Chapter 6: You Meditate With Your Body

We think of meditation as a mental skill. Something you do with your mind while your body just sits there. Like math or problem-solving - doesn’t matter if you’re relaxed or stressed, the calculation works the same way.

So we don’t think much about when we practice. We sit down right after a tough meeting. Or squeeze it into that 10-minute gap between obligations. We assume we can just… do it.

But our bodies have other ideas.

Heart rate elevated. Jaw clenched. Shoulders tight. The mind notices the tension and can’t settle down. “Pay attention to the breath? Are you crazy? We have problems to solve!”

It’s no wonder meditation feels hard.

Think about learning to ride a bike on a busy street. Cars honking. Pedestrians darting out. Your body would be tense, gripping the handlebars, heart racing. Could you technically learn balance in those conditions? Maybe. But it would be much, much harder.

Now imagine learning on an empty street. Quiet. Room to wobble. Your body can relax just enough to find that feel for balance.

That seems obvious for physical skills. But here’s what I missed for years: meditation IS a physical skill. And I kept trying to learn it with concentration alone - with effort, with force, with just my mind.

The Elephant You Can’t Force

Jonathan Haidt has this metaphor in “The Happiness Hypothesis” that helped me understand what was happening. He says your conscious mind is like a rider sitting on top of an elephant. The elephant represents everything else - your body, your emotions, your automatic processes, all the things happening beneath conscious awareness.

The rider can nudge. The rider can suggest. But the rider can’t force.

The elephant weighs 6,000 pounds. If the elephant decides to go somewhere, the rider is going with it.

That’s what I was doing when I tried to meditate after a stressful day. My conscious mind - the rider - was saying “focus on the breath.” But my body - the elephant - was still processing everything from the day. Still activated. Heart still racing. Still on that busy street.

I’d been trying to direct everything - my focus, my awareness, my body - from the rider’s seat. But awareness doesn’t work that way. That spacious, present quality? It lives in the elephant.

The rider doesn’t have the strength to override the elephant. And I spent years trying to develop that strength, thinking if I just concentrated harder, forced my attention more, I could make it work.

But you can’t meditate without your body’s cooperation any more than you can ride a bike without your body’s cooperation. The body isn’t optional equipment. It’s how meditation happens.

Traditional meditation practices understood this. That’s why Vipassana retreats give you days to settle before teaching advanced techniques. They knew: the body has to be ready. The elephant has to be aligned with what the rider wants.

Once I understood this, things changed. I stopped trying to force my way through and started paying attention to where my body actually was.

When the Body Leads

I learned this the hard way during a particularly stressful project at work. Deadlines looming. Too many moving pieces. My mind spinning through all the things that could go wrong.

I thought meditation might help. Sit down, focus on the breath, calm down. Seemed like a good approach.

I sat on my cushion. Closed my eyes. Tried to focus on breathing.

My mind had other plans. It kept spinning. Running through scenarios. What if this went wrong? What if that person didn’t deliver? The breath? Forget it. My attention couldn’t stay there for more than a second before getting yanked back to work problems.

After ten minutes of fighting with myself, I gave up. This wasn’t working.

I put on my running shoes and headed to the park near my house.

At first, my mind kept running along with my body. Same worries, same spinning. But I kept moving. And something started to shift. My body got activated - heart pumping, muscles working, that familiar rhythm of feet hitting pavement. And somewhere in there, as my body found its stride, something opened up. That frantic, darting quality of mind shifted. Less like pointing attention at things, more like just… being present.

Not because I was trying to calm it down. Not because I was focusing harder. Just because my body had something to do with all that energy.

By the time I finished - maybe 20, 25 minutes - I had that runner’s high. You know the feeling. Endorphins coursing through. Muscles tired but in a good way. Body satisfied.

I came back home, took a quick shower, and sat down to meditate again.

It was completely different. My body wasn’t fighting me anymore. It was relaxed. Ready to rest. And my mind? It just… followed. The breath was easy to find. Thoughts still came, but they didn’t grab me the same way. I could just sit there.

Same cushion. Same room. Same meditation instruction. But things had changed because my body’s state had changed.

The elephant was calm. Relaxed. And when the body settles, the mind can settle with it. They work together. The body leads, the mind follows.

Body and Mind Together

For years, I had a 2 p.m. operations meeting at work every Monday. One of those meetings designed to surface all the problems - what’s broken, what’s behind schedule, who needs help, who’s blocking who.

On days when the problems involved my team, or when I needed other groups to resolve issues they’d been sitting on, I dreaded that meeting. The tension. The potential conflict. The need to push back or defend decisions.

I’d walk in already tight. Jaw clenched.

At some point, I started taking a yoga class at noon - just before the meeting. An hour of movement. Stretching. Holding poses. Breathing.

The difference was remarkable.

I’d come out of that class and my body was different. Loose. Relaxed. There was one time I even fell asleep during shavasana - that final resting pose at the end. My body knew how to be present. And when my body was present - actually here, not spinning in story - my mind could be present too.

When I walked into the 2 p.m. meeting after yoga, I was still dealing with the same problems. Same tensions. Same conflicts. But my body wasn’t as wound up. And because my body was calm, my mind could stay calmer. I could handle the difficult conversations without getting activated.

It wasn’t that I’d learned to control my reactions better. It’s that my body’s state had changed, and my mind’s state changed with it.

This is actually the origin of yoga. The word yoga means “yoke” - to bind or unite. It was designed as a spiritual practice to bring body and mind together. Movement first, to prepare the body. Then meditation, when the body was ready.

Not body versus mind. Not mind controlling body. Body and mind working together. Yoked.

Start With Your Body

You probably have your own version of this. Maybe it’s a hike that clears your head. Or swimming. Or playing music. Times when your body settles and your mind comes along for the ride.

Those are the moments when meditation becomes natural. Not harder. Not something to force.

So here’s what changed: I stopped trying to control awareness through concentration alone. Started working with my body instead - because that’s where presence lives. Where awareness actually happens.

Before sitting down to meditate, I check in. Where is my body right now? Activated? Tense? Still processing the day?

If so, I don’t try to override it. I give my body what it needs first. A run. A walk. Some stretching. Even just a few minutes of movement.

And if I can’t move? If I’m at my desk with ten minutes between meetings?

That’s where the breath comes in. Because it turns out your breath is one of the fastest ways to shift your body’s state. And once I understood how that worked, it opened up a whole new way to prepare for meditation - even when I couldn’t go for a run first.

But that’s the next chapter.