Yesterday, @brandonwilson asked me this question in response to a post I wrote about practising meditation for slightly over 10 years:
Ten years is a long time. What are the 1-2 aspects of your life that you feel have fundamentally changed over that time period that you attribute to your practice of meditation?
It’s hard to attribute any one benefit to just sitting meditation, but perhaps, there are some smaller, more immediate/superficial and physical indicators could be attributed to (sitting) meditation. My best guess is better mental hygiene. I love to draw the analogy to physical hygiene, because it often doesn’t feel that different from it.
Just as we brush our teeth every day, shower, use soap, wear clean clothes to keep our outer body hygienic and healthy, meditation often feels like showering for the mind. In fact, just as you might feel an uncomfortable feeling in your mouth if you forgot to brush your teeth in the morning and went out, I feel the same if circumstances doesn’t allow that I can to sit in the morning. Sometimes, a botched alarm setting. Other times, waking up on a plane.
When I get to sit anything between 5-30min in the morning, it feels like a lovely way to start the day. In contrast, sometimes we wake up startled (from over-sleep), and rush through the morning preparations to get out to work. And that stressed, hurried energy kind of lingers on you through the rest of the day. When I get to start my day doing some yoga and sitting meditation, and then a quiet breakfast of fruits and oats, I feel fresh, energised, calm and grounded, ready to take on anything that comes. That first one hour really does make a huge difference to my day.
Sitting meditation at night before sleep is another noticeable benefit. It’s like cleansing the mind of all the chaos and clutter from the day, releasing the grip on the hectic pace of the day, and resets the mind. After that, I sleep better, deeper and with less fitful dreams, less tossing and turning.
With good starts and good sleep, everything else in between feels possible.