27/11/2025
Lovely guidance on meditation 😊
It’s very common for people to say, “I can’t get my mind to stop thinking,” as if the presence of thoughts were proof that meditation isn’t working. But the mind is built to produce thoughts. Neuroscience shows that the default mode network—responsible for daydreaming, planning, remembering, and imagining—never fully turns off. It generates a continuous flow of images and language, just as the ocean generates waves. Expecting the mind to stop thinking is like expecting the tide to stand still. Thinking is not the problem. Attachment is.
What meditation develops is the ability to see a thought without being taken by it. The moment we notice the mind has wandered, something important happens. The salience and executive networks of the brain come online, which help us recognize: “Ah, thinking.” In that moment, we are not lost inside the thought—we are aware of the thought. This is the beginning of liberation. As awareness becomes more stable, activity in the brain’s threat circuitry decreases, and the prefrontal regions responsible for emotional balance, perspective, and insight become more available. Biology and the Buddha are pointing to the same thing: freedom comes not from suppressing thought, but from no longer clinging to it.
This capacity is strengthened every time we return to the breath. The body plays a central role here. When we shift attention from the story-making mind to the sensation of breathing, the interoceptive network becomes active, especially the insula, which integrates signals from the heart, lungs, and internal organs. This deepens self-awareness and stabilizes the nervous system. The breath becomes an anchor, not because it eliminates thoughts, but because it gives the body a place to rest that is not entangled in them.
And this is where the science becomes astonishingly supportive of the Dharma. When we respond to our own wandering mind with kindness, the nervous system shifts in a different direction. The vagus nerve engages. The heart rate slows. The breath deepens. Oxytocin, the hormone associated with warmth and trust, can rise. Activity in the threat circuitry fades, and the prefrontal cortex—the region tied to perspective, emotional balance, and insight—comes back online. In very real terms, self-compassion changes the brain. It allows the body to relax, which allows the mind to open, which in turn allows us to see more clearly. Gentleness doesn’t weaken practice; it makes practice possible.
When we return to the breath with a soft hand rather than a clenched fist, we are teaching the nervous system that this moment is safe. We are creating a physiological environment in which healing and learning can actually occur. We stop bracing against our own experience. The body unwinds from its protective habits, and the mind begins to trust itself again. Over time, this repeated act of returning with kindness forms a new pattern—not just of attention, but of being. The inner landscape becomes less hostile, less contracted. There is more room for honesty, more room for feeling, more room for wisdom to take root.
And something subtle but profound happens alongside this. When we become gentler with ourselves, the world becomes gentler as well. We stop interpreting other people’s behavior through the lens of our own internal harshness. We see their suffering more clearly because we are no longer overwhelmed by our own. Compassion becomes a natural response instead of an obligation. What changes is not the world, but the conditioning through which we perceive it.
Meditation is not the practice of perfect stillness. It is the practice of beginning again with grace. Over and over. Breath after breath. The generosity we offer ourselves in those moments is not small or sentimental. It is the ground of the path. It is the shift from fear to safety, from contraction to openness, from self-judgment to self-trust. And in that shift, the possibility of transformation becomes real.
