When I first started meditating, I thought I knew why meditation mattered. It reduced stress, improved sleep, softened negative emotions—all the parts of my life that badly needed an overhaul.

It took a few years to learn that although I understood why meditation mattered, I had no idea how it mattered.

I discovered that my attitude toward my own practice counted for more than any technique, ancient or modern. And it was that attitude, without my noticing, that held me back through those first years.

how I was being with the breath

The instructions seemed simple enough: relax the body, notice the breath, bring awareness back when the mind wanders. I assumed some wonderful inner transformation would follow on its own.

Then it hit me. The point was never just being with the breath, or the body. The point was how I was being with them.

Call this a meditation attitude

The way we regard our own experience. It matters more than whatever experience we happen to have, more than anything we might later collect like a spiritual souvenir.

The English word attitude comes from a French word that, centuries ago, described the way a work of art was placed in a room.

When we meditate and meet a pleasant state, we tend to place it in the center of our inner room and lean in as close as we can get. Then we wait to see what happens.

the nature of things

How long can any experience stay pleasant? How long does a lick of ice cream, or a fine sunset, hold its charm? It changes. It always changes. This is simply the nature of things.

We go through most of a day on automatic pilot, responding to whatever comes up. This is not really responding. It is reacting from old conditioning.

When we sit down to meditate, these same tendencies come along and sit down with us.

The teacher Larry Rosenberg once described meditation as sneaking behind enemy lines to spy on our own pre-conscious reactions. When we feel some old pattern about to fire, meditation gives us a moment to step back, breathe, and adjust the placement of the threat.

We make a small inner adjustment.

We meet the moment with a little more friendliness, a little more curiosity.

Noticing “I was really starting to get worked up” can seem like nothing at all. It is not nothing. These small recognitions build on each other, one after another, until they add up to something.

soil, not scenery

Gil Fronsdal compares our attitude to the soil in which the heart and mind are transformed. Dry, hard soil grows nothing useful. Soft, moist soil, rich with humus, lets almost anything grow.

I have written before in this space about the attitudes that make for hard soil: expectation, ambition, striving, the need to stay in control. Impatience belongs on that list too, especially when something unpleasant shows up.

So does boredom.

Any time I leave the cushion convinced my meditation went badly, it is worth asking how I was relating to the wandering mind, the aching knee, the boredom itself. Nothing here needs fixing. It is enough to see clearly what is happening.

U Tejaniya, the Burmese teacher, put this as plainly as anyone I have read:

Meditating is watching and allowing with relaxed attention whatever pleasant or unpleasant experience is happening. Relax, observe, and allow everything that is occurring. Neither try to create nor encourage any experience. Meditation is not waiting for something to occur or waiting for something to go away. It is being patient with all things.

The wandering mind, the aching muscles, the boredom—none of these are problems. They are the present moment showing up with a broken wing, waiting to see how we will meet it.