washed in stress chemicals. Picture how battery acid corrodes steel.).
This happens to people who continually choose to think about things that make them mad.
In case you were feeling happy that you’ve dodged this bullet because you’re not the angry type, it bears pointing out that your adrenal glands pump out cortisol when you think worry thoughts, too. Or when you dwell upon your too-long to-do list. Or if you have a job where you have little control. Or if you're stressed out about the Visa bill.
It’s worth learning how to become aware of your thoughts, so you can mitigate their effects on your mood and body. That’s where meditation comes in.
The practice of meditation, or any mindfulness activity, is to place you here, and remind you that you aren’t the thoughts in your head.
Quieting your mind is a game of recognizing thoughts when they appear.
Thoughts will always come and go in your mind. Your mind is like a river, with thoughts bobbing along in the current. You're in there, too.
You’re free to get out at any time. You can shake yourself off on the bank, sit down and just watch the river carry your thoughts downstream. You'll have lots to watch: there's a whole new batch just upstream.
The game of meditation is to recognize when you slide into thinking. And then to remove yourself back into the seat of the witness—the one who simply observes without becoming emotionally involved.
One of Headspace’s animations illustrates the goal of meditation perfectly, using the analogy of traffic instead of a river. It’s a very short video with the potential to utterly change your life.
The tricky part is this: recognizing when we’re caught up in thought is a challenge. Like the music you hear at the grocery store, our brain plays thought after thought all day long. The muzak never ends! It’s easy to get swirled into replaying past events, or imagining how things will turn out in the future.
All throughout your day, you’re sucked in and carried along by your thoughts—the story, I call it, or the dream. Most of the time we don’t even notice that we’re being carried along in the river.
You might stay there for a few hours before you remember you’re just thinking. You might stay there for a few days before you become aware that your attention has become absorbed in the thoughts and stories. Some people never manage to separate themselves from their thoughts.
This is normal. We are highly intelligent, and so...we think a lot. And because our brains are wired to keep us safe, they churn out five times the negative thoughts for every positive thought.
It’s up to us to rewire them.
In those rare moments when you realize you've been swept into the river, great: you’ve found your way back to the game. Beeline for the shore.
The game resets every time you notice that you’ve gotten lost in thoughts. When you have that “Hey, I’m thinking again,” moment, you are being offered an opportunity to release the thoughts back into the river—or to let them pass by like clouds or cars, whatever metaphor you like best.
When you just watch the thoughts float past, you have chosen presence. You’ve chosen to be here, with what is going on right in front of you…instead of in the past or in the future. That’s the point of the game.
Practice that enough and you win.
Unlike tennis or Tetris, however, this game never ends. You'll play all day long—at least until you master presence. That river never stops, the traffic never abates, the muzak never quits, the little racquet in your mind never stops serving balls over the net.
Ping. [Josef doesn't respect me. He doesn't see how strategic I am with our content.]
Ping. [Where's Janet? I haven't heard from her in weeks. It's weird. Not like her to ghost.]
Ping. [Shit, I forgot white wine for the risotto. I have to stop at the liquor store.]
And most of the time, you go right ahead and hit those balls back over the net. You don't even realize you're doing it.
I'm mixing metaphors. Tennis, river... But really, the essence is this:
Holding a state of awareness, where your attention is only here and only now, requires a meditative watchfulness. Mindfulness.
The prize for winning this game?
Presence. Being here—not distracted by thoughts about what hasn’t happened yet. Not paralyzed by thoughts about what happened in the past.
Presence is an enormous win because it contains within it all the things you really want: calm, flow, ease, enjoyment, the ability to laugh.
The ability to love.
And much more power. Because only in the state of presence do you have any power. You cannot change anything about the past, and you cannot create anything in the future—you can only think about those things.
Only in the Now do you have any capability of creating change, or offering love, or taking action toward what you want.
So stay in the game. And play to win.
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