When people talk about meditation, there is sometimes an idea that techniques don’t really matter. Just meditate. Just sit. As long as you practice enough, eventually you will get somewhere.

There is some truth to this. No technique can replace actually practicing. But I also think learning different meditation techniques, and more importantly understanding the principles behind them, can make a huge difference.

Recently I thought of a simple analogy.

Imagine two first-grade students who have been asked to memorize a passage for school. The first child has no strategy, so he simply reads the passage from beginning to end again and again, hoping that eventually he will remember it.

The second child has learned a few techniques. He divides the passage into smaller sections and memorizes them one at a time. Then he practices connecting the sections. Maybe his parents play a recording of the passage in the car so he can hear it several more times during the day. Perhaps another child has even learned some memory techniques and uses associations or imagery to remember the material more efficiently.

All three children still have to do the work. There is no magical technique that allows them to memorize the passage without spending time with it.

But the right techniques can make the process much more efficient.

I think meditation works in a similar way.

You Still Have to Put in the Time

The foundation of meditation is always practice.

You can read hundreds of books about mindfulness. You can understand Buddhist philosophy, neuroscience, concentration, equanimity, and all kinds of meditation theories. But eventually, you still have to actually practice.

At the same time, this doesn’t mean technique is unimportant. Knowing more than one way to meditate can help you continue practicing when your circumstances change.

Suppose the only meditation technique you know is observing subtle sensations around the nostrils while breathing. That may work very well most of the time. But perhaps one day your mind is extremely busy. There are problems at work or things happening in your family, and those subtle sensations are simply too difficult to stay with.

If that’s your only technique, you may conclude, “I can’t meditate today.”

But suppose you also know that you can observe the movement of the abdomen. That’s a larger area, and the sensations of expansion and contraction may be much easier to detect. Perhaps you also know how to count the breaths or visualize the number while counting.

Suddenly you have options.

The point isn’t to collect meditation techniques like Pokémon. The point is that different techniques can be useful under different conditions.

Different Situations May Need Different Techniques

This becomes even more important when you try to bring mindfulness into ordinary life.

Some people simply find breath meditation boring. If that’s the only meditation they know, maintaining a regular practice can become difficult. But once they understand that mindfulness can be practiced with many different sensory experiences, suddenly there are many more possibilities.

Driving is a good example.

You could pay attention to breathing while driving, but your attention obviously needs to remain primarily with the road. So why not make the experience of driving itself your meditation?

You can notice what you see through the windshield, the sounds of traffic, the feeling of your hands on the steering wheel, and the sensations in your foot as you press the accelerator or brake. You’re training attention while remaining fully engaged with what you’re doing.

In fact, this kind of practice may make you a more attentive driver rather than distracting you from driving.

This is why knowing the principles behind a technique matters. If you think meditation means “pay attention to your breath,” your opportunities to practice are limited. If you understand meditation more broadly as training attention, you begin to see possibilities everywhere.

Sometimes Turn Toward the Problem, Sometimes Turn Away

Different techniques can also give you different ways of working with difficult emotions.

Suppose you have an important presentation coming up and you’re feeling anxious. One strategy is to turn toward the anxiety.

You might notice where anxiety appears in your body. Maybe there is tightness in your chest or throat. You may notice mental images of yourself giving a terrible presentation and everyone judging you. You may hear inner talk saying, “I don’t know if I can do this.”

Instead of experiencing all of that as one giant thing called anxiety, you can begin to separate it into mental images, mental talk, and bodily sensations. Then you observe those experiences directly.

But sometimes the emotion is simply too intense, and turning toward it doesn’t seem helpful.

In that case, you can turn away.

You might put your attention on something neutral, such as breathing. The important part is that you’re not trying to force the anxiety away. You let it remain in the background without fighting it while gently keeping your attention on the breath.

It’s a little like saying, “I’m going for a walk to clear my head.”

You’re giving the emotional system some space to cool down.

Neither strategy is always better. Sometimes turning toward an emotion is exactly what you need. Sometimes turning away and resting attention somewhere neutral is more skillful.

Knowing both gives you a choice.

Meditation Has to Fit Into a Real Life

This flexibility matters especially for those of us living ordinary lives.

If you’re a monk practicing for many hours every day, perhaps one or two techniques are enough. You have deliberately structured your life around practice.

Most of us don’t live like that.

We have jobs, children, relationships, responsibilities, commutes, changing schedules, and unpredictable problems. Even our emotional state changes from day to day. A technique that works beautifully this month may suddenly become difficult when life changes.

Maybe right now you have thirty minutes every morning to meditate. Then your child’s school schedule changes and suddenly that time disappears. You can either wake up earlier, or perhaps learn how to practice during your commute.

The more you understand meditation, the easier it becomes to adapt practice to your actual life instead of waiting for your life to provide perfect conditions for meditation.

And this is one reason I like the definition used in Unified Mindfulness: meditation can be understood as a form of attention training.

That makes the whole thing much less mysterious.

Once you understand that you’re training attentional skills, it becomes obvious that training doesn’t have to happen only while sitting quietly on a cushion. You can train while walking, commuting, driving, working with difficult emotions, or doing ordinary activities.

Good techniques don’t remove the need for practice. They help you practice more consistently, in more situations, and in ways that fit what is actually happening in your life.

You still have to put in the time.

But knowing how to practice can help you make much better use of the time you already have.

I appreciate you taking the time to read this.
If you’re interested in exploring how mindfulness can support daily life, not just on the cushion, but in ordinary moments, I’d be happy to have you here.
Please subscribe and join me.

Subscribe now

And, If You’d Like Some Personal Support With Your Mindfulness Practice…

I offer 1:1 mindfulness coaching as a certified Unified Mindfulness teacher/trainer.

The coaching can help you deepen your practice, correct misunderstandings, or better understand how mindfulness works. We will also design ways to bring the practice into your actual daily life, not just your meditation sessions.

If you’re interested, feel free to book a connection call. We can talk about your goals, your current practice, and how mindfulness training might help. We can also see whether working together would be a good fit.

You can send me a DM or email me at miaosimuse@qq.com, and I’ll send you my availability for a call.

When it comes to spiritual practice, I think people tend to fall into a few different types. This is just my personal classification, and I don’t mean that one group is “good” and another is “bad.” It is simply a useful way to look at how we approach the spiritual path.

I would roughly divide people into four types: the intellectual type, the ritual type, the devotional type, and the integrated type.

And personally, I think the fourth type offers the most complete path.

The Intellectual Type: Understanding Without Practice

The first type loves ideas.

They may read Buddhism, philosophy, psychology, Taoism, or different spiritual traditions. They can explain complicated concepts very well. They may know what emptiness means, what nonduality means, what enlightenment means, and perhaps even compare different schools of Buddhism.

But they don’t actually practice.

There is nothing necessarily wrong with this. Some people are simply interested in spirituality as philosophy. But I think there is a limit to how far intellectual understanding alone can take you.

Shinzen Young is an interesting example. Before becoming a serious meditation practitioner, he was primarily a scholar. He studied Asian religions academically and eventually went to Japan to study Shingon Buddhism. Only later did meditation become something experiential rather than merely intellectual for him.

This distinction is important because there are certain things you can understand conceptually but not really know until you experience them.

Take impermanence. You can read a hundred books telling you that everything changes. You can completely agree with the idea. But perhaps one day you are sitting in meditation with a very unpleasant sensation. You observe it without interfering, and suddenly it breaks apart or disappears.

Now impermanence is no longer only an idea.

You have tasted it.

In Chinese we sometimes use the word wu, 悟, which means something like realization or insight. I don’t think this kind of realization necessarily comes from accumulating more information. Practice creates the conditions in which something you intellectually understand can suddenly become something you directly see.

The Ritual Type: When Spirituality Becomes Mostly Form

The second type is what I would call the ritual type.

This person may be very serious about doing certain religious practices correctly. Perhaps there is a particular way to bow, a particular ceremony to perform, certain rules to follow, or certain things that must be done to accumulate blessings or receive some benefit.

Ritual can certainly have value. It can create structure, meaning, community, and reverence. My concern is when the ritual becomes the entire spiritual path.

Sometimes people also become very attached to religious doctrines that cannot really be verified through direct experience. Reincarnation is an obvious example. Can a human being be reborn as an animal? Can an animal be reborn as a human being? Different traditions have different teachings about these things.

Maybe they are true. Maybe they are not. I cannot prove them, and neither can most people discussing them.

For someone interested in actual practice, I don’t think you necessarily need to spend too much energy arguing about these questions.

You can meditate and investigate your own experience. You can observe suffering, attachment, and how anger arises in the body and mind. You can observe what happens when you stop resisting an unpleasant experience.

These are things you can actually test.

The Devotional Type: When the Heart Opens

The third type is very different. I would call this the devotional type.

Imagine two people chanting the name of the Buddha. One person may be doing it because they believe it will bring better health, good fortune, or some other personal benefit. Another person may say exactly the same words, but something completely different is happening internally.

There is genuine devotion. There is reverence. There is love.

The same thing can happen in Christianity. Someone may pray not simply because they want God to give them something, but because prayer itself opens their heart toward something greater than themselves.

Some people seem naturally sensitive to this dimension of spiritual life. They may have had experiences that gave them a deep sense of connection with something greater, whether they call it God, Buddha, the sacred, or simply a higher reality.

I think there is something very beautiful about this type of practice because it comes from the heart rather than merely following instructions.

If there really is some higher power to be touched, I imagine genuine openness of the heart matters more than whether you performed a ritual perfectly.

The Integrated Type: Understanding, Practice, and Devotion

The fourth type is what I would call the integrated type, and personally, I think this is the most complete approach.

This person has intellectual understanding, but doesn’t stop there.

Maybe they read the Platform Sutra and encounter teachings about original nature. Maybe they read Wang Yangming and think about the unity of knowledge and action. They use ideas to understand the direction of the path.

But they also practice.

They sit down and meditate. They observe their own mind. They experience concentration, silence, emotional release, or perhaps moments when the usual sense of self becomes quieter. Something that was previously a philosophical concept begins to become experiential.

Perhaps they have read that everything is impermanent. Then during meditation, they watch a sensation that seemed solid begin to move, vibrate, weaken, and disappear.

Suddenly the teaching means something different.

The theory pointed in a direction. Practice allowed them to walk in that direction.

And perhaps there is another dimension too: devotion. Alongside understanding and direct practice, the heart begins to open toward something larger. You may call that God, Buddha-nature, original nature, truth, or something else entirely. The particular word may not be the most important part.

For me, this combination is powerful because each dimension corrects the limitations of the others.

Theory without practice can remain trapped in the head. Ritual without deeper understanding can become mechanical. Devotion without discernment can sometimes become blind belief. But when understanding, direct practice, and genuine openness of the heart begin to support one another, the path becomes much richer.

You don’t only think about spirituality.

You don’t only believe in spirituality.

You practice, observe, experience, and gradually discover what these teachings mean for yourself.

And I think that is where spiritual practice really begins to come alive.

I appreciate you taking the time to read this.

If you’re interested in exploring how mindfulness can support daily life, not just on the cushion, but in ordinary moments, I’d be happy to have you here.

Please subscribe and join me.

Subscribe now

And, If You’d Like Some Personal Support With Your Mindfulness Practice…

I offer 1:1 mindfulness coaching as a certified Unified Mindfulness teacher/trainer.

The coaching can help you deepen your practice, correct misunderstandings, or better understand how mindfulness works. We will also design ways to bring the practice into your actual daily life, not just your meditation sessions.

If you’re interested, feel free to book a connection call. We can talk about your goals, your current practice, and how mindfulness training might help. We can also see whether working together would be a good fit.

You can send me a DM or email me at miaosimuse@qq.com, and I’ll send you my availability for a call.

A lot of people tell me they don’t have enough time to meditate.

I completely understand. You wake up and immediately have things to do. Maybe you need to make breakfast, get ready for work, take care of your kids, or maybe you simply went to bed too late and don’t have another thirty minutes in the morning to sit quietly.

But there is one period of the day that many people don’t think of as meditation time: the commute.

If you spend twenty or thirty minutes every day on the subway, bus, or in your car, that’s already a substantial amount of time. And you don’t necessarily need to add anything else to your schedule. You can simply turn some of that existing time into mindfulness practice.

The Subway Can Become Your Meditation Room

Public transportation is probably the easiest place to start because you aren’t responsible for driving. You can give much more of your attention to meditation.

Suppose your subway ride takes twenty minutes. You could spend ten minutes simply observing your breath. You could also do a body scan, moving attention gradually through different areas of the body and noticing whatever sensations are present.

You don’t even have to sit down. Meditation works perfectly well while standing.

In fact, standing on a crowded subway can give you some interesting meditation objects that you wouldn’t have at home. The train moves. Your body adjusts its balance. Someone bumps into you. You feel your feet pressing into the floor or your hand holding the rail. All of these are physical sensations, and all of them can become objects of mindfulness.

In some ways, practicing in a noisy subway may even train your attention more than practicing alone in a quiet room. There are more things competing for your attention, so staying with the breath or the body requires stronger concentration.

Of course, I’m not saying you should replace all formal meditation with subway meditation. But if you already spend thirty minutes commuting every day, why not use some of it?

Driving Can Be Meditation Too

Driving is a little different because safety has to come first. I wouldn’t recommend closing your eyes, becoming absorbed in internal imagery, or doing anything that takes attention away from the road.

But mindfulness doesn’t require you to turn away from the world. You can make driving itself the meditation.

One simple approach is to become much more aware of your visual field. Instead of driving while thinking about yesterday’s meeting or tomorrow’s problems, actually look at the road. Let your attention include the whole visual field rather than staring narrowly at one point.

This may even make you a safer driver. You may notice a pedestrian approaching the road earlier, a car beginning to change lanes, or a scooter or motorcycle appearing from the side.

You can also notice how surprisingly rich the visual experience of driving actually is. Maybe it’s summer and the trees are particularly green. Sunlight is reflecting from the leaves. People are walking along the sidewalk. Cars are constantly entering and leaving your field of vision.

Normally we miss most of this because we’re busy thinking.

When you actually pay attention, an ordinary drive can become surprisingly interesting. You can almost treat the windshield like a movie screen and simply watch the movie unfolding in front of you.

And vision isn’t the only thing available. You can notice the physical sensations involved in driving: your hands touching the steering wheel, the subtle movements in your arms as you turn, your foot pressing the accelerator and then releasing it, or the pressure involved in braking.

You can also hear the sounds of traffic and notice how a vehicle approaches, passes you, and gradually disappears into the distance. None of this requires you to do something extra while driving. You’re simply becoming more aware of the driving you’re already doing.

Traffic Can Also Train Your Equanimity

There is another kind of meditation that driving offers, and this one may be even more valuable.

Someone cuts you off. A car suddenly brakes in front of you. A scooter or motorcycle suddenly moves into your lane. Immediately, irritation arises.

For some people, this becomes road rage. They start swearing, complaining, or mentally attacking the other driver. But if you have some mindfulness practice, that moment can become something completely different.

Notice what irritation actually feels like in the body. Maybe your chest tightens. Maybe your face becomes hot. Maybe your hands grip the steering wheel harder. Instead of immediately following the angry thoughts, stay with the bodily experience for a moment while, of course, keeping enough attention on the road to drive safely.

You don’t have to suppress the anger, and you don’t have to tell yourself that you shouldn’t be angry. Just let the sensations be there and observe them without adding unnecessary resistance.

Then the person who cut you off has accidentally given you a meditation exercise.

You could even say they’re helping you train your temperament.

This is one of the things I find interesting about bringing mindfulness into ordinary life. Experiences that used to be nothing but annoyances can gradually become opportunities to practice Concentration, Sensory Clarity, and Equanimity.

You May Have More Time to Practice Than You Think

When people say, “I don’t have time to meditate,” sometimes what they really mean is, “I don’t have another thirty minutes to sit alone in a quiet room.”

Those are not the same thing.

Formal sitting practice is valuable, and I certainly recommend it. But meditation doesn’t have to happen only on a cushion. If you broaden your definition of where practice can happen, you may discover that your day already contains many opportunities.

Your subway ride can become a body scan. Your walk to work can become walking meditation. Your drive can become an exercise in sensory clarity. Getting cut off in traffic can become equanimity practice.

You don’t necessarily need to find more time.

Sometimes you just need to use the time you already have differently.

I appreciate you taking the time to read this.

If you’re interested in exploring how mindfulness can support daily life, not just on the cushion, but in ordinary moments, I’d be happy to have you here.

Please subscribe and join me.

Subscribe

And, If You’d Like Some Personal Support With Your Mindfulness Practice…

I offer 1:1 mindfulness coaching as a certified Unified Mindfulness teacher/trainer.

The coaching can help you deepen your practice, correct misunderstandings, or better understand how mindfulness works. We will also design ways to bring the practice into your actual daily life, not just your meditation sessions.

If you’re interested, feel free to book a connection call. We can talk about your goals, your current practice, and how mindfulness training might help. We can also see whether working together would be a good fit.

You can send me a DM or email me at miaosimuse@qq.com, and I’ll send you my availability for a call.

One of the most common questions beginners ask is what to do when their mind keeps wandering during meditation.

They sit down, start following the breath, and within a minute they’re thinking about yesterday’s conversation, tomorrow’s meeting, or something completely unrelated. Then they realize what happened and immediately feel frustrated.

“Why can’t I focus?”

“Am I doing meditation wrong?”

The first thing I’d like to say is that this is completely normal.

Even people who have practiced meditation for years still experience distraction. The difference isn’t that experienced meditators never lose focus. The difference is that they understand what’s happening and know how to work with it.

Noticing You’ve Wandered Is Already Mindfulness

In fact, the moment you realize you’ve been distracted is already a moment of mindfulness.

Think about someone who talks endlessly without noticing that nobody around them is listening anymore. The problem isn’t simply that they talk a lot. The deeper issue is that they aren’t aware of what’s happening in the present moment.

Our thoughts work in much the same way. Most of the time we’re completely absorbed in them. We don’t even know we’re thinking—we’re simply inside the story.

Then one day, during meditation, something different happens.

“Oh, I’ve been thinking.”

That small moment of recognition is actually a big step. It means there is already a little space between you and your thoughts. You are no longer completely lost inside them.

In Unified Mindfulness we talk about three core skills: Concentration, Sensory Clarity, and Equanimity.

Simply noticing that you’ve wandered is already training Sensory Clarity. You’re becoming clearer about what’s actually happening in your experience.

Then, when you gently bring your attention back to the breath, you’re training Concentration.

Every Return Is One More Repetition

I often compare meditation to strength training.

Imagine going to the gym and trying to lift a heavier weight than usual. You can’t quite do it. Does that mean the workout was a failure?

Of course not.

That challenge is exactly what allows the muscle to grow. The effort creates stress, and after recovery the muscle becomes stronger.

Attention works in a very similar way.

Every time your mind wanders, every time you notice it, and every time you bring your attention back, you’ve completed one repetition.

If you bring your attention back ten times, you’ve done ten repetitions.

If you bring it back one hundred times, you’ve done one hundred repetitions.

Ironically, the moments when you think your meditation is going badly are often the moments when you’re doing the most training.

As you continue practicing, you’ll probably notice that your attention naturally stays with the breath a little longer before wandering again. You don’t force this to happen. The attention muscle simply becomes stronger over time.

There is another important skill hiding inside this process.

Many people don’t actually suffer because they became distracted. They suffer because they immediately start criticizing themselves.

“I’m terrible at meditation.”

“I still can’t focus.”

“I should be better than this.”

Now you’ve added a second problem on top of the first.

Instead, try treating distraction much more simply.

Notice: Thinking.

Then come back.

That’s all.

You don’t need to fight the distraction, and you certainly don’t need to punish yourself for having one. In Unified Mindfulness, this is how we train Equanimity.

Imagine practicing basketball. You miss a shot. Would yelling at yourself help the next shot go in?

Probably not.

You simply retrieve the ball and shoot again.

Meditation works exactly the same way.

Know What You’re Actually Practicing

Another thing that often helps is understanding what actually counts as distraction.

Every meditation practice has a meditation object. That object defines what belongs inside your practice and what lies outside it.

If you’re observing the breath at the nostrils, then thoughts are outside your chosen object. If you’re doing a body scan and your attention jumps from the chest to the neck before you’re ready, that’s also a distraction.

But suppose your meditation is observing thoughts themselves.

Now thoughts are no longer distractions—they’re the meditation object.

The distraction would be losing awareness and becoming completely absorbed inside the story instead of observing it.

So before judging yourself, it’s worth asking one simple question:

What exactly am I practicing right now?

For many people, thoughts are the strongest distraction. Instead of fighting them, you can even expand your meditation object.

Stay aware of the breath, and when thoughts arise, simply observe them for a moment before returning.

The important difference is this: observing a thought is not the same as being lost inside a thought.

When you’re lost in thinking, there’s usually a strong feeling that I am solving a problem or continuing a story.

When you’re observing thoughts, it feels more like listening to an inner voice. Thoughts appear on their own. You hear them. Then they disappear.

That distinction becomes clearer with practice.

If staying present still feels difficult, labeling can also help.

While breathing in, silently note inhale. While breathing out, exhale. Or simply count your breaths.

If you suddenly realize you’ve been thinking for several minutes, quietly label it:

Thinking.

Not as criticism.

Just as recognition.

Then gently return to the breath.

That tiny label creates a little space between awareness and the thought, making it easier to come back.

The Return Is the Practice

Many people believe meditation is about reaching a state where the mind never wanders.

I don’t think that’s the right goal.

The wandering is part of the practice.

Every time you notice it, you strengthen awareness.

Every time you return, you strengthen concentration.

Every time you return without judging yourself, you strengthen equanimity.

So the next time you find yourself lost in thought during meditation, don’t think,

“I failed.”

Instead, you might simply smile and think,

“Here’s another repetition.”

Because that moment of coming back isn’t interrupting your meditation.

It is the meditation.

I appreciate you taking the time to read this.

If you’re interested in exploring how mindfulness can support daily life, not just on the cushion, but in ordinary moments, I’d be happy to have you here.

Please subscribe and join me.

Subscribe

And, If You’d Like Some Personal Support With Your Mindfulness Practice…

I offer 1:1 mindfulness coaching as a certified Unified Mindfulness teacher/trainer.

The coaching can help you deepen your practice, correct misunderstandings, or better understand how mindfulness works. We will also design ways to bring the practice into your actual daily life, not just your meditation sessions.

If you’re interested, feel free to book a connection call. We can talk about your goals, your current practice, and how mindfulness training might help. We can also see whether working together would be a good fit.

You can send me a DM or email me at miaosimuse@qq.com, and I’ll send you my availability for a call.

A reader recently asked me two questions about mindfulness meditation.

The first was about experiences of emptiness, or more accurately, a relative sense of emptiness, spaciousness, or reduced sensation.

Do you have to practice for a very long time before something like that can happen?

The second question was more practical:

Are you allowed to move during seated meditation?

I think both questions are worth answering, because they touch on something important. Meditation does have methods and general principles, but people are also different. There is no single timeline, and there is no need to turn practice into another form of perfectionism.

You may not need years to experience spaciousness

The honest answer is that it depends.

People have different natural abilities.

We can see this clearly in ordinary life. Some children seem naturally good at mathematics. Some have a strong feeling for language. Some are naturally athletic. It is almost as if everyone begins life with different points already placed on different branches of a skill tree.

I think spiritual practice can be like that too.

If you believe in past lives, you might say that someone practiced before and therefore finds meditation easier in this life. If you do not believe that, you can simply call it natural aptitude. Either way, the practical point is the same.

Before you begin, you do not really know what your aptitude is.

So you also do not know how long it will take before you experience something deeper.

My suggestion is simple: practice honestly and remain open.

Do not tell yourself, “This is impossible for me,” or “I probably need twenty years before anything happens.” That belief may itself become a kind of obstacle.

Something may happen sooner than you expect.

Sometimes beginners even have what people call beginner’s luck. They may sit down and suddenly feel that the body has become very quiet, that part of the body has disappeared, or that the whole visual field has become dark and spacious.

They may not think much of it because nobody has explained what it is.

But that may already be a small experience of spaciousness or reduced sensory activity.

It is not necessarily the absolute emptiness described in Buddhist philosophy. We should not exaggerate it. But it may still be a real shift from our normal, solid way of experiencing the body and the world.

Some practices may point toward emptiness more directly

Although there is no guaranteed timeline, some techniques may make spacious experiences more accessible.

One is to close your eyes and look at the gray-black visual field behind the eyelids.

Do not stare too hard. Just look naturally.

You may see darkness, vague light, changing patterns, or a few points of brightness. Then notice the edges of this visual field.

Where does it end?

You may find that the boundary is unclear. It can feel much larger than expected, almost without a definite edge.

If thoughts arise, you do not need to fight them. Just return to that dark visual field.

You can even hold a gentle willingness to let go of your usual sense of yourself and rest in that space.

For some people, staying with this may create a sense that the ordinary world has faded into the background. There may be a feeling of openness or emptiness.

Another method is to work with areas of the body that have very little sensation.

For example, you might notice the earlobes, the nose, the forehead, or the toes. Different people will find different places.

You can rest attention on one relatively quiet area for a few seconds, then move to another. You may also include the sense of relaxation during the exhale.

The attention is changing locations, but each time it settles on an area with very little sensory information.

As you become more sensitive to this quietness, you may begin to notice other low-sensation areas. Sometimes the body can gradually feel less dense. At a deeper level, the whole body may feel very still, vague, or spacious.

Again, I would not call this the final realization of emptiness.

But it points in that direction.

And time does matter. Ten minutes may give you a taste. Twenty or thirty minutes may allow the experience to deepen. If thirty minutes feels impossible, start with ten. When practice becomes more interesting and you begin to have clearer experiences, you may naturally want to sit longer.

Why people are often told not to move

Now let’s talk about movement.

Usually, meditation instructions encourage you not to move too much.

There is a reason for that.

A lot of movement during meditation does not come from a real physical need. It comes from restlessness, impatience, boredom, or resistance.

The body wants to move because the mind does not want to stay with what is happening.

If you remain still, the stillness of the body can help reveal a deeper stillness in the mind.

The heart of the mind, you might say, is not actually moving, even though thoughts and emotions are moving on the surface. By keeping the body still, we gradually become more sensitive to that deeper stability.

Stillness also teaches us something about impermanence.

An itch appears.

A pain appears.

Restlessness appears.

If you do not move immediately, you may notice that the sensation changes. It may weaken, move to another place, transform, or disappear.

That can be a very useful lesson.

It shows you that not every unpleasant experience needs an immediate reaction.

The same principle can later help in daily life. Something bothers you, and instead of instantly acting, arguing, or escaping, you observe it for a while. Then you discover that it changes on its own.

But stillness should not become self-harm

At the same time, not moving should not become an obsession.

I once knew someone who was very perfectionistic. During a retreat, he sat cross-legged without moving for around three hours. He later injured himself, and for years afterward that area of his body would hurt when the weather changed.

That is not wise practice.

If you believe staying still may injure you, adjust your posture.

The key is to move consciously.

There is a big difference between moving automatically and moving with awareness.

Imagine someone shaking their leg without noticing. Maybe the movement comes from restlessness.

But if that person deliberately observes every sensation involved in shaking the leg, then it becomes a meditation on movement. They may notice the muscles contracting, the pressure changing, and the rhythm of the leg.

And sometimes, once the movement becomes fully conscious, the urge to continue disappears.

That is quite interesting.

Awareness changes the experience.

So if your leg is slightly sore, you may stay still a little longer and observe it. You do not have to move at the first sign of discomfort.

But if the pain becomes too strong, feels dangerous, or may cause injury, then move.

Change your leg position. Straighten the knee. Adjust the body.

Just do it slowly and consciously.

Feel the intention to move.

Feel the movement itself.

Feel the body settling into the new posture.

Then continue meditating.

The point is awareness, not perfection

So, do you need to practice for many years before experiencing spaciousness?

Not necessarily.

People are different, and some practices may point in that direction more directly. Stay open, practice sincerely, and do not decide in advance what you can or cannot experience.

And can you move during meditation?

Yes.

Stillness is valuable because it trains patience, reveals impermanence, and helps the mind settle. But stillness should not become another rigid standard.

If you can remain still safely, stay a little longer and observe.

If you genuinely need to move, move with awareness.

The goal is not to become a statue.

The goal is to become more conscious.

I appreciate you taking the time to read this.

If you’re interested in exploring how mindfulness can support daily life, not just on the cushion, but in ordinary moments, I’d be happy to have you here.

Please subscribe and join me.

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And, If You’d Like Some Personal Support With Your Mindfulness Practice…

I offer 1:1 mindfulness coaching as a certified Unified Mindfulness teacher/trainer.

The coaching can help you deepen your practice, correct misunderstandings, or better understand how mindfulness works. We will also design ways to bring the practice into your actual daily life, not just your meditation sessions.

If you’re interested, feel free to book a connection call. We can talk about your goals, your current practice, and how mindfulness training might help. We can also see whether working together would be a good fit.

You can send me a DM or email me at miaosimuse@qq.com, and I’ll send you my availability for a call.

Today I want to talk about emptiness.

This is a very interesting topic, and of course, in Buddhism there are famous lines such as:

“Form is not different from emptiness, and emptiness is not different from form.”

I am not qualified to explain the deepest Buddhist philosophy behind this. So instead of beginning with doctrine, I want to start from ordinary experience and even from science.

The world around us looks very solid.

A table looks like a solid object. A wall looks solid. Our bodies look solid.

But if we look more closely, matter is made of atoms, and atoms are not like tiny solid balls packed tightly together. They contain a great deal of space between their components.

At the other end of the scale, the universe is also mostly vast space, with stars, planets, and other objects separated by enormous distances.

So whether we look at the microscopic world or the universe, space is not some small and unimportant part of reality.

It is everywhere.

But human beings normally pay much more attention to things than to the space around things.

We notice objects, movement, sound, and activity. We usually do not notice the background that contains them.

This makes sense from the perspective of survival.

Imagine our ancestors walking through a forest. If they became fascinated by the spaciousness between the trees but failed to notice a tiger moving toward them, they would not survive for very long.

As living creatures, we naturally notice what moves, what changes, and what may help or threaten us.

Meditation, however, can gently redirect some attention toward what we normally overlook.

It can help us become more aware of space, silence, stillness, and absence.

I am not saying that these simple exercises are the same as directly realizing Buddhist emptiness. That would be a much deeper matter.

But we can think of them as fingers pointing toward the moon.

They point our attention in that direction.

Seeing space

The first practice is seeing space.

Every object appears within space.

A room can contain furniture because there is open space in the room. A tree can spread its branches because there is space around and between them.

When most people look at a tree, they notice the trunk, leaves, flowers, and movement.

But you can reverse your attention.

Instead of looking only at the leaves, notice the gaps between the leaves.

Instead of focusing only on the branches, notice the open sky between them.

On a busy street, you can notice the spaces between cars, the distance between buildings, and the open area above the road.

Nothing needs to disappear.

You are simply shifting attention from the objects to the space that contains them.

This is especially easy when standing somewhere high and looking into the distance.

When there are fewer visible details, the open field becomes more obvious. This may be one reason people naturally enjoy looking from a mountaintop or over a large body of water.

Outer space can create a sense of inner spaciousness.

The mind becomes quieter.

But you do not need a mountain.

You can practice while looking at a tree, sitting in a room, or walking along a normal street.

Notice not only what is present, but also the space around what is present.

Over time, your attention may become less dominated by active objects and more sensitive to their quiet background.

For me, looking at space can sometimes feel like a kind of massage for the mind.

Hearing silence

We can also listen to emptiness.

Of course, silence is not exactly a sound.

But we can become aware of silence through contrast.

Imagine walking through a quiet forest.

Suddenly, a bird calls.

Then the sound disappears.

The birdcall makes the surrounding silence more noticeable.

The sound seems to emerge from silence and then return to it.

Ancient Chinese poetry often uses this effect. A voice, a bird, or a bell does not destroy the quietness of a mountain. It may actually reveal how quiet the mountain is.

In daily life, when your environment is relatively quiet, you can place attention on the background silence rather than giving all your attention to inner thinking.

Normally, even when the outer world is silent, the mind keeps talking. We become so absorbed in inner talk that we do not notice the silence around us.

But if you gently move attention outward, you may notice that the silence is still there.

You can also use contrast.

Maybe there is traffic or rain outside, while your room is quiet.

Instead of focusing only on the outside sounds, notice the stillness of the room.

Sound and silence do not have to compete.

You can hear a sound and, at the same time, sense the quiet background around it.

Feeling space in the body

The third practice is feeling space.

This may sound more unusual, but it can be very simple.

When you sit quietly, some areas of the body may have very little sensation.

Perhaps the earlobes, toes, or parts of the hands are almost sensationless.

When you place attention there, you may notice something strange.

You know intellectually that the body part is there, but you have very little direct sensory evidence of it.

If a hand is painful, hot, or tingling, it feels very solid.

But if a toe has almost no sensation, and your eyes are closed, where exactly is its boundary?

You may know where it should be, but you may not be able to feel a clear edge.

If you stay with that absence of sensation, the body part can begin to feel vague, spacious, or almost absent.

Some meditators describe parts of the body as disappearing.

This does not mean the body has literally disappeared.

It usually means the ordinary sensations that define its shape and boundary have become faint.

Another possibility is vibration.

When meditators become more sensitive, a body part may feel less like a solid object and more like tingling, pulsing, or waves.

The hand is no longer experienced as simply “a hand.”

It becomes a field of changing sensations.

And because waves do not feel as solid as an object, the body can begin to seem lighter or more spacious.

Sometimes the boundary between the body and the space around it also becomes less clear.

Suppose you place attention on a toe that has almost no sensation.

You cannot clearly feel the toe, and you also cannot directly feel the space around it.

The two may seem to blend.

That can be a very peaceful experience.

A quieter layer of experience

These practices are not necessarily profound realizations of absolute emptiness.

But they can reveal a quieter layer of experience that we usually miss.

Normally, our attention is pulled toward objects, thoughts, problems, and activity.

When we begin to notice space, silence, and the places where sensation fades, the world may feel less dense.

Our problems may also feel less solid.

I sometimes imagine suffering as clouds covering the sun.

The sun is still there, but we cannot feel its warmth because the clouds are thick.

When we touch a deeper layer of spaciousness, it can feel as though a little sunlight is passing through.

The problems may not disappear.

The clouds may still be there.

But something larger becomes visible behind them.

And sometimes that small glimpse of spaciousness is already enough to bring a sense of relief.

I appreciate you taking the time to read this.

If you’re interested in exploring how mindfulness can support daily life, not just on the cushion, but in ordinary moments, I’d be happy to have you here.

Please subscribe and join me.

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A lot of people hear the word meditation and immediately think of Buddhism.That makes sense. Buddhism has developed many detailed meditation systems, and in the modern world, a lot of what we call mindfulness also came through Buddhist traditions.

But meditation is definitely not something that belongs only to Buddhism.

If we look across religions and cultures, we can find many different ways people have trained attention, entered silence, worked with the body, or tried to move closer to what they considered sacred.

The names are different.

The beliefs are different.

The practices are different.

But there are often some very interesting similarities underneath.

Meditation does not have to mean sitting still

The most obvious example in Chinese culture may be Daoism.

Daoist inner alchemy includes many practices involving breath, attention, visualization, and the body. These practices may not use the same language as Buddhist meditation, but they are still clearly forms of inner training.

Islam also has contemplative traditions.

In Sufism, for example, there are practices involving chanting, remembrance of God, music, movement, and sometimes turning or dancing. The famous image of the whirling dervish is one example.

This can be understood as a kind of moving meditation.

And moving meditation is not something unique to Sufism.

Zen Buddhism has always placed a lot of emphasis on work and ordinary activity. In a Zen context, meditation is not only something you do while sitting. You can also practice while cleaning, cooking, walking, or doing physical labor.

So meditation does not necessarily mean becoming physically still.

Sometimes movement itself becomes the practice.

We can also find ritual practices among Indigenous cultures that involve dancing, fasting, exposure to heat, pain, or physical difficulty. I do not want to oversimplify those traditions, because they have their own meanings and should not just be reduced to “meditation.”

But from the perspective of attention training, some of these practices may involve entering a very different state of consciousness and changing one’s relationship with pain, fear, and the body.

So even before we talk about Christianity, we can already see that meditation has appeared in many different forms.

Christianity also has a deep contemplative tradition

When people think about Christianity, they often think mainly about prayer.

Prayer may mean speaking to God, asking for help, giving thanks, or reciting certain words.

But Christianity also has a long tradition of contemplation.

In contemplation, the emphasis may shift away from talking to God and toward silence, presence, surrender, and resting in God.

This begins to sound much closer to meditation.

One famous figure in this tradition is Teresa of Ávila, a Spanish Christian mystic. In her book The Interior Castle, she describes the spiritual life as moving through different rooms or stages inside an inner castle.

The movement is inward.

It is a journey toward deeper stillness, surrender, and union with God.

Christian traditions also have texts such as The Cloud of Unknowing, which teaches that God cannot be fully reached through ordinary thought or concepts.

Instead of trying to understand God intellectually, the practitioner enters a kind of loving unknowing.

To me, this is very interesting.

It sounds quite different from normal prayer, where we are asking God for something or speaking to God in words.

It is more like resting in a mystery that cannot be explained.

And when you compare that with some forms of Zen, there are obvious similarities.

In Zen, you may be told to just sit, without chasing thoughts or trying to reach a special result.

In Christian contemplation, you may let go of concepts and rest in the unknown presence of God.

The theology is different.

But the inner movement may feel surprisingly similar.

Are Christian mystics and Buddhist practitioners discovering the same thing?

This is a very difficult question, and I do not think we need to answer it too quickly.

Christian mystics may describe the deepest experience as union with God.

Buddhists may speak about emptiness, nonduality, no-self, or original nature.

Zen may talk about your original face before your parents were born.

Are they all describing exactly the same reality?

I cannot prove that.

But personally, I think it is possible that people from different cultures entered very deep inner states and then described them using the language available to them.

A Christian calls it God.

A Buddhist may call it emptiness or suchness.

A Daoist may use a completely different vocabulary.

Maybe the experiences are identical. Maybe they only overlap partly. Maybe the beliefs surrounding the experiences shape them more than we realize.

We do not have to settle that question.

What is already clear is that many traditions discovered that normal thinking is not the only way to know reality.

They developed practices for training attention, becoming quiet, observing experience, surrendering control, and going deeper than the ordinary surface of the mind.

Attention may be the common ground

If we look past the different religious language, one common feature becomes very obvious.

These traditions all train attention.

You may place attention on the breath.

You may place it on a prayer, sacred phrase, image, bodily movement, or the name of God.

You may rest attention in silence.

You may observe thoughts without following them.

You may surrender attention into what feels unknown.

The object changes, but attention is still being trained.

And when attention becomes more stable, clear, and open, people often report that their relationship with suffering changes.

The problems of life may still be there.

But they do not grip the mind in the same way.

That may be one reason meditation-like practices appear again and again across human history.

People from different cultures discovered that training the mind changes how life is experienced.

Modern meditation takes something ancient and makes it available to more people

Modern mindfulness often takes some of these attention-training methods and separates them from religious belief.

That has both benefits and limitations, but one benefit is very practical.

You do not necessarily have to become Buddhist, Christian, Muslim, or Daoist to meditate.

You can simply practice.

You can train your attention.

You can learn to sit with discomfort.

You can explore silence.

You can observe your own mind.

And perhaps, through your own experience, you can begin to ask the deeper questions.

Is there a God?

What is the self?

What remains when thought becomes quiet?

What is this awareness that knows experience?

I do not think we always need to believe the answer first.

Sometimes we can practice first and see what we discover.

So no, meditation is not only a Buddhist practice.

It is something human beings, across many cultures and traditions, have returned to again and again.

The language may differ.

The rituals may differ.

But the desire to go inward, to suffer less, and to discover something deeper seems to be shared.

I appreciate you taking the time to read this.

If you’re interested in exploring how mindfulness can support daily life, not just on the cushion, but in ordinary moments, I’d be happy to have you here.

Please subscribe and join me.

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Hey, it’s Muse again.

Here are three ideas about mindfulness that I think are worth exploring.

The first is about breaking experience into sensory categories, so difficult moments become easier to handle.

The second is about what Shinzen calls a complete experience, and why even washing dishes can become more fulfilling when we are fully there.

And the third is about what I think may be one practical ultimate direction of meditation: becoming less dependent on outer conditions for happiness.

So here are three reflections.

1. Breaking experience into smaller pieces makes it less overwhelming

For most of us, each moment of life feels like one complete experience.

Someone criticizes you, and it feels like one big painful event. You do not naturally separate the sound of their voice, the expression on their face, your inner reaction, your thoughts, and the sensations in your body.

It all arrives as one thing.

But if we look more carefully, every moment is actually made up of different kinds of sensory experience.

In the Unified Mindfulness system, we can divide experience into See, Hear, and Feel.

Seeing can be divided into what we see outside and the images we see inside the mind.

Hearing can be divided into external sounds and inner talk.

Feeling can include ordinary physical sensations, such as the body touching a chair or the breath moving through the body, as well as emotional sensations, such as tightness in the throat, heaviness in the chest, or warmth in the face.

Why do we separate experience into all these categories?

Because when everything is mixed together, it can feel solid and overpowering.

Imagine a white rope and a red rope twisted together. From far away, they may look like one pink rope. But when you move closer, you can see that they are simply two different ropes wrapped around each other.

A difficult experience is often like that.

Someone speaks harshly to you. At first, the whole situation feels like one huge attack. But if you slow down, you may notice the sound of their words, the look on their face, the inner voice saying, “They shouldn’t speak to me like that,” an image of yourself arguing back, and tension rising in the chest.

When these parts are seen separately, the experience becomes less solid.

It does not mean the situation no longer matters. But it may lose some of its power over you.

Instead of immediately becoming angry, you may notice anger forming. Instead of automatically acting from it, you may have a little more room to choose what to do.

That is one of the practical benefits of sensory clarity.

We are not trying to escape experience. We are looking at it more closely. And when we look closely enough, the large and frightening thing often becomes a collection of smaller things arising, changing, and passing.

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2. A complete experience can turn neutral moments into something fulfilling

The second idea is what Shinzen calls a complete experience.

The simplest way to describe it is this: when you are washing dishes, you are really washing dishes.

That sounds easy, but most of the time, it is not what we are doing.

Imagine that we have ten units of attention available in each moment. While washing dishes, maybe only three units are actually on the dishes. The other seven are thinking about yesterday, planning tomorrow, worrying about work, or replaying something someone said.

The dishes still get washed, because washing dishes is simple. But we are not fully experiencing it.

Why does a complete experience matter?

Because when we fully experience something neutral, it can become positive.

If you really pay attention while washing dishes, there is a lot happening. You can feel warm water moving across the hands. You can notice the texture of the bowl, the grease slowly disappearing, the friction changing as the surface becomes clean, and the sounds of plates and utensils touching each other.

You may also notice a small satisfaction as the sink becomes emptier and the dishes become clean.

That satisfaction is usually very subtle. But when you notice it, it can become stronger.

Something neutral begins to feel quietly fulfilling.

And these small moments matter, because life is made of them. Five or ten minutes of washing dishes is still part of your life. Why should those minutes be treated as wasted time?

A complete experience also changes the way we relate to pain and difficult emotion.

Suppose you have to give a presentation tomorrow and you feel anxious. Usually, we do not want to experience the anxiety directly. We may prepare frantically, distract ourselves, or keep thinking about how to solve it.

But if we stop and fully experience the anxiety, we may see that it includes several parts.

There may be an inner image of ourselves freezing or being laughed at.

There may be inner talk saying, “I can’t do this.”

There may be tightness in the chest or discomfort in the stomach.

When we allow ourselves to experience those parts fully, the anxiety may still be there, but it does not hit us as hard.

This is one of the strange things about mindfulness. When we stop trying to escape an unpleasant experience and open to it completely, the suffering often decreases.

Sometimes there is even a subtle positive feeling underneath it: the sense that something old and accumulated is finally being faced and released.

So a complete experience can turn neutral into positive, and negative into something more workable.

3. Maybe the practical goal of meditation is happiness that depends less on conditions

Some people say the ultimate goal of meditation is enlightenment or liberation.

Maybe that is true, but it can feel distant and abstract.

A more practical goal, at least for me, is to develop a kind of happiness that depends less and less on external conditions.

We all have different conditions attached to our happiness.

For one person, it may be appearance.

For another, it may be money or status.

For another, it may be whether their child behaves well, gets good grades, or becomes successful.

For another, it may be whether their boss approves of them.

I sometimes imagine happiness as a tabletop supported by several legs. Each leg is an external condition.

We believe, “I can be happy if I have this, if that person treats me well, if my child succeeds, if I remain attractive, if I keep my position.”

The ideal direction of meditation is that the tabletop gradually needs fewer legs.

Maybe one day it can almost float on its own.

For most of us, this will be gradual.

Before, one wrinkle may make you unhappy. Later, five wrinkles may not matter so much.

Before, criticism may disturb you for two days. Later, maybe it still hurts, but it passes more quickly.

Before, your child crying may immediately create anger or sadness in you. Later, maybe you can remain steady enough to stay with them without making the situation worse.

I had one experience like this.

One day, after dealing with work stress and illness in the family, I sat for about half an hour and faced the discomfort inside. The unpleasant feelings did not completely disappear, but I was no longer suffering from them in the same way.

Later, my son became upset because I would not let him watch more television. He cried and got angry.

Normally, that would create some disturbance in me too. But that night, there was almost no ripple inside. I did not need to yell, lecture, or fight with him. I could simply stay there until his emotions passed.

That was a small thing, but it showed me what meditation may be slowly building.

The change is not usually dramatic. It is more like a child growing taller. You do not notice it every day. Then one day, you compare an old photograph or try on an old piece of clothing, and suddenly the growth is obvious.

Meditation may work like that too.

Over time, our happiness can become a little less dependent on appearance, approval, money, status, family behavior, and life going exactly as planned.

I do not know whether we can become completely independent of conditions in one lifetime.

But even moving in that direction seems deeply worthwhile.

I appreciate you taking the time to read this.

If you’re interested in exploring how mindfulness can support daily life, not just on the cushion, but in ordinary moments, I’d be happy to have you here.

Please subscribe and join me.

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Hey, it’s Muse again.

For this one, I want to share three ideas about mindfulness practice that may sound a little different, but I think they are deeply connected.

One is about learning to notice “rest” in our experience.
One is about why simply wanting to be good is sometimes not enough.
And one is about samadhi, or meditative stillness, and why it should not only stay on the cushion.

So here are three reflections.

1. Rest is also something we can notice

In Unified Mindfulness, there is a practice category called Rest.

At first, this may sound strange. What does it mean to notice rest?

Usually, we pay attention to active experiences. We notice movement, sound, thought, emotion, pain, desire, worry. These things pull our attention because they feel more obvious.

But there are also experiences that are neutral, quiet, inactive, or almost empty of information.

That is what I mean by rest.

For example, when your eyes are open and you look at the world, visual experience is active. There are objects, colors, movement, people, cars, screens, things changing.

But when you close your eyes and notice the gray-black screen behind the eyelids, there is much less information. Maybe there are a few light spots or vague patterns, but compared with normal seeing, it is quiet. That can be a kind of visual rest.

Even with eyes open, if you soften your gaze and do not focus on any particular object, the visual field becomes more even. Nothing is especially important. Everything has equal value. That can also be rest.

There is rest in hearing too.

Imagine walking in a small forest. It is quiet. Suddenly a bird calls, then the sound stops. After that, the silence of the forest feels even more obvious. The bird sound helps reveal the quiet background.

That quiet background is rest.

The body has rest too. When you exhale, the breathing muscles soften. There is a settling, a letting go. Some body parts may also feel neutral, or almost like nothing is happening there — the ears, the nose, the toes, the hands resting somewhere. These quiet or neutral sensations are also rest.

Why does this matter?

Because our attention usually gets pulled toward active things, especially stressful things.

Worries are active.
Pain is active.
Anger is active.
Fear is active.

And when attention keeps going to those active experiences, they get magnified. It is like asking yourself to write down ten strengths and ten weaknesses, but then spending the next ten minutes only staring at your weaknesses. Of course you will feel like you are full of problems.

But that is not the whole picture.

Rest helps us recover the whole picture.

There may be worry, but there is also quiet.
There may be tension, but there is also neutral space.
There may be sound, but there is also silence.

When we learn to notice rest, the mind and body can gradually relax. It helps balance stress, and for me, this has been very practical. I used to have more stress headaches. With practice, I learned to notice tension earlier and soften it more often. Not perfectly, of course. But enough that stress does not accumulate in the same way.

So rest is not nothing.

Rest is a real part of experience.

And learning to notice it can be deeply healing.

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2. Goodness needs awareness, otherwise it can get distorted

Sometimes people ask: why do we need meditation? Why not just keep a good heart, do good deeds, and be kind?

Of course, having a good heart and doing good things is wonderful.

But for ordinary people like us, there is a problem.

We often do not see clearly what is truly good.

Why? Because our own pain, fear, attachment, and conditioning can distort our view of good and bad.

For example, maybe you have a friend who keeps borrowing money from you. You think, “I should be kind. I should help. This is good.” And maybe sometimes it is good.

But what if your repeated help makes this person more dependent? What if they never learn to stand on their own? What if you are partly helping because you want to feel like a good person, or because you want to accumulate some kind of merit?

Then the situation is not so simple.

Or take a parent whose child has an addiction. The parent keeps giving money because they cannot bear to see their child suffer. On the surface, this looks like love. But maybe that money keeps the addiction going. Maybe the child needs to hit a turning point before real change can happen.

So is giving money good or bad?

It depends.

And the answer is often not obvious, because our own pain is involved.

This is why awareness matters.

If you cannot bear your own discomfort, you may call something compassion when it is really avoidance. If you cannot tolerate your child’s pain, you may keep rescuing them in a way that actually harms them. If you cannot face your own fear or anger, you may act it out while telling yourself, “I am doing this for your own good.”

This happens in families. It happens in workplaces. It even happens in religion and politics.

People often do harmful things while believing they are doing good.

That is why reflection is important. But beyond reflection, mindfulness is even more basic. We need the ability to observe our own inner activity clearly.

When anger rises, can you feel it?
When fear rises, can you notice it?
When an old wound gets activated, can you see how it is shaping your judgment?

For example, a parent may think, “I am strict because I care about my child.” But with deeper awareness, maybe they realize the strictness is connected to their own childhood shame, fear, or insecurity.

Then they have a choice.

Without awareness, the old pattern continues. With awareness, there is a chance to stop passing the pain forward.

So yes, kindness is important. But kindness without awareness can become distorted.

Meditation helps us become more aware, so that our goodness can become wiser.

3. Samadhi is beautiful, but it has to enter life

Samadhi is usually translated as concentration, absorption, or meditative stability.

In Chinese, we often call it ding定 — a settled, undistracted state of mind.

I don’t think samadhi is something only advanced spiritual people can taste. Ordinary people have small experiences of it too.

For example, when you are deeply focused on studying, working, or doing something you love, you may forget your worries for a while. The mind becomes gathered. It is not scattered everywhere. That is already a small taste of samadhi.

Meditation is a way to train this more intentionally.

When the mind settles, it can feel very peaceful. At a shallow level, it may feel like dust in a room slowly falling to the ground. The inner world becomes quieter.

At a deeper level, sounds may feel far away. Thoughts may feel like someone speaking in another room. The body may feel light, spacious, or without a clear boundary. Sometimes parts of the body feel like they are not there.

These states can be very healing and beautiful.

But there is also a trap.

A calm meditative state is not the same as freedom from suffering.

You may sit very deeply, but then get irritated the moment your family says something you don’t like. You may love meditation because it gives you peace, but then use that peace to avoid life.

That is why I think the real test is ordinary life.

Does meditation reduce your suffering?
Do you recover faster after being disturbed?
Do you become more skillful with your family, work, and emotions?
Are you less reactive than before?

If yes, then your meditation is helping.

The stillness you find on the cushion is important. I really believe that. Those states are not something foreign you brought from outside. They are already part of your own nature, like the sun behind clouds.

But the question is: can that stillness move into life?

One way is to start with simple activities. If you can feel calm while sitting, can you feel a little of that while walking? If walking is possible, can you bring it into washing dishes? Then maybe simple work. Then more complicated situations.

Another way is to practice with small frustrations first.

Maybe it rains when you wanted to go outside. Maybe someone cuts you off in traffic. Maybe a small irritation arises. Instead of letting it take over, observe it. Where is the irritation in the body? What inner talk is happening? What images appear?

Let it be there, but do not keep feeding it.

If you can practice with small disturbances, gradually you can practice with bigger ones.

Then one day, maybe someone says, “You seem calmer recently.” And maybe you feel surprised, because inside you still notice many disturbances. But that is partly because you are paying closer attention now. Compared with before, you may already be much more stable.

So samadhi is wonderful.

But don’t leave it only on the cushion.

Let it walk with you.
Let it wash dishes with you.
Let it meet traffic, rain, family, work, and small frustrations.

That is when meditation really starts to change life.

I appreciate you taking the time to read this.

If you’re interested in exploring how mindfulness can support daily life, not just on the cushion, but in ordinary moments, I’d be happy to have you here.

Please subscribe and join me.

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Hey, it’s Muse again.

For this one, I want to share three ideas that are very practical for meditation.

One is about breathing meditation, and why it is such a good place to start.
One is about attention, and why positive thinking is hard when you don’t have some control over your attention.
And one is about fear, or really any difficult emotion, and how we can learn to be with it instead of running from it.

So here are three reflections.

1. Breathing meditation is simple, but it trains something very deep

Breathing meditation is one of the best beginner practices.

The reason is simple: the breath is neutral.

Thoughts are often not neutral. They are full of worries, plans, memories, judgments, and old emotional patterns. So if you begin meditation by trying to observe thoughts directly, it can be difficult. You may get pulled into them very quickly.

But the breath is different. It is always here. It is fairly neutral. And it has enough change in it to keep attention interested. There is an inhale and an exhale. There is expansion and contraction. There is movement, rhythm, temperature, pressure.

So even a very simple breathing practice is already training the three core mindfulness skills.

When you bring your attention back to the breath, you train concentration.

When you notice the details of the breath, you train clarity.

When thoughts and worries arise, and you do not fight them or follow them, but gently return to the breath, you train equanimity.

That is why “just watching the breath” is not as small as it sounds.

There are also different ways to practice with the breath, and I think this is helpful because different people need different levels of support.

The simplest way is to feel the breath at the nose. You notice the air coming in and going out around the nostrils. Maybe the inhale feels slightly cool. Maybe the exhale feels warmer. Maybe the inhale is clear and the exhale is subtle. Even “not much sensation” can be observed too.

If the nose area feels too subtle, you can move attention to the chest or belly. You notice the body expanding on the inhale and settling on the exhale. There is something interesting here. When you inhale, the space in the body expands, but some muscles may tighten. When you exhale, the space shrinks, but the muscles soften. If you watch carefully, the breath is not boring at all.

If the mind is still very busy, you can add counting. One full inhale and exhale is one. The next breath is two. Count to ten, then start again. If you lose count, no problem. Just return to one. There is no need to blame yourself. Blaming yourself is already resistance.

And if even counting is not enough, you can add inner imagery. As you count, you can imagine the number in your mind. Maybe it has a color, shape, or style. This gives the inner eye something to do. You are using feeling, hearing, and seeing together to stabilize attention on the breath.

So breathing meditation can be very simple, or it can be a little richer. The point is not the form. The point is that you are training attention.

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2. Positive thinking is hard if your attention is like a kite with no string

A lot of people tell us to think positively.

They say, be more positive, focus on what you have, forgive others, let go, look on the bright side.

And honestly, a lot of that advice is not wrong.

But the problem is that it is very hard to do when you do not have some control over your attention.

If someone says something bad about you, or criticizes you, or hurts you, you may understand intellectually that you should let it go. You may even understand that the other person is probably acting from their own pain.

But still, your mind keeps going back.

Why did they say that?
What should I say back?
What if other people think the same thing?
Why am I always like this?

This happens because some experiences have a much stronger pull on attention than others. A tree outside the window may be beautiful, but one negative comment can pull your attention for hours.

And once your attention goes there, it magnifies that experience. It fills your awareness. Then you start to feel as if your whole life is only that problem.

This is why mindfulness practice is so important. It helps us reclaim some freedom over attention.

Even simple breath meditation is a way of doing this. When a worry pulls you, and you gently return to the breath, you are telling the mind: I do not have to follow every pull. I can choose where attention goes.

I noticed this recently while walking to work. I had some worry about the future, and I could feel it as tightness around the throat. It wanted to pull my attention into itself and become bigger.

So I practiced deliberately noticing other experiences too.

I looked at the trees and labeled the experience as pleasant. I noticed flowers people had planted outside their homes. I noticed the feeling of my legs walking, which was also pleasant in a simple way. I noticed open space, leaves, light, and ordinary things around me.

The worry did not instantly disappear. But its pull became smaller. It stopped being the whole world. It became one experience among many other experiences.

That is a big shift.

When unpleasant experience is not magnified so much, your thinking becomes clearer. You are not forcing positive thinking. You are giving your attention more freedom, and then a more balanced view naturally becomes possible.

3. Making peace with fear begins by meeting it in the body

Fear is just one difficult emotion. It could also be anger, jealousy, shame, or anxiety. But fear is a good example because we all know it.

Someone asked me about fear in social situations, where the body reacts, maybe even blushing. Of course, psychological methods can help. Therapy can look into childhood, past stories, and old patterns.

Mindfulness works a little differently.

Instead of digging into the story first, mindfulness trains awareness and acceptance. Over time, this awareness and acceptance can go deeper into the mind and loosen old knots.

The key is to understand that fear is not only a thought. Fear is also energy in the body.

When fear arises, it may create many thoughts and images. You may imagine the worst-case scenario. You may hear inner talk saying, “I can’t do this,” or “People will laugh at me.” But underneath all that, there is often a body feeling.

Maybe tightness in the chest.
Maybe a knot in the stomach.
Maybe something stuck in the throat.
Maybe weakness in the whole body.

So the practice is to find where fear lives in the body, and gently stay with that place.

You do not need to make it go away. You let it be there. You allow it to get stronger, weaker, bigger, smaller, or move around. You observe it with curiosity.

Sometimes you can also relax around it. If the center of the feeling cannot relax, maybe the area around it can. You can notice that fear may be only one part of the body, while many other areas are neutral. That already makes it less scary.

Then comes kindness.

You can place a hand on the place where the emotion feels strongest, maybe the chest, and speak to it the way a loving mother might speak to a crying child.

Not by saying, “You shouldn’t feel this.”
Not by saying, “Everything will definitely be okay.”
But simply: “It’s okay for you to be here. I’m with you.”

This is not weakness. This is self-compassion.

Actually, the frightened part of us is like a crying child. And another part of us, the aware and loving part, can be like the mother.

When we can stay with our own fear in this way, we stop abandoning ourselves. We stop running away from our inner life.

And slowly, the fear may begin to soften.

Not because we forced it away, but because we finally allowed it to be held.

That, to me, is one of the most beautiful things about mindfulness. It does not only train attention. It also teaches us how to be with ourselves.

And maybe that is where real healing begins.

I appreciate you taking the time to read this.

If you’re interested in exploring how mindfulness can support daily life, not just on the cushion, but in ordinary moments, I’d be happy to have you here.

Please subscribe and join me.

Hey, it’s Muse again.

For this one, I want to share three ideas that have been helping me understand meditation in a more practical way.

Do we need to leave ordinary life to really practice?
Why do some unpleasant things seem to take over our whole mind?
And how exactly can mindfulness improve our relationships?

So here are three reflections.

1. Maybe ordinary life is not the obstacle to practice, but one of its greatest supports

Sometimes people wonder whether real practice needs a more withdrawn life. Maybe becoming a lay Buddhist helps. Maybe living more simply helps. Maybe even leaving ordinary life helps.

I used to wonder about this too.

What I’ve come to feel is that there is no single correct answer. Both worldly life and retreat-style life have their strengths. But I do think ordinary life has one huge advantage: it reveals your attachments very clearly.

If practice is, in part, a process of letting go of attachment, then worldly life acts like a mirror. Whatever you are attached to gets triggered again and again.

If you are attached to being seen as competent, criticism will hurt.
If you are attached to being a good parent, your child’s struggles will disturb you deeply.
If you are attached to being respected, one cold comment can shake you.

So ordinary life keeps showing you where the work is.

In that sense, daily life is not just a distraction from practice. It is often the place where practice becomes real.

Of course, ordinary life also has its challenge. If you have no foundation at all, no ability to sit quietly, no ability to observe your inner reactions, then daily life can just sweep you away. Someone criticizes you, and you either argue back, complain to other people, or exhaust yourself trying to control the outer situation.

That is why some quiet time still matters.

Even if you cannot go on a long retreat, even if you cannot leave family and work behind, having some regular time to sit with yourself is very important. It gives you the basic strength and clarity to bring awareness into life.

So to me, the best way for modern people is often not one extreme or the other. Not total worldliness, and not total withdrawal. More like a combination.

You sit when you can. You build some awareness in stillness. Then you bring that awareness back into work, family, stress, criticism, frustration, and ordinary mess. That is how life itself slowly becomes part of the path.

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2. Attention has a magnifying effect, and that is one reason suffering can feel so huge

There is something very interesting about attention.

It magnifies.

And very often, what it magnifies is whatever feels uncomfortable.

For example, let’s say you just argued with your partner, or had an unpleasant interaction with your boss, or got very worried about your child. Afterward, maybe you go for a walk. But instead of seeing the trees or enjoying the air, your mind keeps replaying the event.

You see inner images.
You hear inner talk.
You create more stories.
You imagine what you should have said.
You imagine future consequences.

And soon that unpleasant thing takes up a huge amount of mental space.

Why does that happen?

One possible way to understand it is that the mind treats some discomfort as danger. Even if, objectively, the situation is not life-threatening, some more primitive part of us reacts as if it is. Relationship conflict, criticism, rejection, loss of status — all these can feel like survival threats to the nervous system.

So the mind keeps shouting: pay attention, pay attention, pay attention.

That is why the unpleasant experience gets magnified.

The way I’ve found helpful is not to fight that unpleasant experience directly, but to rebalance the field of attention.

In other words, instead of letting the unpleasant completely dominate awareness, I deliberately include neutral and pleasant experience too.

Maybe I notice the sound of birds.
Maybe I notice the sound of traffic.
Maybe I notice the feeling of my feet walking.
Maybe I look carefully at green leaves moving in the wind.
Maybe I notice a neutral sensation in the body.

I’m not doing this to deny the unpleasant. I’m not trying to pretend it is not there.

I still let the discomfort be there too.

But I stop allowing it to become the whole universe.

When I do that, something starts to shift. The unpleasant experience does not necessarily disappear, but it becomes one part of a much larger field. Its pull weakens. It stops swallowing the whole mind.

Then I can think more clearly again.

So sometimes mindfulness is not only about going deeper into discomfort. Sometimes it is also about educating the mind that the discomfort is only one part of reality, not the entire thing.

That is a very practical use of attention.

3. Mindfulness can improve relationships because it helps us stop passing our pain around

When relationships go wrong, I think a lot of the time one of two things happens.

Either we explode outward, or we suppress inward.

If we explode, we throw our pain onto other people.
If we suppress, we hold the pain inside until it ferments.

Neither one really helps.

So I sometimes think of emotional pain like toxic water inside a bottle.

Some people open the bottle and spray it everywhere. That is anger, blame, harsh words, coldness, and reactive behavior.

Other people seal the bottle shut and keep everything inside. That may look calm from the outside, but inside the pressure keeps building.

Mindfulness offers a third way.

Instead of spraying the poison outward or trapping it inward, you place the bottle in sunlight and let it slowly evaporate.

That sunlight is awareness mixed with kindness.

In practice, this means that when pain, anger, hurt, or resentment arises, you observe it. You notice the body sensations, the negative thoughts, the inner images. And instead of either acting them out or burying them, you stay with them.

You let them be there.

You do not resist them.
You do not justify them.
You do not feed them.
You do not dump them onto someone else.

You just stay.

This is actually a kind of self-compassion. A kind of self-love.

And when you can do this, something important happens: your pain starts affecting your behavior less. You do not react so harshly. You do not need to attack, defend, or punish as quickly. Then relationships naturally improve, because less poison is being passed around.

And there is another surprising effect too.

When you really learn to be with your own pain, it becomes easier to understand other people’s pain. Then when someone says something harsh, sometimes you can feel that their own suffering is spilling over. Not always, but often.

That does not mean you become weak or let people walk all over you. It just means you see more clearly that their behavior may be coming from their own unprocessed pain.

And that makes forgiveness and patience much more natural.

I don’t think real compassion starts with trying to force ourselves to forgive others. I think it starts much closer to home. It starts with learning how to stay with our own pain without turning it into more pain for the people around us.

That alone can change a lot.

And I think that is already a very meaningful form of practice.

Hey, it’s Muse again.

For this one, I want to share three ideas that have been important in how I understand meditation lately.

What is a realistic ultimate direction for practice?
Why does it matter to fully experience ordinary moments?
And why do Unified Mindfulness system breaks experience into categories into see, hear, and feel?

So here are three reflections.

1. Maybe one ultimate goal of meditation is a kind of happiness that depends less on outer conditions

Some people say the ultimate goal of meditation is enlightenment, liberation, or transcendence.

Maybe. But that can feel a bit far away.

So I want to talk about a more practical version of an ultimate goal: a kind of happiness that depends less and less on outer conditions.

What do I mean by outer conditions? It can be many things. Appearance. Money. Status. Whether your child is successful. Whether your boss respects you. Whether your life is going the way you want.

Different people depend on different things for their happiness.

It’s almost like each person’s happiness is a tabletop being held up by different table legs. For one person, one leg is money. For another, it is appearance. For another, it is whether other people approve of them.

I think one direction of meditation is that, over time, the tabletop needs fewer and fewer legs.

In the ideal case, it is almost floating by itself.

That may sound too high, but I do think we can move in that direction, even if only gradually.

For ordinary people like us, maybe the point is not that one day we become completely independent of conditions. But we can notice that our dependence becomes weaker. Before, maybe one wrinkle could ruin your mood. Later, maybe five wrinkles cannot. Before, one criticism from a boss could disturb you for two days. Later, maybe it still stings, but much less.

That is already meaningful.

I had one small experience of this myself. One day I came home with a lot on my mind. Work stress, family illness, all kinds of unpleasant feelings. I sat down and meditated for half an hour, just being with the discomfort.

Afterward, the discomfort was still there, but I was no longer suffering from it in the same way. There was some distance.

Then my son came home, got upset, and started crying because I wouldn’t let him watch TV. Normally I would at least feel some inner disturbance — sadness, frustration, irritation. But that night, there was almost no ripple inside.

And because there was no inner ripple, I didn’t need to lecture him or fight with him. I just stayed with him until the storm passed.

To me, that was a small proof that meditation really works. Not like magic. More like a slow change in what I depend on and what can shake me.

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2. A complete experience can turn ordinary moments into satisfaction and difficult moments into something workable

The second idea is what Shinzen Young calls a complete experience.

Very simply, it means that when you are doing something, you are really doing it.

For example, when you are washing dishes, you are actually washing dishes.

That sounds obvious, but if we’re honest, a lot of the time we are not fully there. Maybe only 30% of our attention is on the dishes, and the other 70% is off in thought, replaying things, planning things, worrying, fantasizing.

So the experience is incomplete.

Why does this matter?

Because when you fully experience something neutral, it can become positive. And when you fully experience something negative, it can become more neutral, sometimes even meaningful.

Take washing dishes. If you really pay attention, there is the feeling of water touching your hands, the warmth, the flow, the sound of plates and bowls, the grease gradually disappearing, the little satisfaction of seeing things become clean.

If you really stay with it, even washing dishes can contain a small happiness.

And when you notice that small satisfaction, it can grow.

That is very different from absentmindedly rushing through it while thinking about ten other things.

The same principle applies to difficult emotion.

Let’s say you feel anxious before giving a talk. Usually we don’t want to fully experience the anxiety. We either overprepare in a frantic way, or we try to escape it mentally. But if you stop and really experience it, you may notice that the anxiety is not one giant thing. It may include inner pictures of yourself failing, inner talk saying “I can’t do this,” and body sensations like tightness or unease.

When you fully experience those parts, the anxiety often stops hitting you quite so hard.

It may still be there, but it is less overwhelming.

That is one of the beautiful things about mindfulness. A neutral experience can become quietly joyful. And a painful experience can become workable, sometimes even cleansing.

3. Breaking experience into categories can make life feel less overwhelming

The third idea comes from the see-hear-feel way of practicing.

For most people, each moment of life feels like one big block. Something happens, and it just feels like one overwhelming experience.

But if you look more carefully, each moment can actually be broken into categories.

There is what you see outside.
There is what you see inside, like mental images.
There is what you hear outside, like sounds.
There is what you hear inside, like inner talk.
There are body sensations.
And there are emotion-related sensations in the body too.

Why does this matter?

Because when everything is mixed together, especially in a stressful moment, it feels heavy and solid. But when you begin to separate it into pieces, divide and conquer, it becomes easier to handle.

It’s a little like twisting a white string and a red string together until from far away they look like one pink rope. But when you come closer, you see that it’s just two separate strings twisted together.

Experience is often like that.

For example, if someone says something hurtful to you, from far away it feels like one big painful event. But when you slow down, you may notice: there is the sound of their voice, there is the look on their face, there is your inner talk responding, there is a mental image, there is tightness in your chest, there is heat in your body.

Now it is no longer one giant thing. It is a combination of smaller things arising and passing.

That makes a big difference.

It doesn’t mean the situation stops mattering. But it becomes less solid, less oppressive, less “me.”

And that is one reason mindfulness can help so much in real life. It gives you more room inside the moment.

So to me, these categories are not just theory. They are a practical way of making experience more workable, more transparent, and less overwhelming.

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Hey, t’s Muse again.

For this one, I want to share three ideas about mindfulness practice.

The first is about the attitude of practice: how to keep going without becoming too obsessed with results.

The second is about why we practice mindfulness in the first place.

The third is about how we can gently plant positive seeds in the mind, instead of letting the world constantly plant negative ones for us.

So here it goes.

1. Don’t turn mindfulness into another achievement project

In normal life, result-oriented thinking can be very useful.

For example, if you want to pass an exam, you may set a goal: “In one year, I want to pass this test.” Then you make a plan. You study this subject first, then that subject. You decide when to review, when to practice, and when to take the exam.

That kind of thinking works well for many things.

But it is very hard to apply that same mindset directly to mindfulness meditation.

Why?

Because mindfulness, at its heart, is about observing present-moment experience without judgment.

And “without judgment” is very close to what Buddhism traditionally calls non-attachment.

So when we practice mindfulness, we are not only training attention. In a deeper sense, we are also practicing non-grasping.

But if we become too attached to a result, the practice easily becomes tense.

For example, maybe you think, “I want to be awakened within one year.”

Or, “I want to have no anxiety within one year.”

Or even, “I have practiced for one week, why am I still stressed?”

Then when you sit down and watch your breath, you start judging everything.

“My attention is not staying with the breath.”

“Am I doing it wrong?”

“Why do other people get results, but I don’t?”

And because of this hidden goal, your practice becomes full of pressure. You are trying to practice non-attachment, but at the same time you are strongly attached to a certain outcome.

Of course, in spiritual history, we do hear stories of people awakening very quickly.

The Sixth Patriarch Huineng heard one line from the Diamond Sutra and had a deep realization. Later, after the Fifth Patriarch explained more to him, his realization became complete.

But there are also people like Master Xuyun, who practiced for many, many years. Then one day, after hearing the sound of a cup falling, he awakened.

People are different.

Some people are naturally gifted in mathematics. They listen in class, and they understand everything. Other people need to do many extra exercises.

Spiritual practice is similar.

Some people may sit down, quiet the mind very quickly, and have deep insight. Other people may find it very hard just to stay with the breath for a few seconds.

But wherever you begin, that is okay.

Even if all you do is return to the breath again and again, you are already practicing letting go. When your mind gets pulled into a thought, and you gently return to the breath, you are letting go of that thought a little bit.

For many people, this is a slow process.

And that is fine.

Mindfulness is not a 100-meter race. It is more like a marathon.

Sometimes you improve. Then you reach a plateau. Then you improve again. Then another plateau appears. You may not know how long the plateau will last, but if you keep practicing, something will slowly shift.

Maybe a worry that used to bother you for three days now bothers you for only two days.

Maybe a painful emotion that used to take over your whole mind now occupies 90% of your mind instead of 100%.

That may not sound dramatic, but it is already real progress.

So the point is not to force yourself to reach some imagined result quickly.

The point is to practice patiently.

Just practice.

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2. Mindfulness makes ordinary life less painful and more fulfilling

Why do we practice mindfulness?

I think there are many reasons, but here are five that feel especially important to me.

The first reason is that mindfulness can reduce suffering.

This can mean physical pain. For example, I used to have headaches more often. Maybe once every one or two weeks. I could not always find a clear reason, but I think many of them were related to stress.

After more consistent practice, the headaches became much less frequent.

And when pain does appear, mindfulness can help. I remember one time when I was under a lot of pressure in the hospital because my wife was sick. I had a headache, and I closed my eyes and started practicing with the pain. The pain reduced by maybe 50%.

That is already very helpful.

But mindfulness can also reduce emotional suffering.

Maybe you failed an exam. Maybe your boss criticized you. Maybe something happened that made you feel ashamed, angry, or anxious.

Often, the problem is not only the event itself. The problem is that we resist the feeling, or we hide inside our thoughts, thinking again and again about how to fix everything.

But if we can become still enough to observe the emotion directly, the energy of suffering can begin to move and dissolve.

The situation may not change.

The exam score is still there. The criticism still happened.

But the suffering around it can reduce. It does not have to become a wound that stays in the heart for years.

The second reason is that mindfulness can increase fulfillment.

Many small joys are already here, but we miss them because our attention is somewhere else.

When we eat, we may not really taste the food. Even something simple, like cucumber, can have layers of taste if we actually pay attention.

When we walk outside, we may not really see the trees, the sunlight, or the clouds. But if we become quiet, we may notice the leaves moving gently in the wind, or the soft changing edge of a cloud.

There is a quiet beauty in ordinary life.

But we need attention to receive it.

The same is true with family.

I remember times when my child smiled at me, but my mind was caught in work stress. The joy was there, but it was covered by worry.

Then, in one moment, I noticed his smile. I felt a small sense of happiness and satisfaction. It was subtle, but it was real.

Mindfulness helps us notice these small moments. And when we notice them, they can grow.

The third reason is that mindfulness helps us understand ourselves more deeply.

Sometimes, during practice, old memories or emotional patterns appear. We may suddenly see how a current anxiety is connected to something from childhood.

For example, I have noticed in myself a fear of being criticized, especially around performance and work. Through practice, I saw how some of this may connect to earlier experiences of feeling not good enough, not protected, or not valued.

Whether every memory is completely accurate is not always the main point.

The point is that the mind is showing us a pattern.

And when we see the pattern clearly, we have more freedom.

The fourth reason is that mindfulness helps us act more wisely.

For example, when a child is crying or angry, it is easy to react. We may scold them, then regret it later.

But if our inner state is more settled, we may still feel irritation, but we do not have to act from it.

We can respond instead of react.

That is a very practical benefit.

The fifth reason is that mindfulness improves our relationships.

First, it improves our relationship with ourselves.

When we sit with our difficult emotions instead of escaping into the phone, entertainment, or distraction, we are saying to ourselves: “I am here with you. You are allowed to be here.”

That is a form of self-love.

And when we can be more accepting toward ourselves, we may also become more accepting toward others.

When someone speaks harshly to us, maybe they are not really attacking us. Maybe their own suffering is overflowing.

This does not mean we become weak or let people mistreat us.

It simply means we do not always need to escalate the situation.

Sometimes, because we do not react, the other person later softens and apologizes.

So mindfulness is not only about sitting quietly.

It changes how we suffer, how we enjoy life, how we understand ourselves, how we act, and how we relate to others.

3. Plant positive seeds in the mind

Because mindfulness is a long-term path, it is helpful to know why we are practicing.

Not just in a vague way, but in a personal way.

Maybe you practice because you want to reduce anxiety.

Maybe you want to be more patient with your child.

Maybe you want to improve your relationship with your partner.

Maybe you want to suffer less from physical pain.

Maybe you are interested in awakening.

All of these reasons are okay.

The important thing is to connect with your own reason.

One simple practice is to sit quietly and ask yourself:

“Why do I want to practice mindfulness?”

You do not need ten answers. One honest reason is enough.

Then you can imagine yourself practicing every day.

Where are you sitting?

What is your posture like?

Is your back upright?

Is your body relaxed?

Can you see yourself breathing steadily?

In Unified Mindfulness language, this uses See In. You are noticing or creating an inner image.

Then you can say a simple sentence inwardly:

“I want to practice mindfulness because…”

And then complete the sentence with your own reason.

This uses Hear In, because you are working with inner talk.

Then you can say:

“I am willing to practice five minutes every day.”

Or ten minutes.

Or even three minutes.

The exact number is not the most important thing. The most important thing is to begin.

After that, notice how your body feels.

Maybe there is a little warmth in the chest.

Maybe the face relaxes.

Maybe there is a small feeling of satisfaction.

This is Feel In.

So in this simple practice, we are using See, Hear, and Feel.

We create a positive inner image. We speak a positive inner sentence. We feel the positive emotion in the body.

This is like planting a seed in the mind.

Every day, the world plants many seeds in us.

News, social media, arguments, fear, comparison, negativity.

If we are not careful, our mind becomes a garden filled with weeds we did not choose.

So sometimes we need to sit down and plant something intentionally.

A little clarity.

A little patience.

A little love.

A little willingness to practice.

When we nourish ourselves in this way, we are not only helping ourselves.

In a small way, we are also helping the world.

Because when one person becomes a little more peaceful, that peace does not stay only inside that person.

It touches the people around them too.

Hey, it’s Muse again.

For this one, I want to share three simple ideas about meditation that I think can help make it feel less mysterious.

A lot of people think meditation means emptying the mind. A lot of people also don’t really know how to observe their thoughts. And many people still feel like mindfulness is some special spiritual thing only certain people can do.

I don’t think that’s true.

So here are three reflections.

1. Meditation is not zoning out

A lot of people think meditation means “emptying yourself out.”

They think meditation is basically blanking the mind, spacing out, or becoming empty.

But I think that’s actually the opposite of meditation.

Because when people “zone out,” they are often still thinking a lot. They just don’t know they are thinking. Their awareness is low. So if you interrupt them and ask, “What were you thinking about?” they may say, “Nothing,” but that usually isn’t true. They were thinking, but they were not aware of it.

Meditation, to me, is not that.

I would define meditation much more simply as non-judging awareness of present-moment experience.

That experience may be bodily sensation. It may be thoughts. It may be sounds. It may be emotions. But the key thing is that you are aware.

So if you are lost in thought and then later don’t even know what you were thinking about, that is not meditation. That is more like unconscious drifting.

A very simple example is washing dishes.

You can wash dishes in a zoned-out way. Your hands are moving, but your mind is somewhere else. You are thinking about yesterday, tomorrow, what someone said about you, what you should do next, and so on. The dishes still get washed because washing dishes is easy. Maybe they just don’t get washed very well.

But you can also wash dishes in a meditative way.

In that case, your attention is actually on washing dishes. You notice the flow of the water. You notice the bubbles. You notice the feeling of water touching your hands, and your hands touching the bowl. You notice the grease slowly disappearing. You notice the small satisfaction of putting the last bowl down and realizing, oh, I finished.

That small satisfaction becomes much bigger when your attention is really there.

So to me, meditation is not about making experience disappear. It is about actually being there for it.

And when you are there for even simple things, life becomes less dull. Even washing dishes can become part of practice, and even a small task can contain a small happiness.

2. Learning to observe your thoughts can save you from getting pulled around by them

The second thing I want to talk about is thoughts.

A lot of people think thoughts are just words in the mind. But actually, I think thoughts usually have at least two forms.

One is inner talk. That is the voice in your mind, the sentences, the comments, the inner monologue.

The other is inner imagery. That is what you inwardly see. Sometimes it’s a clear image, sometimes a vague picture, sometimes almost like a little movie playing inside.

So when I talk about observing thoughts, I’m not only talking about words. I’m also talking about the images that arise in the mind.

Why does this matter?

Because if you can observe your thoughts, you stop being completely trapped inside them.

For example, maybe a thought appears: “I’m no good. I can’t do anything well.”

If you have no mindfulness at all, you may immediately believe the thought. Then you start building a whole case for it. You remember all your failures. You remember what someone said. You get more and more convinced. Soon the thought becomes your reality.

But if the thought appears and you can notice, “Oh, that is inner talk. That is a thought,” then you already have some distance from it.

You and the thought are no longer exactly the same thing.

That is very important, because a lot of our thoughts are not solid truth. They are interpretations, habits, reactions, moods, stories. The same goes for the way we judge other people and ourselves. Most of that is much less certain than it feels in the moment.

This can help a lot in family life too.

For example, if your child is crying or acting badly, maybe you suddenly see an inner image of yourself yelling at them. Or you hear inner talk saying something harsh. If you can catch that before acting on it, you have a chance not to follow it.

That can save you from doing things you’ll regret later.

So how do I practice observing thoughts?

One way is indirect. If you do simple breath meditation, you keep bringing your attention back to the breath. While doing that, you begin to notice that thoughts arise by themselves. You don’t know in advance what the next thought will be. It just comes. Then it changes. Then it disappears. Seeing that is already a kind of observing thoughts.

Another way is more direct.

You can notice outer sounds and label them, like “hear out.” Then when you suddenly catch the inner voice commenting on that sound, you label it as “hear in.” And if an inner image appears, you notice that too.

Over time, this gives you the feeling that thoughts are things appearing in awareness, not the essence of who you are.

That is a very useful shift.

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3. Mindfulness is not something mysterious. It is a skill you can train.

The last thing I want to say is this: please don’t treat mindfulness meditation like something mystical or only for special people.

I really think it is better to think of it as a skill.

Like learning an instrument.

If you practice guitar every day for years, you will get better. Maybe some skills are harder than others, but the basic principle is not mysterious. You train, and slowly the skill grows.

Mindfulness is like that too.

If I had to describe it simply, I would say it is the skill of being with present experience unconditionally.

What does that mean?

Let’s say you feel nervous before an exam, or before meeting someone important. What does it mean not to be with the experience? Usually it means you immediately try to escape. Maybe you grab your phone and start scrolling. Or you start spinning in thought. Or you go talk to someone just to get away from the feeling.

That is not being with the experience.

Being with the experience means noticing: where is this nervousness in the body? Is it tightness in the chest? A strange feeling in the stomach? Something in the throat?

Then you stay with it.

You don’t run.
You don’t suppress.
You don’t immediately try to fix it.

You just stay with it.

At first, maybe you can only do that for a few seconds. Then you want to escape again. That’s normal. But with practice, maybe you can stay a little longer. Then longer. Then one day you can sit with it for half an hour or an hour, and something starts to change.

This is why I call it a skill.

And like any skill, life is where you test it.

I had a very clear example of this recently. I was under stress. My wife had been sick, work was stressful, and there were a lot of emotions in me. I happened to sit quietly with those feelings for half an hour. Then later my six-year-old came home, wanted to watch TV too late, and started crying and making a scene.

Normally, that would stir up a lot in me too. Maybe irritation, maybe sadness, maybe anger.

But that day there was almost no ripple inside.

So I didn’t explode, and I didn’t need to lecture him much either. I just let him have his emotions, and eventually he settled down.

That moment showed me something.

When you’ve really practiced being with your own inner storm, sometimes the outer storm can no longer hook you in the same way.

That’s when you know the skill is becoming real.

So to me, mindfulness is not something mysterious. It is a trainable skill. Anyone can practice it. And the proof is not some spiritual title. The proof is in life itself.

Maybe a month ago you would have exploded, and now you don’t. Maybe before you stayed angry for hours, and now it passes faster. Maybe before you had to dump the emotion on someone else, and now you can dissolve it inside.

That is real practice.

That is real progress.

Hey, it’s Muse again.

For this one, I want to share three ideas about meditation that I think matter a lot, especially for ordinary people living ordinary lives.

Not people living in monasteries. Not people trying to disappear into some perfect spiritual state. I mean people with jobs, family, stress, responsibilities, and not that much free time.

So here are three reflections.

1. Meditation trains a bottom-layer life skill: attention

One reason I think meditation matters so much is that it trains something very basic, something underneath almost everything else in life.

That is attention.

No matter what you do in life, you are always using attention. You use it when you work, when you study, when you read, when you talk to people, when you raise children, when you deal with stress, even when you try to rest.

So if the quality of your attention improves, almost everything in your life can improve with it.

In Unified Mindfulness, one way to understand this is that attention is like a muscle. Just like you can go to the gym and train your physical muscles, you can also train the muscle of attention.

And to me, that muscle has three parts.

The first is concentration, or the ability to keep your attention where you want it to be. For example, maybe you are worried about something, but you are still able to keep bringing your attention back to your work or your study. That helps you finish what you need to finish, and often you handle the worry better afterward too.

But if you cannot hold your attention steady, then everything starts mixing together. You think about your worries while working, and then while trying to solve the worry, you think about work again.

Everything gets messy.

The second is clarity. This means you really experience what is happening now in a clear and rich way. Maybe you are outside in spring and there are flowers, trees, color, beauty, but if your attention is lost in your thoughts, you almost don’t experience any of it.

But if clarity is there, the beauty reaches you more fully. The same thing applies inwardly. If your boss criticizes you, and you can clearly notice the reactions rising in your mind, then you are less likely to get hijacked by them. You can respond better.

The third is equanimity, or what I sometimes think of as “flowing through.” Let’s say you have a headache. Someone with equanimity may still feel the headache, but they stop fighting it. The pain is there, but the mind is no longer making it ten times worse. Someone without equanimity starts thinking, why me, why today, now everything is ruined, and the suffering multiplies.

To me, these are like three muscles of attention. And meditation trains all three.

When these muscles get stronger, life gets richer. A flower becomes more beautiful. Criticism becomes less disturbing. Pain becomes less painful. The good becomes more vivid, and the difficult becomes more workable.

In that sense, meditation is not some side hobby. It is training a bottom-layer life skill.

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2. Meditation has depth, but it also has breadth

When people think about meditation, they usually think about depth.

That part is easier to understand.

You sit down, close your eyes, follow the breath, and after some time the mind gets quieter. The world feels further away. The inside becomes still. That is depth.

You could say most people’s normal daily state is close to zero. The mind is wandering, emotions are moving everywhere, attention is scattered. Then during meditation, maybe you reach a six out of ten, or whatever your current limit is. That is depth.

But I think many people miss something important: meditation also has breadth.

What do I mean by breadth?

I mean: does meditation only exist when you are sitting alone with your eyes closed, or can some of that meditative state also be present while walking, washing dishes, chatting with someone, or doing your work?

That is breadth.

At first, maybe your seated practice has more depth than your daily life. That is normal. Maybe when you sit, you can reach a six, but when you walk mindfully, maybe you only reach a two. That is still good. Over time, both can grow.

This matters because ideally meditation does not stay trapped inside the formal session. It begins to spread into life.

Maybe you start with mindful walking, because walking is simple and does not require too much energy. Then maybe you bring some mindfulness into washing dishes. And if you really pay attention, even washing dishes is not boring. You can feel the water, the movement, the texture. It is more alive than we usually think.

So to me, meditation is not only about how deep you can go when sitting still. It is also about how widely that quality spreads through your day.

And if both depth and breadth keep growing, there may come a point where it feels less like “you are meditating” and more like “meditation is happening by itself.” You are being meditated, in a way.

When that begins to happen, life gets less heavy.

I think this is also why retreats can feel amazing, but then people come home and lose so much of it. They built depth, but not enough breadth. If you do not keep practicing in walking, working, talking, and daily life, then a lot of what you touched in retreat fades quickly.

So yes, depth matters. But breadth matters too.

3. For ordinary people, the most important meditation may be the one we do in life

A lot of people imagine meditation as sitting cross-legged alone in a quiet room, maybe with incense, maybe with no one around, entering some deep state.

That is part of meditation. But for ordinary people, I don’t think that is the whole picture.

A very useful definition of mindfulness meditation is simply this: non-judging awareness of present-moment experience.

If you are observing what is happening now, whether inside or outside, without resistance and without grasping, then in that moment you are in a meditative state.

And I think this matters a lot for ordinary people.

Because most ordinary people are not meditating mainly to get enlightened in some grand sense. Maybe that goal is there for some, and that is fine. But most people are practicing because they want less stress, fewer arguments, less suffering, and more peace in everyday life.

Maybe you want to stop snapping at your child so easily. If so, the key moment is not only when you are sitting on the cushion in the morning. The key moment is when anger rises in real life and you are able to notice it, feel it, and not immediately act it out.

That is where meditation starts becoming useful.

To me, seated meditation is a bit like learning basic basketball drills. You learn to dribble, pass, and shoot. That matters. But at some point you also have to play the game. You have to bring the skill into movement, into unpredictability, into real conditions.

Life is the game.

That is why moving meditation matters so much. If you do not have time to sit, you can still practice while brushing your teeth, walking down the hall, going from one hospital counter to another, washing dishes, or feeling your feet while moving.

The body is a great place to begin because bodily sensations are easier to notice. And once you get used to observing bodily sensation, you may find that you can also observe thoughts more clearly, and then emotions too, because emotions also show up in the body.

Then one day, in the middle of life, you may notice that you were about to get angry, but you didn’t. Or you were about to spiral into depressive thinking, but you didn’t. That is not a small thing. That is a real fruit of practice.

So for ordinary people, I think meditation in daily life is not secondary. It is essential.

And the beautiful thing is that the two support each other. The more you practice in life, the more you want to sit. The more you sit, the more you can practice in life.

That is how the snowball starts rolling.

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Hey, it’s Muse again.

For this one, I want to share three ideas I’ve been thinking about around meditation.

They all come from things I’ve experienced directly in practice, and also from questions I think a lot of people have.

Why keep meditating for so many years?

Why do some people meditate for a while and still feel emotionally stuck?

And what is meditation, really, beyond the mystery around the word?

So here are three reflections.

1. Why I keep meditating: because it points to a kind of happiness that doesn’t depend so much on life going my way

One big reason I’ve kept practicing meditation for over ten years is actually very simple.

There have been many times when I was just sitting there, doing nothing, and still felt a kind of inner peace, happiness, or quiet sense of fullness.

To me, that is kind of amazing.

Because for most people, happiness usually depends on something outside. You need to make more money, go on a trip, watch something entertaining, drink something, achieve something, buy something, or at least have life go your way for a while.

But when you sit down and do nothing, and still feel okay, or more than okay, sometimes even deeply content, that points to something very important.

It suggests that there is a kind of well-being that does not depend so heavily on conditions.

I think this is one of the deepest promises of meditation.

Not that you instantly become enlightened, and not that you never suffer again, but that you slowly move toward a kind of inner happiness that depends less and less on circumstance.

And I think that matters because life is unstable.

The people we love will not always stay.

The people who love us may one day leave too.

Money goes up and down.

Even the things we enjoy lose their charm.

A great show is not as exciting the second time.

A beautiful trip ends.

A good mood passes.

Life is full of impermanence.

So if your happiness depends completely on external things, then your happiness will always be shaky too.

But if you can sit quietly and still feel some peace, some enoughness, some okayness, then it feels like you have found something more stable. Something that can balance out the impermanence of life.

At least for now, this is one of the biggest reasons I keep practicing.

2. Why meditation can feel like it’s not working, especially when you still have strong emotions

A lot of people meditate for a while and then feel discouraged.

They think, I’ve been practicing, but I still have so many emotional problems. I still get angry, anxious, hurt, resentful, triggered. So is this even working?

I think one important reason is that our emotions are not just about what happened today.

A lot of what we feel is old.

You can think of it as accumulated emotional energy. When we were very young, we cried, got upset, and then often released it quickly. But as we got older, most of us learned to suppress emotion instead. We distract ourselves, explain it away, push it down, or try to forget it.

So what comes up now is often not just today’s frustration. It may also be years of built-up emotional energy getting activated by one event.

That means release takes time.

If you practice simple breath meditation, and you keep returning attention to the breath, some of that emotional energy may still be releasing in the background. But it is often gradual.

There is also a more direct way to work with emotion.

When something in life really triggers you, instead of exploding or distracting yourself, you can sit with the feeling.

Not with the story. With the feeling.

This is very important.

If you are angry, the mind will produce endless thoughts. Why did they do that? How dare they? What should I say back? All of that can go on forever. But the emotional energy itself is usually showing up in the body.

Maybe anger is tightness in the throat.

Maybe it is pressure in the chest.

Maybe it is heat in the stomach.

So the basic method is to find the bodily expression of the emotion, then stay with that feeling without resisting it, without grabbing at it, and without trying to force it away.

Just be with it.

To me, it’s a little like when a child is throwing a tantrum. If you don’t yell, don’t hit, and don’t try to argue them out of it, but just stay with them, eventually the energy passes. Then they come back.

Emotion can work like that too.

When you stay with the bodily feeling, sometimes it gets weaker. Sometimes it moves. Sometimes anger turns into sadness. That is okay. Change means something is releasing.

And if someone wants to work more actively, there is even a more intentional method. You can write down the things that still bother you, from small to big, and then during meditation bring one memory up, let the emotional reaction arise, and again stay with the bodily feeling instead of the thought stream.

Over time, some of those old charges really do lose their force.

Then the mind changes too. Not because you forced compassionate thoughts, but because once the emotional charge is less, the negative thinking naturally softens.

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3. Meditation is less mysterious than people think: we already know its 3 basic states

A lot of people hear the word meditation and feel like it is something mysterious, or only for advanced spiritual people.

But I actually think meditation is much more ordinary than that.

You can think of it as entering certain mental states more intentionally.

And the truth is, most people have already tasted these states in daily life.

I like to think of meditation as developing three basic skills or states: concentration, clarity, and what I would call equanimity or release.

The first is concentration.

This is when your attention stays with one thing steadily. You may have felt this before while doing something you really care about. You get absorbed. You lose track of time. Your attention stays there naturally.

That is already a meditative state.

The second is clarity.

Maybe you’ve experienced this while hiking, being in nature, or sometimes even in a very vivid moment. Suddenly everything feels sharper. Colors look brighter. Sounds feel clearer. Time may even seem slower.

That is another meditative state.

The third is what I would call release, or equanimity.

This is when something unpleasant is still there, but you stop fighting it. Maybe you have a headache, and after resisting it for a while, suddenly you relax and accept it. The pain may still be there, but the suffering drops. Or after a breakup, one day you just let go. The pain is no longer gripping you in the same way.

That is also a meditative state.

So to me, meditation is not some exotic thing. It is the cultivation of capacities we already have.

You could say the three basic skills are: staying focused, seeing clearly, and allowing experience to pass through without getting so stuck.

For most people, these states happen only by chance.

But with meditation, you can train them.

And that is why I think meditation should feel much less mysterious than many people imagine. Everyone has attention. Everyone already knows these states a little. So in that sense, everyone can practice.

Hey, it’s Muse again. Glad to see you here.

I’m on a mission to share how we can bring mindfulness into daily life, even continuously throughout the day, to relieve pain and cultivate fulfillment.

For each newsletter, I’ve decided to share three ideas I’m learning, practicing, or deepening.

So here it goes.

A lot of people think mindfulness meditation has to be something special.

You sit on a cushion. You close your eyes. You become very calm. You enter some beautiful spiritual state.

But in real life, mindfulness can be much simpler than that.

It can be breathing.

It can be feeling a headache.

It can be noticing your body while walking to get a glass of water.

The core of mindfulness is not complicated. It is a non-judging awareness of the present moment. You can be aware of your breath, your body, your thoughts, your inner images, your emotions, or even the world around you.

The practice is not about forcing yourself to become peaceful.

It is about coming back to what is already happening, again and again.

1. Breathing Meditation: The Easiest Door for Beginners

For mindfulness meditation, technically you can use almost any experience as your object.

You can observe your thoughts. You can observe sounds. You can observe the outside world. But for many people, breathing is one of the best places to start.

Why?

Because breath is simple. It is neutral. It is always happening as long as you are alive.

Observing thoughts can be difficult for beginners because thoughts easily pull you in. One thought becomes another thought. Suddenly you are planning tomorrow, remembering yesterday, or arguing with someone in your head.

But breath is just breath.

One common way is to observe the breath at the nose. You pay attention to the air coming in and going out. You notice the subtle feeling of air touching the inside of the nostrils, or the area around the upper lip.

You may notice that the in-breath feels stronger, cooler, or more obvious. The out-breath may feel weaker. Sometimes you may not feel much during the out-breath. That is okay too. You can simply notice, “There is not much sensation right now.”

Another way is to observe the rise and fall of the belly.

When you breathe in, the belly rises. There may be a slight feeling of expansion or tension. When you breathe out, the belly falls. There may be a feeling of release or relaxation.

There is a kind of yin and yang inside this. In-breath and out-breath. Expansion and release. Tension and relaxation. If you stay with it patiently, it can become surprisingly interesting.

Of course, your mind will wander.

This is not a mistake. This is not failure. This is completely normal.

When your attention goes to thoughts, sounds, memories, or plans, just gently bring it back to the breath. Every time you bring it back, you are training concentration.

And if you do not judge yourself when you get distracted, you are training another important skill: equanimity.

Equanimity means you do not fight with the experience. You do not add, “I am bad at meditation. I can’t do this. My mind is too messy.” You simply notice what happened and return.

For people who get distracted very easily, counting can help.

You can breathe in and out, then count one. Breathe in and out, count two. Continue until ten, then start again from one.

If you want to make it even easier to focus, you can close your eyes and imagine the number in front of you. When you count one, see the number one. When you count two, see the number two. You can even make the numbers colorful, cartoon-like, or interesting.

At the same time, you can listen to the inner voice saying the number. So part of your attention is on the body, part is on the inner sound, and part is on the inner image.

In a way, you are filling the inner system with the meditation object: seeing, hearing, and feeling.

This can help because many distractions also come through inner seeing and inner hearing. You remember something as an image. You hear yourself thinking about tomorrow. With counting, you give the mind something simple and steady to hold.

And when distraction still happens, again, it is about equanimity.

You come back.

That coming back is the practice.

2. Using Mindfulness to Soften Stress Headaches

Sometimes we have headaches because of illness.

But many times, especially with stress-type headaches, the pain seems to come from nowhere. There is no obvious reason, but the head hurts.

I used to have many of these headaches. For me, mindfulness often reduced the pain by around 50%, sometimes more.

The first step is acceptance.

This does not mean you like the headache. It does not mean you refuse medicine or medical help when needed. It simply means you stop adding the second layer of suffering.

The first layer is the physical pain.

The second layer is resistance: “Why is this happening? I hate this. What if it gets worse? I can’t handle this.”

That second layer creates more suffering on top of the pain.

So the first move is to allow the pain to be here, at least for this moment.

Then, if you can, sit down quietly. You do not have to sit in any special posture. Close your eyes if that feels comfortable.

Now comes the counterintuitive part: put your attention on the headache.

Most of us want to escape pain. We want to move away from it, ignore it, or push it away. But if the headache is related to accumulated stress, turning toward it with awareness can help the body and mind release some of that pressure.

You can observe the headache in detail.

Where exactly is it?

Is it more on the left or the right?

How big is the area?

Where are the edges?

Does it reach the eyes? The temples? The forehead? The back of the head?

Is it steady, pulsing, vibrating, moving, expanding, shrinking?

These details matter because the more clearly you observe the headache, the more you stay with it in the present moment. And the more you stay with it, the less you resist it.

When resistance softens, the stress behind the pain can begin to release.

You can also keep part of your attention on the dark or gray visual field behind closed eyes. This can be relaxing. It gives the mind something soft to rest on while another part of your attention feels the headache directly.

You may also observe the breath at the same time. Breath is changing. Pain is also changing. When you notice that the pain is not a solid thing, but something shifting moment by moment, you begin to understand impermanence directly.

This pain is here now.

But it is moving.

It is changing.

And one moment, it will disappear.

For long-term prevention, mindfulness is not only something you do when the headache already appears. It is also something you bring into daily life.

Many people carry stress in the jaw, neck, shoulders, chest, or hands. When the mind is tight, the body often becomes tight too.

So during the day, pause for one minute.

Scan the body.

Is the jaw tight?

Are the shoulders raised?

Is the neck tense?

Are the fingers gripping something?

Then gently relax.

This is simple, but powerful. When the body relaxes, part of the mind relaxes too. Over time, this can reduce the accumulation of stress that later becomes pain.

Long sitting meditation can also help because many of us have stored tension for years, even from childhood. Sometimes we do not consciously know what we are carrying. But when we sit, observe, and allow, some of these inner knots slowly loosen.

The less we suppress, the less the body needs to express that suppression as pain.

3. Practicing Mindfulness When You Have No Time

Many people say they do not have time to meditate.

I understand that.

But if mindfulness means awareness of the present moment, then you do not always need a cushion, a quiet room, or a long session.

You can practice inside ordinary life.

For example, you walk every day. Maybe only for one minute from your desk to get water. That one minute can become walking meditation.

Feel the legs.

When one leg lifts, there is a release. When the other leg supports the body, there is tension. Then they switch. Step by step, you can notice this yin and yang of walking.

This is not separate from breathing meditation. It is the same principle. You are observing direct body experience as it changes.

You can also create one-minute pauses during work.

Every hour, stop for a short moment. If closing your eyes feels strange around coworkers, keep them open and soften your gaze. Do not focus hard on one object. Let the eyes relax. Notice the edges of your visual field. Then feel one or two breaths.

That is already a mini meditation.

Another useful method is background mindfulness.

This is not a formal sit. It is a gentle awareness running in the background while you work.

For example, I used this for posture. I used to have a habit of hunching. While working at the computer, I would occasionally check: What is my posture now? Is my back collapsing? Is there tension in my body?

If I noticed tightness, I relaxed. If I noticed my back hunching, I gently straightened.

Over time, this became a habit. My posture improved a lot.

This is also mindfulness.

You are not escaping life to practice. You are practicing inside life.

You can notice your body while typing. You can relax your jaw before a meeting. You can soften your shoulders while talking to someone. You can feel your feet while walking. You can take one conscious breath before replying to a message.

Small moments count.

Because mindfulness is not only about what happens during meditation.

It is about slowly changing your relationship with experience.

Instead of being pulled around by every thought, pain, emotion, and tension, you learn to notice.

You learn to return.

You learn to soften.

And little by little, ordinary life itself becomes the practice.

You know how some people on the spiritual path ask for a sign?

They ask for some kind of confirmation that they’re on the right track. A message from life, or God, or the universe telling them, yes, keep going.

I never really did that. I didn’t ask for a sign for my mindfulness practice.

But I do think I got one.

And it didn’t come in some mystical way. It came through something very ordinary: my son’s tantrum.

That’s why I want to share this story. Because the lesson in it stayed with me. If I had to put it simply, it would be this: the real goal is not to eliminate disturbance from life. The real goal is to become more comfortable with disturbance when it appears.

Or maybe said another way: to develop comfort with discomfort.

That, to me, is one of the most valuable things mindfulness can give us.

Most of us meditate because we want to live better, not just because we want enlightenment

I think most of us meditate because we want life to get better.

Maybe a few people are mainly aiming for enlightenment. Personally, I vaguely have that goal somewhere in the background. But if I’m honest, what feels more immediate is much simpler. I want to live more peacefully in this secular life. I want to suffer less. I want to handle things better. I want to be less reactive and less hijacked by what happens.

A few weeks ago, I had one of those moments where I felt the practice really worked.

Not as an idea. Not as a philosophy. But in a very concrete way.

My wife was in the hospital going through surgery. There was uncertainty around it, so even if I wasn’t consciously panicking all the time, there was definitely anxiety in me. At the same time, work was also stressful. So already there was a kind of inner disturbance in me before anything happened at home.

Then one night I came back, and my son threw a huge tantrum.

Earlier that day, he had already used up his playtime outside. After he came home, he still wanted to watch TV, but that wasn’t allowed, and we had already made a deal beforehand. So from his point of view, he was frustrated and angry. From my point of view, the rule was the rule.

The interesting part was not really his behavior. The interesting part was what happened in me.

My son’s tantrum showed me what the practice had changed in me

Before the tantrum, I had been alone for a while, and I sat down to meditate for about half an hour. During that sit, I was already working with the discomfort in me. I was sitting with the feelings in the body and letting them be there without trying to solve them.

So when my son exploded, I could still feel the stress and anxiety already in me. But somehow I wasn’t bothered by them in the same old way.

And even more surprising, his tantrum did not create a new disturbance in me.

That almost never happened before.

Usually, in the past, if he got really angry and cried hard, I would either feel angry myself or feel deeply frustrated. Sometimes I would get pulled into his emotional storm because I didn’t want him to suffer, and then my own suffering would get added on top of his.

But this time, that didn’t happen.

I stayed calm. I said a few things once in a while, like we already made a deal and your playtime is used up. But I wasn’t arguing with him. I wasn’t trying to overpower him. I wasn’t emotionally hijacked.

He cried and protested for a while, and eventually the energy passed. The anger died down. He became his sweet self again. Later he even recognized that he had done something wrong.

And the beautiful thing was that nothing had to be repaired between us afterward.

Because I hadn’t added more disturbance on top of his.

That was the sign for me. It showed me that if we can handle the disturbance inside, we become much more capable of handling the disturbance outside.

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Disturbance is not the problem; how we relate to it is the deeper issue

I like the word disturbance because it feels accurate.

A disturbance is what happens when something throws ripples into your inner world. It may show up as emotion, like anger, fear, frustration, anxiety, sadness, or hurt. It may show up as thoughts, like replaying conversations, inner arguments, worrying, or imagining what you should have said. It may show up as mental images, little scenes or movies in the mind.

Usually it’s some combination of all three.

Sometimes the disturbance is big. A loved one is sick. Work becomes unstable. A child melts down in front of you. Sometimes it’s small. The weather ruins your plan. Someone says something irritating. You feel a subtle frustration that lingers.

But whether it is big or small, I think the same principle applies. The goal is not to make sure you never feel disturbed. The goal is to become more okay with disturbance being there.

That may sound subtle, but I think it changes everything.

Because most of us do not know how to stay with inner disturbance. So we usually try to manage it indirectly. We repress it so we can look calm on the outside. We distract ourselves with food, scrolling, entertainment, or work. We overthink and replay everything in our head. We chase success, power, or control, hoping that if life finally goes our way, the inner discomfort will go away too.

But none of those really solve the root problem.

Exploding may release some energy, but it creates consequences and rarely brings peace. Repressing may make you look composed, but the disturbance stays inside. Distraction gives temporary relief, but when the distraction ends, the discomfort is still there. Overthinking feels productive, but often it is just another way not to feel. Chasing success may change your outer life, but it does not automatically heal inner disturbance.

If outer success alone could solve inner suffering, then the most successful people would all be deeply peaceful. That is obviously not true.

What has been working for me is allowing the disturbance instead of trying to get rid of it

The more I practice, the more I feel the real solution is very different.

It is not to get rid of disturbance as quickly as possible. It is to allow it to be there.

To sit with it.

To stop trying to change it.

To surrender to it.

What does surrender mean here? It means that if I notice myself trying to control the experience, improve it, fix it, replace it, or escape it, I let go of that intention. I let the disturbance be exactly as it is.

And if I stay with it long enough, the charge behind it often starts to dissolve on its own.

That is the part I trust much more now than I used to.

I think comfort with discomfort is a very important middle stage on the path. Before the deeper blockages are fully gone, before there is total peace, there is this stage where discomfort is still there but no longer disturbs you in the same old way.

You still feel it. But you are no longer fighting it.

There is a kind of truce.

That was my state after meditation that night. The anxiety and stress were still in my body, but I had become more at peace with their presence. So when my son’s tantrum came, it didn’t throw me off center in the same way.

And because of that, skillful action became possible.

Disturbance does not mean something is wrong with you; it may mean something old has been touched

This is another thing I’m learning.

Just because I feel disturbed does not mean something is wrong with me. It does not even necessarily mean something is wrong with the world.

From a spiritual point of view, disturbance may simply mean that life has touched some blockage in us. Old pain. Old fear. Shame. Anger. A belief that we are unworthy. Some old wound or unfinished energy that has never fully been integrated.

So the path is not really about fixing ourselves like a broken machine. It is more about allowing what is already in us to surface and dissolve.

The sun is already there behind the clouds. The clouds just make it harder to feel.

A simple 5-step way I practice with disturbance when it shows up

For me, the method is simple, even if it is not always easy.

Step 1: Notice that I’m disturbed

First, I acknowledge that something in me has been stirred up. Usually there is a trigger, something someone said, something that happened, or even just a thought or memory. Instead of immediately reacting, I try to recognize, okay, there is disturbance here.

Step 2: Notice what the disturbance is made of

Then I look more closely. Usually the disturbance has a few parts: body feelings, mental talk, and sometimes mental images. There may be tightness in the chest, pressure in the throat, heaviness in the stomach, or heat in the face. At the same time, there may be inner arguing, replaying, or imagined scenes. Breaking it down this way already helps, because it stops feeling like one giant solid thing.

Step 3: Focus first on the body feeling

Usually I go first to the body. I ask: where do I feel this most strongly? Then I stay with that sensation and track it more carefully. Is it tight, heavy, shaky, warm, cold, pulsing? Is it getting stronger or weaker? Is it in one place or several? I’m not analyzing it. I’m just feeling it more clearly.

Step 4: Let it be there without trying to change it

This is the most important part. Once I’m with the feeling, I try to let it be there exactly as it is. I don’t try to fix it, calm it down, replace it, or think my way out of it. Sometimes I gently label what is happening with simple words like feel in. Sometimes I use a very simple affirmation: It’s okay for you to be here. That sentence helps me stop treating the disturbance like an enemy.

Step 5: Hold the whole experience in awareness and let it soften on its own

After staying with the body feeling, I may include the thoughts and images too. Then I try to hold the whole experience in awareness without interfering. The body sensation, the inner talk, the mental images — all of it can be there.If my attention is on a feeling, I label it as* feel in*. If it’s on mental talk, I label it as* hear in*. If it’s on a mental image, I label it as see in.

And at the end, I just sit quietly for a moment and do nothing. No fixing, no forcing. Just letting things settle in their own time.

Why this matters in ordinary life, not just on the cushion

I understand more now why formal sitting practice matters.

It helps build concentration, clarity, and equanimity. Concentration helps me stay with disturbance longer. Clarity helps me see it more precisely, so it feels less overwhelming. Equanimity helps me stop fighting it.

And when those capacities grow in meditation, they start to carry over into daily life.

Then even while working, talking, parenting, or dealing with stress, part of me can remain in that attitude of allowing. That matters a lot, because most of us are not monks. We have jobs, families, obligations. We cannot spend all day sitting on a cushion in order to release old blockages.

So daily life has to become part of the practice.

And maybe that is the deeper lesson I got from that night.

The real fruit of mindfulness is not that life becomes perfectly arranged. It is that when life becomes difficult, we are less thrown around inside. We remain calmer. We suffer less. And because of that, we can respond more wisely.

That is already a big change.

Maybe big enough to call it a sign.

There was a period in my life when I really wanted to run away from ordinary life.

I wanted to leave daily life behind and go to a monastery. In my mind, a monastery was a place where all I had to do was meditate, practice, and focus on transcendence. No chaos, no mundane responsibilities, no emotional friction, no endless little things pulling at me. Just silence, depth, and spiritual work.

At that time, I really believed transcendence lived somewhere outside ordinary life. I thought daily life was the obstacle.

The noise, the repetition, the emotional pain, the unpredictability — all of it felt like the opposite of the spiritual path. I wanted to get beyond it. I wanted unity, peace, love, non-separation. And I thought the monastery was the place where those things could finally be found.

Looking back, I can see something more clearly now. What I was really seeking was not just transcendence. I was also seeking relief. I wanted out of the discomfort of being human in ordinary life. I was resisting the pain, the boredom, the messiness, and the constant friction of daily experience. And at the same time, I was attached to some ideal spiritual state I had read about in books.

That created a split in me. On one side was the ideal: enlightenment, unity, love, freedom from suffering. On the other side was my actual life: washing dishes, folding clothes, feeling resentment, having a wandering mind, getting triggered, feeling disconnected, dealing with responsibilities.

And because I kept comparing daily life to that ideal state, daily life started to feel even more dull, more painful, more lacking.

But gradually, I began to see something I couldn’t see before: the desire to escape ordinary life was itself part of the obstacle.

Daily life is not the obstacle

I can’t tell you exactly when this shifted. It didn’t happen all at once. It happened gradually.

A few teachers really helped point the way for me. David Hawkins helped me see that daily life brings up emotions, and those emotions are not interruptions to the path. They are the path. They are opportunities to let go.

Michael Singer pointed to something similar. When daily life triggers frustration, anger, fear, craving, or emotional contraction, the practice is not to run away from those experiences. The practice is to be with them, to relax around them, to stop trying to force or control them, and to let the energy move through.

Other mindfulness teachers helped me see even more clearly that spiritual practice does not need to be separated from ordinary life. You do not need to leave the world in order to wake up. In fact, daily life itself can become the training ground.

That realization changed a lot for me.

Because once you really see this, the whole thing flips. The ordinary is not what blocks transcendence. The ordinary is where the path actually happens.

The world is not the real problem

Something else became more obvious to me over time.

When I listen to stories from deeply awakened people, what stands out is not that they escaped the world. It’s that the world changed in how it appeared to them.

The ordinary became luminous. A street, a tree moving in the wind, the sound of the city, even pain, even difficulty — all of it could be experienced differently.

So it started to seem to me that the problem was never the world itself. The problem was the state we were in while perceiving it.

And I’ve tasted this a little myself. Not fully, not steadily, and definitely not all the time. But enough to trust that something real is there.

Sometimes I’m just walking down an ordinary street in an ordinary city, and suddenly there is a sense of silence underneath everything. Or gratitude. Or some kind of harmony behind the noise.

Sometimes the leaves moving in the wind feel beautiful in a way that doesn’t need explanation.

Sometimes I still get criticized, but I recover faster. I forgive faster. I don’t get trapped in the same way.

These are small things, but to me they matter. They show me that the ordinary is not as ordinary as I once thought.

Why daily life is actually so useful

I think there are at least two gifts in practicing in ordinary life.

The first is that daily life shows you where you really are.

It’s easy to feel spiritual when nothing is bothering you. But what happens when someone criticizes you? What happens when your child is crying, when your boss pressures you, when you feel rejected, anxious, bored, resentful, or ashamed?

That is where you start to see your real level.

Daily life gives you feedback. If someone speaks harshly to you and you burn with anger for three days, that shows you something. If, after some sincere practice, the same thing happens and the anger still comes but passes in a few hours, that also shows you something.

The second gift is that daily life reveals your blockages.

The world triggers what is already inside us. If someone criticizes me and I feel intense anger, yes, the criticism triggered it. But the deeper issue is that there was already anger in me waiting to be triggered.

If I fail at something and immediately feel worthless, that event did not create worthlessness out of nowhere. It revealed a wound, a belief, or a pattern that was already there.

So daily life keeps showing us what still needs awareness, love, release, and integration.

That is why I no longer think the painful and ordinary parts of life are random inconveniences. For the practitioner, they are raw jade.

Raw jade

A piece of raw jade doesn’t look impressive at first. It can look like just another rough stone. If you didn’t know what it was, you might overlook it completely or even throw it away.

But inside, there is something precious. It just hasn’t been revealed yet.

That image has stayed with me because I think our ordinary moments are often like that. A headache, a wandering mind, a day of disconnection, resentment, restlessness, shame, loneliness, boredom — these are the rough stones of life. Most of the time we reject them. We want them gone. We assume they are getting in the way.

But what if they are not in the way? What if they are actually where the work is?

Then the question becomes: how do we polish the stone without rejecting it?

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Love the ordinary

More and more, I feel the answer is love.

Not sentimental love. Not pretending everything feels good. I mean a very simple and courageous kind of love: not rejecting what is here.

The ordinary needs to be loved. The painful needs to be loved. The parts of ourselves we want to push away — shame, anger, restlessness, jealousy, grief, numbness — also need to be met with love.

Because when we resist, it persists. Resistance itself is often part of the blockage.

But when we stop rejecting what is here, something begins to soften. Something can dissolve.

I often think of it like how a loving parent looks at a child. To a stranger, the child may seem ordinary, difficult, noisy, even annoying. But to a loving parent, that child is deeply worthy of love exactly as they are.

That doesn’t mean the child is perfect by worldly standards. It means they are fully worthy of love.

I think this is the attitude we need toward our own ordinary and painful experience. Even this headache. Even this wandering mind. Even this loneliness. Even this resentment.

Not because these experiences are pleasant, but because they are part of what is here now. And what is here now is where the path is.

A simple way to practice this

So what does this actually look like in practice?

Not as an idea, but as something you can really do?

The way I understand it now is actually pretty simple. It’s not complicated. It’s more about attitude than technique.

Step 1: Settle in and check what is here

First, just settle.

Sit down. Relax your shoulders, your jaw, your face. Let the spine be upright but not rigid. The point is not to force yourself into some spiritual posture. The point is to become alert and relaxed at the same time.

Then just check in with your inner state.

What is happening in the body right now? Is there tightness, pressure, heaviness, warmth, agitation, tiredness?

What is happening emotionally? Is there anxiety, sadness, irritation, loneliness, dullness?

What is happening mentally? What thoughts are running? What kind of inner talk is there? What kind of mental movies are playing?

You can also notice what is happening outside you. Sounds in the room. What you see if your eyes are open. Maybe something pleasant, maybe something unpleasant, maybe something neutral.

Just notice the whole field of experience.

Step 2: Notice what you are calling “not perfect”

Then see if there is something in your present experience that you are silently rejecting.

Usually there is.

Maybe it’s a headache. Maybe it’s restlessness. Maybe your mind keeps wandering. Maybe you feel disconnected, ashamed, bored, numb, or irritated.

These are usually the parts we label as bad, flawed, inconvenient, or in the way. We think, this shouldn’t be here. We think, I need to get rid of this before I can really practice.

But this is exactly where the shift begins.

Instead of calling that experience a mistake, you begin to recognize it as part of the path.

Step 3: Affirm its perfection

This step may sound strange at first, but I think it matters.

Take the thing you are resisting and quietly say to it: This is perfect.

Not because it feels pleasant. Not because you are pretending to like it. Not because you are doing positive thinking.

You are saying it in a deeper sense.

You are saying: this too belongs. This too has a place. This too is part of reality right now. I do not need to reject it.

If there is a headache, you can bring your attention to it and say, this is perfect.

If there is a wandering mind, this is perfect.

If there is loneliness, this is perfect.

If there is restlessness, this is perfect.

To me, this does not mean we glorify suffering. It means we stop acting as if this moment has gone wrong just because it contains discomfort.

The raw jade may not look beautiful yet, but that doesn’t mean the jade is not there.

Step 4: Meet it with love

Then from there, bring kindness.

Not analysis. Not fixing. Not argument. Just kindness.

Almost like you are sitting with a child who is crying. You do not need to lecture the child. You do not need to tell them to stop. You do not need to explain why they shouldn’t feel what they feel.

You just stay with them.

That is love.

And in the same way, you stay with your own discomfort. You let it be seen. You let it be felt. You let it be held in a wider field of acceptance.

Sometimes it helps to inwardly say something like: I accept you. It’s okay for you to be here.

This is where the practice becomes more than mental. It becomes a heart practice.

And sometimes, if you really stay there, you can actually feel something soften in the chest. A warmth. A tenderness. A real compassion toward your own humanity.

That matters.

Because a lot of what keeps suffering in place is not just the pain itself. It is the rejection of it. The shame around it. The feeling that this part of us should not exist.

Love begins to loosen that knot.

And if it feels real, let it widen

If the practice starts to feel real in you — if there is genuine kindness there — then sometimes I like to let it widen.

I think about all the other people feeling this same kind of thing. Other people feeling boredom, loneliness, shame, resentment, confusion, disappointment. Other people sitting with headaches, wandering minds, tired hearts.

And I just let the love widen a little.

Nothing dramatic. Just a quiet recognition that this is part of being human, and that none of us are alone in it.

This moment is the practice

So scrubbing a pot, folding clothes, walking down the street, drinking a glass of water, hearing a baby cry, feeling irritation rise — these are not distractions from practice.

They are practice.

The moment you stop dividing life into “spiritual things” and “non-spiritual things,” something starts to change. You stop waiting for a more sacred moment. You stop imagining that real practice begins somewhere else, under better conditions, in a quieter place, after life becomes easier.

You begin to see that this moment is already it.

And I think this is one of the deepest shifts: not trying to escape life, but learning to awaken to it.

Not later. Not elsewhere. Not after everything is fixed.

Here, in the middle of ordinary life.

That is where the jade is.

We all have physical pain here and there.

Maybe not today. Maybe not this week. But if we live long enough, pain will visit us. I think nobody can say they will never experience physical pain.

Some of us have already had very intense pain. Some may be dealing with it right now. And even if you feel healthy today, who knows what life brings in a few years? An accident. Illness. Aging. Something unexpected.

Pain is just part of being human.

Usually we see pain as something purely negative.

Something to get rid of. Something unfortunate. Something unfair. Something that interrupts life.

And of course, I understand that. Pain hurts. I’m not trying to romanticize it. I’m not trying to pretend pain is enjoyable or that suffering is somehow automatically noble.

But I do think there is another way to look at it.

Is it possible that pain has a deeper meaning?

Not always. Not in every case. But sometimes?

Is it possible that if we understand and work with pain in a different way, it can actually teach us something useful—physically, psychologically, emotionally, and even spiritually?

Or even contribute to our long-term happiness?

I know this may sound wild, but that’s what I want to explore here: just the possibility.

Not as some guru. Not as someone who has mastered pain. I definitely haven’t. I’m sharing this as someone who is still learning, still practicing, still experimenting, still trying to understand what pain is really showing me.

The First Meaning of Pain Is Telling Us Something Is Wrong in the Body

At the most basic level, pain is a warning signal.

It tells us something is wrong in the body.

Maybe there is inflammation. Maybe there is an injury. Maybe something needs treatment. Maybe the body is telling us to stop and pay attention.

That part is obvious. If you break your leg, the pain is telling you something real. Go take care of it. Go get help. Fix what needs fixing.

But what about the times when we already got the message? What about when you know something is wrong, you’ve already checked it, maybe you even got treatment, but the pain is still there?

A lot of people live like this. Headaches. Back pain. Chronic tension. Symptoms that don’t fully go away. Or one issue improves and then another appears somewhere else.

So then what?

If the pain has already delivered the obvious message, but it remains, is it still just meaningless suffering? Or can it point to something deeper?

Pain could function as a distraction to keep you from feeling some terrible emotions you don’t want to face.

This idea really stayed with me.

I learned a lot from Dr. John Sarno’s work. He points to something important: sometimes pain can function as a distraction from emotions we do not want to consciously feel.

The brain decides that it would be really bad to face some terrible emotions, so it creates pain by reducing the oxygen supply to the local tissues. With less oxygen, pain occurs. And when there is pain to lock your attention, you won’t notice the repressed emotions.

But according to him, once one understands this mechanism and drops the distraction method by being willing to face the emotions, the pain stops.

So what kind of emotions we are so afraid to face?

Rage, shame, guilt, fear, grief, resentment. All the darker feelings that threaten the identity we want to have.

Because if I consciously feel rage toward someone I love, what does that mean about me? If I feel jealousy, guilt, or shame, what does that say about me?

It can feel threatening to our image of ourselves as a good person.

So what do we do?

We suppress, we repress, we push it down.

But what is repressed does not disappear.

It stays there like pressure in a pressure cooker. It wants to be experienced. It wants to come into consciousness. And if we don’t know how to feel it directly, the system may find another route. In this framework, pain becomes a distraction. Attention goes to the body, so attention does not have to go to the repressed emotion.

I’m not saying this explains every pain. But I do think some pain may be saying something more subtle than, “This tissue is damaged.”

It may also be saying:

There is something in you that has not been fully felt.
There is some part of life in you that has been pushed away.
There is an inner backlog that wants to move.

And when that happens, pain is no longer just a physical problem. It becomes part of inner growth too. Because if we keep repressing parts of ourselves, in a way our growth gets arrested. To become whole again, we have to be able to experience what is in consciousness as it is.

Pain Can Help Develop the Skill of Equanimity, Which Reduces the Suffering from Pain.

This is another big way I’ve come to see pain.

In spiritual traditions, people have intentionally worked with pain for a long time.

Zen practitioners sit in the lotus position for long periods. This posture can be very painful if maintained for a long time, especially when your legs are not flexible enough. Certain Native American rituals, for example, the Sun Dance, involve physical hardship and piercing.

From the outside, that can look extreme. Why would anyone do that to themselves?

But I don’t think the point is pain for pain’s sake. I think one of the deeper purposes is to train equanimity.

By equanimity, I mean the ability to let experience be there without immediately pushing or pulling.

Not clinging when something feels good. Not resisting when something feels bad.

Just being with what is there.

That sounds simple, but it’s a very deep skill.

Because what makes suffering so intense is often not just the pain itself. It is the resistance on top of the pain.

Here is the formula by Shinzen Young:

Suffering=Pain × Resistance

The mind says:

This shouldn’t be happening.
Why me?
What if this never stops?
I can’t handle this.

And then the body tenses more. Emotion rises. Fear rises. All these are components of resistance. The whole thing compounds.

So in that sense, suffering is not just pain. It is pain multiplied by resistance. And the less resistance there is, the less suffering there tends to be.

When your equanimity skill is trained to a higher level, you have less resistance.

That doesn’t mean pain disappears instantly. It means the relationship to it changes.

And that change helps you suffer less from it.

Higher Equanimity Can Help You Release Repressed Emotions

I’ve had meditation sessions in full lotus where the pain became really intense.

One time I did two sessions with only a short break in between. During the second one, it hurt so much that my body started shaking. It was way beyond comfort. I was not calm and above it all. It was just intense. But afterward, something surprising happened.

I felt lighter.

It was as if some old grief or sadness had been released. I had been working with physical pain, but somehow emotional pain moved too.

Why would that happen?

My understanding is this:

When we work skillfully with physical pain, we are training less resistance. And less resistance doesn’t only apply to physical sensation. It also applies to repressed emotional holdings.

Resistance is basically an attitude. When our equanimity is trained to be higher, we are shifting to the attitude of non-resistance.

So if we become more capable of letting physical pain move through, we may also become more capable of letting grief, sadness, fear, and other buried feelings come to the surface. And once they come to the surface, they no longer need to stay repressed in the same way.

This may also explain why some people temporarily feel worse when they meditate more deeply.

It’s not necessarily that the practice is harming them.

It’s actually because they are just becoming less numb.

They are giving permission for what was buried to rise. And that can feel uncomfortable.

Once the repressed feelings are let go, one immediately feels lighter and even happy for no apparent reason.

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Pain Can Even Open a Sense of Spaciousness—a Transcendent State

There is another thing pain can do.

Sometimes, if we approach it in the right way, pain can push us toward a different experience of awareness.

Usually we feel, “I am the one in pain.”

But sometimes there is a shift.

Instead of “I am pain” or “I am trapped in pain,” it becomes more like, “Pain is happening within awareness.”

That may sound abstract, but it is actually very practical.

The image I like is this: you are the sky, and the pain is a dark cloud.

The cloud is still there, the pain is still there, but the sky is larger.

And when identity shifts more toward the sky than the cloud, the suffering changes. Not always instantly, not perfectly, but something opens. The pain is no longer the whole universe. It is something being held within a larger space.

And you suffer less in that state.

I think this is one reason intense spiritual practices have existed for so long. Pain can sometimes push us closer to that direct experience of spaciousness, not as an idea, but as something lived.

Two Practices to Work with Pain to Reduce Suffering

What follows are two strategies I use.

Not as someone who has mastered this, but as someone still practicing.

Sometimes one works better than the other. Sometimes I move between both.

Strategy 1: Escape into pain

This sounds strange at first, but what I mean is this:

Instead of trying to run from the pain, I go into it. I bring my attention closer. I get more intimate with the experience. I stop relating to it as one giant enemy and start exploring it directly.

Step 1: Remember that pain and suffering are not exactly the same

The first thing I remind myself is this:

I’m not only suffering from the pain itself. I’m also suffering from my reaction to the pain.

That reaction includes the fear, the resistance, the mental story, the tension around it.

That reminder helps me separate raw sensation from the extra suffering I’m adding to it.

Step 2: Notice the thoughts around the pain

Before going deeper into the body, I notice what the mind is doing.

Usually the mind is spinning some kind of fear story or future story.

So I just notice thoughts like these:

What if this gets worse?
What if this never goes away?
Why is this happening to me?
I can’t take this.

Not trying to force it away. Just seeing it more clearly.

That already gives me a little more space.

Step 3: Let the emotional reaction be there too

Pain often comes with emotional reaction.

Fear, anger, helplessness, irritation, and sometimes even sadness.

So I try not to only focus on the physical sensation. I also allow the emotional reaction to be there.

Not fixing it. Not suppressing it. Just letting it be part of the moment.

Sometimes the emotional layer is sitting in the body too, tightness in the stomach, contraction in the chest, agitation in the system. Letting that be there is part of the practice.

Step 4: Turn toward the raw sensation itself

Then I gently bring attention into the actual pain.

Not in an aggressive way. More in a curious way.

I ask:

What is this really made of? Is it burning, tightness, pressure, throbbing, stabbing, pulsing, or heat?

Step 5: Break the pain down into smaller pieces

This part helps a lot.

Instead of relating to the pain as one overwhelming thing, I look more carefully.

Where is the center?
Which part is most intense?
Is there a softer edge around it?
Does it stay still or move?
Does it come in waves?

Sometimes there is a very intense center, but there is also a less intense periphery around it. Sometimes I move attention between the center and the outer area. That way I’m still with the pain, but I’m not fixated only on the sharpest part. The more detail I notice, the more present I become, and the less overwhelmed I usually feel.

Strategy 2: Anchor away on spaciousness

Sometimes going into the pain helps.

But sometimes the pain is too intense, and going deeper into it is just too much.

In those moments, I use a different strategy. Instead of moving closer to the pain, I anchor attention somewhere else — in spaciousness.

Step 1: Widen the field of attention

I stop focusing tightly on the pain and start noticing space.

The space in the room, the space around objects, the space above me, the space behind me, and surrounding my whole body.

It helps to open the eyes and really notice the room or the space outside the window. Usually we notice objects first, but here I try to notice the space holding the objects. Then I let the pain be just one thing happening inside a much bigger field.

Then I may close my eyes and feel the infinite dark space all around me. It’s a blend of imagination and a felt sense.

Step 2: Rest as the larger awareness

From there, I try to feel that awareness itself is bigger than the pain.

The pain is happening, but it is happening within awareness.

That subtle shift can make a big difference.

Instead of feeling like I am trapped inside the pain, it starts to feel like the pain is being held by something larger.

That “something larger” gives me room to breathe.

I move between both

So for me, these are the two main ways I practice with pain:

One is to go into it. The other is to open beyond it.

One is intimacy with sensation. The other is anchoring in spaciousness.

Sometimes the right move is to get closer. Sometimes the right move is to zoom out.

I don’t think this is about following a rigid method. It’s more about sensing what the moment needs.

And underneath both strategies is the same deeper practice: a little less resistance, a little more openness, a little more willingness to let the moment be what it is.

Why This Matters Beyond Physical Pain

To me, this is not just about pain. This is about life. Because life keeps bringing things we do not want: disappointment, fear, aging, sickness, uncertainty, loss, emotional pain, and situations we cannot control.

And usually the instinct is the same: contract, resist, fight reality.

But reality does not always listen.

So at some point, the deeper question becomes: can I meet this moment with a little more equanimity? A little more surrender? A little less inner friction?

That is why I think pain can become a teacher.

Not because pain is good in itself. But because pain gives us a place to practice a way of being that helps with all of life.

The willow tree survives the storm because it bends. If it were rigid, it would break. There is wisdom in that.

I’m Still Learning This Too

I’m not beyond resistance.

I still resist pain.
I still tense up.
I still get lost in thought.
I still don’t enjoy pain.

But I’ve seen enough to believe this: Pain is not always just an enemy.

Sometimes it is a message.
Sometimes it points to buried emotion.
Sometimes it trains equanimity.
Sometimes it helps emotional release.
Sometimes it opens a more spacious awareness.

So I don’t think we should glorify pain. But I also don’t think we need to see it only as meaningless bad luck.

Maybe pain is one of life’s hardest teachers.

Not one we would choose. But still, a teacher.

And if pain is inevitable, then maybe one of the wisest things we can do is learn how to work with it, not just so we suffer less, but so we become a little more whole in the process.