Meditation is, unfortunately, sometimes boring. Specifically, people are often bored when employing the common meditative strategy of intentionally focusing our full attention on a limited and mundane aspect of the human experience like how it feels to breathe, how the soles of our feet feel as we walk, repeating a simple phrase, or staring at a point on the floor. When we try to focus on something simple and relatively dull such as this, most of us find that our mind repeatedly wanders away to thoughts, emotions, external sounds, external sights, and other phenomena that are comparatively more interesting. Again and again, we find that we have to bring our attention back to the relatively dull object on which we are choosing to focus.
Why would we work so hard to limit our attention to something relatively monotonous, in a world full of such almost infinite colorful, interesting, and alive things that we could instead be engaging with? Well, one reason is that doing so increases our power of concentration – our ability to pay attention to what we want, when we want, our ability to pay attention on purpose on demand. Many people consider the concentration level of our minds to be simply a matter of random luck, but meditation teaches us that it is actually something that we can develop and strengthen.
Most meditators, after sticking with a simple object of meditation – say, the breath – even when it is tedious, eventually break through the boredom, and discover that having a focused mind is pleasurable. We eventually find that it feels good to have attention that is stable, steady, rooted, settled, rested, grounded, collected, and simplified.
As we concentrate the mind while meditating, most people also come to find that a deeper and more focused awareness carries over into everyday life and helps us to also more enjoy things like the food we eat, the music we listen to, and the people we interact with. A concentrated mind is also useful in areas of everyday life like being more productive at work that we do, being safer when driving a car, and listening to others on a deeper level.
Some people imagine that concentrating the mind is the final or main point of meditating, but there are important steps beyond that. Many of those further levels of development depend on concentrating our mind first, however.
As we do the work of concentrating our mind, of bringing our mind back again and again to something small and boring, we become more aware of what we are aware of, which is crucial for all meditation techniques. And as our mind becomes more stable through concentration, it becomes like a microscope or telescope that has been made steady and now is useful for investigation.
We can eventually see the repetitive work on concentrating the mind as being like physical exercise or playing musical scales – perhaps boring in the moment, but developing a facility that can make wonderful, enjoyable things possible.