Our animal friends don’t move through life with the benefit of understanding what their life is. They just live in it. They just exist and do their animal thing. They haven’t studied eye cells to understand how they work; they just see and respond. They haven’t examined musculature; they just move. They don’t know how the heart and lungs work together; they just breathe. This isn’t a half-bad way of being in the world – it really gets the job done. 

We human creatures have done a lot more figuring out, particularly in the last 400 years. Through scientific inquiry, there’s a lot we know now about how our bodies work – and that knowledge is pretty satisfying. Certainly there’s a lot we can do with the information we’ve collected to improve how things are working for us. We are able to shape the world into what we need for our human bodies to thrive because we understand so much about what makes things function better. 

And it’s hard to overstate the spiritual richness of the experience of understanding the intricate ballet of our functioning bodies. When we have even a little insight into what makes it all work, there is so much to marvel at – our billions of cells, replicating perfectly every microsecond of the day. Our red blood cells busily transporting oxygen from lung cilia to the brain. How a sperm and egg grow into a whole new human. Adding in the historical view makes the experience of having a physical body even more staggering – how all of this is the result of 4 billion years of trial-and-error that started with organic molecules that accidentally started reproducing themselves, and ended with tooth cells and bones and neurons bustling around building skyscrapers and curing disease. It’s too much for me to comprehend sometimes. 

Before I started meditating, my consciousness was like the experience of an animal living in a physical body. It was going all the time, but I had no idea how it worked. In most ways, not knowing how it worked didn’t stop me from living my life. My mind was constantly full of thoughts, and they propelled me through life. I was swimming in thoughts all the time, and simultaneously not understanding how my mind was working. 

I made it through the day this way, but my lack of understanding meant that I didn’t have any insight into how to improve the experience of living in my consciousness. I couldn’t make it any better. After some years of mindfulness practice, I am able to interact with my thoughts in a way that gives me some leverage. I spend infinitely less time trapped in circles that grind me down and break my heart. I have more power to improve how things are working for me, because I know more about what makes things function better. I have access to powerful positive thoughts that allow me to do something other than just exist – I can change my world. 

As if that wasn’t enough, I also have access to a deep well of consciousness that feels sacred. I’m honored to hold a tiny space in this vastly improbable planet of life, and I never felt that before my meditation practice. There is a lot of variety to what people get out of mindfulness, but what I’ve gotten is a feeling of connection to the tapestry of life, to beings that I used to feel contempt for, to a universe of infinite mystery. 

It’s not a half-bad thing to be a smart critter, moving through life without examining every thought. But that means being a mindful critter can be twice as good. Mindfulness practice is bringing knowledge to the table – and that knowledge makes us better at moving through life, and makes life an infinitely richer experience. In our mindlessness, we are great animals. In mindfulness, we are scientists of consciousness, examining and learning and improving. I would argue that mindfulness has done for me what science has done for our species.  Not a bad return on investment.