1.  Increasing Concentration 

Concentration is the ability to focus on whatever you want to, moment by moment. Being able to stay present without spaciness, distraction, anxiety, boredom or being lost in thought is an incredibly useful life skill, both for getting things done and being able to relax into appreciation of each moment.

2.  Increasing Clarity

Clarity means knowing what is happening in your own heart and mind in each moment, including your “subconscious” mind (making it more conscious). This means discerning the difference between thoughts and emotional feelings, and clearly differentiating what you see and hear in the world from the thoughts, both visual and verbal, in your mind.

Did you ever say or do something dumb or harmful and then wonder why you did it? Or hear something differently than what someone said. The inevitable distortions in our senses, and communication, come from a lack of clarity about what we actually heard another person say vs. what the voice in our head told us they said. Past experience, conditioning, projection, expectations and fear distort what we see, hear and feel. This lack of clarity causes arguments, conflicts, delusion, stress, confusion, depression, alienation, etc. With more clarity comes a much deeper knowing of ourselves, others, and the world through direct and undistorted experience.

3.  Increased Equanimity

Equanimity is not resisting, clinging to, trying to change or repress our experience in each moment, but instead radically loving and allowing each moment’s experience to be fully and exactly what it is. This doesn’t mean we cannot or should not try to change conditions, but we can’t do that by resisting our experience. We need to allow ourselves to fully experience how things actually are, with equanimity, and then if appropriate work to change what is causing that experience in the world. As conditions are not always pleasant, or changeable, building our capacity for equanimity is essential for increasing unconditional happiness and well-being.

4. Increased Ease, Love and Well Being

In moments of presence and equanimity, regardless of what is happening, we contact an underlying sense of ease, well-being, love, kindness, peace, safety, connection, and compassion. Contacting these positive states is a great reason to meditate, and the more we meditate the more they underly our experience of day-to-day life.

4. Happiness

Thomas Jefferson posited “the pursuit of happiness” as the central purpose of life. The Buddha seems to have agreed, though their understandings of “pursuit” and “happiness” are quite different. Jefferson would probably describe this as the freedom to pursue pleasant and pleasurable experiences while avoiding unpleasant and painful ones. 

The Buddha taught that with life’s unavoidable pains, losses, diseases, and eventually old age and death, staking happiness on conditions inevitably leads to suffering. Given this understanding, the only reliable and absolute path to happiness is to learn to see past the craving for pleasant experiences and resistance to unpleasant ones, and instead be fully with how things are in each moment (equanimity). This does not mean pleasant experience is to be avoided, only that we are fully with every experience exactly as it is.

Seeing through our automatic and deep attachment to what is pleasant and resistance to what is unpleasant is a difficult undertaking, but it yields unconditional happiness. You can still enjoy pleasure without being attached to it, making it even more fulfilling, and while the unpleasant is still painful, without resistance to it there is no added stress or suffering. This is a counterintuitive and revolutionary insight, and one of the reasons meditation works.

5. A Better Life

The goal of our practice is not to be a great meditator, the goal is to have a better life. The path doesn’t end with a better life, the path is a better life. Year to year, things get better. We become more relaxed, less reactive, more loving and accepting, less driven, more present, softer and stronger, and less and less stressed by life and the world.

6. Spiritual Awakening

What many of us most deeply yearn for, even though the ego self that wants it is not going to get it, is awakening. No one wakes up, no one realizes anything; we wake up out of that self, into our true nature, non-separation, not-self, no-self, or whatever you want to call it. Words fail here. Even though this is nothing like anything expected, it is worth whatever it takes. As Rupert Spira says so simply: “The nature of our being is peace and happiness, and we share our being with everyone and everything.”