Meditation: A spam filter for your mental inbox

Imagine if your email inbox didn’t have a spam filter.

In addition to the usual mountain of legitimate things you have to wade through, you also had to make your way through all the dross.

The alluring emails from Nigerian princes offering riches in exchange for your bank details, the fake pharmaceuticals, the phishing messages from your bank and energy companies.

It would slow you down and make you unproductive right? As soon as you heard of a spam filter, you’d install it straight away.

Meditation is like a spam filter for the mind.

Instead of allowing all the mental chaff to accumulate and take up space and capacity, meditation processes it all out.

It’s the processing that people often mistake for being bad at meditation. When we process all the crap that comes in, we find ourselves thinking during meditation.

Becoming good at meditation isn’t about stopping yourself thinking, it’s about being OK as the mental processing takes place.

It’s not about not receiving spam in the first place, it’s knowing how to filter it out.