“Training our brain through meditation enables us to make wise choices. When we meditate, we begin to see our stressful thought patterns, our reactive tendencies, and the stories we make up. When we see through the mental chatter, it becomes easier to pause, take a conscious breath, and choose a more skillful response in real life.” — Gloria Green
We meditate to train our brains to be more mindful—because mindfulness helps us make better decisions. Through practice, we learn to notice when our attention has drifted away from the present moment and gently guide it back. That, at its core, is what meditation is about: learning where our attention is and choosing where we want it to be.
Repetition Is How the Brain Learns
I once read that babies are born with an excess of neural connections because they need them to learn. That’s why toddlers do the same thing over and over—dropping a spoon from a highchair, insisting on the same book night after night. Repetition strengthens neural pathways. It’s how the brain makes sense of the world.
Meditation works the same way. Our mind wanders, again and again—and again and again we bring it back. Each return is not a failure; it is the practice. That return is how new neural pathways are formed.
Feeling the Breath
In meditation, we often begin with simple awareness:
- Noticing the sensation of the breath in the body
- Cool air entering the nostrils
- Warm air leaving
- The chest rising on the inhale
- Falling on the exhale
- The belly expanding and softening
This is how we begin to train attention—by choosing what we want to notice.
Strengthening Helpful Pathways
When we meditate, we are strengthening the neural connections we want to grow and allowing unhelpful ones to weaken. We are not trying to push anything away or force ourselves to be positive. Instead, we practice awareness of what is actually happening and become aware of the stories we add on top of it.
This is the heart of mindfulness: teasing apart fact from fiction.
When we see our stories clearly, we can ask, Is this really true? Or is my brain filling in the blanks again? Without that awareness, we make decisions based on distorted information. With it, we respond with clarity.
Mindfulness vs. Meditation
Mindfulness and meditation are related—but they are not the same. Mindfulness is a state of awareness: open, accepting, and as nonjudgmental as possible of what is happening right now. Meditation is the training that helps us develop that state.
Some people are naturally mindful throughout the day. I was not. When I began meditating, I lived at two speeds: full throttle or completely asleep. Meditation was the only way I learned to slow down my mental chatter. It took months before I noticed real changes—feeling calmer, steadier, and more collected.
Many apps label relaxation exercises as meditation. Relaxation can be helpful, but it doesn’t necessarily train awareness. Meditation trains us to notice thoughts as they arise, so we are no longer yanked around by them.
What do you tend to get pulled away by most often: planning, worrying, judging, remembering, or something else?
Preparing for Life’s Challenges
We often tell ourselves, Once I get through this, things will be fine. But life always brings something else. Meditation prepares us—not by eliminating difficulty, but by strengthening our ability to meet it. For much of my life, I was driven by my thoughts—reacting, rushing, doing things I didn’t need to do. Meditation helped me step off that hamster wheel.
We also see that we can handle emotional discomfort and the trials and tribulations of life. When I first started meditating, I thought it was crazy to sit through any discomfort at all. I couldn’t sit through any discomfort. I started by sitting with the discomfort of an itch. And I learned that if I just let it be there, it would go away. We need to learn to be with discomfort, because we will have physical, mental, and emotional discomforts in our lives. We have to build up our strengths to be with them. We have to start with the little irritating things. Then slightly bigger discomforts, so we expand our window of tolerance. For example, often our impulses tell us we have to do things, but we really don’t have to. When you get the urge to move while meditating, you don’t have to impulsively follow the urge. Let’s see what happens when we don’t give in to the urge to move. Since many find it really difficult, we’ll start with a Calming Breath. The Calming Breath carries the message that the threat has passed. The exhale tells the body it is safe to rest.
Calming Breath/ Intention Not to Move
- Move around until you are in a comfortable position.
- Set the intention not to move.
- Breathe in for the count of 4.
- Breathe out for the count of 8-10, breathing out the full count.
- Let your breath come back to its natural rhythm.
- Notice the urge to move coming up.
- You don’t have to give in to the urge, stay still.
With practice you can avoid giving into the urge for longer periods of time.
Sitting Meditation: Seeing Clearly
Sitting meditation teaches us how to relate directly to life. When we slow down, we finally see what has been there all along: thousands of thoughts moving through the mind each hour. People often say, “I can’t meditate—my mind is too busy.” But meditation doesn’t make the mind busy; it reveals how busy it already is.
We don’t meditate to be comfortable. We meditate to cultivate compassionate awareness of whatever is present. We learn to stay with ourselves—even when we don’t like what we’re experiencing. “I don’t like this—but I can be with it.” “I might not be okay right now—but I will be okay.”
This practice gently loosens our habit of labeling everything as good or bad, right or wrong.
Feeling Breath Meditation
- Noticing the sensation of my breath in my body
- Cool air coming into my nostrils
- Warm air leaving my nostrils
- Breathing in my chest rises
- Breathing out my chest falls
- Breathing in my stomach expands
- Breathing out my stomach deflates
Anchors for Attention
The breath is a common meditation anchor because it is always in the present moment. But breath awareness isn’t right for everyone. Some people find it unsettling or even triggering.
If that’s the case, you can anchor attention in your feet on the floor, your hands in your lap, or another physical sensation. An anchor gives the mind somewhere to return when thoughts begin to spin—because thoughts arise naturally, just like saliva in the mouth.
A breath poem can also serve as an anchor. One I used often is by Thich Nhat Hanh:
- Breathing in, I know I am breathing in
- Breathing out, I know I am breathing out
- Breathing in, I know I am breathing deeply
- Breathing out, I know I’m breathing slowly
- Breathing in, I feel calm
- Breathing out, I feel ease
- Breathing in, I smile
- Breathing out, I release
What Meditation Reveals
Through meditation, we begin to notice:
- How quickly the mind races
- When we drift into fantasy
- When we tense around certain people or situations
- When we shut down or check out
- How often we judge and label experience
We also see that no amount of planning can guarantee certainty. Life is unpredictable. What is predictable is our capacity to meet what arises. Meditation teaches us that we can handle emotional discomfort—and that awareness itself is strength.
The Mindful Middle
Meditation is about balance—not suppressing thoughts and not getting lost in them. We practice the “mindful middle,” where we notice thoughts without being controlled by them. The goal is not to become a “good meditator.” The goal is to train the brain to be mindful—so when life gets hard, we have choices.
Strong Back, Soft Front
Meditation helps us cultivate both resilience and tenderness—strong boundaries with an open heart. This balance allows us to fully experience joy—and sorrow—without being overwhelmed by either.
Reflect on where you tend to lean too much toward rigidity—or too much toward openness?
A Double-Edged Gift
Awareness allows us to savor joy more deeply. It also means we feel sadness more fully. Meditation teaches us how to choose where we place our attention, even as emotions arise. We train the brain by strengthening the pathways we want—and letting others fade.