Meditation has become hipper than vintage clothes and ironic mustaches in recent years, but have you ever wondered why meditate? What’s the point?

Common reasons given for meditation often revolve around the health benefits, mental and physical, calming the mind, reducing stress, sleeping better, reducing stress, etc. Or you might hear of more esoteric reasons, such as heightening your awareness, merging with the Cosmic Consciousness, becoming One with the Universe, or attaining Enlightenment.

Those are all true, but there’s a more practical and mundane reason to meditate: it can bring more fun into our lives. 

Fun? How can meditation bring us more fun? Let’s answer that question by asking another: What is fun? What makes an experience fun? How do you know you’re having fun?

I recently asked this question in a meditation class I taught, and the answers fell along these lines: my heart is full of joy, my whole being feels light, I forget about the world, time flies by, I’m fully absorbed in what I’m doing, in the flow, in the zone.

An experience is fun when it pulls us out of ourselves and brings us fully into the present moment. But experiences always end, and then we’re left chasing after the next bit of fun.

That’s where meditation comes in, meditating pulls us into the present without going through some other experience, allowing us to directly forget about the world and feel our heart filled with joy, to feel lightness and ease permeate every fiber of our being. 

As an added bonus, the more we meditate, the easier it becomes to lose ourselves in other experiences, to have more fun as we go about our daily lives. Because meditation helps quiet the mind, reducing the constant mental chatter that distracts us and prevents us from losing ourselves in the moment. 

We usually think of fun as a quality inherent in an experience, something is fun when it over-rides our internal dialogue, drowns out the babbling that compares our current experience to our expectations of it. Our minds are often telling us what’s wrong with our current circumstances and then chattering on relentlessly: this restaurant is too crowded, this bar is too noisy, Michael is telling that same story again, should I have fish tacos for dinner, how many likes will this photo get, why is Karen such a bitch all the time? 

All this mental activity prevents us from living in the moment, weighs us down, shoves love out of our heart, and instead fills us with dissatisfaction. 

When we meditate, we enjoy a mini-vacation from that incessant blathering of the mind. Instead of living in our heads, we can live completely in our lives.

Personally, I found meditation in a dark time in my life, and it saved me, helped me find meaning in my life, purpose. But even if your life is already pretty good, meditation can help make it better. Meditation can bring more joy, more happiness into everyone’s life. Meditation can bring more Love into our hearts. Watch a video on this topic here.