What If We Quit Meditating?

A lot of us come to practice and immediately turn it into another thing to get right. Another place to perform. Another place to quietly fail and judge ourselves for it. Sit up straight. Focus on the breath. Stop thinking. Be calm. Do it better. And before we know it, we are doing so much just to do nothing at all.

At some point, meditation started making a lot more sense to me when it stopped being about controlling my experience and started being about getting to know it. Not getting rid of anger. Not fixing anxiety. Not becoming some calm, spiritual version of myself. Just noticing what was actually here. This is anger. This is sadness. This is fear. This is doubt. That shift matters. Because “I am angry” can feel like an identity, like this is who I am. But “anger is here” gives a little bit of space. Not dismissal. Not bypassing. Just enough room to breathe and actually pay attention. And that attention can be transformative.

A lot of us know what it feels like to get stuck in the suck of experience. Caught in loops of thought. Grasping at what feels good. Pushing away what doesn’t. Wanting joy to stay. Wanting discomfort gone immediately. I know that place really well. I didn’t come to meditation because life was already going great and I wanted to optimize my inner peace. I came because I was suffering. I was desperate enough to try something different. And the thing that first brought me through the door was not peace. It was agitation. It was anger. It was the sense that something in me was always bracing, always on edge, always ready to react.

Over time, I started to see that anger was not the whole story. Underneath it was fear. Underneath it was worry. Underneath it was low self-worth and old beliefs about myself that I had been carrying for a long time. But I couldn’t get to any of that while I was busy trying to get rid of what I was feeling. That was the game changer. Not fixing the feeling. Learning from it.

I used to offer mindfulness to the youth at juvenile detention centers. We would use terms like “feel it to heal it” and “name it to tame it.” Maybe they sound simple, maybe even a little cheesy, but there is something real in them. Sometimes just naming what is happening creates a little separation. Something in us is noticing the experience instead of being completely fused with it. And from there, curiosity can come in. What does this actually feel like in the body? Where do I notice it? Is it heat? Tightness? Buzzing? Collapse? Does it live in the shoulders, the chest, the gut?

For me, anger used to show up in what I called my cobra shoulders. They would rise up, tighten, get ready to strike. I knew how to attack quickly, especially with words. That was part of my conditioning. Part banter, part defense, part not wanting anyone to get close enough to see what was really going on. But when I slowed down enough to notice the shoulders and soften a little, I could feel what was under them. Usually it was something much more vulnerable. A pit in the stomach. Fear of being judged. Fear of not belonging. Fear of not being enough. Old stories that had been planted early and repeated so many times they started to feel true.

This is where practice becomes real for me. Not in escaping experience, but in learning how to be with it without becoming it. And sometimes the most helpful part of practice is incredibly simple. Come back to what is right here. Feet on the floor. Seat in the chair. Hands resting. Sounds coming and going. Breath moving in and out. Not as a way to avoid what we feel, but as a way to steady ourselves enough to stay present. Because when the mind gets stuck, it keeps sending the same message over and over: not okay, not okay, not okay. But if we shift attention to something direct and neutral, even for a moment, the system can soften. It can be something as random as your elbows or your earlobes. Seriously. Just something that does not carry a huge story. Something that lets the mind remember that not every moment is a threat. Even if life feels messy, this moment might be okay. That matters.

I love the image that Ajahn Chah offers of the mind becoming like a still forest pool. When the water settles, all kinds of creatures come to visit. Fear comes. Doubt comes. Joy comes. Grief comes. And the practice is not to chase them off or cling to the beautiful ones. It is to let them come, let them drink, and let them go.

If fear were a lion, we wouldn’t try to shoo it away. We’d probably stay very still and hope it doesn’t see us. And if it does, maybe we stay calm and watch. And in that watching, we might even begin to see how powerful it is. How beautiful it is in its own way. Something to respect, not something to fight.

And if joy were a deer, we wouldn’t try to pet it or keep it. As much as we might want to, the moment we move toward it, it’s gone. So we let it come to the water, let it drink, take it in, appreciate it, and let it go on its way. That image and my perspective is important to me, it helped me realize that a lot of my own suffering comes from my relationship to what arises. 

I believe that we all try to shove away what hurts and hold onto what feels good. It's natural only because the mind has been conditioned to do this, but everything moves. Everything changes. That is the blessing and the curse of being alive.

There are practices that can help with this. One that I really appreciate is Tara Brach's RAIN contemplative practice: recognize what is here, allow it to be here, investigate with curiosity, and nurture with care. What I like about that practice is that it does not ask us to fix anything. A lot of the time what we need is not a solution, it is acknowledgment. The sadness wants to be seen. The fear wants to be met. The tightness in the chest wants a little care, not immediate exile. Sometimes nurture looks like a hand on the heart. Sometimes it is a few kind words. Sometimes it is getting up and taking a walk. Sometimes it is letting yourself cry instead of holding everything in. That is the practice. That is allowing. That is compassion.

So when I say “quit meditating,” I do not mean stop practicing. I mean stop turning this into one more place to fail. Stop approaching your inner life like it needs to be conquered. Let yourself notice. Let yourself feel. Let yourself think. Let yourself come back.

I used to think this practice was about becoming perfect. What I found is it is the complete opposite. It is about becoming more honest. More spacious. More curious. More able to be in relationship with your own life. Perfect within all of our “imperfections”  And that does not just matter on the cushion. It matters in conversations, in conflict, in joy, in the moments when you feel yourself start to tighten or brace or disappear. It matters from the seat to the street. And maybe that is the real heart of it. 

You do not have to meditate perfectly to be practicing. You do not have to feel peaceful to be doing it right. Sometimes the practice is simply that you showed up, you noticed something, and you came back. You gave yourself one honest moment of presence. That counts. And in my experience, it counts a lot more than we think.