Meditation was a huge leap of faith for me. You have to do it a long, long time to get the sense that it’s working. And then, you have no control group, so it’s hard to say that it’s helping. Did I react better because I’ve been meditating? Or did I just happen to be in a better frame of mind at that moment? But wait, was that better frame of mind because I’ve been meditating? It’s so hard to determine if the correlation has a root cause. 

There aren’t a lot of approaches to life that we take on faith. Obviously, religious folks have a lot more practice with the faith thing. I did some 12-step work that centered a lot on taking a leap of faith – that I couldn’t trust my faulty mind, so I needed to put faith in the program and believe things would get better, before they actually did. Recovery groups sometimes call it “acting as if” it were true, so you can discover down the road if maybe it’s true. 

One source that can sustain faith even when you’re not sure you’re getting results is testimonials from people you trust. This was a big one for me. My common-sense experience was that breathing was a sorry response to the huge dragons chasing me down. Totally inadequate to the task of quieting my wildly overactive fight-or-flight mind. But all kinds of medical sources said it’s one of the few things that works. Feeling like I was out of ideas, unable to even kill myself correctly, I took a leap of faith. I meditated, even though it seemed ridiculous. 

So now I offer you another kind of testimonial (and you may or may not trust me). This blog is a personal account of how meditation has transformed my life. At least, I think it was meditation. It was also getting sober. It was also getting a job I love. It was also losing 200 pounds. It was all of those things, but I was 200 pounds lighter and still miserable in my own head until I started meditating. 

What I have definitely seen – and I don’t see a lot of other factors that could have messed with this experiment – is that since I started meditating, my brain is a better place to be. When I am sitting with my breath, the thoughts that come are friendlier, often joyful, and when they’re hard to take, I can make them go away. I am far more attuned to seeing good things everywhere. 

So often meditation is about discipline. I’ve seen it can be about joy. The joy of connection. The joy of feeling your heart and lungs work together – a beautiful dance so barely visible, meditation is the only way to experience it. The joy of sitting so still, you can feel your aliveness throbbing through your fingers and toes and skull – alive…alive…alive. 

It took probably a couple of years to get here. That’s a long time to do something every day that you’re not sure is helping. Along the way, I got some powerful testimonials (Dan Harris, Chade-Meng Tan), but actually those came along when I was pretty far down the meditating road. It was just that blind faith -”People say it helps, I have no other ideas, let’s see if this works.” Meditation has succeeded in changing my brain to a degree I could have never anticipated. If anything, Harris and Tan are woefully underselling it. It takes mountains of practice, but it works. A suicidal skeptic like me went from waiting and even trying to die, to weeping with joy at the beauty of life all around, and my life in particular. If I can turn it around, absolutely anyone can.