Meditation isn’t just one thing - by Nimish Gåtam
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Meditation isn’t just one thing<br>How subtle instructions can change the whole practice
Nimish Gåtam<br>Aug 20, 2026
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Image by ChatGPT, trying to show various sides of meditation. I’m not artsy.<br>Technically, wiggling your toes, carving wood, MMA fighting, and dancing are all forms of movement. Despite that similarity, you don’t usually see salsa-dancers and casual toe-wigglers fighting in cage matches. That’s because we recognize that, despite involving body movement, the resulting practices are so different that it doesn’t make sense to lump them together.<br>Thanks for reading Society, Technology and Culture! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.
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But we lump together mental practices as ‘meditation’, myself included until recently. I thought I understood what it was until I went on a meditation retreat and realized the activity being taught was nothing like the activity I had been engaged in for years.<br>To make it even more confusing, the practice from the retreat derived from (essentially) the same instruction as the one I had been following. I reflected and discussed with others, and have realized that even the exact same instruction can be read in different ways and result in completely different ‘mental practices’, as different as woodcarvers and dancers.<br>This isn’t a complete list, but just a handful of ‘mental practices’ that can come out of a simple instruction:<br>“Focus on your breath. As your mind wanders, gently bring it back to the breath.”
Working on ‘gently’
Many fixate on the word gently. It’s especially poignant because most people’s self-talk is anything but. For some people, getting to gently becomes the entire practice. They learn and continue to cultivate more self-acceptance and self-compassion until they can eventually guide their own thoughts in a way that they feel loved and supported internally while doing it.<br>Pitfalls/cautions
I’ve learned that some people’s self-critic is so harsh that asking them to sit with their own thoughts is genuinely torturous and they have to do a lot of psychological work (usually beyond the realm of meditation) to get to a point where they can even sit in silence without judging themselves, let alone have a full session.<br>This can also lead to an infinite rabbit-hole. How gentle is gentle enough? Because you could probably always be more gentle. This doesn’t seem problematic at first, but fixation is always dangerous. If you keep fixating on what would make one more gentle, you’ll start extrapolating harshness in the simplest scenarios, both inside and outside meditation.<br>Clearing mental baggage until you get to the breath
My interpretation of the instruction resulted in a kind of clearing of mental baggage.<br>For me, my breath isn’t particularly exciting. At any given moment, there’s a huge list of things I find more exciting than my breath.<br>So, I would basically go through that list. I’d work on letting those thoughts happen and let them emotionally process to completion until the most exciting thing in my thought queue was my breath. Sometimes, it surfaced stuff I needed to remember, so I’d just write that down on a list that I tackled immediately afterwards. Sometimes it was an emotion I hadn’t completed feeling (ie something worried me but I didn’t feel the full worry at the moment, so I feel it during the sit). Sometimes it was a combination of both (ie I’m worried about something but if I took some time to think it through, I’d find the worry was unfounded, so I took that time during meditation to let the thought go through all the way).<br>Anyways, I’d eventually run out of top-of-mind things. Once at that state, there would usually be a handful of other concerns that popped up but usually they weren’t so big and dissipated on their own. At some point I’d hit concerns that were actually less interesting than breathing, so I’d ignore them automatically.<br>Once I got to breathing I’d see if I could stay there for a while (“a while” for me being like a minute at most).<br>I assumed this was the whole practice and the benefit was the processing/clearing/prioritizing/notes etc that were generated, along with a mental practice of returning to a task (not sticking with it, because I found that hard, but the actual practice of clearing things out of the way so you can get closer to sticking with a task).<br>Pitfalls/caution
I think this is also where some people go overboard… if you ask yourself to actively find concerns, you will. Your mind will obediently generate an infinite list for you to “deal with”. If you train yourself in meditation to do this, you’ll do this in real life too, and paradoxically find more things to be concerned about than you used to, requiring more meditation to deal with those.<br>I didn’t realize it, but I was able to use the breath as a ‘neutral’ control to keep from infinitely finding things to be...