What will meditation do for me?

Even as little as ten minutes meditation every day will make a noticeable difference to your life. Meditation is a form of training, so meditating for a bit longer will help you see progress. Doing it consistently will also help. Meditating once in a while isn’t likely to have much effect beyond some short-term relaxation.

What progress can you expect to see?

• You’ll find that things that used to “push your buttons,” you can now face with calmness.
• You will experience more confidence.
• Your relationships with others will become more harmonious.
• You’ll feel happier.
• You may well sleep better.
• You’ll start to have more psychological insights and better understand why things happen they way they do in your life.
• You’ll feel more at peace with yourself.
• You’ll start to get more of a sense of your life having a purpose.

You’ll accomplish all these things by learning more about the way your mind works. You’ll learn to recognize unhelpful patterns of thought, feeling, and action that tend to make you less effective. These unhelpful patterns include getting unnecessarily angry, or feeling despondent.

You’ll learn how to let go of these patterns.

You’ll also learn how to choose to respond more creatively, in ways that allow you to remain calm and aware of the effects of your actions on yourself and others. You’ll learn, for example, how to calm your mind and how to develop more empathy for others. You’ll learn to have more patience with yourself and others.

But…

I’ve often joked that we just say that meditation makes you happier in order to get people to come to beginners’ classes. It’s only half a joke; meditation does make you happier.

But it also makes you aware of problems you didn’t know you had. Now if you see that as a bad thing — good luck! To my mind starting to learn the ways in which you unconsciously cause suffering for yourself and other people is an excellent thing, even if the process is at times very painful. You’ll still experience the suffering you’re unconsciously creating for yourself even if you’re not conscious that you’re unconsciously creating it (if you know what I mean).

If you don’t know what I mean then all will become clear in practice. At times you’ll wish that you could return to an “ignorance is bliss” way of being, but you’ll most likely realize that actually ignorance is the opposite of bliss. In fact awareness is bliss — once you’ve gotten past the state of cringing at realizing what you’re really like. But, hey, that’s what the development of lovingkindness practice is for! Awareness on its own can make us depressed, but lovingkindness and awareness combined make for great happiness.