At what point does meditating turn into "listening to music" or "napping"?

We're all supposed to meditate these days.

The nebulous "they," an amalgamation of our doctors, therapists, HR and management consultants, yoga teachers, business leaders, and other trusted and idolized gurus suspected to be holders of some truth that we could all access if we just behaved a bit more like them, tell us: You must meditate. Meditation is the key to physical and mental health. Meditation is the common factor among successful people. Meditation is both the question and the answer.

Okay . . . sure.

Hop aboard, they say, embark on this life-changing meditation journey. Get ready to be hit by the truth and knowledge bombs this ancient art is about to throw your way. Get ready to absorb the learnings of self-actualization, escape the trappings of the corporeal world, and peek into the ethereal. Get ready to join the ranks of our enlightened idols like Gandhi, Steve Jobs, Lebron James, Oprah, Joe Rogan . . . if you want to be someone, you gotta start meditating.

What even is it we're doing when we meditate? You need to be alert enough that you don't fall asleep, but absent-minded enough that your meditation practice becomes more than just listening to music. Instructions and descriptions from senior meditators ring of the surf lesson in Forgetting Sarah Marshall ("You're doing too much. Do less."). Meditation is training your mind to focus, yet also letting it wander where it will. It's awareness of the world outside of us but recognition that the whole universe is inside of us, and we are inside of it. It's conscious unconsciousness. Effortless effort. Nothing and everything.

What are we even talking about anymore?

As tempting as it is to mock and satirize the meditation-touters for their paradoxical instructions and descriptions, or their oxymoronic assurances that by doing nothing you accomplish everything, the annoying truth is that they're right. Neither the method nor the purpose of meditation can be effectively verbalized, at least not in any logical sense, due to its contradictory essence: by doing nothing, we achieve something. This paradox is as true in the world of meditation as 2 + 2 = 4 is in the world of mathematics. As eye-roll inducing as a washed-up stoner babbling about the meaning of life, most descriptions of meditation are caricatures of themselves.

And yet, so many of us still want to meditate. Barring any sort of emperor’s-new-clothes complex, this many people, many of whom are our most admired cultural heroes, can’t be wrong, right?

But meditating is kind of hard. And boring. And how do you even know if you're doing it right? And when do you start seeing these results "they" promised? So many of us abandon the lofty goal of meditation. We "can’t" meditate, we say. Our minds are too busy, our bodies to fidgety, we start to feel silly. Just thinking about meditating must be good enough though, right? No one is checking our meditation homework anyway. Even if "they" were, well that'd be about the easiest homework to fake in the history of cheating students.

Everyone says we should meditate. But we're all on our honor.

If you’re serious about meditating though and are willing to put in the time, you’ll eventually find a routine that works for you. But sometimes it can help to be pointed in one direction or another, so below is the silly little playlist I use to meditate.

It's not a typo. It's the same song, Forgotten Hill by Chihei Hatakeyama, repeated four times in a row, followed by a silent track by Atlas Fret, aptly titled (silent track). The purpose of the silent track is purely practical: it prevents any lingering songs in your queue from rudely interrupting your meditative state, should you achieve it. I play Forgotten Hill four times in a row also for a practical reason, which is that it sets me up for a sixteen-minute meditation, an amount of time I find works for me. Adjust up or down as needed.

Practicality aside, Forgotten Hill is especially well-suited for meditation. It has a base layer that sounds like it came from the under-water level of a video game, and a background that could be used in any Hollywood depiction of heaven, all wispy clouds and pink-and-yellow sunlight. It mimics the paradoxical nature of meditation itself: both watery and airy at the same time. It begins with a subtle crescendo and ends with a mirror-image as the song fades out, allowing the song to loop seamlessly back into its beginning like an uroboros eating it's own tail.

The truth is it doesn’t matter what you listen to or don’t listen to as you meditate. Some days a playlist will help and some days it won’t. Exactly what it is or is not "helping," we may never be able to define. You can look at thousands of pages of philosophy or hundreds of clinical trials on the benefits of meditation, but until you sit down and do the work yourself, you’ll never know exactly what meditating is.