There are many good reasons to take up and continue a meditation practice. You may have multiple reasons, or just one really good one. Your reasons may also change over time. Mine certainly have. Mostly I have found more and more great reasons to keep going.

I started practicing more than twenty years ago due to a nascent interest in spirituality, which at the time was mostly of the “new age” variety. I found that meditating felt really good. I got peaceful, I experienced some blissful states, and sometimes it seemed to help me deal with my raging college-age emotional life.

After college I stopped practicing and lived a relatively happy but pretty un-spiritual life. In 2015 when my wife and I were expecting our first child, I had an instinctual paternal urge to turn inward and work on myself again so I could be the best version of myself for my son. By this point I was well-studied in Ken Wilber’s Integral meta-theory and one thing that particularly stuck with me was how highly Wilber spoke of the contemplative practices and their impact on a person’s development. So this time my reasons for meditating were to become a better person for my son and enhance my personal self-development.

Around this time I started learning a lot more about Buddhism, and my practice starting turning from a less specifically spiritual or Integral type of practice to more of a Buddhist and mindfulness style.

Early on during this time I was having some of the reward states that can result from practice – feeling very relaxed and blissful. I was mostly concerned with these states at the time. I practiced in a certain way, and I expected these states to arise. When they didn’t, I was disappointed. I knew on some level that I as practicing for long term development, but I didn’t often remember that in the moment.

I used a particular app with some particular audio tracks to meditate and I really enjoyed it. One day the app developer took the app down, and suddenly I could no longer use it. I got very upset, and thought this was a huge blow to my meditation practice.

In the end though, this was a good thing. Realizing how much I was “chasing states” ultimately helped lead me to a more mature practice. While these states are nice, and can help motivate us, if you’re practicing only to get into certain states, you’re setting yourself up for disappointment. Inevitably these states will change or you won’t have access to them. Also a temporary feel good state is really a small fraction of the incredible transformation that can come from mindfulness practice. It’s important to have a long view of your practice and remember that you’re developing skills over time, just like with physical exercise. With this view, even a practice session that doesn’t feel that great, or even feels unpleasant, can be viewed as valuable still.

After learning about Shinzen Young’s Unified Mindfulness system, I really internalized this developmental view of mindfulness practice. I say mindfulness practice now as opposed to just “meditation” because I now have a bevy of techniques to develop mindfulness skills during all sorts of activities, beyond just meditation in seated stillness.

My reasons now include some of the earlier reasons, like personal development as per Wilber, but my main focus is building my skills of concentration, sensory clarity, and equanimity over time. The reasons I want to build these skills are laid out in Shinzen’s happiness grid. In short, it’s to be happy, independent of the conditions of my life. More specifically it’s to increase happiness in five dimensions;

• Minimize Suffering – to make life easier, to deal with unpleasantness and difficulties without it feeling like it’s ruining my life. Over the past several years I’ve known deep suffering that in my youth I came nowhere close to experiencing. Mindfulness has helped me through this and at this point I can’t imagine getting through the tough times without it. I continue to find new ways to take refuge in my practice during the most painful and difficult moments of my life.
• Maximize fulfillment – to more fully enjoy the good times, savor the pleasant moment, experience more lasting satisfaction from positive experiences
• Understand myself – to know myself at all levels including the deepest levels of transcendence, oneness, non-duality. The expansive and contractive activity of the Source.
• Mastery – acting skillfully. To develop means of acting skillfully. This affects my work, my relationships, my parenting, even my leisure activities like playing hockey and video games. Mindfulness can enhance all of these things and I have seen it in my own life.
• Service – Serving from Love – Shinzen also recently is modifying this dimension to include “connection”. This resonates well with me. As I have seen the benefits of mindfulness in my life and begun to teach others, I have been delighted to see if help others and this feels really good, for both the reasons of knowing that I’m benefiting someone else, and the connection I feel with that other person when I’m really helping them in an important way.

At this point my main reason for meditating could be summarized as – I want to become awakened, enlightened. What does that mean? Essentially to me it’s the culmination of those five dimensions of happiness. Reaching their ultimate levels.

What are your reasons?