Boredom & Meditation: Enjoying the fine art of repetition
Meditation isn’t complicated. It’s about sitting, breathing, and feeling.
It’s simple and repetitive . . . by design.
Here’s why: when the brain is presented with a repetitive pattern, in short order it habituates. It stops registering the input and focuses elsewhere.
In a groundbreaking study from the 1960s, researchers compared the brain waves of non-meditators and experienced meditators when presented with a repetitive sound.
After just a few beeps, non-meditators got bored and their attention wandered.
In scientific lingo — they habituated. This was reflected in their brain wave patterns.
- But, the meditators didn’t habituate.
- The meditators didn’t become bored.
They remained present and aware, appreciating the unique arising and passing away of what — to the non- meditators — appeared repetitive. Each repetition of the beep registered as a fresh, unprecedented event.
It’s not that the meditators forgot what had just happened.
They knew that the beeping pattern was repeating but they didn’t experience the repetition as boring. They didn’t habituate. And thus, their attention didn’t wander off into day dreams, associations, thoughts, or memories.
They were able to meet their experience from a level of awareness that is awake, present, and non-bored.
There is a consciousness within you that is inherently awake.
Meditation practice reconnects you with this consciousness. And it does this by being boring.
The boredom of the meditation method trains your capacity to focus attention and to sustain that focus. When you begin practice, this capacity is weak. One expression of this weakness is that the mind gets easily bored.
Attention is like a muscle that consistent meditation practice strengthens.
Each time you bring attention back to the object of meditation — without effort or strain — you build that muscle. As your attentional muscle strengthens — that awake awareness emerges.
You don’t create this awakeness.
It’s already within you. What happens, through practice, is that you develop your capacity to abide in and embody it. You become more and more acclimated to this deeper level; more capable of functioning from that deeper level for longer and longer periods of time.
So, the repetitive nature of the practice has a purpose.
As you do the practice, that purpose is fulfilled. You break out of the trance of habituation and instead of restlessly wondering “Now what?” you discover the ever-new, ever- wondrous nature of life as it arises in this moment.
