Stop Trying To Meditate Like a Monk: An Argument For Chaos Meditation

I’ve come to a sobering realization when it comes to my meditation practice:  I will never be an elite meditator.  

And that has led me to rethink the basic nature of mindfulness practice.

Here’s the context. In Daniel Goleman and Richard Davidson’s latest book Altered Traits, which brings together the most cutting edge scientific research on the benefits of meditation, they conclude that the benefits of meditation are a function of the amount of time you spend doing the practice.

Beginning level meditators (those who have practiced for at least a couple weeks), can hope to experience:

• Better focus
• Less mind-wandering
• Improved working memory

Long-term meditators (those with over 1,000 hours of practice), can experience these benefits and:

• Lower reactivity to stress
• Strengthening of prefrontal circuits for managing distress
• Greater ease in sustaining attention
• Weakening of the attachment system

Olympic level meditators (those with somewhere around 27,000 lifetime hours of meditation), can realize a near permanent state of meditative awareness:

• Large gamma waves synchronized throughout the brain
• A meditative brain state that persists throughout the day, even when formal meditation has ended (Goleman and Davidson, 273-4).