17 Jan 2026 21 min read

Is Your Meditation Actually Working?

How to know if it is, and why the question still doesn't go away when you do.

I've been meditating daily for over five years, and prior to that on and off since I was a kid.Yet I still ask myself: "Is this really doing anything?"The question shows up far less than it did in the beginning, but it still resurfaces. It tends to come up during particularly busy or stressful periods, or when I've racked up some sleep debt. Usually I notice it right before I choose to sit, or in the middle of a particularly restless session when my thoughts feel like they’re moving through mud and my body won’t settle.Here's what's peculiar: after I’ve meditated, the question almost always evaporates.I’ll finish a meditation, and suddenly this question that had so much charge and nuance before, now seems irrelevant, or even absurd. The obvious answer becomes: “Oh yeah, duh. I know it’s working because life feels so much better when I do it. How did I forget that?”The urgent work email that consumed my attention twenty minutes ago now feels small and less important. My body feels lighter. My thoughts move more freely and precisely through mental space. Everything seems to have a bit more depth and color to it.

It turns out the sky was never falling. In fact, it’s quite beautiful today.
But here's the thing, when I started off meditating, I didn't feel a clear shift like this, not for a while. When I started, the differences were much more subtle, sometimes imperceptible. I'd finish a meditation and think, did anything even happen?Often, people begin meditating because of how the later stages are described. You go in expecting bliss; you get racing thoughts. You prepare for samurai-level focus; you get a numb foot and the overwhelming urge to check your phone.
So you conclude: I'm bad at this. Meditation doesn't work for me.That’s why so many people quit in the first 30 days: they can’t yet tell if it’s making any real difference.What’s become clear to me through working with beginner meditators is that if you can help people have real, felt experiences of deeper meditation earlier, they’re far more likely to stick with it. Not just a nice app session or a chill playlist, but a clear internal “oh—this is different” moment. Once someone has even a few of those experiences and can connect them to how they feel in daily life, the motivation problem changes. You’re no longer asking them to keep showing up on faith alone because they heard that meditation is “good for you”; they’ve tasted the result and now they’re building on something real.
So what is a beginner meditator supposed to do about this? And why does the question still show up years into practice, even when there’s clear, felt evidence that something is changing?

Here’s the frame I want to offer:
It’s difficult to know if your meditation is working due to three blind spots inherent to human perception:

slow, gradual changes in your baseline are hard to notice while they’re happening
your current mood heavily filters how you remember your practice
the deeper you go in a session, the less able you are to evaluate it in the moment

To see through those blind spots, you need three kinds of feedback:

something that helps you stay on track during meditation without constantly checking yourself
something that makes the before-and-after of each session visible
and something that lets you see how your behavior and baseline are changing over months, not minutes

If you stick with meditation consistently, it will change you—and over time that change becomes obvious. But even then, the question “Is this actually working?” never completely disappears. Some traditions even treat the impulse to evaluate progress as an “egoic trap,” but it’s not a question to discourage a meditator from asking, it’s a question that can accelerate your progress when engaged with correctly.To answer it fully, we need to look at what the ancient traditions say about progress, what modern neuroscience can measure, the specific blind spots in our perception that make progress hard to see, and how to build feedback loops so you can answer this question for yourself in a clear, grounded way.

What the Ancient Traditions Understood About Measuring Progress

Long before anyone was putting meditators in MRI machines, the major traditions provided answers to the same question:

How do you know if this is actually working?

They answered it in different ways, but each shared a clear through line.Theravada has the sixteen stages of insight. Tibetan Buddhism has the nine stages of mental training. The Yoga Sutras lay out the eight limbs. Even Zen, despite its reputation for “no goal” and its caution against separating practice and result, still acknowledges clear developmental shifts that happen over time.One of my favorite maps is the Tibetan image of leading a black elephant — the unruly mind — up a winding path while a monkey of distraction keeps pulling it off-course. As practice deepens, the surrounding flames of effort shrink, the elephant grows white and steady, the monkey disappears, and finally the mind follows so reliably that you’re no longer dragging it — you’re riding it.But here's the crucial point all of these systems agree on: the true measure of progress is your behavior in daily life, not your experiences during meditation.

These systems absolutely track the states that arise during meditation as well, but they never use those experiences as the primary yardstick for progress. They look at traits.

Are you less reactive?
Do you snap less and recover faster?
Are you a little kinder, a little more grounded, a little less ruled by fear?

Theravada teachers put it bluntly: if meditation isn’t making you less angry, less greedy, and more patient, that’s when something is off. It doesn’t matter if you see lights or feel bliss while you sit, what matters is whether the way you behave the rest of the day actually changes.

Other traditions hit the same note from different angles. Yogic systems talk about peacefulness that follows you off the mat. Tibetan teachers joke: “If you want to know how your meditation is going, spend a week with your family.” The mind that stays steady in real life, not just in ideal conditions, is the true signal of progress.
So this gives us the first part of an answer:You can know your meditation is working if, over time, you become a different person off the cushion.In modern scientific language, you could say meditation is “working” when it produces trait-level changes — in your reactions, habits, and relationships — not just state-level experiences during a single sit.
That’s powerful, but it’s also slow, coarse, and easy to misread. If you’re practicing alone, juggling a busy life, and perhaps aiming for a promotion rather than enlightenment, “watch your conduct for a few years” is not a satisfying feedback system.
Which is where the modern lens comes in.

How Neuroscience Knows if Meditation is Working

The early contemplatives were basically running long-term behavioral experiments without lab equipment. They watched what happened when people trained attention and compassion for thousands of hours, then documented the patterns they saw.Modern psychology and neuroscience have spent the last few decades putting numbers on those same patterns.With tools like EEG and fMRI, we can now see the biological signatures that match the shifts the traditions described.
Agitated, high-frequency beta quiets into more steady alpha. Theta rises as attention deepens. Brain activity becomes more synchronized as the mind stabilizes.
At the hardware level, the mechanisms are straightforward. Meditation repeatedly engages the neural circuits responsible for attention, emotional regulation, and impulse control. With repetition, those pathways strengthen. Stress-reactivity circuits gradually lose dominance. Gray matter density increases in the prefrontal cortex. Amygdala reactivity tends to drop. HRV often improves. Cortisol levels can decline. Focus stabilizes.Put simply: long-term practice upgrades the neural pathways that support clarity and self-regulation. What begins as a dirt road gradually becomes a six-lane highway.
These are the biological echoes of the behavioral changes the traditions emphasized.Modern science looks to external, instrument-measured signatures of change to determine the impacts of meditation. Researchers also track subjective reports of change through psychological surveys, but the core focus falls on objective biological data—measurable shifts in the brain and nervous system.This emphasis reflects a different way of knowing. Where the ancient systems privileged inner experience and changes in conduct, science privileges outward, quantifiable markers that unfold beneath conscious awareness.Taken together, these two lenses give us a fuller picture of what progress in meditation looks like.

But even if the traditions say you’re changing, and the instruments say you’re changing, you can still feel like nothing is happening.

That isn’t because you’re “bad at meditation.” It’s because of how perception itself works.To understand why you can be changing in every way the traditions and the data describe yet still feel stuck, we have to shift the focus from meditation to the blind spots built into your own nervous system.

There are three perceptual blind spots that make meditation improvement hard to detect — not just early on, but throughout practice. Once you understand them, you can build feedback loops that reveal what your moment-to-moment awareness can’t.

Let’s start with the most universal and the most underestimated.Human perception is built to detect change, not continuity. Your nervous system flags sudden shifts but goes silent when things stabilize. That’s great for survival; it’s terrible for noticing slow improvements.
In meditation this shows up in two ways: short-term and long-term.

Short Term: Change Detection Bias

You notice when the AC turns on.
You notice when it turns off.
But you don’t notice that it’s been humming loudly for the past 15 minutes until the moment it stops.
Only then do you think: Has that been on the whole time?

Meditation works the same way.

You notice tension becoming calm.
You don’t notice calm remaining calm (or tension remaining tension for that matter).

Right after a sit, you may feel clearer, lighter, and more grounded. But once that state settles in, your nervous system stops flagging it as important. A couple of hours later, when stress comes back, it feels as if the clarity was never there—even if it absolutely was.
This is why progress can feel inconsistent even when, averaged out, your “after” state is getting steadily better.

Long Term: Baseline Drift

The slower version is even sneakier.Imagine meditation gradually moves your stress baseline from a 7/10 to a 4/10 over eight weeks. You don’t feel three points less stressed, you just feel, “normal.”
Your perception quietly recenters around the new normal. The change is real, but because it arrived in tiny increments, it slipped under your radar.
The second hand is always moving; the minute hand never seems to—until you look away and then back.People around you see the hour hand: “You seem different lately.”You’re stuck staring at the minute hand, thinking, “I feel the same.”By the time meditation has meaningfully changed you, your nervous system has already updated its idea of who you are. Month three can feel suspiciously like month one, even when your partner or coworkers swear you’re calmer and less reactive.This is the first trap: you are changing, but the part of you that’s supposed to notice change is tuned for drama, not gradual shifts. So it quietly writes off exactly the gains you’re working so hard to build.And even when slow change is happening, a second distortion kicks in: your memory of practice depends heavily on the state you’re in when you look back.

Psychologists call it state-dependent memory: your current state doesn’t just color how you feel—it controls which memories you can even access.
If you’ve just had a spacious, calm, settled meditation, it’s easy to remember other times you felt spacious, calm, and settled. In that state, the practice feels obviously effective. You feel like someone who meditates, and your mind pulls up all the data points that support that story.
But if you’re foggy, irritated, or dull, you remember every other time you felt foggy, irritated, or dull. It suddenly seems like you’ve always struggled, because the mind selectively retrieves a highlight reel of the flattest sessions you’ve ever had.

The question “Is this working?” becomes contaminated by the state in which it’s asked.And notice when that question usually shows up. Most of us don’t wonder whether meditation is working on the days we feel open and settled. We wonder on the days we feel stressed, restless, or shut down. Those are precisely the states that can’t retrieve your best evidence. The question tends to arise when you’re in the worst position to answer it accurately.

This effect is stronger than it sounds in the abstract. In one classic study, participants who learned information while drunk actually recalled it better when drunk again than when sober—a dramatic example of how strongly internal state gates memory access.
Meditation amplifies this bias because the contrast between states can be so big. On expansive days, your contracted states feel far away. On contracted days, your expansive states feel imaginary.So you get a predictable loop:

After a great meditation, you remember all your best sits and think, “Why did I ever doubt this?”
After a difficult meditation, you remember all your worst sits and think, “Why can’t I ever get this right?”

You’re not evaluating your practice.
You’re evaluating the slice of your memory your current state allows you to reach.This blind spot is sneaky because it feels like honest introspection. It feels like you’re finally seeing things clearly. But what you’re actually seeing is a biased subset of your history, filtered by whatever mood or physiological state you happen to be in.

This is why journaling, periodic reviews, or more objective tools like EEG and HRV matter so much: they give you access to parts of your experiential history that your present state hides.The first two blind spots distort how you look back on your practice. The third distorts your ability to evaluate it in the moment: the brain systems that produce meditative depth and those that monitor meditative depth compete with each other.

The third blind spot is perhaps the most counterintuitive: evaluating your meditation practice disrupts the very experience you’re trying to measure.If you sit expecting calm and instead encounter restlessness, the mind labels the session a failure — even when the practice is doing exactly what it should. The moment you start checking, comparing, or asking “Is this working yet?” you step out of meditation and into analysis. Analyzing progress while meditating creates the very mental activity you're trying to quiet.It's like trying to fall asleep by repeatedly asking yourself, "Am I asleep yet?”This is the paradox of striving: the more you monitor for progress, the more you disturb the conditions that produce it.Modern flow science describes the same tension through transient hypofrontality: as you enter deeper absorption, the prefrontal cortex—the hub for self-monitoring and evaluation—downshifts. The circuitry required to check “How deep am I right now?” is the same circuitry that has to quiet down for depth to emerge in the first place.Zen teachers like Dōgen pointed to the same dynamic: the moment you ask “Is this working?” you’ve already stepped out of direct experience. It isn’t a commandment to never evaluate. It’s a reminder that the deeper you go, the quieter the part of the mind becomes that could evaluate depth at all.Both lenses converge on a single structural fact about meditation:The brain systems that generate meditative depth are not the same systems that evaluate meditative depth. When one turns up, the other turns down.This leads to two predictable distortions:

When you’re calm, spacious, or absorbed, you’re literally less able to evaluate those qualities in that moment. The deeper the state, the quieter the self-monitoring machinery becomes.

2. When you’re agitated or restless, the evaluative machinery roars back online and judges the session harshly. Ironically, the worst moments for evaluation are the moments when you’re most likely to evaluate.The moments when you are most transformed are the moments you are least able to notice it.
The moments when you feel least transformed are the moments you are most inclined to question everything.This doesn’t mean you’re completely blind to deeper meditative states. It means you only gain access to them retrospectively.You can finish a meditation—or a tennis match, or a deep creative flow—and sense that something unusual was happening. But what you perceive afterward isn’t the state itself. It’s the residual clarity, the afterglow, the side-effects the state leaves behind.It’s like remembering a dream: you can feel the emotional tone, the impression it left — but it’s a trace of the state, not the state in its original form.And this is why you need feedback systems that don’t depend on the same neural machinery meditation temporarily shuts down.

Why These Matter

Together these blind spots explain:

why beginners feel like meditation “isn’t doing anything,”
why intermediate meditators feel like they’ve plateaued,
and why even long-term practitioners periodically doubt everything.

Because each blind spot misleads you in a different way, each requires a different form of feedback — one for immediate shifts, one for objective signals, one for long-range behavioral patterns.It is not a failure of awareness or discipline.
It is the predictable, mechanical consequence of how the nervous system processes change.And it sets up the final piece of our puzzle: if you want to know whether meditation is working, you need feedback systems that restore the contrast your perception automatically erases—one for each of the three blind spots.

What To Do About It: The 3 Feedback Loops

Now that you understand why meditation progress can be so hard to detect, the solution becomes clear.You need three types of feedback. Each one addresses a specific blind spot, each one available at different timescales. Roughly: Feedback Loop 1 answers the “minute-hand” problem, Feedback Loop 2 softens the paradox of striving, and Feedback Loop 3 exposes the long-term baseline drift.Together, they give you enough info to continuously improve and fuel your motivation or change course if need be.

Feedback Loop 1: Before + After Meditation

The first type of feedback helps you feel the contrast before and after meditation, and captures the shift before your brain normalizes it. It’s the antidote to our first blind spot: change detection.This takes less than thirty seconds, but the effect is disproportionate.Before you sit, notice:

How tense is your body?
How fast are your thoughts moving?
How reactive do you feel to the day's demands?

After you sit, notice:

Did your body soften?
Did your thoughts slow down or clarify?
Do the things that felt urgent now feel optional?

This isn’t performance evaluation; this is baseline recording. You’re giving your nervous system a marker to compare against later.Over time, you’ll start to notice two changes:

Greater contrast — the difference between “before” and “after” becomes sharper and more reliable.
Longer carryover — the settled quality lingers into the rest of your day, stretching from minutes to hours.

For many beginners, this is the first real signal that meditation is actually doing something. It’s also the signal that keeps people practicing long enough for deeper changes to take root.

Why This Loop Matters

This loop is the antidote to Change Detection Bias—the brain’s tendency to forget your calm the moment it stabilizes. By explicitly marking the before and after, you make the improvement feel real rather than theoretical.It also trains you to recognize your own internal markers of progress.For you, that might be:

a smoother, deeper breath
a loosening in the jaw or face
thoughts moving more cleanly through mental space
a subtle drop in physiological pressure
a shift from “narrowed” attention to “open” attention
more emotional availability
increased sensitivity to beauty or subtle sensations

These signals are different for everyone, but noticing them is part of developing an internal language of practice. When you know what your mind and body feel like in a more regulated state, you become better at returning to it on purpose.

What Beginners Often Miss

Early on, people think they’re supposed to feel a dramatic transformation after each sit. In reality, the first reliable signs are often small and body-based, not mystical or mind-blowing:

a slightly steadier breath
a small drop in shoulder tension
the mind feeling 2% more spacious
a faint sense that urgency has dialed down

If you don’t look for these shifts, you won’t notice them.But once you do notice them—even intermittently—your relationship to practice changes. You’re no longer practicing on blind faith; you’ve had felt evidence.

A Practical Tip

If you want to strengthen this loop, keep a simple log with two one-sentence entries:

Before: “Right now I feel…”
After: “Now I feel…”

It takes less than a minute, but it builds a long-term record of contrast that your moment-to-moment introspection can’t hold onto.

Feedback Loop 2: Feedback During Meditation

If Feedback Loop 1 makes the before-and-after visible, Feedback Loop 2 helps you stay in the zone while you’re meditating—without constantly asking, “Is this working yet?”Long before EEG neurofeedback or brainwave entrainment, meditators relied on external signals to help them stay in the intended state.One of the clearest examples is the keisaku, or “encouragement stick” in Zen practice. A silent attendant walks the meditation hall holding a long, flat wooden stick. They watch each practitioner’s posture, breath, and subtle signs of dullness or drift. When they see someone slipping—often before the meditator notices it themselves—they deliver a quick, precise strike to the shoulders or back. There’s also a voluntary version: when the meditator notices themselves fading and requests the keisaku, its sound and sensation snap them back into wakefulness and focus.

It’s borrowed awareness: temporarily outsourcing part of the monitoring function to someone who can see what your moment-to-moment introspection cannot.Most traditions have equivalents. Tibetan teachers ring bells when group attention sags. Yogic breath practices use externally paced ratios to prevent subtle collapse. Different methods, same principle: external feedback catches drift that internal awareness misses.Modern tools work on the exact same principle with more resolution.Neurofeedback acts like a keisaku that fires hundreds of times per second, flagging micro-shifts in attention long before they rise to consciousness. Brainwave entrainment provides a steady external rhythm—like a continuous bell—that nudges the mind toward the intended state with less self-monitoring.This borrowed awareness doesn’t replace a meditator’s sensitivity—it extends it. It increases the number of effective feedback cycles, reduces the burden of “checking,” and lets you spend more of the session in the state instead of managing the state. Instead of silently asking, “Is this working yet?” every few minutes, you let the external signal track the state for you so you can stay inside it.

This is why EEG and entrainment can produce rapid improvements early in practice: they lend the practitioner an awareness they haven’t yet developed and compress the time to the first real felt win. Neurofeedback is simply the keisaku, upgraded for the 21st century.
The principle is ancient.
The instrumentation is new.

And you don’t need high-tech tools to benefit from this loop. Any well-timed external cue—a bell at the halfway mark, a breathing track, a teacher’s voice—can serve as borrowed awareness that keeps you oriented without constant self-inspection.

Feedback Loop 3: Longitudinal (Watching the Baseline)

The third feedback loop is the one most people never build—and it’s the one that answers the question most convincingly.If Feedback Loop 1 shows you immediate contrast, and Feedback Loop 2 helps you stay on track in the moment, Feedback Loop 3 reveals what’s happening to your baseline over time. It’s the antidote to Baseline Drift.
Instead of asking, “How was today’s sit?” you start asking:

“What’s different about me this month compared to three months ago?”
“What’s different about me this year compared to last year?”

You’re not evaluating individual sessions anymore, you’re evaluating what those sessions are doing to your life.
What to Look For Over TimeAt this scale, you’re looking for trait-level shifts, not one-off peak experiences. For example:

Do you recover from stress faster than you used to?
Do you spiral less when things go wrong?
Do conflicts resolve quicker or feel less catastrophic?
Does post-meditation clarity linger longer into your day?
Can you access calm or focus more quickly when you need it?
Are you less yanked around by boredom, cravings, or irritation?

You also see it in the fine-grain texture of your attention:

You don’t lose your train of thought as often
You can sustain work blocks without your mind fraying
You catch distractions before they fully hijack you

If nothing in your attentional life changes over months, it’s a sign that your practice might be maintenance sitting—keeping you roughly where you are—rather than actually training anything new.You can track this informally just by earnestly asking the questions. Or you can add a bit of structure.

Ways to Track It

Subjective:

A short weekly or monthly reflection:
- “Where did I handle something better than the old me would have?”
- “Where did I lose it in ways that feel familiar?”
Noting moments of unexpected patience, perspective, or ease.
Noticing subtle but recurring shifts: life feeling “more in color,” more depth in ordinary moments, noticing beauty on a walk you’ve done a hundred times.

Objective:

Heart-rate variability trends over weeks or months.
Sleep quality and recovery metrics.
Periodic attention or reaction-time tests.

You don’t have to obsess over the data; the point is to notice direction, not chase perfect scores.Hybrid (where physiology and experience line up):This is where EEG becomes especially useful. Even occasional sessions—once a week or once a month—let you track things like:

how quickly you drop from high beta into more stable alpha,
how consistently certain brainwave patterns appear when you feel “settled,”
how your “best” sessions look electrically compared to your average ones.

If you pair those sessions with the same before/after check-ins from Feedback Loop 1, you end up with a longitudinal record that has both your felt sense of the session and an objective pattern the brain was running at the time.Over time, that creates trend-lines you could never reconstruct from memory:

“Three months ago it took me 18 minutes to settle into that pattern; now it happens in 7.”
“When my alpha:beta ratio looks like this, I consistently report feeling clear and stable.”
“On weeks when I practice more, these brain states show up more easily; on weeks I slack, they’re harder to access.”

You don’t need a lab to benefit from this—consumer EEG devices are already good enough to show meaningful trends if you’re consistent. And if you never touch a device, the same principle applies if all you track are your own reflections and a few simple behavioral markers. The point isn’t to worship the numbers; it’s to give your nervous system evidence it can’t easily dismiss.

A Simple Longitudinal Test: Missed Days

One of the simplest long-range checks is also one of the most honest: notice what happens when you miss a day or two of meditation.If even a single missed session leaves your daily functioning a little more brittle—a shorter fuse, more compulsive phone-checking, work blocks that fray, perspective that tightens—that’s the signal.
If the answer is yes, your meditation is already working at a trait level.If the answer is consistently no, it doesn’t mean you should quit — but it does suggest you may want to adjust how you’re practicing or how you’re engaging with feedback.

You don’t have to engineer a derailment “for science.” Life already sprinkles plenty of those in for free. The real skill is noticing what those moments reveal.The specific signals that matter most will be different for everyone. What you’re looking for are changes that feel both meaningful and repeatable to you—the beginnings of your own internal language of practice. Things that, when you notice them, genuinely make you think, “Ah, this is different from how I used to be.”For me, the longitudinal signals include:
• Life feeling more “in color.”
• A different relationship with boredom: it stops being aversive and becomes a texture I can sit inside without agitation.
• Feeling it when I miss practice for a day or two.
• Attention stability I can feel directly and also see in EEG data: not losing my train of thought as often, sustaining work blocks more easily, catching distractions earlier and returning to focus quicker.
My list is not a checklist to copy; it’s an example of the kind of thing you might start paying attention to. Yours might be completely different—fewer arguments with your partner, less dread on Sunday nights, a softer inner voice at work. The important part is that you can recognize them as real shifts, not that they match anyone else’s list.
Zoomed out, the pattern looks less like a straight line and more like a stock chart: lots of short-term ups and downs, but a gradual trend up and to the right. This is the level where coworkers comment that you seem calmer, your partner notices you’re more patient, and friends ask what changed—often before you fully see it yourself.

A Way of Seeing Your Practice Clearly

In practice, everything in this article boils down to three habits:Mark the shift.Borrow some awareness.Look for the arc.
Mark the shift.Take 10–30 seconds before and after a sit to notice how you feel. A couple of questions is enough:

Before: “Right now my body feels… my mind feels…”
After: “Now my body feels… my mind feels…”

You’re not grading the session, just giving your nervous system a before/after snapshot. This is Feedback Loop 1 in its simplest form.Borrow some awareness.Use an external cue so you don’t have to keep checking yourself mid-sit:

a bell at the midway point
a breathing track
a short guided segment
or, if you have access, EEG / entrainment

Let something outside your head help you notice drift so you can stay inside the practice. That’s Feedback Loop 2 without the constant “Is this working yet?” commentary.Look for the arc.Once a month or quarter, zoom out:

“Where did I handle something better than the old me would have?”
“Where did I lose it in ways that feel familiar?”
“What actually feels different about me compared to three months ago?”

You can add HRV, sleep, or EEG if you like—but you don’t need gadgets to see the arc. You’re watching for your own long-range signals: fewer spirals, quicker recovery, softer edges around stress. That’s Feedback Loop 3.
You don’t have to do any of this perfectly. Even a rough version of these three habits is enough to turn “Is this working?” from a vague worry into a question you can actually answer.

So, Is Your Meditation Working?

The question never really goes away—and that can be a good thing. It reminds us that meditation is not a fixed state but a relationship with our own awareness. Every time the question arises, it’s another chance to practice curiosity instead of judgment, presence instead of performance.

My bet is that if we can shorten the time between “I hope this is doing something” and “I can feel that this is doing something,” more people will make it to the stage where meditation becomes one of the most life-improving things a person can do.Over time, you stop needing to believe meditation works because you begin to know it. It’s subtle until it’s not. Stick with it until then. You will forget, again and again. You need to remind yourself, again and again. You will forget your best meditations. Your job isn’t to hold onto them, you just need to keep creating the conditions for more of them to happen.

Experience first, concepts second.

And sometimes, the most reliable answer is still the simplest one:When you finish meditating, the question disappears.