While I’ve experienced the benefits of meditation with my own experience, it bothers me that I can’t figure out the connections. When I’m meditating 2 hours a day, my life trends upward. If my wife or I start missing our sittings, our lives just go in circles and we become agitated by the details of life. As a scientist, I like seeing the action-reaction pairs. When I water my plants, they grow. If I neglect them, they die. If I push the gas pedal, I move forward. When I hit the brakes, I stop. With meditation, it’s more like, if I meditate two hours a day for the next 3 months, I know my family relationships will improve. That doesn’t make any sense!
With my plants or my car, I’m acting directly on the object and seeing the result. With meditation, I’m sitting in a room by myself for many hours, which has nothing to do with my relatives, but I interact with them, things keep improving. Even more frustrating is that when I try to help (or change) a relative, it backfires and typically makes situations worse. So, when I try, I fail, but when I do nothing, I succeed. Wait, what?
The scientist in me has mostly given up trying to understand. If things are working, what is there to complain about? By overthinking it, I’m simply tying new knots that meditation is working to unravel. Maybe someday I’ll develop a deep enough awareness to see these subtle connections, but for now, I’m just going to roll with it. Time to meditate.