It Is Impossible to Meditate: What Meditation Really Is, and Why Almost Everyone Misunderstands It

Part 11 of the article series “The Path to Spiritual Enlightenment”.

The headline is not meant as a provocation. It is meant quite literally: It is impossible to meditate. Not difficult. Not demanding. Impossible. And the misunderstanding hidden in the little sentence “I meditate” is one of the main reasons why so many people sit year after year with their eyes closed without anything essential happening.

That is why the word needs precise content: what meditation is, what it is not, why we do it at all, and how you can begin yourself, today, with a concrete and well-tested method. You need no prior knowledge. You do not need to believe in anything. You only need the will to be a little more precise than usual, and a little patience with yourself.

For precision is the key word here.

The word that means everything, and therefore nothing

Ask ten people what meditation is, and you will get fifteen answers.

One says: “I meditate when I knit.” Another: “I meditate when I walk in the forest.” A third uses an app with a calm voice that guides them through a fantasy journey. A fourth pictures a man in the lotus position on a mountaintop in the Himalayas. A fifth sits for ten minutes in the morning following the breath in order to feel less stressed. And they all use the same word.

That is how it was for me once, and that is how it is for practically everyone in the beginning. The word meditation has become so diluted, especially in the modern alternative scene, that it can mean a thousand different things. And a word that means everything means, in practice, nothing.

This is not hairsplitting. Vague concepts have real consequences. For if your brain associates meditation with everything from knitting to fantasy journeys, it becomes impossible to understand exactly what you are supposed to do and why. You think: “I do something similar, so I suppose I am doing the same thing.” And then you are stuck in your own inner hamster wheel, perhaps for years, without knowing it. Not because you are stupid, but because the concepts you steer by are foggy.

That is why the first step on any serious journey of inner development is to be precise: What am I doing? What do I call it? What is the goal? The clearer you are on this, the faster and safer the road.

Meditation is a state, not an action

Meditation is not something you do. Meditation is a state.

You cannot “do” meditation, any more than you can “do” sleep. You can lie down, turn off the light, calm the body, and prepare the ground, but sleep itself is a state you slide into. It is the same with meditation. Meditation is a state of deep, silent unity with what is: a state in which the noise of thought has settled, in which you are separated from your habitual churning of thoughts, and in which you are in contact with something far greater than yourself.

What you can do, on the other hand, is a meditation process: a concrete, learnable method that gradually leads you into this state.

You cannot “do” meditation, any more than you can “do” sleep. You can lie down, turn off the light, calm the body, and prepare the ground, but sleep itself is a state you slide into.

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Everything else rests on this distinction. Strictly speaking, “I meditate” does not exist. What exists is: “I carry out a meditation process in order to find the way into the state of meditation.” And the moment you understand the distinction, something happens to your whole attitude:

You stop judging every sitting by whether it “felt good.” The process is training, and training is heavy some days and light on others, without that saying anything about its value.

You stop believing that you are “not getting it” just because thoughts appear. Thoughts that come are not a sign that the process is failing. They are the very material of the training.

And you stop confusing pleasant moments of relaxation with the goal. The goal is a state that very few people have ever tasted, and it is worth every single minute of the road there.

What meditation is not

Since the word is so diluted, we must also be clear about what we are not talking about here. None of the following is wrong or worthless. It is simply something else.

Meditation is not relaxation. Sitting quietly and lowering your shoulders is healthy, and calm is a prerequisite for the process. But relaxation is not the goal. It is the starting line. If you use an app to feel less stressed, you are practicing a relaxation technique. Fine and useful, but it is something other than what we are talking about here.

Meditation is not guided inner journeys. Fantasy journeys, visualizations, and dream journeys can be valuable tools for their purposes. But they fill the mind with images and content. The meditation process goes in the opposite direction: toward less content, toward the stillness behind the content.

Meditation is not flow. Knitting, running, painting, or playing an instrument can bring you into a lovely flow where time disappears. But in flow, attention is absorbed in an activity. In meditation, attention is free of any activity.

Meditation is not thinking about something nice. Contemplating gratitude or love is valuable, but it is still thinking, only with more pleasant content.

And most important of all: meditation is not the absence of thoughts. This is perhaps the most widespread misunderstanding of all, and it creates great frustration. Many sit and fight to “empty the head,” and give up because the thoughts always come back. But the goal is not an empty head. The goal is something far more exciting: a change in who you experience yourself to be while the thoughts are going on.

Who is it, really, that is supposed to meditate?

To understand why you carry out a meditation process, you must first ask a strange question: Who is it that is sitting there with closed eyes?

Brain researchers have searched for the answer for years. They have looked for the control room, the boss, the one who is really you. And they found nothing. Michael Gazzaniga, one of the pioneers of modern brain research, sums it up in his book Who’s in Charge? from 2011: There is no boss in the brain. It is a swarm of local processes working side by side, with no one at the top. What remains when the boss is gone can best be described as an open space in which thoughts, feelings, and sensory impressions arise and vanish again. Like clouds drifting past. They come, they change shape, they are gone. And no one is at the helm.

And then the question arises: Who is it that is watching this dance?

The great wisdom traditions, the yogic tradition, Zen, and the Indian Upanishads, have explored this question for thousands of years, and they all point in the same direction. In you there are two completely different “instances,” and the whole path of meditation is about learning to tell them apart.

The inner commentator. The voice in your head that always has something to say. It describes, judges, criticizes, praises, worries, and plans in a steady stream from morning to night. In Buddhism it has an apt name, the monkey mind: a monkey leaping from branch to branch, from thought to thought, without pause. The commentator is shaped by your childhood, your culture, your fears, and your desires. It is part of what we may call your construct: the intellect, the ego, the identity, and all your stored patterns. Useful, necessary, and in constant change.

The observer. Something else entirely. The observer does not think, does not analyze, does not react. It sees your thoughts, sees your feelings, sees the commentator carrying on with its business, and never intervenes. It is always silent. And it is always the same: The one who noticed the world when you were five years old is the same one reading these words now. Unchanged, undamaged, and untouched by everything you have experienced.

In Hinduism the observer has a name you may have heard: Atman, the eternal self, the silent witness. And the same tradition, especially the philosophical school of Advaita Vedanta, goes one step further: This silent awareness in you is not private. It is the same universal consciousness that looks through all eyes, in all beings. This all-encompassing consciousness is called Brahman. A classic image: Atman is the wave, Brahman is the ocean. The wave believes it is something of its own, but it has never been anything but water.

The Norse tradition pointed to this too. In the creation story, Odin, Vili, and Vé blow the breath of the gods, Önd, into Ask and Embla, the first human beings: the divine spark in you, that which connects you with the origin. Different cultures, different images, the same discovery. If you want to go deeper into this, read the article “Who Are You If You Are Not Your Thoughts?”, Part 10 of this series.

And here lies the answer to why we do this at all.

Why do we really meditate?

We do not meditate to relax. We do not meditate to get better at work, sleep better, or lower our pulse, even though all of this tends to come as a bonus. Those are side effects, not the goal.

We carry out a meditation process for one single reason:

To experience, not think, but experience, that you are not your thoughts. That you are not your feelings. That you are not the inner commentator. And to discover, from the inside, who you really are: the silent observer. Atman.

Experience, not understand. You can read the sentence “you are not your thoughts” in one second and nod. Many do. They understand it intellectually, say “yes, yes, that is probably how it is,” and nothing in their lives changes. For intellectual understanding of this is worth astonishingly little. It is like reading about the taste of strawberries: You can memorize every description in the world, but until the berry is on your tongue, you know nothing.

The first time you truly experience this distance between yourself and your own churning of thoughts, it is one of the most life-altering moments a person can have.

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The meditation process is how you get the berry on your tongue. It is the practical, systematic road to the day when you sit there and suddenly experience, unmistakably and in your body: The thoughts are going on over there, and I am here. I see them. I am not thinking them. I am not them.

The first time you truly experience this distance between yourself and your own churning of thoughts, it is one of the most life-altering moments a person can have. Not because it is dramatic on the outside. Often it is quite quiet. But because it turns your very self-understanding upside down: What you have believed all your life to be you turns out to be something you can observe from the outside. And the one who observes turns out to be something far calmer, far greater, and far more unshakable than you ever suspected.

What this experience does to a human being

The consequences of this one experience reach into every part of life, and they are anything but theory.

Think of a person struggling with anxiety. As long as they identify with it, “I am anxious, that is how I am,” the anxiety has full power. But the day this person experiences that they can observe it, that the anxiety is something happening in the system and not something they are, something fundamental has changed. The unease can still come, but it no longer owns you. The same applies to low moods, depression, and illness: You are not your depression, and you are not your illness. The experience opens a door that no amount of well-meant advice has managed to open.

Or think of something more everyday: a hurt feeling after a snide comment. For the one who lives fully identified with their thoughts and feelings, such a comment can ruin an entire week. For the one who has trained the observer’s perspective, it is different: The reaction comes, it is registered, it is allowed to pass, like a gust of wind that brushes by and is gone. You can still speak up and set boundaries, but you do it from calm, not from hurt.

One thing, however, does not happen: Life does not become flat. This is a common worry, and it is groundless. You do not stop feeling. On the contrary: When you are no longer afraid of your feelings, because you know they cannot define you, you can experience them more directly than before. Joy becomes purer. Grief is allowed to be grief and to finish. You live fully and completely, with the whole register of feelings, but from a place of inner stability that does not waver with every wave.

This is what we train toward. Not a life without storms, but a life in which you experience the still eye of the storm.

Before you sit down and start the process itself, three prerequisites must be in place. If you skip them, the road becomes needlessly heavy.

Prerequisite 1: Turn down the noise

The first is brutally simple and unpopular: You must reduce the amount of noise you fill your mind with.

Modern human beings pour chaos into their heads from morning to night. News, social media, short video clips, notifications, opinions, drama. The short video clips are the worst: When we watch such clips over and over, day after day, the brain is trained to shift attention at an ever faster pace, and the inner commentator is whipped into constant activity. It was not without reason that the Oxford dictionaries named “brain rot” the word of the year in 2024.

Trying a meditation process on top of this is like trying to hear a whispering voice at a rock concert. It is not impossible, but why make it so hard for yourself?

You do not need to become a hermit. But be honest with yourself: How much of what you spend time on every day gives you anything at all? Cut what is only noise. Set fixed time windows for news and social media. Give your mind fewer balls to juggle. The quieter the background noise in your head, the easier everything that follows becomes.

Prerequisite 2: Calm in the body

Mind and body are not two separate systems. A restless body gives a restless mind, and an agitated nervous system makes stillness almost inaccessible.

That is why it pays to prepare the body every time you are going to sit down, and to take care of it in general. Some simple and effective methods:

Breathe. A few minutes of calm, deep breaths down into the belly calm the nervous system noticeably. Nothing advanced: Breathe in slowly, breathe out even more slowly, and let the shoulders sink.

Stretch. Calm, long stretches where you hold each position for one to two minutes, as in yin yoga, bring the body into rest mode. A few simple positions are enough.

Nature. Spending a little time in nature beforehand, a short walk in the forest, a few minutes under a tree, is one of the most effective things there is. Nature calms your nervous system all by itself. More on why is in the article “Skogsbad: naturens medisin mot stress, angst og utbrenthet” (Forest bathing: nature’s medicine against stress, anxiety, and burnout) on wanvig.no, in Norwegian.

In life in general: sleep, food that does not stress the body, movement, and rest. The calmer the body and the nervous system, the easier it becomes to go deep, and to stay there.

One more piece of advice: Give yourself plenty of time. Do not squeeze the stillness in between two appointments with one eye on the clock. An attitude of “I have all day,” even when you only have half an hour, does more for the depth of the process than most techniques.

Prerequisite 3: Train your focus

The third prerequisite is the most underrated, and the one modern people struggle with most: the ability to hold attention on one thing over time.

Try it yourself: How long can you keep your attention gathered on one single thing before it runs off? For many, the answer is a few seconds. And that is not because we have become more stupid, but because we have been drilled into it. Social media and news feeds train us, hour after hour, year after year, to shift focus constantly. Reading a whole book can feel like a marathon. Sitting through a conversation without feeling the pull toward the phone has become a rarity.

The meditation process demands the exact opposite: an attention that can rest on one point, for a long time. This ability is like a muscle, and it can be trained. The simplest exercise requires nothing more than a stone:

Exercise: the stone

1. Find a small stone, a crystal, or another simple object. Place it on a neutral surface in front of you, preferably one color and without pattern.
2. Sit well. Move all your attention to the stone. Just look at it. The shape, the surface, the colors. Nothing else exists.
3. Every time a thought appears and pulls your attention away, and it will happen again and again, you register it kindly and bring your attention back to the stone.
4. Start with five minutes daily. Increase gradually.

You can just as well use a candle flame or a dot on the wall. The point is not the object. The point is the repetition: attention runs off, you bring it back. Every single return is one repetition for the focus muscle. It is boring and frustrating in the beginning, and that is completely normal. After a few weeks you notice the difference, in the exercise and in your whole life: in conversations, in reading, in work.

With these three prerequisites in place, less noise, a calmer body, a stronger focus, you are ready for the process itself.

The still eye of the storm: the meditation process itself

There are many meditation processes in the world’s traditions: following the breath, resting on a mantra, focusing on the tip of the nose. Many roads lead toward the same state. But for beginners I prefer to teach one particular process, because it is simple, visual, and hits exactly where everything begins: the distinction between you and your thoughts.

It is called the still eye of the storm.

The image is taken from nature: At the center of every hurricane there is an area where everything is still. Around it the winds rage, but in the eye it is windless and clear. It is the same in you. Your thoughts, feelings, and worries are the storm. And in the middle of the storm there is a point of perfect stillness: the observer. The process is about finding this point, taking your place in it, and staying there.

This is how you do it:

Your thoughts, feelings, and worries are the storm. And in the middle of the storm there is a point of perfect stillness: the observer.

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1. Sit well. Find a place where you can be undisturbed. Sit upright, but without strain, on a chair or on the floor. Close your eyes.

2. Land in the body. Move your attention down into the belly. Breathe deeply and calmly in and out a few times. Feel the shoulders sinking and the body letting go. Take the time you need.

3. Picture the storm. Picture yourself standing in the middle of a very strong storm. Around you, in a wide circle, the clouds rotate: dark, gray, in constant motion. These clouds are your thoughts, your feelings, your opinions, everything that usually buzzes. The image is only a scaffold: It is there to help you place your attention, not to entertain it.

4. Take your place in the still eye. In the middle of the storm, where you stand, it is completely still. Not a breath of wind. This is the still eye of the storm. Let your attention rest here, in the stillness, and nothing else.

5. Let the storm rage without you. The clouds keep rotating out there. Thoughts are going to appear, that is as certain as anything. The art is this: You can notice the storm without moving into it. Like the seagulls gliding past behind a boat, or the landscape passing outside the train window while you read: It is there, it moves, and you remain seated.

6. When you get caught, and you often will in the beginning: let go and return. Suddenly you discover that you are in the middle of a train of thought. “How long have I been sitting now? Did I remember to answer that message?” Then your attention is inside the storm. No crisis. Do not scold yourself. Say a quiet thank you to the thought, send it on with the storm, and move your attention home to the stillness in the eye. You are going to do this a hundred times. Every single time is a successful repetition, not a mistake.

7. Sink deeper. As you rest in the still eye, let yourself sink. Deeper into the stillness, deeper into the calm, layer by layer. Do not chase anything, do not look for anything. Just let yourself sink, like a stone sinking calmly through still water.

That is the whole process. 15 to 30 minutes a day is a good start. The simplicity may tempt you to think this is too little to work. Do not be fooled: In this simple form lies everything. Every time you distinguish between the storm and the eye, you train the most important thing a human being can train: the distinction between the contents of consciousness and consciousness itself.

What happens when you begin: the resistance and the meeting with yourself

The beginning is often uncomfortable. Not always, but often. And that is not a sign that you are doing something wrong. It is a sign that you are doing something right.

The first thing most people meet is frustration. The thoughts keep coming, attention runs off again and again, and the commentator has opinions about all of it: “I am not getting this. How long am I supposed to sit like this? Others surely manage this better.” All of this is normal, and all of this is the training itself. Bringing the attention back is not interrupting the process. It is the process.

The second thing many meet, a little further in, is themselves. When the noise begins to settle, things come to the surface. Feelings you have kept at a distance. Memories you have pushed down. Unease you did not know you were carrying. For some, even fear comes: fear of the stillness, fear of what lies there in the quiet.

If this happens to you, it helps to know three things. First: It is normal. What you have avoided feeling has been waiting for a safe space, and now you have made one. Second: It is not dangerous. What comes up is stored energy in motion, and what it wants is to pass. Let it pass: Do not fight it, do not grab hold of it, do not analyze it to death. See it as a cloud moving across the sky: It is there, and then it is gone. And afterward you are a little lighter. Third: If what comes up is large and heavy, old traumas for example, do not stand alone with it. It is both wise and brave to seek support from an experienced guide or therapist. Asking for help is wisdom, not weakness.

And through it all: Be kind to yourself. This road takes time, not because it is technically difficult, but because the patterns that are to loosen have been built up over a whole life. They do not let go in a night. Periods of resistance, doubt, and heavy days are part of it, and they do not mean that the road is not for you. On the contrary: Resistance usually means that something has begun to move.

The traps along the way

Some dead ends are so common that it pays to know them in advance. Then you recognize them when they appear.

Trap 1: chasing the stillness

After a while you begin to taste the stillness. Wonderful moments without thoughts. And then the almost inevitable happens: You begin to chase them. “Oh, now it is still! No, now it is gone. Now I was almost there. Maybe if I breathe a little differently…”

The stillness has then become a new object for the commentator to comment on. The chase for stillness is itself a thought, a new disturbance, the monkey mind dressed up as a monk. It is the same force as always, only in a new costume.

The solution is to understand what we are really practicing toward. We are not chasing the absence of thoughts. We are practicing the distance to them. You can have thoughts buzzing in the background like a distant radio, and still rest fully and completely in the observer. It is the distance that changes everything.

Trap 2: making camp and believing you have arrived

This is one of the most common misunderstandings in the modern spiritual scene:

Stillness is not the goal. Stillness is the gateway.

Many have meditated for years, some for decades, and found the stillness. A room without thoughts. A pause in the noise. Peace, calm, openness. And then they believe that this is it. That they have arrived. That the stillness is the top of the mountain.

But they are not at the top. They are at the foot of the mountain. They have found a comfortable spot along the way and made camp there. One could call it a false awakening: mistaking a rest stop for the destination. Stillness is a prerequisite, the very first step. What it opens onto, the experience of the observer, of Atman, and finally of universal consciousness itself, lies beyond it. That is why it is so important to be precise with the concepts from the start, so that you do not end up making camp in the wrong place and believing the journey is over.

Trap 3: the ego playing spiritual

And then the most cunning trap of all. As you get better at holding calm and presence, your ego becomes more creative. It begins to produce “spiritual experiences”: beautiful phenomena of light, dramatic inner images, intense encounters with figures, feelings of being chosen. And then it is easy to believe that now it is happening: Now I have seen the light, this is the great awakening.

Most often it is only the ego playing. Your mind is a brilliant storyteller, and when it notices that you are seeking depth, it serves you depth theater. The rule is simple, if a little deflating: The more spectacular and entertaining something appears, the more likely it is to be a product of the mind. The real experience of the observer is as a rule the opposite of fireworks: quiet, simple, clear, deep. Nothing to tell about afterward, and yet it changes everything.

So when the inner cinema shows come: nod kindly to them, let them pass with the storm, and return to the stillness. That is the training that builds the real muscle.

Trap 4: expectation

Finally, a trap that lies beneath all the others: sitting down with an expectation. “Today I am going to have a deep experience. Today it is going to happen.” Perhaps you have heard about something someone else experienced, and now you want the same.

But expectation is seeking, and seeking always comes from the construct, from the part of you that wants to have, achieve, and collect. The moment you sit there waiting for a result, you have placed yourself in a dead end. For what you are waiting for cannot be grasped. It can only be met, and it meets you only when you have let go of chasing it.

That is why the basic attitude of the meditation process is this: Surrender fully and completely to what is, without an agenda. Every moment in the stillness is complete in itself, whatever it contains.

You are not seeking. You are uncovering.

We are trained to think that development means acquiring what we lack. More knowledge, more skills, and new experiences. And that is how most people think about meditation too: I am going to find something, achieve something, arrive at something.

But what you are looking for here, you do not lack. The observer is not something you are going to build up or acquire. It is already there, fully finished, and has been the whole time. It was there when you were five years old. It is there now, while you read. The only thing that has happened is that it has been drowned out: buried under layer upon layer of thoughts, imprints, noise, and stories.

That is why the right description of this road is not seeking, but uncovering. You remove, layer by layer, what covers it, and what comes into view is something that has always been there. You are, in your deepest nature, already whole. Already complete. The meditation process adds nothing new. It clears away what casts the shadow.

That is a completely different way of sitting down. Not “now I am going to achieve something,” but “now I let what has always been there come into view.” It takes away the pressure, and paradoxically, that is exactly when it begins to happen.

You are, in your deepest nature, already whole. Already complete. The meditation process adds nothing new. It clears away what casts the shadow.

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The Sahara and the grain of sand

One last image shows where this road leads.

Picture an endless desert. A Sahara without borders: still, timeless expanses of sand without beginning or end. This Sahara is an image of what you most deeply are: the boundless, silent awareness, that which was there before the story about you began. Your Sahara is your own entrance to what the traditions call Brahman.

And now picture one single grain of sand in this desert. The grain of sand is this life: this body, this name, this everyday life with work and family, joys and struggles. One tiny grain in an endless expanse.

Most people live their whole lives with both feet in the grain of sand, convinced that the grain of sand is all there is. The path of meditation is not about leaving it. Your life is precious, and it is in the grain of sand that you can love, laugh, and taste strawberries. The path is about arriving at a place where you stand with one foot in your Sahara and one foot in the grain of sand: with your roots in the infinite, and at the same time fully present in the small life.

And where does it show that you have arrived there? Not on the meditation cushion. The real proof is everyday life: the encounter with the colleague who irritates you, the conversation with the child who will not cooperate, the day when everything goes wrong at once. When you notice that these situations no longer sweep you along in the same way, that you are a little more present with the people you love, that you sleep a little better and carry a little more calm: then the training is working. Not as a new and improved version of yourself, but as a gradual uncovering of who you have always been, beneath all the layers.

After a period of steady practice, something beautiful also happens: the state begins to become available in the middle of life. You no longer always need to sit down and carry out a formal process. In the kitchen, on the train, in the middle of a conversation: Suddenly the distance is there, the calm is there, the still eye is there. The body has learned the way, and it finds it by itself.

How to start today

The whole road, gathered in six points you can begin with today:

1. Cut the noise. Reduce news, social media, and short video clips. Give your mind calmer ground conditions.
2. Calm the body. Breathing, stretching, nature, sleep. Spend a few minutes landing before you sit down.
3. Train your focus. Five minutes a day with the stone, the candle flame, or the dot on the wall.
4. Do the meditation process. The still eye of the storm, 15 to 30 minutes a day. Every return to the stillness is a repetition, never a mistake.
5. Recognize the traps. Do not chase the stillness, do not make camp in it, do not let yourself be dazzled by inner fireworks, and leave your expectations at the door.
6. Be patient and kind to yourself. Count on months, not days. And when the first deep experiences come, it may be wise to find an experienced guide who can help you onward in a safe way.

In the end

It is impossible to meditate. But it is fully possible, for every single human being, to carry out a meditation process: to turn down the noise, calm the body, train the focus, and day by day find the way into the still eye of the storm. Not to relax. Not as a hobby. But to one day experience what changes everything: that you are not your thoughts, not your feelings, not the voice in your head. That in you there is a silent observer who has never been damaged, has never been gone, and has never been separate from anything at all.

This is not for a chosen few. It requires no special abilities, no special background, and no belief. It requires an honest will, a little time every day, and enough patience to let the process take its time.

The stillness you are going to find is not far away. It is closer to you than your own breath. It has waited for you your whole life, in the middle of the storm, completely still.

Sit down today. Close your eyes. And begin to uncover what you have always been.

The stillness you are going to find is not far away. It is closer to you than your own breath. It has waited for you your whole life, in the middle of the storm, completely still.

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Do you want to go deeper? In the podcast “The Journey to Self-Realization” (in Norwegian), episode 38, “Atman, Brahman, meditasjonsprosess” (Atman, Brahman, the meditation process), Amina and I walk through this whole process in conversation. On my blog you will find more articles on the path to Unity. See also “Who Are You If You Are Not Your Thoughts?” (Part 10).

If you want to walk the path yourself, it begins at the Yggdrasil Shamanic School with our free online course on primordial shamanism: Nature’s Path to Freedom and Self-Realization – Shamanism, Rituals, and Rune Magic – Twilight Between Two Worlds. No path could begin more simply. How far it reaches is up to you.