Why Meditate?

It is an undeniable fact that during most of our waking life, we are stuck in our heads, engaged in a constant internal dialogue in which the meaning and emotional associations of one thought trigger the next. We smell a familiar scent and suddenly we’re thinking about the first time we met an old boyfriend or girlfriend and how that relationship ended. If we’re still holding emotional pain over that ending, those feelings may pop up and then our mind may go into mental chaos with criticism, self-pity or worries about the future.

Every day our mind creates incessant stories about our weight, money, health, profile, loved ones and our future. Most of the time we’re not even conscious of this internal banter that is plaguing our mind and yet it is the greatest source of stress in our lives.

It’s true that our minds can create spectacular and positive stories, but it also has what neuroscientists call negative bias: a tendency to pay more attention to negative experiences than to positive ones. This pattern of behaviour has evolved as a survival mechanism over millions of years. Our ancestors always focused their attention on avoiding being eaten by sabre-tooth tigers, they didn’t have the luxury of relaxing to enjoy the sunset with a glass of Pino. This would have been a total waste of their precious energy reserves, not to mention a possible death wish. Those who survived passed on the gene that pays extra attention to danger. Their legacy is a brain that is somewhat obsessed with negative experiences and has an override function that forces us to get stuck in conditioned patterns of thinking, returning again and again to thoughts of anxiety, depression, and limitation.