David Cain

Essentially, meditation allows us to live in ways that are less automatic. This necessarily means less time spent worrying, ruminating, and trying to control things we can__ control. It means we become less vulnerable to the throes of the fear-driven, older parts of our brains, and freer to use our newer and more sophisticated mental abilities: patience, compassion, acceptance and reason.

Meditation isn__ only the act of successfully keeping your attention on the breath, it__ the whole period of time you spend with the intention to observe the breath. It is this intention and its application _ not your success at achieving perfect concentration _ that is responsible for the benefits of meditation.

The standard way of reducing stress in our culture is to put as much energy as possible into trying to arrive at a moment that matches our preferences. This ensures that we feel some level of stress until we get there (assuming we ever will) and worse, it makes the present moment into an unacceptable place to be.

By learning to allow different types of discomfort to simply stay in the room with you, without your scrambling for a button to push (real or metaphorical), you make discomfort matter less.The pool of things you__e afraid of shrinks. It becomes a lot less important to control circumstances, because you know you can handle moments of uncertainty or awkwardness or disappointment without an escape plan.

Our work and educational institutions reinforce this preference for later over now throughout our lives. In school we focus on the ends _ passing the semester, making the grade, or otherwise getting it all behind us _ rather than the present-moment experience of actually learning. As employees, we want the work to be over as soon as it begins. Work culture is driven by quotas, billable hours, budgets, and Gantt charts _ bottom lines of any sort. The value is always somewhere ahead of you, rather than here right now, in the room with you. We__e perpetually looking ahead to a payday or a weekend or some other kind of finish line. Virtually every day of our lives, we__e trained to lean towards something we don__ have, which essentially trains us to be dissatisfied with where we already are.