For me, meditation had come to mean being with my own mind no matter what state it was in. In this way, it was closer to psychotherapy than I had initially thought.

In learning to meditate, albeit from some of the best teachers I could find, I came to appreciate that once I understood the basics, I had to teach myself how to do it. I had to take what I had learned, in terms of the formal techniques, and then make it real from the inside. Only then could I begin to appreciate what meditation could and could not accomplish.

Seasoned meditation involves the interplay of concentration and mindfulness; both are cultivated from the start. It is very difficult to stay mindfully attentive to rapidly changing elements of experience, for instance, without the buildup of sufficient concentration, so most meditators in the Buddhist traditions are using both techniques at different times, oscillating between the two modes of attention.

With the recent popularity of mindfulness and the proliferation of apps and blogs and podcasts about it, people like Fred tend to look to it as a kind of mental gymnastics, good for one’s health and beneficial if practiced on a regular basis. This is not necessarily mistaken, but it can make meditation feel like just another thing one is doing wrong. While some of my patients have been able to prioritize the regular sitting practice of mindfulness, many others, in the midst of busy work and family life, cannot.

As a therapist, I have been taught to pay close attention to the intimate details of people’s lives in order to help them decipher the mystery of who and what they have become. But as a meditator, I have learned that experience isn’t everything. It can just as easily obscure one’s truth as reveal it. This is the paradox I have faced in bringing these two worlds together. Traditional therapy unpacks in order to make sense. Meditation asks us to stop making sense so that we can find where happiness truly abides. Therapy examines the accumulated self, the one that is shaped by all the defenses we have used to get through life. Meditation asks us to divest ourselves of those very defenses so that we can recapture the original and intrinsic vitality we were born with.