On Meditation

Earlier today my meditation app, Headspace, asked me a simple question: "Does meditation feel like part of your life or something separate?"

The answer, of course, is complicated. Isn't everything, though?

On the one hand, I feel like meditation is a part of my daily life in many ways, and no longer entirely separate from it. The techniques I've learned in the last year-or-so of meditation (noting, breathing exercises, mindfulness, etc.) have had a big impact on my daily routine. I feel like I get less caught up in thought-spirals, and it's easier for me to "surface" from engaging tasks because I've had some practice at letting go of whatever I'm doing or thinking at the moment and coming back to the breath.

On the other hand, I feel like my morning meditation, when I can fit it in before work, is a welcome break from my everyday life. I spend so much of my time jumping from task to task that ten to twenty minutes of quiet time spent sitting on the balcony with my eyes closed is a nice change of pace. It's a moment where I quietly ask myself to remember that things are pretty good: I woke up on the right side of the sod, as they say.

There was a time when a question like the one above would have caused me consternation. I would have become obsessed with parsing out an answer, with analyzing whether a thing can be both separate from and part of something else. But now, I just look at the question and smile at it. "Huh," I say to myself. "That's a very interesting paradox."

And then I let go of the question, and come back to the breath.