The mind can be a terrible place. The chorus of thoughts running through our heads can be abusive, needling, relentless, and cruel. “My partner must not reciprocate my love, how dare they act like that.” “The cat didn’t eat well this morning, they must be dying.” “Does my best friend love me back?” “My boss must not respect me to continually blow off meetings, this must be the end of my career.” The persistent tapes of negative self-talk are, to paraphrase Sam Harris, like the biggest jerk you know, following you from room to room, never giving you a moment’s rest from self-doubt, resentment, and fear. 

Mindfulness meditation offers respite. What if you could instantly be freed from the horrible narrative, on demand? A single mindful breath helps you step out of the torrent of running thoughts, and frees you for the next breath, and the next, until your concentration wanes and the thoughts drift back in. But good news! With the next mindful breath, you are free again. 

Mindfulness meditation helps you see all of these thoughts and their emotional repercussions in a wider perspective. When you observe the thoughts of the mind as simply thoughts, they slowly lose their power to control your every emotional experience. It takes practice – a lot of practice. You build a contained, dark space, safe from thoughts, one breath at a time, over hundreds of thousands of breaths. 

I’ve found that a certain kind of mindfulness helps right-size my thoughts into their proper context. It’s not that thoughts and emotions don’t matter – they do; human experiences matter. But a number of reflections help me to pinpoint the Me having these experiences. That I am here to take a breath, to have a thought, to have an emotion, because 4 billion years ago a single cell phaged a smaller cell and put it to work on the larger cell’s behalf. Because for millenia, plants and trees have been turning carbon into oxygen. Because for generations, joyless and grim farmers plowed the land and grew slightly more joyful and slightly less grim children. Because my heart pulses blood around my body, swirling around the oxygen the trees made for us. I may be having a rough moment, but in the face of millenia of evolution, in the face of the dizzying wonder of life on this planet, and my own inconsequential, improbable life, most thoughts and emotions feel trivial by comparison – a tempest in a teapot. At least, they feel fleeting and, well, even laughable in the flow of human life – and even more inconsequential in the context of Earth’s life in our solitary planetary orbit.

And if this isn’t enough, there is always a line of thought about all I can be grateful for in this moment as I meditate. That my lungs and nose are clear. That I’m not steering a loved one through the final, chaotic stages of a bewildering memory loss. That I don’t have a parent in an ICU bed, struggling to breathe, and dying alone. That I know where my rent money is coming from. That the ache in my knees went away, and I can walk comfortably through a forest again. These are some of my gratitudes, and nearly everyone can marshall at least a few. What are some of yours?