Meditation Results

I consider meditation to be my most fruitful experiment yet in my life. I heard about meditation at the end of high school when I read a book on Yoga. I practiced it for the first time during my freshman year for a free introductory class. I started practicing it for real after going to a free Vipassana Retreat where I meditated for 10 days in silence.

While I've never had an "out-there" experiences, it changed how I view myself. After trying to focus for over 100 hours on different sensations in the body, I realized how little control I have over the mind. Also, I realized many of the tricks the mind plays on itself. In day-to-day life, I'm normally too slow to catch on to a lot of stuff, but the tricks become pretty obvious when there are no distractions.

For example, I noticed my tendency to fantacize about things was taking me away from actually doing things in the present moment that I didn't like. In the case of meditation, I was fantacizing about going to the next retreat for 20 days instead of 10 and going to many throughout the year. In the mean time, I was simply fantacizing instead of doing the actual meditation in the present moment.

There was a lot of stuff like that, all of which added up to the feeling that I am not the thoughts I have. Furthermore, it is not necessarily the most productive use of my time to be thinking about stuff all the time. Also, it was interesting to see that most of my thoughts seemed unproductive.