Why I meditate every day: A testimony.

People meditate to relax, but that's not my intention. I do calm down a lot when I meditate, but my goal is to be free from the chains of the mind.

I meditate to stop falling prey to my anger attacks for good. 

Is that possible? The Buddha said so. My experience says so. I used to have anger fits every day. Now, I have one or two every year.

I meditate to weaken my tendency to distract myself with any nonsense from the Internet, to eradicate the habit of postponing my projects, and to quit yielding to pleasurable sensations.

When I don’t meditate, emotional and sensory addictions take over. I stop moving forward. I start going backward. 

Without noticing, I begin hurting other people. Because of my lack of practice, anger returns and takes over gradually. 

I suddenly become rude. I yell, insult, and disrespect people. I use sarcasm and hurtful mockery. If my anger gets ridiculous, I start punching things. It’s embarrassing. Degrading. 

That’s why I don’t skip daily meditation. It’s not about staying stress-free. That’s bullshit practice. Actual meditation practice is about weakening spiritual illnesses and strengthening sanity.

If I don’t meditate daily, I easily get distracted by online nonsense and waste a lot of time. To me, that’s a big mistake. Lately, I’ve been thinking about how impermanent my life is. I will never get back the seconds that are passing right now. And without a doubt, I know I will die, and so will you. 

That’s why hypnotizing myself with the phone and consuming idiotic content is utterly absurd. Hence, I meditate to stay focused and advance in my work, projects, education, and personal development. I meditate to stick to valuable online content instead of yielding to my urge to check social media or get distracted by notifications.

If I stop meditating, eventually, I begin postponing my projects for later. I prefer to “rest” when I don’t need rest. I continue watching that “important or interesting” YouTube video that doesn’t add value to my life. I’ll keep doing what I like because “I deserve it.” 

When I don’t meditate, I slowly prefer pleasantness over beneficial hardship. When I do, I cultivate openness to all types of sensations, thus cultivating the willingness to do my duty, even if it is unpleasant.

For those reasons and many others, I meditate.

Meditation is much more than relaxation. It is much more than mental health. It goes beyond paying attention to an object to still the mind. Yes, that’s where it starts. But the real benefits come when you understand how much you can free yourself with proper meditation, which takes me to my next point.

Right meditation purifies your cognition from false views.

Of the hundreds of extraordinary experiences I have had when practicing meditation, two radically impacted my life.

The first one happened in 2008. I don’t remember the exact date, but I was in a taxi on my way home. It was like 8:00 p.m. in Mexico City, and it was raining. I was enthralled watching how the drops running down the taxi window distorted the red taillights of the cars in front.

Anyone who knows Mexico City knows that driving on a rainy night means spending hours in traffic. I took advantage of this time to practice meditation. The object of attention was the bright red hexagons.

At the time, I had no idea if I was doing it right or not. I had only been practicing for a few months. I focused on the sensations in my body while I saw the lights. Nothing was happening. I started thinking about how I argued with people. In those days, I frequently got into fights with my parents. I did not have a partner, but I would surely get into verbal altercations with her if I had one.

As I meditated on my body, I imagined my arguments with other people were like two forces colliding. Like two bighorn sheep butting heads. Then, I remixed that image with the idea of surrendering (which I’d learned from my AA meetings). My sponsor used to say: “When you can’t change something, just give up. Surrender.”

As I was thinking about how we butt heads when arguing, I realized that some people would not change no matter how much I would hit them with my words. While meditating on all that, I imagined I could stop being stubborn. I figured that by giving up, the other person could no longer collide with me. I visualized myself fading away and simply accepting people as they were. 

Then something happened. 

My mind understood that the more it gave up, the more it opened up to everything else. And the more it opened up, the more it expanded everywhere.

Suddenly, my awareness “included” all the lights, the sounds of the rain, the taxi driver’s music, and the aroma of his car. The colors became brighter, and I felt great joy. It was an unforgettable experience, big enough to make me google the world’s religions. I listened to the Dharma a few months later, and things clicked. It was the first time I realized I couldn’t confine consciousness to a limited self.

The second experience came years later. I had already become a practitioner of the Dharma. I was direct messaging with another friend about Buddhist philosophy. During the dialogue, I realized firsthand one of the most profound truths of Buddhism. I understood that nothing could exist by itself. This insight once again modified my sensory experience. Suddenly, I perceived a spacious quality of all phenomena. Solidity was open. I noticed a transparent, pure, and luminous emptiness I still contemplate. This emptiness is nothing but purity. When I get distracted and lose sight of it, neurosis sets in. But when I sit and meditate, I abide in emptiness again, and neurosis fades.

You may wonder why I tell you about these experiences, and the thing is, one has to go through this so that one’s meditation practice skyrockets. 

When I understood how to surrender fully so that my awareness expands and how reality is utterly empty of selfishness, my practice took a quantum leap. These experiences liberated my awareness of ideas of identity, narratives, time, and physical space. They didn’t destroy the ideas; they just freed me from them.

The presence of this liberated awareness became more and more omnipresent, and, therefore, my common neuroses were weakened.

In other words, today, I get less triggered and less angry because 1) I meditate every day and 2) because of the insights into the nature of reality I went through.

So that’s why you should also meditate: to leap into purer ways of cognizing reality.

The good news

These last few months, I’ve been thinking about producing a robust meditation course. I won’t give you the same meditation instructions you can find anywhere. I aim to provide the correct views needed to practice with a sharp, steady, and powerful awareness so you can have genuine cognitive breakthroughs.

To make quantum leaps, knowing the subtleties of meditation practice is necessary. You must distinguish mental aspects like stillness, clarity, natural awareness, perception, attention, intention, or will.

This knowledge makes it possible to completely let go of your mind and body and access a transcendental way of abiding.

I have already started producing this course. I won’t teach this live like I usually do. I will record everything and upload it to an educational digital platform so you can study the lessons at your own pace. Would you be interested in taking it? Let me know in the comments, send me a message, or email me.

Don’t forget to meditate today.