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At some point, meditation became the “new black” as they say. So many articles about the benefits of meditation were reaching my inbox that I basically stopped reading them – even the ones about celebrities.

Public awareness and curiosity are increasing as the scientific and anecdotal evidence mounts – even I’m in the middle of a PhD researching meditation and emotion regulation under stress.

People are overcoming addictions such as cigarettes and alcohol, losing weight, reducing stress as well as increasing wealth, kindness and compassion. There are many accounts of improved athletic performance, people are overcoming severe anxiety and depression, heart disease and the list goes on.

However, saying “I am a meditator” is a bit like saying “I am a musician.” It doesn’t convey whether I am first violinist in a renowned symphony orchestra, playing washboard in a Louisiana zydeco band, or the drummer of a punk band disturbing the neighbours from a suburban garage.

There are different types of meditation, designed to enhance different qualities and skills. You can improve your attention, kindness and compassion or improve understanding of your mind and the world. When used together, they are like a balanced diet tailored to each of your personal needs.

The most researched and talked about form of meditation is commonly known as mindfulness.

In the modern world this term has taken on as many different meanings as there are people teaching it.

Traditionally, this type of practice involves strengthening your powers of concentration to overcome distractions and pay better attention. To increase these attention skills, you do your best to keep an object (your breath for example) in the foreground of your attention and leave all the usual opinions, chatter and activity in the background. Over time, this ‘background noise’ subsides and you’re better able to focus on any object you choose for ever-longer periods of time.

It doesn’t take long before the benefits of these skills spill over into your daily life. For example, you will be more attentive and less reactive to the emotional lives of yourself and others, leaving you in a much better place to balance emotions and avoid overwhelmed by them.

Again, wonderful news. But even if your new found powers of concentration could help you bend spoons or join the Jedi’s fight against the empire, it can’t strike at the cause of your own dissatisfaction or unhappiness. It has only limited benefit in the longer term, because mindfulness is really only part of the picture.

At some point we are bound to have an emotional button pushed that could furrow even Yoda’s brow.

When this happens, we are destined to spiral into the sort of uncontrolled behaviour that is the hallmark of what eminent emotions researcher Dr. Paul Ekman calls a regrettable emotional episode.

Although we are hoping to reduce or even eliminate regrettable emotional episodes, this should not be misunderstood as getting rid of our emotions. An emotionless life wouldn’t just be difficult or boring, it would be pretty much impossible. Fear, enjoyment, sadness and so on are all necessary to make sense of the world around us. They are the primary way we experience life and without them we would not wish the best for ourselves and others, nor would we strive to overcome difficulties and achieve goals. But they can also cause us to say and do things we later wished we had not. For most of us, control over this kind of emotional behaviour is life-changing.

This brings us to another type of meditation which is designed to help you understand how your emotions work and identify particular traits and habits you’d like to cultivate. It involves all sorts of fun emotional experiments performed on yourself to give insights into the world around you. Mindfulness is much like the microscope that helps us see more clearly, and this analytical meditation is the training necessary to understand what it is we see.

Finally, you use our improved attention skills and the results of your emotional experiments to set about eliminating reactions that cause you problems and cultivating the qualities and skills you’ve identified as desirable. Cultivating these qualities such as kindness and compassion in meditation means they will inevitably show up in your daily life.

These traits have been shown to increase the overall happiness of ourselves as well as those around us, with even physical benefits such as improving the immune system.

Consider the full picture: Sitting on a chair or cushion during a session of mindfulness meditation is like anchoring in a protected lagoon, relatively safe and unaffected by what might be happening in the open ocean. It’s peaceful, restorative but only a temporary stop before you move on through your day. Once you’re back in the open water of your daily life, the mindfulness you’ve developed functions like a keel, keeping you upright as we are swamped and buffeted about in the turmoil of your own emotional oceans.

Staying upright is important for your basic survival, but at this point, arrival at your destination would be left mostly to chance. You need to consult maps to plot a course and a compass to know which direction to go and this is the job of our analytical meditation. However, even with these in place, we are still adrift, and the practices of cultivating kindness and compassion are like the sail and the rudder that will give us power to move steadily toward our destination.

Even against the tides and weather that are pushing you off-course.

Now you can be confident not just that you’ll survive the day, but that you’re headed in the right direction. As you get more skillful in this navigation of your daily life, you can better use the tides of your moods and changeable emotional winds to power the voyage. Not only will this leave you with an enjoyable journey, but before long we will gain the confidence to take interesting, uncharted side trips along the way. 

Join the Balanced Minds Community

Joy, purpose and support using genuine science and Buddhist approaches.