On my previous blog, I wrote about my experience meditating 30 minutes per day for a year. It's now been over two years and for this new blog and new year, I want to share an updated perspective. After hundreds of hours of practice, I remain absolutely convinced that insight meditation is a game changer for humanity.

In fact, in my view it is such a helpful and transformative practice that once the broader population realizes what it offers, it will become a permanent fixture in all our lives, integrated into schools, daily work schedules, morning and evening rituals, you name it. In the same way that there is essentially unanimous agreement and scientific consensus that connection is important for our happiness, and that exercise is important for our physical health, eventually we will all recognize that meditation is important for our mental health.

That's a strong claim — and not one I make lightly — but I'm confident that once you glimpse the vast potential of the practice, you too will be in agreement.

Why start meditating? What does it really offer?

There is ample scientific and first-hand evidence that meditation is a profoundly beneficial practice, and I encourage you to research it for yourself if you have doubts. Here's my perspective on what's most helpful:

Heightened self-awareness

You learn to observe your thoughts, emotions, reactions, and bodily sensations with greater clarity and less judgment. This is key. Cultivating this awareness is the critical first step in growing beyond our habits and patterns and living in greater alignment with our values.

Heightened external awareness

You also learn to improve your external awareness with regard to what's going on in the environment around you. Boredom becomes a thing of the past as you re-discover a world vastly more rich, awe-inspiring, and beautiful than you've ever realized. It's like wearing blurry goggles your whole life that you thought were crystal clear, then suddenly taking them off and realizing there is so much more to see.

Part of having an increased external awareness also means becoming more in tune with others: you learn to "read the room" by becoming sensitive to the energy of the people you are engaging with.

Better emotional regulation

With your increased internal awareness, you develop the ability to notice emotions arising, giving you the spaciousness to respond instead of react. Emotions eventually cease to hold you in their grip and consume your every thought for hours like they might have in the past.

This broadly describes the process of transitioning from identifying with one's emotions/thoughts to simply being aware of them as transient experiences. ("I am sad" → "I feel sad" → "I am aware of sadness")

Ultimately, it leads to greatly reduced stress, anxiety, anger, frustration, etc. and greatly increased feelings of joy, happiness, appreciation, and other positive emotions.

Improved concentration and attention

For a long time I believed I had ADHD — the attention deficit part more than the hyperactivity part. But what I came to realize after many months of practice is that my "attention deficit" was actually related to historical thinking patterns, i.e. my tendency to "go down rabbit holes". I have a habit of getting deeply absorbed in ideas, following one idea to another in a way that leads me far from where I started, and in the past I would get so lost in my head that I would lose awareness of the present moment.

So while it was true on some level that I had an "attention deficit" (i.e. my attention would drift off elsewhere), it wasn't that I had faulty genes or inadequate brain chemistry that needed to be fixed with a daily pill, it was just that I had an untrained mind. I had never trained myself to be mindful of my body, nor my environment, so I just went down deeper and deeper into thought rabbit holes until something else snapped me back to reality. With meditation, that's no longer the case — I have the awareness to pull myself back (at least sometimes 😂).

Ultimately, meditation helps you train your mind so you can focus your attention on what matters to you.

Greater equanimity

Meditation helps you maintain balance and peace of mind regardless of circumstances. Do you ever get flustered? I get flustered all the time, especially when I'm speaking in front of a group. Mindfulness helps with that. Do you ever freeze up / get paralyzed in certain situations? Mindfulness helps with that. It's a powerful practice for remaining calm and composed under pressure or in stressful circumstances.

You make better choices

Heightened internal and external awareness as well as improved emotional regulation combine to give you the spaciousness to make more deliberate, more informed, more intentional choices. I cannot stress enough how valuable this is.

Like other animals, much of our behavior is driven by an ancient, primitive part of the brain that uses shortcuts to save energy — the limbic system, which governs emotions, instinctive responses, and quick decision-making. It's quite a useful part of our brain, but sometimes it can also lead us astray.

Now, what's special about humans is that we have a massive prefrontal cortex compared to other animals, the area of the brain which handles complex reasoning, logic, and problem-solving. This allows us to make better decisions but it requires a lot of energy so our brain tries to offload thinking to the limbic system whenever it can. The problem is that for most of us, the switch to using our primitive brain happens without our awareness and we end up making poorer decisions than we might have if we had otherwise engaged our prefrontal cortex.

This difference is encapsulated in the difference between what we want to do and what we actually end up doing. We might know full well that exercise is good for us and we genuinely do want to exercise more, but we don't actually end up exercising very often. We know full well that eating too much junk food is bad for us, and we want to stop, but we still end up eating too much junk food. This is the dance between our prefrontal cortex, which reasons about how we think we should be but takes a lot of energy, and our limbic system, which requires much less energy but often gives into our baser urges.

Through insight meditation, we learn to notice when the limbic system is driving our choices. We develop the ability to pause, step back, and engage our prefrontal cortex more deliberately. This doesn't mean suppressing emotions or instincts — they often contain valuable information. Rather, meditation helps us integrate both systems: the quick wisdom of intuition and the careful analysis of reason.

This has profound benefits for all areas of your life. It could be something as simple as when someone criticizes you at work, instead of reacting defensively (limbic), you might pause to consider the feedback objectively (prefrontal). When faced with a difficult decision, rather than rushing to eliminate discomfort (limbic), you can sit with uncertainty long enough to weigh options carefully (prefrontal). The result is choices that better align with your values, desires, and long-term well-being.

Okay, I'm convinced. What's the best way to get started?

For a beginner, unless you have regular access to an instructor, I recommend using the Waking Up meditation app. I have used many meditation apps at this point and I've found Waking Up to be the most helpful by far. You can get a free month of access with my invite code, and honestly at $10/month this app is very reasonably priced for what it offers. That said, if you are truly financially strapped you can request a scholarship after your one-month trial ends.

I recommend Waking Up because I like how concepts in the introductory course are explained from a very grounded perspective, and also because the app provides both guided meditations and theory discussions from a wide range of respected practitioners which can really deepen your understanding of the practice. For the first year or two of meditating, I practiced mostly with guided meditations and supplemented that with theory discussion, which helped shape my understanding of the practice and its many nuances. Two years in now I mostly do unguided meditations because I believe I can get more out of a session that way, but I try to mix it up periodically with the theory and Q&A sessions offered on the app on to keep things fresh and ensure I'm not missing out on helpful insights from other practitioners.

As for how to practice, I recommend finding a quiet room with a comfortable seat where you are upright and not leaning against anything (it's too easy to subconsciously fall into a bad posture which in the long run will not be good for your spine) nor reclined/lying down (beginners may fall asleep). I prefer a kneeling chair, but most any chair will do, even if it has a back — you can just sit forward on it without leaning back. Same with a couch, if it has a firm enough edge you can just sit there and that will work just fine.

The Waking Up app will guide you through the rest. However, I have a few additional tips that you might find helpful.

Tips for beginners

At its core, meditation is simply about non-judgmental observation — observing what's going on inside you and around you. Closing one's eyes, sitting in a particular way, being in a quiet space, these are all techniques which can be helpful for beginner practitioners but they are not essential to the practice. I say this because I don't want you to get caught up with trying to figure out the "perfect" technique. It's not about the technique, it's more about the attitude you have, the attitude — in the words of spiritual teacher Adyashanti — "of ease and openness." It's about letting go of control and accepting what is. That's really all there is to it.

A good sign you aren't embracing an attitude of ease and openness is if you find that you are judging yourself for getting lost in thoughts or emotions when you meditate. "I'm so bad at this." "I'll never be able to do this." "I must be dumb if I can't figure this out." Human beings aren't robots, we can't just download meditation into our brains and be perfect at it right away. Like any skill, it's something you have to practice and naturally some people will be quicker at certain aspects and others will be slower. That's life! We all have to start somewhere, so don't judge yourself for where you start or how fast you feel you are progressing, because that judgment itself will impede your progress. Accept yourself for the unique and extraordinary individual that you are and in that loving acceptance, cultivate an attitude of openness to whatever experiences come your way.

Another way of looking at it is this: when you recognize your mind has wandered, that's a success! At that very moment you are no longer subject to the whims of your distracted mind and you are now empowered to direct your attention back to the present. That is the practice. Getting distracted, recognizing it, and pulling your attention back to the present — again and again and again until it becomes second nature. This is how you train your attention.

To be extra clear: You are not trying to stop thoughts or emotions, you're not even trying to stop becoming distracted. That's controlling behavior, and again the practice is about letting go of control. It's about observing and accepting whatever you notice. Over time, you'll notice more readily when you are distracted and thus you'll be able to catch yourself from going down rabbit holes sooner — unless you want to go down that rabbit hole. Again the goal is not to stop thoughts or emotions from arising, it's to learn to recognize when that happens and in that noticing, give you the power to decide whether you want to investigate them further (or not).

In time, you will also notice your practice beginning to blend with your daily life — quite literally, in fact. While as a beginner you typically learn to meditate seated with your eyes closed, eventually you learn to meditate with open eyes, and then while walking, all the way until you can practice essentially in every waking moment. If there is an end goal of meditation practice, that's it: to practice until there is no difference between practice and life and you are able to permanently harness the full power of choice and attention.

And with that, I hope you find this invitation to meditate helpful and I wish you the best in your practice. ❤