From the studio, a piece on the practice.
Meditation has been having a moment for a while now. It's in the apps. It's in the wellness magazines. It's in every third podcast interview with a CEO. And because of all this attention, it can start to feel like a modern productivity hack, another optimization strategy for people who are already too optimized.
I want to talk about where it actually came from, because the history is more interesting than the current packaging suggests.
The word meditation is roughly two thousand years old in English, from the Latin meditari, which means to think over, to consider carefully. But the practice is much older than the word. The oldest documented version comes from what is now northern India and Nepal, sometime between the fifth and third centuries BCE. What we now call meditation was not called meditation. It was called various things in Sanskrit, most notably dhyana, which translates roughly as sustained attention. There were also older Hindu practices that involved sitting still and repeating a phrase, and even older practices in Chinese Taoism that involved observing the breath.
The Buddha, who died around 483 BCE, did not invent meditation. He inherited it. What he added was a specific framework for what to do with your attention while you were sitting, and a specific reason for doing it. His reason was suffering. He had noticed, as many people had before him, that human beings suffer, and he had proposed that the reason for the suffering was that we cling to things that pass. His answer was to train the mind to stop clinging. Meditation was the training.
For roughly two thousand years after that, meditation traveled with Buddhism. It went from India to Sri Lanka, to China, to Japan, to Korea, to Tibet. In each place it changed. In Japan it became Zen, which is largely about sitting and doing nothing, which sounds simple and is not. In Tibet it became a much more elaborate visualization practice. In each culture, meditation adapted to the temperament of the people who received it.
It arrived in the West in the nineteenth century, mostly in the form of translated Buddhist texts that European academics found interesting but did not practice. Practice didn't really begin in the West until the twentieth century, and even then it stayed marginal until the 1960s, when a generation of Americans went abroad and came back with the actual training.
The version most of us know now, called mindfulness, was extracted from Buddhist meditation in the 1970s by a man named Jon Kabat-Zinn, at the University of Massachusetts Medical Center. He wanted to teach meditation to hospital patients who were in chronic pain. He needed a version of it that could be taught without any religious framing, because you can't prescribe Buddhism to a Catholic hospital patient. So he stripped out the Buddhism and kept the technique. He called it mindfulness-based stress reduction. It worked. And once it worked, it spread.
The version of meditation you get now on an app is a direct descendant of Kabat-Zinn's clinical protocol, which is a direct descendant of Theravada Buddhist meditation, which is a direct descendant of pre-Buddhist Indian meditation, which is a direct descendant of whatever it was that led some person twenty-five hundred years ago to sit down under a tree and try to pay attention to their own breathing.
I find this history reassuring, personally. When I sit down on my mat in the morning and try to breathe in and out for ten minutes without getting lost in the day's to-do list, I am doing something that people have been doing for two and a half thousand years. The technique is old. The problem it addresses is older. Human minds have been unruly for a long time.
I don't meditate in a formal way. I don't count my breaths. I don't have a mantra. What I do is closer to what the Zen tradition calls just sitting. I sit for ten minutes, I try to notice what my mind is doing, I fail, I try again, I fail again, ten minutes goes by, I get up. That's the whole practice. It has done more for my life than any book I've read or podcast I've listened to. I have no idea why it works. I only know it works.
If you have wanted to start meditating and haven't, I want to say this. There is no correct version. There is no app you need. There is no cushion you need. There is no time of day you need. There is only sitting down, and then getting up ten minutes later, and doing it again tomorrow. The technique is old. It works. It has worked for a lot of people who came before you.
You don't have to figure it out. You just have to sit down.