The kind of meditation I've been making a habit of is pretty useless, but the modern-day secret of useless things is how they are everything but a waste of your time. So I made space for this article in my tech blog, a small break looking at a facet of human consciousness in this 2023 period of AI gold rush. I only have some limited experience with meditation mixed with a few ideas from the variety of interesting literature anyone can find on the subject. I have no ground to stand between yoga, mindfulness or zen budhism, these are just a few words taken from my personal perspective.  


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From the little that I’ve learned of zen meditation, I found a particular practice that’s not about abstracting yourself away from stress, as sold by #mindfulness self-help proponents. You’re feeling stressed, angry, or sad? You sit with your stress, anger, or sadness. It’s also not about escaping to a different reality or obtaining enlightenment. It doesn’t even have to be about being thankful for what you have. Feeling that something isn’t quite right? Let’s sit on that. Don’t give strength to that feeling and don’t suppress it, just sit down and shut up for a little while.  

My small intuition is that Zen meditation is like brushing your teeth, but for your attention. It’s correctly described as a practice, but not in the sense that you do it because you’re motivated to do it better. You’re just brushing your attention every day, it’s simply a personal habit. Have you brushed today? Nice, guess what you’re doing tomorrow… brushing it again. You're not mastering your ability to focus. You're just making a habit out of noticing where your attention goes and bringing it back to the present moment. 

Yoga has given Zen meditation a good athletic base on which to sit cross-legged on: the half lotus or the more advanced full lotus posture. However, you don’t need to level up on Yoga before starting to meditate. The only purpose of the posture is to give your mind and body a ritual, a special moment where you can try to meditate without the risk of falling asleep. Zen meditation is not blissful relaxation, it needs that little bit of physical strain to make sure that you stay aware of the present moment. But it doesn’t have to be perfect. If you find yourself focusing only on your posture, use a pillow to find some basic level of comfort. 

Also, several details may help with finding a good posture. Breathe from your abdomen, let your shoulders drop, but don't slouch. Keep your eyes open and look down at some fixed point in front of you. Your hands can rest below your navel with palms facing up, fingers of one hand on top of those in the other, and the tip of your thumbs slightly touching. Usually, the tension in your whole posture can feel reflected in how well your thumbs are just touching. You can also relax your lips by letting the tip of your tongue touch the roof of your mouth. Breathe in and out your nose. Notice how long your mind can keep paying attention to only each moment of breathing.    

You meditate by failing to meditate and coming back to it over and over.  Your mind inevitably wanders, you notice these thoughts arising, you let them go and come back to your breathing. It's kind of like a repeating joke. You think that you have control over your thoughts, that they only occur if you want them to. And then you quiet your mind and they just slide into your DMs uninvited. For a moment, you forget that you're supposed to be meditating and instead take the time to think about your grocery list or watering the plants. You even retroactively tell yourself that you actually wanted to pause your meditation to think about other things before going back to it. 

You can smile at this recurring cycle and don't feel bad for falling into it again and again. The truth is that we are not the cause of these thoughts. All that we can do is observe ourselves noticing them arising in our consciousness and let them go at their own speed. Buddhism describes this as an opportunity for us to realize that the self is merely an illusion, but we need not be too eager to philosophize this experience, especially during the meditation itself. Even if we might feel that there's some deep and positive meaning, this is just sitting down and shutting up. The novelty of the whole ritual should wear out and even feel boring. Remember boredom? 

It feels that a good opportunity for meditation is for it to replace the habit of picking up your phone as soon as you wake up. Get up, sit down, and shut up for a few minutes. Set a timer for three minutes or maybe more in the following days as you feel like giving yourself a greater range of moments. You want enough time to settle into something beyond checking if your posture is okay, feeling a bit bored, and wondering what the hell this article was on about. Enough space to notice how your mind really can think of anything while you're there observing your attention.

You can also see it as a part of the process of waking up, maybe by stretching a bit before and after. Maintaining a good posture is just enough exercise to slowly decide you're no longer asleep. Paying attention to your mind while not letting it take over also allows you to assess what kind of mood are you starting your day with.  Listening to your body as it wakes up also seems easier than doing at the end of a long day. 


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I remember hearing the famous actor and writer Stephen Fry talking about meditation in a podcast and joking about how he doesn't want to be a cow ruminating through his thoughts. I understand how even any other activity can seem more empowering to the human spirit, especially if you're channeling your energy into some creative endeavor. I also enjoy relaxing by playing music, for example. But sometimes I also feel that what we are paying attention to is just about all that defines us and that we often forget about our ability to observe ourselves in the present moment. However, I'm not going to push my somewhat aimless point any further, since convincing you to get into the habit of meditation would kind of defeat the whole purpose of it. But I do thank you for reading and I hope that you can take something from this article.