Life is crazy. Life is hectic. We’re always running and running and running. And sometimes, meditation feels like a forced relaxation, a little bit of time carved out of an otherwise chaotic life.
We want to meditate more often. We know it helps. But life gets in the way.
There’s work, family, responsibilities, anxiety, restless thoughts, and a million other things that seem to prevent us from sitting down and doing the practice we want to do.
But there’s something important to understand here: there is no life getting in the way of your practice. Life is the practice.
When I first started meditating about twenty years ago, I split myself into two people. I had Monk and I had Mark, and they were always at war with each other.
Monk wanted to stop drinking and be kind. Mark wanted to be a rock star, a wild and crazy college guy. One wanted to practice, and the other wanted to do whatever the hell he wanted.
It was a tough battle.
I’d go on retreats, and they were amazing. I’d experience the quiet, the simplicity, the structure, and the space to really settle into the practice. Then I’d come home and try to force retreat life into regular life.
That never worked.
I’d find myself thinking that life was getting in the way. I wanted to deepen my practice, but I had all this nonsense and all these responsibilities. How was I supposed to do it?
I have four kids, a wife, and a full-time job. I can’t just tell my wife, “Sorry, honey. I know I’ve been working all week, but I’m going away for the weekend. See you in a few days.”
There was a little tension between me and one of my Zen teachers because he was always encouraging me to make more time for retreats and practice. I understood what he was saying, but I also had a life to live.
My other teacher offered a different perspective.
He told me that my practice was being a husband and a father. That’s a really hard practice. Go do it.
And that was an important lesson for me.
My second book, Your Life IS Meditation, is built around this very idea. It’s a collection of stories and short chapters, but the essence is simple: nothing is separate from your practice.
Your anxiety isn’t getting in the way. Your restless mind isn’t getting in the way. Your depression, your addiction, your partner, your work, your responsibilities, and all the other things you wish were different aren’t getting in the way.
That is the path.
And the three simple words I keep coming back to are these:
This is it.
Whatever this is, that’s your practice.
The Difference Between Practicing and Living
Now, I understand what people mean when they say life gets in the way. It’s hard to fit formal sitting meditation into an already busy schedule. I’m not dismissing that.
Sometimes you really do need to make meditation a habit. Pick a realistic time, pick something manageable, and show up.
You don’t have to commit to an hour every day. Start with five minutes.
Five minutes in the morning. Five minutes before bed. Whatever works for you.
But make it something you actually do, rather than something you keep considering doing.
Because when you start listening to that voice that says, “I don’t want to get up five minutes early,” or “I could meditate, but I really should do the dishes,” you’re strengthening the very habit you’re trying to change.
The whole point of this practice is to stop being so limited by our conditioned minds. We don’t have to identify with every thought that pops into our heads, believe everything we think, and immediately do whatever our minds tell us to do.
We can learn to be free.
And freedom doesn’t mean being comfortable all the time. It doesn’t mean doing whatever we want.
Think about a traditional meditation retreat. Everything is structured. You bow a certain way, walk a certain way, ring the bells a certain way, hold your hands a certain way, and eat a certain way.
At first glance, that can seem restrictive.
You might think, “I don’t want to bow like that. I want to walk the way I want to walk. I don’t want to wake up at five. I want to wake up at seven-thirty.”
But something interesting happens when you let go of the constant need to do everything your way.
You discover freedom in the discipline itself.
You’re no longer completely controlled by your preferences. You can do something even when you don’t particularly feel like doing it.
That’s a kind of freedom we don’t usually think about.
And that’s what we’re cultivating when we show up for our practice day after day.
Meditation Isn’t About Feeling Good
I think one of the biggest misunderstandings about meditation is that it’s supposed to make us feel good.
We want to relax. We want to quiet our minds. We want to be happy. We want to get rid of our anxiety and stop feeling uncomfortable.
And sure, there are plenty of benefits to meditation. Generally speaking, people often feel pretty relaxed after sitting for a while.
But if that’s all you’re after, what happens when you get out of the car and someone cuts you off? What happens when your partner comes home and throws their clothes on the floor? What happens when your kids start fighting, something breaks in the house, or you receive some unexpected bad news?
All that peace you experienced during meditation can disappear in an instant.
And if all you did was feel relaxed for a little while, you might not have learned much about how to meet the rest of your life.
That’s why I don’t think happiness is the best goal for meditation.
Happiness is conditioned. It depends on circumstances, and circumstances change.
You can meditate every day and still get sick. You can practice for decades and still feel anxious. You can be a genuinely kind person and still have a terrible day.
Life cannot promise you that you’ll always feel good, no matter how much you practice.
So why make that the goal?
Instead, what if the goal were to be awake? To be compassionate? To be free to respond wisely and kindly to whatever is happening?
Those are qualities we can cultivate in any circumstance.
You don’t need to feel happy to be awake. You don’t need to feel relaxed to be kind. You don’t need your life to go the way you want it to go in order to practice.
You just need to be here for what’s happening.
The Problem Isn’t Always the Experience. It’s What We Add to It.
There’s a great story about a student who was practicing with Joseph Goldstein, a well-known meditation teacher.
During a retreat, the student went to speak with Joseph because he was having a terrible time. His back was killing him. He couldn’t concentrate. He was frustrated and couldn’t stop thinking about how he was never going to develop enough concentration to gain any insight.
Joseph listened and then asked him something along the lines of, “So, your back hurts?”
The student explained that his back hurt, but it was also making him frustrated, which was making him upset with everyone, which was making his mind restless, which was making his practice miserable.
Joseph came back to the same basic point: his back hurt.
Eventually, the student began to see what was happening.
The truth of that moment was that there was an unpleasant sensation in his back. That was it.
Was it unpleasant? Sure.
But look at everything else his mind was adding to that experience.
He was telling himself that something was wrong, that he shouldn’t be feeling this way, that he was failing at meditation, and that his pain was preventing him from reaching some magical state called enlightenment, freedom, or happiness.
He had taken one unpleasant sensation and dumped an entire pile of extra suffering on top of it.
And we do this all the time.
Something happens, and then we start thinking about what it means for us. We think about how unfair it is, how we don’t want it, how it shouldn’t be happening, how it’s going to ruin everything, and how we’re going to get out of it.
Before long, the original experience is almost beside the point. We’re caught up in the story we’ve created around it.
I see this in my own life.
Take my car situation, for example. I’m frustrated. There’s a problem with the transmission, and I have no idea exactly how everything is going to unfold or what it’s going to cost me.
Those are the circumstances.
But then the mind gets involved.
How am I going to pay for this? What if it gets worse? Why is this happening to me? I don’t need this right now. How am I going to deal with everything else if this happens?
And suddenly, I’m not just dealing with a car problem. I’m dealing with all the fear, frustration, and imagined possibilities my mind has piled on top of it.
I’m not saying those concerns are unreasonable. There are real things to figure out. I still have to make phone calls, talk to people, and find a way forward.
But there’s a difference between dealing with the conditions in front of me and turning those conditions into a personal catastrophe.
The car situation is what it is. Whether I like it or not, that’s what’s happening.
And I can work with that.
This is where wakefulness becomes so important. We begin to notice how quickly the mind adds things to reality and makes it more difficult for us.
Then, slowly, we learn not to indulge every thought, not to get lost in every reaction, and not to limit ourselves to whatever story happens to be running through our heads.
Wakefulness Is Different From Trying to Control Your Mind
I often talk about wakefulness rather than mindfulness. They’re closely related, but I like the word wakefulness because it gets right to the point.
It’s that simple quality of being awake and aware of what’s happening right now.
Your mind is thinking. Your body is breathing. There are sensations, sounds, feelings, and thoughts coming and going.
And something knows all of this is happening.
That’s wakefulness.
You don’t have to create it. You don’t have to manufacture some special experience. You don’t have to make your mind quiet before you can access it.
Think about how we normally respond to our thoughts.
We’re not upset that our hearts are beating. We’re not angry that our stomachs are digesting food. Those things are simply doing what they’re supposed to do.
But we’re often angry that our minds are thinking.
We sit down to meditate, and the moment thoughts appear, we assume we’re doing something wrong.
“I can’t stop my mind.”
Well, I never told you to stop your mind.
Good luck with that, anyway. The mind is made to think.
Meditation doesn’t stop you from functioning as a person. It can change how you relate to the thoughts that arise.
And that can make a world of difference in everyday life.
Imagine you come home after a bad day at work. The kids are fighting, the cat has thrown up, the radiator isn’t working, and you feel completely overwhelmed.
You can react automatically. You can get angry, yell, blame somebody, and start trying to force everything into order.
Or you can pause for a moment.
You can notice the arguing. You can notice the broken radiator. You can notice the tightness in your chest, the frustration, and the feeling of being overwhelmed.
These are the conditions of this moment.
That’s what’s true right now.
You don’t have to like it. You don’t have to pretend it’s pleasant. You don’t even have to feel calm.
But when you’re awake to what’s happening, you have a choice in how you respond.
When you’re not awake, the habits tend to take over.
It’s almost like opening a program on your computer. You double-click it, and the program runs.
We do the same thing with our conditioning.
We encounter a certain person, and we react in a familiar way. Someone speaks to us with a particular tone, and we respond with anger or defensiveness. We feel anxious, and we immediately begin doing whatever we usually do when anxiety shows up.
Double-click the anxiety, and the anxiety program runs.
Double-click the annoying person at work, and another program starts running.
Most of us are far more predictable than we realize.
A lot of our reactions were shaped by how we grew up, how we dealt with pain, how we sought attention, and how we learned to protect ourselves.
Those habits aren’t necessarily our fault. But if we’re unaware of them, we can spend our entire lives repeating them.
And many of those habits are habits of suffering.
That’s why wakefulness matters. It gives us a little space between what’s happening and what we do next.
We can begin to ask ourselves: Is this reaction helpful? Is it skillful? Does it cause harm? Is there another way to respond?
That’s where wisdom starts to develop.
We begin to see that certain things we do repeatedly cause suffering. And eventually, we may become less interested in doing them.
There’s an active part of the practice, where we consciously choose to pay attention and let go of unhelpful reactions. But there’s also a passive part, where, over time, some of that letting go begins to happen on its own.
We don’t have to force everything.
We just have to keep showing up and seeing clearly.
Nothing Is an Obstacle to Your Practice
One of the most important things to understand is that nothing is an obstacle to your practice.
If you’re having a great day, that’s your practice.
You can appreciate it. You can share that happiness with other people. You can wish that other people experience the same kind of ease.
If you’ve been diagnosed with cancer and you’re feeling miserable, that’s your practice, too.
You can recognize your own pain and use it to cultivate compassion for everyone else who is sick, afraid, or suffering.
You can think, “How many other people are feeling this way right now? May I and everyone experiencing this kind of pain be free from suffering. May we be healthy. May we find some peace.”
You’re not trying to make the illness disappear through positive thinking. You’re not pretending that everything is fine.
You’re meeting the experience that’s actually here and allowing it to open your heart rather than close it.
That’s the practice.
The two qualities I keep coming back to are wakefulness and compassion.
Notice that I didn’t say feeling good.
I’m not saying meditation will make you miserable. There are benefits to the practice, and many people experience greater ease and relaxation.
But if you’re constantly chasing a particular feeling, you’ll inevitably be disappointed when that feeling changes.
And feelings always change.
Instead, we can learn to be awake, compassionate, and free to respond wisely and kindly, regardless of how we happen to feel.
That’s something we can practice all the time.
The question is simple:
Am I awake, and how am I meeting this moment?
However It Is, There’s Room for It
There’s another phrase I come back to again and again: however it is, there’s room for it.
That’s the message of wakefulness.
However life shows up, there’s room for it to be that way.
A busy mind? There’s room for it.
Anxious thoughts? There’s room for them.
An aching knee, a difficult conversation, a broken car, an illness, or an overwhelming day? There’s room for all of it.
This doesn’t mean you have to enjoy everything that happens. It doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try to improve your circumstances when improvement is possible.
It means you don’t have to turn every unpleasant experience into something that shouldn’t be happening.
You can say, “Okay, this is how it is right now. I’m willing to work with it.”
That’s a radical shift from how we’re usually taught to approach well-being.
We’re constantly being offered ways to fix ourselves. Try this technique, repeat this mantra, attend this retreat, and maybe you’ll finally get rid of the thing that’s bothering you.
There’s a whole world of promises built around the idea that we can eliminate our discomfort if we just find the right method.
And I understand the appeal. When you’re struggling, you’re vulnerable. You want relief. You want someone to tell you that everything is going to be okay.
But what happens when the discomfort doesn’t go away?
What happens when you try the technique and you’re still anxious? When you meditate and your mind is still restless? When you do everything you’re supposed to do and life still refuses to cooperate?
If your understanding of meditation is that it’s supposed to fix you, you’ll probably conclude that the practice isn’t working.
But what if the practice isn’t about fixing yourself?
What if it’s about learning to sit with what scares you?
Can you sit with fear without immediately trying to get rid of it? Can you sit with overwhelm, panic, sadness, or uncertainty and become curious about the experience rather than treating it as an enemy?
What is this feeling, anyway?
What does it feel like in the body? Where do you notice it? What happens when you stop feeding it with stories about how terrible it is or how you can’t bear to feel this way?
You don’t have to make the feeling disappear.
You can explore it. You can sit with it. You can learn to make room for it.
And when you begin to make friends with the things you once feared, something changes in your relationship with them.
You’re no longer spending all your energy running away.
This doesn’t mean you’ll never feel fear again. It means fear doesn’t have to dictate every decision you make.
That’s a very different kind of freedom.
The Habit of Wanting and Not Wanting
There’s another important part of this practice that we often overlook: how we relate to the feeling tone of our experiences.
In meditation, we can notice that sensations and experiences tend to fall into three basic categories.
They’re pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral.
Something feels pleasant, and immediately the mind wants more.
How can I keep this? How can I make it last? How can I feel this way all the time?
Something feels unpleasant, and the mind wants to get rid of it.
How do I make this stop? How do I fix it? How can I make sure I never feel this way again?
And when something feels neutral, we tend to ignore it altogether.
Most of the time, these reactions happen so quickly that we don’t even notice them.
We’re simply conditioned by what we feel.
This is why people sometimes have very different opinions about their meditation practice from one day to the next.
One week, they come away feeling relaxed and focused. They think, “Oh my God, this is working! I love this practice.”
The following week, their minds are restless, they’re anxious, and they can’t seem to concentrate.
Suddenly, the practice is terrible. They think they’re doing something wrong, or maybe the whole thing is a waste of time.
But what actually happened?
One week, you felt good. Another week, you felt bad.
That’s it.
Why does one experience have to mean you’re succeeding while the other means you’re failing?
A restless mind is just a restless mind. Anxious feelings are just anxious feelings. An aching body is an aching body.
You don’t have to turn any of these things into a verdict about yourself or your practice.
You can simply notice what’s happening.
This is especially easy to understand when we pay attention to ordinary experiences.
Think about having someone hold your hand while they do your nails. You might notice the warmth of their hand, the cooler temperature of the polish, or the different sensations as they work.
Usually, you’re probably somewhere else in your head. You’re thinking about what happened earlier, what you need to do later, or whatever else is occupying your mind.
But when you become fully present, you start noticing things you might never have noticed before.
Some sensations are pleasant. Some are unpleasant. Some are neutral.
And you can experience all of them without immediately needing to do anything about them.
That’s wakefulness.
You’re not strengthening a habit of fear or running away. You’re learning to be present for the experience itself.
The same is true of the difficult moments in your day.
They come and go. Even the unpleasant ones eventually become memories.
I can be caught up in my car situation today, feeling overwhelmed and convinced that I’m stuck with a terrible problem. But eventually, this will be a memory of that week when my transmission died.
Whatever happens, that’s how it will have happened.
It doesn’t magically make the situation better. It doesn’t mean I won’t have to deal with the consequences.
But it reminds me that the experience isn’t as solid and permanent as it feels when I’m caught up in it.
My thoughts change. My moods change. My circumstances change.
And life continues.
Life Continues
I learned something important during a grief retreat I attended a few months ago: life continues.
Life continues whether my car breaks down or not.
The seasons keep changing. The bills keep coming. Children keep playing. People keep living their lives.
Whatever happens to us, life continues to unfold.
When we’re in the middle of something painful, it can feel as though we’ve been trapped in it forever. The experience feels so real, so overwhelming, and so solid that we can’t imagine anything else.
But that’s not the truth.
We might feel completely overwhelmed in one moment and feel fine a little while later. Something that seemed unbearable yesterday might feel manageable today.
This doesn’t mean we should dismiss our suffering or pretend that difficult things don’t matter.
It means we can remember that experiences are changing all the time, even when we’re too caught up in them to see it.
A friend once reminded me of a saying from the Talmud: “Where there is no solution, there is no problem.”
I think there’s something interesting to explore in that.
We often create a problem, then immediately start chasing a solution to the problem we’ve created.
Again, I’m not saying there aren’t real things we need to deal with. Of course there are.
If your car breaks down, you have to figure out how to repair it. If you’re sick, you may need medical treatment. If there’s a difficult situation at work, you might need to have a conversation or make a change.
We still have to engage with life.
But there’s a difference between saying, “This is what’s happening. How can I respond as skillfully as possible?” and saying, “This is a problem, and I have to fix it before I can be okay.”
The first approach allows us to work with reality.
The second makes our well-being dependent on getting reality to cooperate.
And reality doesn’t always cooperate.
Sometimes we can solve the problem. Sometimes we can’t. Sometimes we can change our circumstances, and sometimes we have to learn how to live with them.
The practice is learning how to meet each situation as it is.
How am I meeting this moment?
That question applies to everything.
How am I meeting my anxiety? How am I meeting my children? How am I meeting the person who frustrates me? How am I meeting my illness, my responsibilities, my grief, or my financial worries?
How am I meeting the life that’s actually happening, rather than the life I think I should be having?
That’s the practice.
The Practice Is to Make Room
When we sit in meditation, we don’t have to do anything magical or mystical.
We don’t have to hypnotize ourselves, force ourselves into a special state, or make the mind stop thinking.
We simply show up.
We notice the body. We notice sensations coming and going. We notice the breath, the sounds around us, and the thoughts moving through the mind.
Some experiences feel pleasant. Others feel unpleasant. Others don’t seem to matter much at all.
We let ourselves experience them without immediately grabbing on, pushing away, or deciding that something has gone wrong.
If the mind is restless, we can notice restlessness.
If we’re worried, we can notice worry.
If we’re peaceful, we can notice peacefulness.
Sometimes it helps to give the experience a simple label.
“Oh, struggle. Good to see you today.”
“Oh, worry. Come sit with us.”
There’s no need to turn the experience into an identity. We don’t have to think, “Why am I like this? What’s wrong with me? Why can’t I be different?”
We can simply recognize what’s happening.
These are the conditions of this moment. Whether we like them or not, this is what we’re experiencing right now.
And these conditions will change.
The point isn’t to fix or manipulate everything we experience. It’s to make the vessel of awareness bigger, big enough to hold whatever is happening until it changes.
Think about that for a moment.
What if you didn’t have to fight every feeling? What if you didn’t have to divide your experience into the things you want and the things you don’t want?
What if you could simply allow the moment to unfold without constantly getting in the way?
There’s a settling that can happen when we stop struggling against our experience. There’s a sense of space, ease, and what I sometimes call profound okayness.
It’s difficult to describe because it’s not necessarily a particular feeling.
It’s more like the absence of that constant internal war.
We aren’t fighting with ourselves about what should be happening. We aren’t trying to force the present moment to become something else before we’re willing to be here for it.
We’re simply here.
And if sitting with everything feels too difficult, we can always return to the breath.
Feel yourself breathing in. Feel yourself breathing out.
When the mind wanders, notice that it’s wandered, and come back.
You don’t have to do it perfectly. You don’t have to maintain your attention without interruption.
You just keep returning.
And as you practice, you may begin to notice something remarkable: the ability to be aware is always here.
Hundreds of thousands of thoughts might pass through your mind, but the ability to know that a thought is happening doesn’t disappear.
Thoughts change. Feelings change. Sensations change.
But the capacity to be aware of them is available again and again.
You can always come back to it.
You can always come back home.
Five Minutes Can Change the Direction of Your Day
This is why I think even five minutes of meditation can be worthwhile.
Not because five minutes will magically make you happy or eliminate your problems, but because you’re setting the compass of your heart and mind in the direction of wakefulness.
You’re reminding yourself to be present.
And then you carry that intention into the rest of your day.
You get out of bed and notice what you’re doing. You brush your teeth and feel the sensations. You get dressed, make your coffee, eat breakfast, and walk to your car.
You can bring awareness to all of it.
You don’t need to turn every ordinary activity into some elaborate spiritual ritual. You can simply ask yourself, from time to time, whether you’re present for the experience you’re having or caught up in your thoughts.
You might even use a mindfulness bell on your phone. When it rings, pause for a moment. Listen. Notice what’s happening.
That little pause is important.
It interrupts the automatic momentum of your day. For a moment, you’re not simply indulging your conditioned reactions.
You’re awake.
And the more often you remember to do this, the more opportunities you have to respond differently.
Maybe you notice that you’re about to snap at someone. Maybe you recognize that you’re getting caught up in anxiety. Maybe you see that you’re trying to control something you can’t control.
You don’t have to be perfect. You don’t have to catch every reaction before it happens.
But you can begin to recognize your patterns and work with them.
That’s how the practice moves beyond the cushion.
It’s not something you do for five minutes and then forget about, like taking a multivitamin in the morning.
It’s something you keep returning to throughout the day.
Formal sitting is valuable. It gives us time to settle down, observe the mind, and become familiar with this quality of wakefulness.
But the rest of life is where we get to practice living it.
Your family is your practice. Your job is your practice. Your difficult conversations are your practice. Your anxiety, your grief, your responsibilities, and even your broken transmission are your practice.
This is it.
Keep Showing Up
I like to think of meditation as watering a garden.
You water the garden, and things grow. But you have to keep showing up and watering it.
You don’t get to decide exactly what will grow, when it will grow, or how quickly it will happen.
You just keep watering.
You give the garden what it needs, and over time, things develop in their own way.
That’s how I think about this practice.
You keep showing up. You keep paying attention. You keep learning to meet your experience with wakefulness and kindness.
There are benefits to doing this. I wouldn’t spend so much time talking about it if I didn’t believe it could be helpful.
But I don’t want you to become so focused on some future result that you miss what’s happening right now.
If you’re always looking for the moment when meditation finally makes you happy, you’ll spend your practice chasing happiness.
If you’re always looking for the moment when your mind finally becomes quiet, you’ll spend your practice fighting with your thoughts.
And if you’re always waiting for life to settle down before you can practice, you might be waiting a very long time.
Instead, you can begin right here.
With the restless mind.
With the anxious feelings.
With the aching body.
With the difficult circumstances.
With the life you have, rather than the life you wish you had.
You don’t have to make yourself into someone else before you can practice. You don’t have to fix every problem or eliminate every uncomfortable feeling.
You can start exactly where you are.
However it is, there’s room for it.
And when you begin to see that, the division between meditation and the rest of your life starts to fall away.
There is no separate practice waiting for you somewhere else. There is no perfect set of circumstances you have to create before you can begin.
There is just this moment, and the opportunity to meet it with awareness, kindness, and a little less resistance.
So keep showing up.
Sit for five minutes if that’s what you can manage. Pay attention while you’re brushing your teeth. Pause when you notice yourself getting caught up in a familiar reaction.
And when you forget, as we all do, just come back.
You don’t need to make anything special happen.
You don’t need to feel good.
You don’t need to be anywhere other than where you are.
This is it.
Your life is not getting in the way of your meditation.
Your life is your meditation.