The first time I heard about meditation, I wanted to throw up. Though I’m sure that had more to do with the shots of Jameson from the night before.

I was sat in a cab with the CEO of the PR agency I worked at, on our way to give a presentation to a room full of fund managers. A big opportunity, both for my career and the business.

I was also dog tired and hungover as shit.

Our train to Long Island was at 8 am. I had gone to bed at 2. I was at the office at 6. I was confident I had scrubbed all traces of shame from my body. But there was no hiding the yawns. Gaping yawns. Think Lion’s Breath on repeat.

The CEO took one look at me, cleared his throat and asked me if I’ve ever tried meditation. As it turns out, the calm, methodical and moderate man I knew him to be was actually once known for his virulent tirades*and once even threw a chair through a conference room window. Through meditation, he had learned to tame that energy, finding a place of calm, control and peace.

He suggested I try it sometime. I nodded my head in agreement. I’m sure calm tasted better than chicken wings and bottom-shelf vodka.

—

Three years into the journey, I can tell you a few things about meditation:

• Meditation is confusing.
• Meditation is hard.
• Meditation is easy.
• Meditation is life-changing.

When I started, I bought into the idea that meditation was practiced by hippies, yogis and all those that renounced (or, in my judgmental words at the time, “couldn’t handle”) modern life, sat in a room filled with incense and chants of OOOOOMMMMMM.

My first meditation class didn’t do much to dispel those notions. For 45 minutes, I watched ruefully as individuals sat in weird positions and breathed like angels while I squirmed on my cushion and struggled to drown out the cacophony of Manhattan traffic and thoughts of dinner. How the hell was any normal human supposed to sit still for that long?

Thankfully, I found my first meditation app – the aptly named Breathe, Stop & Think.. It was a pretty smart set-up on the part of the developers: 10 minutes each morning felt \ manageable, it could be done from anywhere and the app’s progress tracker turned daily meditation into a game (“20 days in a row, I’m such a badass!”).

Some days, I would feel refreshed. Others, I would feel more frazzled than I did before. Mostly, I just had lots of thoughts about trying not to have thoughts.

After those initial few months, I changed my approach. I went from one 10 or 20-minute session to 10 one-minute sessions, with the intention of seeing how long I could go without having a thought. I was determined to be thought free. Wasn’t that the point?

My experiment in turning the art of meditation into science was a disaster. The farthest I got was about 23 seconds. As soon as a thought came in, I would spend most of the remaining 40-odd seconds thinking about how I was going to do better the next minute. It felt less like meditation, more like I was training for some sort of competition.

At that point, I shrugged and went back into the 10- or 20-minute sessions. I accepted that thoughts would always be a part of the equation. I could never be the LeBron James of thoughtlessness, but perhaps I could be the journeyman equivalent.

This lasted a year. I didn’t feel like I was progressing, but I knew I wasn’t regressing either.., There were a whole raft of changes going on that I couldn’t see: I was becoming more patient with people, more in tune with my emotions, less likely to be swept away by euphoria, more connected to others.

I wouldn’t see or embrace these changes until I came across a meditation app called Headspace and finally l began to let go of the idea that meditation had to be all about concentration and the thoughtless mind.  One day, the Headspace ad mentioned something about “RRP Episode 142 with founder Andy Puddicombe.” Intrigued, I popped on the episode.

Mind blown. I can’t recall all of the details, but let’s just say that there was enough there to dispel my previous notions of what meditation was. It wasn’t meant to be about having no thoughts – that was practically impossible. Instead, it was about acting as a sort of detached observer. Acknowledging your thoughts, feelings and emotions and watching them drift away, rather than get caught up in them.

I downloaded Headspace soon after. The meditations were so much more instructive. And intelligent. And simple. But most importantly, the tone was empathetic and gentle. It acknowledged the challenges of meditation, namely dealing with a tsunami of thoughts. Most importantly, it noted that effort was counterintuitive – working hard wouldn’t free me from a busy mind, but that liberation could come by simply letting the mind be.

From that point onward, meditation became easy.

My favorite lesson from Headspace was ‘noting’. Puddicombe describes it as giving a light “note or label” to a thought, which then “gives a feeling of space.” This space is the difference between watching a car go by and choosing to step in front of it. As I mentioned in previous posts, much of our desires, impulses and decisions are dictated by a swath of chemicals in the brain, the balance (or imbalance) of which is influenced by a variety of factors.

What meditation gives me is a moment to get reconnected with the breath, to step back out of the snarl of thoughts and emotions and return to a place of quiet intuition. It gives me a moment to see the reasons behind an impulse or a feeling. It allows me to acknowledge that feeling, rather than try to push it away. And, if I don’t need to act on it, I can simply let it go.

I find that when I’m not at the whim of my thoughts or emotions, I’m much more of an honest, caring, selfless, loving individual. I find myself doing the right things more because they are what I want to do, not because I just happened to win some mental tug-of-war.

Over the last nine months, I’ve started applying meditation into my everyday routine. You can do it when you’re eating, walking, writing, sat at your desk, even when listening to music. It’s simply an act of taking a breath and letting go of everything that isn’t in front of you. It’s just you and the sidewalk or the plate of nachos or the cheeky Taylor Swift song.

At the same time, I’ve started expanding my meditation repertoire by going to retreats, reading works by experts and masters like Thich Nhat Hanh and Sharon Salzberg. I’m trying everything, keeping things that I like and discarding what I don’t need.

Meditation is no longer some lofty goal, but an everyday practice, almost like a hobby. I do it for the joy of it, which as it turns out, does leave a nicer taste than chicken wings and bottom-shelf vodka.