How do we know that meditation is working for us?
I know it's not a magic pill, but is there a point when we should see a difference in ourselves?
It's a bit difficult.
It's difficult for two reasons.
One, meditation works very slowly.
And two, it's very difficult to see a change in yourself.
Right?
It's very difficult to see what's wrong with you, to see your problems.
It's very easy to see the problems that other people have, and their problems tend to be very easy to solve.
And to solve someone else's problems is very easy.
But solving your own problems is quite difficult because you don't really see them correctly.
You think you do.
You think you see, I have this problem, I have that problem, but it's quite superficial.
You're not able to see that actually thinking like that is a part of the problem.
what you should see is a change in understanding.
It's the first most important thing to gain.
It's really the final thing to gain as well.
The key is that your understanding of things is changing.
Not that you feel more happy or that you feel more at peace or so on, but that you have more understanding.
And as a result, you have a knowledge that as a result, you're more at peace.
Because
It's very hard to convince yourself that you feel more peaceful because it's impermanent.
Sometimes you feel pain and a lot of pain even as a meditator.
Sometimes you feel quite stressed even as a meditator.
When you think about the understanding that you've gained, then you can convince yourself that actually it's true that overall you must be, and you definitely are more peaceful, even though it's hard to tell for yourself because you can think, gee, yesterday I was more peaceful, today I'm not peaceful, or last week I was more, or a month ago I was not peaceful, now I am peaceful.
You don't really have this kind of comparison.
It's not a real comparison.
So you can't really confirm that you're more peaceful than you were before, you're more happy than you were before.
But you can convince yourself that it must be the case because you know the nature of wisdom, the nature of the understanding.
The understandings that you've gained have untied knots.
They've changed the way you look at things.
They've straightened and they've simplified your understanding of reality.
And because of that simplification, there's less stress, there's less complication, less busyness and so on.
So look for that, look for the understanding, the simplification of how you look at things, rather than making a big deal out of things, just the ability to just see things as they are naturally.
and the ability to let go and to not stress over things as much.