Meditation Is Not For You

It was the beginning of the pandemic. May 2020. We were driving across the country. 2 kids in the back seat. A crazy hyper German shorthaired pointer in the way back. Staying at Airbnbs along the way.

The pandemic didn’t seem to exist to people in Washington, Idaho, Montana, South Dakota. Then we got to Chicago. Masks everywhere tension thick. We continued on our way from Oregon, relocating back to Pennsylvania.

As we went through the toll booth on the Ohio border, I heard our slightly older Acura MDX make a strange and exasperated grinding sound. I knew it wasn’t good. I knew it wasn’t built to pull a 14-foot trailer full of what was left of our belongings across the Rockies while rolling through a series of expansive states.

The MDX was now validating my fear. And when my wife asked her famous catch phrase, “What is happening?” I took a breath, exhaled, and said, “The car just died.”

My memory is that panic ensued in all seats. We were barely past the toll booth. We had just started the day. It had been the worst of our cross-country Airbnb experiences. Now we were crawling, at best. How could we get to Pennsylvania? How could we even get off the highway? 

“Everyone just take a deep breath.” To my amazement, they did. “Let me just concentrate for a minute.” To my continued amazement, they did. 

For 10 minutes, or perhaps eternity, we slowly crawled with blinkers flashing to the first exit in Ohio at a sweltering 2 mile per hour pace. Everyone was pretty chill. We made it to some sort of parking spot at some kind of rest stop.

Then, everyone first freaked out and then slowly chilled out and laughed as we awaited a tow truck, it’s half Harley rider half angelic driver, the kindness of a tiny Indiana town, and my Clint Eastwood-like father who insisted on driving out to rescue us when that tiny town had no vehicles with a hitch available to rent.

I always thought my meditation practice was about me. And for me. This was when I learned maybe it wasn’t.

That sounds counterintuitive. Meditation is a solo practice. You sit. Probably by yourself. You breathe. You try not to think about work, relationships, that crazy dog, your grocery list. It comes down to you managing your relationship with thinking, feeling, breathing. 

It feels profoundly personal.

But the ancient traditions that gave us meditation weren't particularly interested in personal benefit. They were interested in liberation. And liberation, in both Buddhist and Taoist thought, was never a solo project.

While ancient Hindu meditation/yoga practices that influenced later practices was largely focused on self liberation, Mahayana Buddhism shifted this view. The Bodhisattva vow—the explicit, central commitment of the tradition—is essentially a promise not to check out and walk through the door of liberation until everyone else goes through, first. You’re not practicing for personal peace, a calm mind, or longevity, but for the benefit of all sentient beings. Your clarity becomes available to others. Your sitting benefits the room, the life you walk into next.

Metta practice in Theravada Buddhism works outward by design. This view is like the oxygen mask on airplanes, you put yours on first before helping others. You generate loving-kindness toward yourself first, then toward loved ones, then neutral people, then enemies, then all beings. The practice is literally a radiation outward. You are the butterfly effect, a pebble in the water. Not the destination. 

The Tao Te Ching describes something similar without calling it meditation at all. The cultivated person doesn't try to benefit others. They simply do, through nondoing, by being. Wu wei. Non-action accomplishes everything. Lao Tzu suggests the sage is barely noticed, so present and egoless they are overlooked, yet it is under their presence that all things are accomplished.

Both traditions are saying the same thing—the individual is the vehicle. But the individual is not the point. Benefiting those around you is the point.

Here's where it gets interesting. The traditions share thousands of years of careful observation across millions of practitioners.

Vipassana programs in India and US prisons showed reduced criminal behavior among participants. And changed prison cultures. Staff behavior shifted. Family reunification rates improved. Even people who only observed the practice were affected by it.

Healthcare providers who meditate show measurably better patient outcomes. Not just less burnout, but higher patient satisfaction and diagnostic accuracy. The patient benefits from the practitioner's practice without needing to know about it.

Family systems research documents this too. When one family member reduces their reactivity—through any practice—family system anxiety measurably decreases. Murray Bowen mapped this mechanism decades ago without ever mentioning meditation.

Jon Kabat-Zinn himself has observed it across thousands of MBSR participants. Family members of meditators report calmer households without practicing themselves.

Chronic stress is one of the most well-documented drivers of accelerated aging. When your practice reduces the stress load of everyone around you, that's not philosophy. That's longevity. It’s not different from cooking healthier meals for your whole family/community.

Thich Nhat Hanh called it interbeing. The inside and the outside are not separate. Your practice and the world around you are not separate. When you sit, you are not alone in what changes. When others sit, you benefit.

While many ancient traditions assert that meditation is ultimately for others, modern science is struggling to demonstrate it—not because it isn't true, but because some things resist being quantified by the human mind.

Which evidence base do you trust more for this particular question?

That might be worth meditating on.

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