Learn as You Go: What Expectations Should I Have for Meditation?

None! If you go into meditation with certain expectations in mind, you may feel pressured in ways meditation is not built for. Since everyone is different, everyone will have different results from meditation, and that’s okay. But it’s important not to have too many expectations, because if you do, you may find that you’re not satisfied with the results your seeing, and you may miss the small, day-to-day improvements that meditation is helping you make.

The best way to capture moments is to pay attention. This is how we cultivate mindfulness.

—Jon Kabat-Zinn

Mindfulness is living in the moment without judging it.

—Debasish Mridha

Being mindful means that we suspend judgment for a time, set aside our immediate goals for the future, and take in the present moment as it is rather than as we would like it to be.

—Mark Williams

Nowadays, mindfulness has become a catch-all word, but the general principle of trying to be more conscious and aware in our daily life is very important. Along with this, it’s helpful to contemplate some of the mind training verses which are designed to take and transform all of the problems we experience.

—Tenzin Palmo

Most of us take for granted that time flies, meaning that it passes too quickly. But in the mindful state, time doesn’t really pass at all. There is only a single instant of time that keeps renewing itself over and over with infinite variety.

—Deepak Chopra

Engage and Immerse: Day Scan Meditation (5–6 minutes)

The day scan meditation is intended to help you process your day and prepare for sleep. I especially like to do this meditation after a long, exhausting day, or perhaps after a day where I’ve felt particularly unproductive or failed at something I’d been working toward for a while.

Begin this meditation in your bed, in the same position you intend to fall asleep in. Take a deep breath in, a deep breath out, and as you breathe out, gently close your eyes. For a moment, focus on your breathing only. Prepare yourself to observe without judgment, to recap without having any opinion, and remember that in five or six minutes, you want to go through your entire day.

Then begin. Start with the morning routine, remembering this morning’s unique occurrences, and continue throughout the rest of the day quickly. Remember that you are not in a rush; rather, you are merely acknowledging the day’s events, so you do not want to spend too much time on anything, you don’t want to give yourself time to judge it or wallow in it. The purpose of this meditation is not to dwell on the day’s hardships or joys, but rather to allow them to have been, to allow them to have had meaning in their moments, to process them, and then to let them go.

What I must do, is all that concerns me, not what the people think. This rule, equally arduous in actual and in intellectual life, may serve for the whole distinction between greatness and meanness. It is the harder, because you will always find those who think they know what is your duty better than you know it.

—Ralph Waldo Emerson

Mindfulness is the aware, balanced acceptance of the present experience. It isn’t more complicated than that. It is opening to or receiving the present moment, pleasant or unpleasant, just as it is, without either clinging to it or rejecting it.

—Sylvia Boorstein

Mindfulness is like a microscope; it is neither an offensive nor defensive weapon in relation to the germs we observe through it. The function of the microscope is just to clearly present what is there.

—Chogyam Trungpa

Mindfulness is the act of being intensely aware of what you’re sensing and feeling at every moment—without interpretation or judgment.

—Mayo Clinic

Suffering usually relates to wanting things to be different than they are.

—Allan Lokos