Does Meditation Work

Assessing whether meditation works is really dependent on what you expect it to work at! For me I started daily meditation practise at a time when I found myself in a bit of a rut and felt my life wasn’t actually moving forward. The only way I was trying to break out of this rut was by indulging my desires and becoming more and more self-involved. This seemed to be getting me nowhere and was turning me into someone I really didn’t like.

It was at this point that I chanced upon a buddhist article about the nature of desire and it really hit home to me. So I set out to learn some more about this and rather than being all intellectual about it I thought i’d just start meditating first and see what happened. So I suppose for me I wanted meditation to work at making me into someone who was happier with their life and happier about who they were.

So did it work? Well it’s hard to say conclusively but daily meditation practise has had two distinct effects on me. The first was expected, the other wasn’t. The first was that I began to feel less trapped in my current situation and how I reacted to things. It was as if I gained a sense of space around the things I was doing which gave me time to observe myself and come to sensible decisions before reacting. As an example imagine being in a situation where someone gives you cause for anger. Prior to meditation I would usually just react straight away and then maybe feel bad about it later. It was as if the moment of anger robbed me of my intellect and I was reduced to pure emotional drive. My reactions were often very emotionally driven and took place in a sort of claustrophobic space where I felt I had little power to change the course of events and my reaction to them.

Now after meditating daily for several months I started to notice a breathing space developing around me, it was if I could freeze time when something occurred and actually think through how I wanted to react. I could start to observe my emotions arising and think about them rationally and decide whether to go with them or not. Basically my conscious mind began to be able to remove itself from the immediacy of the moment and sit further back to get a full view of the situation. Now I’m not saying I could do this all the time but the ability started to come more and more naturally to me. Now just to clarify this wasn’t about being in control, it was more about working out who “I” was. Rather than just being a set of emotions and desires that needed to be satisfied, meditation made me aware that “I” was also a process or set of mental processes behind that which could observe and direct these emotions in positive way.

So that was the first effect, basically it didn’t change my reactions but it gave me a greater ability to observe and understand my emotions and desires rather than letting them control me, especially in situations which were highly charged or had a high sense of immediacy.

The second effect was something I hadn’t expected. Before I explain it let me set the scene. I had been practising a form of loving-kindness meditation for six months and myself and my partner were due to have our first baby. We were going through all the anticipation and worry that such an event brings, on top of that my wife had had a near accident with falling furniture and we’d rushed to hospital, it turned out okay but it was more stress. On top of this there was some extended family arguments and emotional issues occurring. Basically I was in a place that if I had been irritable or stressed people would have understood and said I had a right to be. So then on the day our baby was due my landlord rings up and tells us he’s putting up the rent by another 100 euro. He says it’s for no particular reason other than that his other properties in the area are fetching more than this one. We were already paying above the odds and this amount would push us over our budget even more so with the baby due. On top of that we had to sign up for a new lease in a couple of weeks or else move out. We could either lock ourselves into something we couldn’t afford for another year or move out with our baby due or just born.

So how did I react to this. Well with previous landlords raising the rent in less dire circumstances I usually hit the roof and ranted how I was being ripped off, got into a foul humour for a week or so and fixated alot of hatred onto the landlord (rightly so some might say).

However in this circumstance a very strange thing occurred. As the landlord was speaking I had a smile on my face and I didn’t feel angry instead my mind started to wander and try to picture what it must be like to be him and live a life where he routinely does things like this to young couples. I actually felt a warmth towards him and left the phonecall with no malice or anger. I was still aware of the newly increased precarity of our situation and if I’m truthful in the days followed as I did feel a few moments of ill will towards him. But the point is that in this situation and others I noticed a new effect that meditation was having on me. Not only was it giving me space to observe my emotions as they arose and choose how to react, it was now also changing the nature of the emotions that arose in the first place, It was making me a better person even if only briefly.

So in conclusion, does meditation work? Well probably not as you might expect and certainly not immediately, you won’t become a buddha overnight. But if you give it time it will start to allow you to observe the workings of your own mind with greater clarity and subtly alter how your mental processes behave. To put it more emotively, it will give you space to breathe and from that space you’ll find that you’re able to do anything rather than just be a slave to habit, desire and emotion. What you do then is up to you!