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Meditation Is Not An Aspirin.
We live in a culture of vitamins vs aspirin. And aspirin is winning. Aspirin is quick, easy, it solves an immediate, urgent problem and has an (almost) immediate effect. Aspirin is great.
Vitamins are a little different. Vitamins don’t do anything immediately. The only immediate benefit that exists even in theory, is the gentle buzz of self-satisfaction that one might get from taking care of their long-term health. Vitamins must be taken regularly, not simply as needed, and the rewards for taking them lie at some theoretical point in the future when we might have been suffering from scurvy but we’re not.
When it comes to our mental health, what we want is an aspirin. We want something quick, easy and effective which will cure our symptoms and make us feel better. I’m not going to launch into some sanctimonious tirade about how this shouldn’t be the way we think about it. This is a perfectly reasonable way to think about it. Pain, all pain is bad. The only natural thing to want is to end it as quickly as possible.
The problem is, that meditation is increasingly presented as a method for treating mental health issues, and meditation is most definitely not an aspirin. Meditation is a vitamin. You might take a vitamin when you have a headache but you most certainly…
