Even the hardest-nosed sceptic would find it difficult to deny that meditation brings a number of significant benefits. The only dispute is what that number is. One zealous website lists 141, while the more sober heathline lists a dozen that are “science-based”. These included reducing stress and anxiety, improving attention, reducing blood pressure, controlling pain and improving sleep. Given that it also said to promote kindness and compassion, why then don’t I meditate?
One answer is that I think I do. I don’t regularly sit in a quiet place and concentrate on my breathing, but I do three other things that I think of as forms of meditation. One is that I play tennis and squash. These sometimes frenetic activities might seem a million miles from the stillness of meditation but they offer a similar opportunity for focused attention. When playing, I strive to eliminate internal “chatter” and simply focus on the ball and my position. When it works, I am sure I am at least as focused and in the moment as any meditator.
Does this bring the same benefits as meditation? It certainly brings many of them because whether playing tennis is a form of meditation or not, physical exercise also helps reduce stress and anxiety, improve attention, reduce blood pressure, control pain and improve sleep. Many of the things meditation is good for plenty of other things are good for too. So if you’re already doing them, you have no more need to meditate than a swimmer has a need to take up running.
Some benefits of meditation are more specific to it, not easily found elsewhere. For example, sport and exercise aren’t meant to do anything for your kindness and compassion. On the squash court, the opposite often feels true, as normally nice people become aggressive and competitive. However, I am not convinced that meditation really is as powerful in this respect as it is supposed to be.
Experiments that show people being kinder immediately after a compassion-based meditation are not particularly impressive. Prime people with generous thoughts in any number of ways, such as by showing them an emotive charity appeal, and they will at least temporarily be more well-disposed towards others. The question is whether meditating makes you more compassionate in life as a whole.
I doubt that it does because I see little correlation between how well people treat others and whether they meditate. For sure, there are few if any truly nasty pieces of work who meditate, but when you look at people who devote their lives to the welfare of others, meditation does not seem to be a common factor.
Indeed, my impression is that the most evangelical meditators are often too impressed by their own internal sense of being kind and calm and don’t feel an especial need to translate this into action. This impression is backed by the evidence of Buddhist monastic life. Monks spend much less time helping others than non-meditating nurses, doctors, teachers or social workers. They are mostly running the monastery, meditating and chanting. Indeed, they are actually net recipients of charity, since lay people bring them food and other gifts. They are only helping others if you believe that their devotion generates spiritual benefits for others.
To the extent that “loving kindness” or compassion meditation – mettā – does help, I think its benefits can be gleaned by the second way in which I “meditate”. I can be quite the misanthrope, easily annoyed by the countless irritations of Other People. To counter this, when walking around I often try to switch on a kind of mettā where I see those around me as fragile, flawed human beings whose deficiencies merit more sympathy than disdain. Like me, they are simply trying to get through life as best they can and if they are failing in ways that bother me, so am I.
Buddhists would of course do the same, perhaps more so. I’d wager, however, that this kind of mettā-in-the-world does much more good than mettā in quiet solitude. What we call character is far from consistent and varies according to context. If we want to be compassionate in the throng, we have to cultivate compassion in that throng, not in our front rooms.
My third form of meditation, like the first two, is also about integrating aspects of traditional meditation in daily life. Put simply, I try to make efforts to be mindful: of the beauty around me, the deliciousness of the food I am eating, my own emotional reactions. I fail more often than I succeed but again, I think doing this is more important than attending to my breathing while sitting. Meditators will claim that the formal practice helps with the daily implementation but I’m not sure there’s been enough research to show that it is necessary.
I do not doubt that meditation helps many people and I don’t want to discourage anyone from doing it. But if our goal is live in the world more attentively, compassionately and mindfully, I think we can try to get on with doing that without having to set aside special times of the day to practice them aside from the world.
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