512 hours and 36 minutes.

That’s the approximate amount of time I’ve spent in the last 3 years sitting on a cushion with crossed legs, and (at least from an external point of view) doing absolutely nothing. If you told me that was going to happen a few years ago, I would have chuckled heartily and dismissed you as some sort of crazy person. So how did it?

For the majority of my life, I’ve been an experimenter. I love trying new things, but for the most part, they don’t stick. I have a tendency to launch myself with surprising furor into a new endeavor, only to all but forget about it a few months later when I’ve lost interest, or the next alluring pursuit presents itself. Therefore, it was particularly surprising to me and many others when, at the end of 2015, I fell so deeply in love with a completely new type of activity (which didn’t even involve a consistent adrenaline rush): mindful meditation.

About a year into this new path, a good friend from my childhood who was definitely one of the surprised folks asked me a simple question: “so, why do you meditate?”. I have a vivid memory of exactly where we were when he asked. Gingerly stepping our way between puddles of slush as we traversed a narrow trail leading between two ski lodges, deep in a snow laden canyon in Northern Utah. I was immediately flustered. There were so many reasons, where was I supposed to start?

I don’t remember exactly what my answer was at the time, but I remember it was less than satisfactory. The inability to vocalize my thoughts on a topic that had become so important to me threw me for a serious loop. It nudged my path in a slightly different direction. I now wanted to understand just what it was that drew me back to the cushion every day, and how I could portray it to others in a way that would resonate for them. I was convinced (and still am) that no one is exempt from benefiting from contemplative practice.

Two years, three global teaching tours, and more than five hundred students later, I feel I’m just beginning to be able to explain why meditation is a worthwhile endeavor. How I describe it depends significantly on my audience, but for the first time I’m going to try to put something more universal into words. In the following paragraphs, I’ll attempt to explain at a high level why I believe it’s fundamental to take time out of the hustle and bustle of modern life to intentionally train your mind.

First and foremost, I consider myself an engineer. I believe in science and data. Not because someone told me to, but because in my own direct experience I’ve seen the scientific method create more positive outcomes than negative ones. Luckily, there is a plethora of hard scientific data supporting the fact that many forms of meditation can measurably improve the functioning of your brain. Despite my passion for this subject, I won’t delve into any of the technical details here, as there’s ample information available elsewhere.

There’s one type of meditation which has received the vast majority of attention from Western scientists in the last 30 years. It’s often referred to as “mindful meditation”, and is an integral part of multiple Eastern traditions dating back thousands of years. Of the many types in existence, mindfulness has been the primary form of meditation I have practiced and taught thus far. I believe it provides an elemental building block to anything you want to improve about your life.

In order to fully comprehend what practicing mindfulness can do for you, it’s important to first understand an essential function of our minds: attention. There are 100 billion or so nerve endings in the human body, and most of them send us pretty useful signals. But you can only actually pay conscious attention to a handful of these billion at any given time (what neuroscientists call cortical awareness).

A rational argument can be made that what constitutes the entirety of your conscious experience from birth to death is merely the sensory experiences you choose to pay attention to. Whether these sensory experiences are visual, auditory, physical, thought-based, etc, what you pay attention to ultimately informs what you perceive, how you react, and what you remember about your life.

Therefore, as a mentor of mine once put it: “if you could level up on one thing in life, it should probably be attention”. But what is all this talk about choice? Do we actually have any choice in where our attention is at any given moment? Sadly, the modern era of advertising has begun to enslave and commoditize our attention, causing it to become slippery and fragmented. But there’s a way to take back the reins, and it’s remarkably simple. Start to pay attention to attention itself.

Which brings us to my alternative name for mindful meditation: Attentional Awareness Training. Mindfulness really just means being able to watch what you’re paying attention to. It involves cultivating the ability to take a third person perspective on the torrent of thought you spend most of your day caught up in, and merely observe and get curious about it. This seems a little strange at first, but the power this simple observational lens can bring over time cannot be understated.

My good friend Nate loves to say “awareness is the precursor to agency”. How do you expect to be able to make effective changes in your life without first taking the time to step back and collect some data about what actually needs to be changed? When you’re caught up in your own life story, this can be surprisingly difficult to do.

As an example, there’s one valuable data stream worthy of more attention than it usually receives: your reactions to stimuli. I often view my life as a continuous series of small and large decisions I’m making every second. Whether it’s where I place my foot next, or why I decide to end a romantic relationship, these decisions rely on data I’ve stored internally about the results of related decisions I made in the past. But while it’s probably easy to remember the time I stepped squarely on a cactus as being a bad decision, it’s likely much more difficult to remember and understand the complex chain of reactions that led me to break up with a partner.

Training in increasing awareness allows you to sharpen your decision making mechanism by developing your ability to carefully watch your reactions to various life phenomena. Over time, the skill becomes automatic, and you begin to catch yourself in the moment when you’re reacting in a less than desirable way. Once you’ve observed enough, you’re eventually able to choose your reactions in a more thoughtful way.

It’s this newfound ability that led me to remain placid during a 26 hour ordeal in an airport when my flight was cancelled, to refrain from being upset when I thought my nose had been broken by a careless skier in the backcountry, and to actually find some odd enjoyment in a multi-hour weekday visit to the IRS office when they claimed I hadn’t filed my taxes properly. It has even caused me to radically change my diet, as I began to notice subtle differences in my physical reactions to various types of food. None of this would have happened before I started training in observing my mental mechanisms.

This key point is this: it’s very difficult to control external circumstances, it’s much easier to control your internal reactions to them. Trying to “win” in life by manipulating externalities is like playing a game of chess with a near infinite amount of pieces on a board extending beyond your vision in every direction. Whenever you think your pieces are in a good position, life can swoop in and take your queen. Instead, you can teach yourself how to be okay operating without the optimal conditions.

With the rising popularity of these techniques, some people have begun to criticize mindfulness as a selfish, individualistic pursuit aimed at giving yourself an edge by enhancing your own mental faculties. While it certainly could be used in that way, it’s hard for me to imagine anyone who has gotten deep enough into the practice without noticing how increasing their awareness can affect those around them. There’s a natural extension to how you interact with others, because you start to pick up on how your reactions cause reactions outside of yourself. This is why many people find themselves growing more compassionate as they grow more aware.

Meditation itself is not a panacea, it won’t solve all your problems. What it will do, however, is build up a box of mental tools to help you respond more skillfully to the many challenges posed by the set of experiences we call life. But don’t expect the fixes to be quick; learning how to hone the items in your personal toolbox to craft a better mind takes consistent effort, just like any other type of worthwhile training. Three years of mindful meditation has built my toolbox to the point where it’s providing me noticeable value on a regular basis, but I’m still only scratching the surface of what’s possible.

I have loads more to say on this topic, but I’ll leave it at that for now to respect your precious attention, and reduce the likelihood of a boredom reaction. I may dive deeper into more of the valuable mental tools and the mechanics of how they work in future posts