Understanding Meditation: 60 Minutes for 60 Days*

Meditation has been something I’ve longed to better understand yet never had much success in doing so. I’ve heard countless people, whom I often look up to or admire, attribute so much of their success, happiness, and/ or performance to some form of meditation. I’ve so often felt like everyone is doing it and I don’t quite get it. Every time I’ve attempted to connect with the practice, I’ve been disappointed and deterred from continuing. Where was all the stuff I’d heard about in connection to meditation? I’d never experienced the peace and serenity. Never has it helped to bring any clarity. I can’t say it ever made me happier in any of my dances with it. I tried the popular apps, guided meditations, classes, but never sincerely felt like, “ya, I get it.” For so long I’ve cared to understand meditation but could never honestly say that I did.

Recently, however, I heard a conversation that shifted my perspective and inspired a self-imposed challenge in hopes of better understanding the practice. It was a podcast episode of the Tim Ferriss Show, which featured Naval Ravikant. Yet again, I found myself listening to strong endorsements for meditation. Familiar chimes from Naval like, “it’s the single most important thing that I do, it is a sheer joy” and familiar responses from me like, “what am I missing here?”

Although the conversation gave rise to some of my pre-existing skepticism, it also gave rise to a bit of hope. The way they described their meditation practice was slightly different from the ways I had approached it in the past. My prior experience was directed by the often trite cues one would expect to be attached to meditation. Let go of thought. Focus on breath. Repeat this mantra. Attempt to be thoughtless. Though these were all well-intended, none of them ever really helped me achieve the states I was promised.

Naval described a different approach that he called self-examination. He would simply sit upright with a straight spine, keep his eyes closed, and allow his mind to do whatever it wanted. He sat for 60 minutes each day claiming that it required this much time to quiet the internal chatter. He also claimed that it took 60 days to fully experience all the benefits of this practice. I thought these two points might help explain why I was always coming up short. I was convinced to give it a real shot. I decided to impose a challenge to myself. 60 days. 60 minutes of meditation.

I had some questions and plenty of curiosity along with some new direction which was encouraging. It made sense that such a significant commitment was required to experience any real change and so, committed I was. Could meditation provide the type of clarity I’d heard so much about? Would it help me to resolve the insistent monkey mind that drove me crazy at times? Was meditation really an antidote to anxiety like people spoke of? Could it actually bring me more happiness? I didn’t know the answers to these questions but I committed to finding out for myself. The following are my insights gained from 60 days of 60 minute meditations.

The Technique: Self-Examination

60 minutes seemed like a long time and 60 days was a daunting endeavor, but something about the approach of self-examination felt much more accessible than ways I went about it in the past. The technique was simply to allow my mind to go wherever it wanted to go, work on whatever it wanted to work on, daydream about whatever it wanted to daydream about. I felt like I involuntarily did this all too often anyways, so I thought consciously doing it for that much time might provide me with a little more mental freedom outside of it.

There was something liberating about allowing your mind to wander wherever it cared to.

As I began, I quickly observed the difference between not listening to your thoughts and not controlling your thoughts. This new approach felt very different and it exposed one of my first misunderstandings of meditation. In past attempts, thoughts would come up and I would suppress or shoo them away. I realized that by doing so, I was actually enabling tendencies of avoidant by-pass masquerading as mindfulness. This was convenient when there were uncomfortable things in my life that were truly calling for my attention. What I thought was spiritual behaviour was actually avoidance. A by-pass of these discomforts in order to achieve “stillness” or “silence”.

The interesting shift that self-examination provided was that it was actually leading me toward the things that pecked away at me, not away from them. What came up consistently often proved to be valuable insight into where I was in discord and ignoring it was a missed opportunity to make change in my life. Some things were financially related, some professionally, some were in regards to interpersonal relationships. Everything that came up, usually did for a reason and reflecting on what it was and why it came up was a new found practice that would lead to many more valuable insights.

My First Insight: Action Vs. Avoidance and Inbox Zero

For the first week it felt like I was being confronted with a long to-do list. I was following the guidance of simply allowing my thoughts to flow and unfortunately they were often flowing towards a lot of tedious unresolved tasks. It felt like there was more on my whiteboard after each sit. This initial “to-do” phase felt mostly like I was just ruminating in busy work. Surely, this did not feel like the stillness everyone talked about. My notes from this phase didn’t exactly offer a glowing review either:

-feeling fairly scatterbrained

-feeling anxious within the meditations and also generally experiencing anxiety outside of it

-whiteboard is full of things to-do

In the podcast, Naval mentioned an idea of “inbox zero”, referring to an internal state of being caught up. If thoughts, emotions, or ideas were like emails then sitting with them, and responding appropriately, is how we achieve the internal inbox zero. If this was the goal, I felt a long way from achieving it. Thankfully, I reminded myself that it was early and the idea of it taking 60 days stuck out in my mind. I was motivated to continue.

I think the idea of inbox zero is what I always thought of as thoughtlessness or stillness. The key difference with self-examination was that you achieved thoughtlessness by reflecting, and resolving the thoughts instead of ignoring them like I had in the past. This time I was going through my thoughts instead of around them.

If I was being honest, the things I was putting on my to-do list were things that I had been avoiding even though I knew they needed resolution. Whatever it was that was pulling at my attention continued to exist, in my life, in my subconscious, and it never failed that the whispers of awareness would eventually increase to a more pervasive anxiety.

I began to witness myself being more productive outside of meditation and freeing up some of my mental space as a result. If I didn’t get this stuff done when I had the chance, I knew that it would be waiting for me within the meditations and that became less tolerable.

It made me laugh at times when I started to understand that sitting still for 60 minutes was one of the most productive things I could do. At first it felt like I was busier, but the more things got done the more things were cleared from my inbox. I began to understand how this created space. It created true space, not the type of space that procrastination provides, because in that space there is no true freedom from the things being asked of you. I was recognizing how much those things remain present and hang around in the back of my mind when unresolved. I could avoid them, distract from them, but to truly get rid of them required resolution. This felt like my first real insight into what meditation really offered and I was feeling pretty encouraged by it.

An Asterisk Out of the Gate

It didn’t take long for me to put a blemish on my 60 days. It was sometime within the first two weeks that I simply “ran out of time” to sit for a full 60 minutes. “Here we go” I thought. It was on a weekend. I was going golfing with friends. I spent the night before at one of their places and the day was far less structured than most.

I needed to be at the course for our tee-time so I decided to pull into a parking lot and sit for the 30 minutes I had to spare. There was an internal debate of what this meant for my streak. Was it over so early? Do I restart? What I decided was that it was just an asterisk. The fact that I even made the time to meditate at all, was an improvement on my past commitments. I let go of some of my extremist tendencies or the opportunity to get out of the challenge and I accepted the imperfection. I was already seeing some benefit and that fueled my curiosity to continue.

Awareness: an Antidote to Anxiety

It became undeniable that meditation offered increased awareness. At first this was actually rather unpleasant and uncomfortable. It was like walking around a social event with a hole in the seat of my pants. Meditation was the friend that came up and said, “dude, there’s a hole in your ass.” With this new information the rest of the party would probably be pretty uncomfortable. Meditation continually whispered in my ear, “dude, this thing in your life is causing tension.” As soon as it revealed these things it was impossible to unsee them.

Sometimes insight was provided within the mediation, but oftentimes it simply revealed an issue and left the rest up to me. When anxiety arose, examination brought awareness to where it was possibly stemming from. The next task I was confronted with was how to best resolve it.

I’ve heard the phrase before, “action alleviates anxiety.” If this were true it would suggest that my to-do list at the beginning was the antidote to my anxiety. This was not accurate of my experience. Although action was necessary to resolve some things in my inbox, it was not always the best choice. If productivity was the only requirement to stillness, then squirrels would be zen masters and I would have continued chasing nuts.

Another way I was learning to clear my inbox was through awareness. I had the space to recognize what in my inbox actually mattered to me and what snuck in there without much consideration. New levels of awareness led to me letting go of things rather than running around for the sake of feeling productive. This provided as much mental space and freedom as actually getting some stuff accomplished.

Awareness alone wasn’t enough to create change when it was deemed necessary. Action was helpful at times but only when it was executed with intention, clarity, and proper consideration. With this experience I thought, perhaps a more accurate phrase was, awareness in action alleviates anxiety. Every piece of that statement matters.

It was around day 32 that I started to really notice the fruits of that statement. It seemed I had crossed a threshold of the halfway point with consistent remarks in my notes stating a significant decrease in anxiety. For the remainder of the challenge, any notes on anxiety were actually comments on how much less I was experiencing it. I was gaining insight that meditation alone was not alleviating my anxiety, but provided the awareness of where it was coming from.

My Most Important Relationship

It felt like I was making progress. Most of my whiteboard was void of any pressing tasks and I would say my mind was clear of most of those things as well. One would think this was a pleasant place to arrive, but I had a different experience ahead.

Some days I noted resistance to entering the meditation and I was unsure why, especially given the fact that I had made some nice progress with my inbox.

It didn’t take me long to find out where that resistance was coming from. What awaited me was myself, at least a part of myself that was familiar and often too dominant in my mind. This was my ego, my small self, my inner critic, or harsh judge. Whatever you want to call this guy or this part of me, he could be a real asshole.

After all the work I had done to resolve and respond to the things that came up on my to-do list, this guy showed up to let me know what he thought of it. “Who do you think you are?” “You’re such an idiot!” “Look at all those mistakes you made!” Yikes! It’s no wonder I was clinging to more tasks if this was what awaited me.

It wasn’t till later that I revisited the podcast and some of Naval’s words made more sense given my experience.

“the most important relationship you have is with yourself, it’s with this voice in your head”

“conversations you’re having in your head all the time, that is your world, that is the world you live in, that’s the worldview you have, that’s the lenses you see through and that’s going to determine the quality of your life more than anything else”

“I hate it, I can’t sit still” Why? Because your mind is eating you alive”

Here I was sitting face to face with another reason as to why I could not connect to meditation. It was true, as soon as I had the space for some silence my mind began to eat me alive. The kicker? Not only did I allow it, I participated in it. If a friend spoke to me this way, not only would I distance myself, things might have even gotten physical. Yet there I was, ripping into myself with no defense. No wonder I was addicted to distraction, busyness, or other forms of quieting that internal dick. If this is what awaited me in stillness,then it was obvious why stillness was no place I desired to go.

This part of me, as outrageous as it was, was asking to be heard. Much like other kinds of thoughts that came up, I allowed it, I observed it, and I watched it dissolve. I did my best not to feed into the outrage but I did allow it space to express. I proceeded with a response of, “I will take your opinions into consideration” and I did. Some things being voiced were worth considering, but it was important that this guy didn’t drive the bus. Thankfully though, even this voice couldn’t fill an hour.

The biggest insight from this phase was the mere awareness of this relationship. If I didn’t keep this in check, it didn’t matter what my external life looked like. If I continued to allow this guy to show up, and run the show in any fashion, he would continue to degrade my quality of life and how I experienced it. In fact, I could spend my whole life trying to hide from that internal relationship and it would be to no avail unless it got cleaned up.

Meditation didn’t take care of this guy. He still showed up, but he became much more recognizable. More importantly, I got better at hearing him out and kindly asking him to leave. Once he left I got one step closer to stillness.

Balancing Input and Processing

Another way my mind could eat me alive was by feeling completely overwhelmed or scatterbrained. Although this could be seen as attention deficit issues, I began to realize that this was also a result of a very practical imbalance of input and processing.

The term input describes any sort of information or influence that I’m exposed to in my conscious life. Walking around in a capitalist culture with a computer in my pocket, the inputs could be constant and relentless. Billboards, bus advertisements, store-fronts, and so many other people just on my walk to work. Throughout my day, social conversations, professional interactions, podcasts, research, peers and entertainment. What was my default break from it all? An infinite amount of inputs every time I unlocked my smartphone.

With closer examination, I began to acknowledge an interesting type of dialogue that lived in the world of social media, podcasts, and articles just like this one. The amount of self-help, self-development, and self-improvement advice that entered my psyche on a daily basis was enough to make my head spin, and sometimes that’s exactly what it felt like. What was missing in most of it was the self. What did I really want? There was no shortage of resources telling me what was best, but what actually felt true for me?

My meditations became an important counter to process all of these inputs and provided me the space to psychologically digest. One hour of every day where the only input came from within. This allowed me to evaluate what was consistent with my priorities and what was worthy of my attention.

Examination often pointed toward internal solutions to feelings of desire or lack and that was the opposite of how most external inputs made me feel. I was beginning to observe how this new found balance was upgrading states of overwhelm, scattered mind, and low self-esteem to clarity and self-assurance. It felt like I was starting to pursue things because I made the conscious choice to do so, not because society, culture, or marketing strategies wanted me to believe I needed to.

Meditation was becoming crucial for me to keep the relationship of inputs and process in balance. This was a key piece that led to me being able to customize meditation and make it my own practice.

Meditating Vs. Imitating

Around the half-way point things started to change and my experience began to resemble some of the things I’d heard so much about. One thing that contributed to this was seemingly very simple but was representative of an internal shift. I moved to the couch.

Until about the 30 day mark, I was sitting on two meditation discs in many different versions of cross legged, lotus, deep squat, wall kneeling types of positions. I thought this is what meditation looked like. What I was doing was imitating. I just assumed that when one meditated, one sat on the floor or held the hands in some mudra. What I was focusing on was the appearance of my meditations and not the fundamentals. My knees hurt, my back tired, my hips irritated, and all of this was becoming more distracting. Once I got over the, “look Mom I’m meditating” bit, I was able to make choices that were more rooted in the core principles of the practice.

So, I moved to the couch, and in doing so, I let go of some of my ideas of how meditation appeared. I decided I would still sit upright, but it was a much more comfortable position to sit on the couch. This unlocked so much for me within the meditations. I was way less distracted by my body’s cries for relief. I wasn’t awaiting the time to be up… as much. I was able to sit with my thoughts a little closer. This move to the couch taught me something about what meditation really was and what it didn’t have to be.

I let go of judgements for taking the occasional peak at the clock. It was ok that I sat on the couch and didn’t hold a yoga type posture for 60 minutes. I allowed myself to say, “hey google, put X on my to-do list.” These were choices I was allowing myself to make and it was liberating me within my meditation experience.

What happened in the days following was pretty remarkable and difficult to explain. For the first time, I began experiencing some of the wild and wonderful things I’d heard about. One of the first days I took my practice to the couch I was met with an intense wave of sensation coming from my chest and flowing towards my arms and hands. The wave felt like a strong and distinct pulsing coming through my palms. It was not my radial pulse. It had a much bigger feel to it. I have such a hard time putting this into words because as I do, I hear my own skepticism of the past. What it felt like, could only be described as an extreme increase of life-force, chi, flow, or energy. Whatever you want to call it, it was an unfamiliar sensation and an incredibly pleasant one. It was a fleeting experience that showed up in a handful of my meditations around the halfway point and it definitely left a mark on me.

For the first time, it felt like I was experiencing a glimpse at true and profound stillness. A complete satisfaction and presence with everything as it was. After a lot of work, patience, and commitment it felt like the first time I had arrived at a place where nothing was pulling me away from presence. I was simply able to be with the sensations of my body.

The lesson for me here was that it required letting go of trying to prove I was meditating to really feel like I was meditating. It no longer mattered to me what anyone else thought of my practice and what rules applied. I made these choices based on what was best for my practice and in doing so, I was rewarded.

There were many special takeaways within my 60 days of meditation, but those experiences on the couch took the cake. I have to admit, talking about them makes me feel like one of the people I used to roll my eyes at.

More Asterisks and Self-Compassion

Just as I began to make some choices to create a practice that worked for me I was put in an unexpected position to evaluate something that happened late in the challenge. This surprise came almost exactly at the ¾ mark on day 44. I simply forgot to meditate. One day I woke up and realized I forgot to sit the day before. I chose to sleep-in that morning and decided I would get it in later that day, and I forgot.

When I realized my streak was over I was pretty shook. I was sad. I wondered what to do next. Then something very interesting and telling happened. When debating whether I needed to start over, or give up on the challenge, I had the thought that this was a decision to be made in meditation. Boom. There was my answer right there. Continue. Accept another asterisk, but nothing was really lost. In fact it only gave me more perspective of how much had been gained. I showed myself compassion, I was centered, and self-assured. It was an honest mistake getting caught up in a busy day. Nothing was lost and nothing was over. So, I meditated on it and never looked back.

There was one more day that I missed in the 60 days, but I don’t even see anything in my notes about it. I know because I accepted at one point that it would end up being 57.5/60. I saw that as a major win and not only did I accept the asterisks, I embraced them as a badge of self-compassion, and progress in triumphing my unrealistic goal of perfection.

This new attitude toward myself was showing up a lot more. I was aware of the benefits I was experiencing thanks to all the meditation and that was the important part, that was the part worth understanding. The metrics of a streak were just numbers, something to gauge, but they were not what truly mattered.

What mattered more than the blemishes on the streak was all the progress I witnessed within me and around me on account of the 60 day challenge. I felt far more centered under stress, confident in my considered choices, clear on what mattered to me, and better understanding of meditation and all the hype surrounding it.

57.5/ 60 Days Complete

So there I sat on the other side of 60 days with 57.5 hours of meditation under my belt. This was by far the most I’d meditated in my life in a serious attempt to connect with the practice and better understand it. When I was evaluating my 60 days, I thought of something Naval said on the podcast. He said the only reason to do something was if it made your life better. So did it make my life better? It felt like it did, but not the way I expected it to. It pointed me where to look if I wanted to improve my life. It revealed to me what contributed to any unhappiness and it also showed me the things that I truly cared about. It didn’t directly change my life, but it revealed how my relationship with myself affected how I experienced it and improving this was life changing in many ways. Was it really a sheer joy? I’ll say rarely was it a joy, but it did cause a shift to understand that joy is created from within and it definitely made me think before looking outside myself for it.

All this to say, that after 60 days I felt like I better understood meditation. I knew that it was not a cure-all solution to anything, but it is a massively helpful tool to better understand myself and the important relationships and aspects of my life.

Now when I hear of anyone speaking about meditation, and it’s life changing potential, I will understand for myself that meditation doesn’t actually change anything. It provided me with the insight and awareness that gave me the opportunity to take action and cause change in my life that was well considered and intentional. This is what it means to live an examined life. After 60 days I could see the internal shifts in my own behaviours and experiences and I was starting to see how my external life was starting to reflect that as well. Now that I felt like I better understood mediation, I also better understood why I needed it.

Afterward Notes:

My challenge took place between the dates of October 19- December 17 2020. After the 60 days I gave myself a small break. I continued to meditate but with less consistency and shorter durations. I probably averaged 30 minute sits every other day between the 17th and 31st. I started to notice some of the experienced benefits diminish. This article will probably be published in mid February of 2021 and so far this year, I have not missed a day of meditation. Only a few have not been 60 minutes.

If this article has inspired you to try and meditate, especially to this extent, below are some suggestions or tools I felt were important to include.

Support:

This is one I think should be stressed a fair amount. As is the case with any psychological, mindful, or spiritual practices some challenging things can present themselves. Meditation, especially this amount, is no exception to this. It can be hugely helpful, if not essential, to have someone to speak to about some of these things as they present. It could be someone who is more experienced than you with the practice, a professional, or it could be something you choose to do with a group. I think it’s important to not feel alone if you’re choosing to take on something like this. I was fortunate to have lots of friends and resources who I could talk about the experience with.

Accountability Group:

As I mentioned above I was lucky to have some friends who had more experience meditating than me and that was really helpful. Also from a motivation standpoint, I was fortunate to be invited by one of those friends into a “Meditation Inspiration” group chat. It was very informal and it was simply a group of people who had meditation practices active, paused, or dormant, and it was encouraged to post your meditation from the day. If you sat for 60 you would simply post, “60”. There was no call for commenting but simply posting my “60” in the group gave me a little added motivation and accountability. I found this to be surprisingly helpful.

The Podcast Referenced in this article:

The Tim Ferriss Show- #473: Naval Ravikant on Happiness, Reducing Anxiety, Crypto Stablecoins, and Crypto Strategy. Oct. 15, 2020