Renowned meditation teacher Sharon Salzberg once said, "We don't meditate to get better at meditating. We meditate to get better at life."

To be honest, I couldn't say it better.

I didn't understand this early on. My first experience with meditation was a silent retreat in Thailand I decided to attend because I thought doing so would get me some street cred once I returned to the USA. I'd climb the mountain, hang with the monks, find enlightenment, go home with the big answers, levitate above everyone and get the respect I deserved for doing something big and important and cool.

Well, that never happened. The only thing that went as planned was me going home. The rest was just gobbledygook I'd cooked up to convince myself to go and then once I went, to bolster my resolve to stay while I struggled to finish the most difficult thing I'd ever tried: three weeks of silent meditation.

But by the end of that first retreat, I did have a partial answer to the question, "Why?"

Why meditate? Why sit in silence, staring at our own experience like it's a fish tank?

Well for one, to simply make sense of the fish.

The mind is an interesting thing, and a lot of its activity goes unnoticed. One need only spend a few moments trying to sit still and focus in silence to experience how quickly it can jump the rails.

"Why the hell am I doing this?" says doubt.

"This is boring," says judgement.

"I'd rather be hitting myself with a hammer," says the wanting mind.

And on and on and on. We heap judgement and opinion onto almost everything: traffic, the weather, our bosses, our sports teams, our partners, our friends, our family. We like it or don't like it, and concoct all manner of reasons to justify our stance. Maybe I'm wrong, but I believe we do this partially because we like being right about things, if only in our heads.

Anyway, most of this we do mindlessly. It just happens. We're living it, not observing it. We're experiencing it, not understanding it.

An analogy I've adopted from other teachers and that I like to use is this: imagine the mind as a river. From the moment we wake up to the moment we fall asleep, we're caught up in a near-constant stream of thought. Most of it, if we pay attention, is involuntary. And a lot of it leads to unnecessary suffering and anguish. Did you consciously decide while showering this morning that then was perfect time to relitigate why you didn't owe your old college roommate that fifty bucks for storing your lawnmower in his garage that one winter? No, you didn't. That was your mind taking you downstream. How many red lights did you run while driving to work today? Ever have that thought? Again, you were caught up in the river, dragged along, lost in it. We're never sure when we get in the river. We're not sure where it's taking us. And most of the time we're not even aware that we're in it to begin with.

Meditation teaches us how to step out of the river. It teaches us how to then stand on the bank to just watch the river flow by. To observe it quietly, without judging it or reacting to it.

On the bank, we find peace.

The bank is why we meditate.

Because from the bank, we can see everything.

We see thoughts arise. We see the emotions that come with them. We see our judgements and reactions and preferences. We see our physical and emotional suffering. We see ourselves clinging to joy and rejecting displeasure, knowing both will inevitably end. We see the constructed image of ourselves we imagine to be permanent: all of our likes and dislikes and opinions and wants and needs and all of our attachments to them.

We see the river.

So, what happens then, when we see? Because it's not just what we see that's important, it's what we do with the seeing.

Allow me to illustrate using a mixed-emotional state of being that I'm quite familiar with: loneliness.

I experienced it first and a lot as a kid. In short, because my father sheltered and controlled me, and because he was emotionally distant and left no space in the house for self-exploration or mistake making, I grew up with loneliness buried deep in me. As I got older, this became a problem. I would do nearly anything for approval from anyone and I grew anxious and fearful at the thought of abandonment. I simply could not be alone for any amount of time. Consequently, I lost myself. I let a lot of people into my world who didn't deserve to be there and I behaved recklessly for many years. I was acting, in part, out of loneliness and the fear of it. I was acting to abate and avoid that feeling, because I'd not learned how to manage it or regulate it.

As I have learned to sit with myself, I have learned to sit with loneliness. I have learned to accept its presence. I see its connection to my memories in the past and my fears in the future. I have learned to lean into it, to let it exist, to explore it. It arrives in my stomach, where I also experience fear and worry, and in my heart, where I experience sadness, anger and joy. I am not the stranger to these spaces or feelings that I once was. And as I have leaned into loneliness, I have watched it dissipate. I have watched it lose its teeth. It is no longer a barking dog in the kitchen, but a puppy, yapping in the street. It's still there, but it's lost its bite. I see it. I know it's impermanent and simply a conditioned mental state. I allow it to be, to come and go as it pleases. I do nothing to reject it or cling to it. As I have simply observed it, it has lost its power over me. This is what we learn to do with the seeing: to recognize the arrival of loneliness, or any emotional state, and allow it to exist, like an itch that doesn't need scratching. The loneliness comes and goes, yet we remain at peace.

"How's the mind today?"

"Ah, loneliness is here. Welcome, old friend."

In this way, we make sense of the fish, and from the bank we watch the river as it flows on by. On the bank, we are at peace.