Does this scenario sound familiar?
You walk into the meditation hall or your favorite meditation spot at home. You settle into a comfortable posture, place your hands in a gentle, mindful position, and lower your eyelids or softly close your eyes. Perhaps you offer an intention for your practice, and then you begin.
You bring your attention to your chosen object of meditation—maybe the breath, sounds, a sensation in the body, a visualization, or a mantra. At first, things are going smoothly. The mind is content to have something simple and steady to rest on.
But then, a few breaths or minutes in, the mind gets distracted. All of a sudden, you start thinking about meditation itself.
Maybe you just find yourself stuck on the self-conscious thought, “I’m meditating, I’m meditating.” Or you might wonder whether you’re doing the practice properly or compare this session to a previous one when everything felt perfect.
Or maybe this session feels so good that you marvel at your meditation prowess, thinking you’ve finally cracked the code. You might begin planning how you’re going to take this calm, focused energy into your interactions with loved ones and coworkers, and you start thinking about the next retreat you want to attend, imagining how it will change your life.
On the flip side, perhaps the practice feels difficult. Intrusive thoughts arise—emotional discomfort, physical pain. The mind starts to question meditation altogether, or worse, your ability to do it at all: “I can’t do this.” Perhaps the mind conjures an image of an ideal meditator, the kind of person you think you should be but feel you could never become.
If any of this sounds familiar, congratulations. You are a meditator.
Most importantly, you are not alone.
No matter what stage of practice we’re in, it’s natural for the mind to drift away from what we’re “supposed” to be paying attention to and begin producing thoughts about what we’re doing. These thoughts can feel close enough to the practice that we don’t immediately recognize we’ve drifted. But even thinking about meditation is still just thinking.
This doesn’t make us bad meditators. It makes us human.
The Buddha had a word for this: papañca. Andrew Olendzki describes it as the mind’s tendency to take a single moment of experience and spin it into layers of mental elaboration—much of it repetitive, obsessive, and disconnected from what’s actually happening—clouding clarity and disturbing calm.
This mental proliferation is the mind trying to make sense of things, to plan, to protect, to replay what was pleasant, to resist what was unpleasant.
Speaking for myself, I have been meditating for over two decades, and papañca still shows up. It’s humbling! The difference between how I related to this in the early years of my practice and how I relate to it now is that I’ve come to see it as less of a problem, partly because I don’t take it personally. I don’t see papañca as a defect of my mind, just as a feature of being human. And when I notice it happening, I meet it with a kind of inner chuckle and gently return my attention to the object of meditation.
I sometimes think of papañca like a dog chasing its own tail. If you saw a dog doing that, you wouldn’t be alarmed or upset. You might watch with a half-smile, maybe even laugh, and then offer the dog something more meaningful to engage with—a ball, or the simple pleasure of being scratched behind the ears.
When the mind starts spinning stories about your meditation practice—about how well it’s going, how poorly it’s going, what you should do next—it’s doing something very similar.
The practice is simply to notice that it’s happening, without judgment or harshness. You might quietly say to yourself, “Ah, thinking.” Then gently return to your breath, or whatever your chosen object is, and be with it in a curious, intentional way.
Each time you notice that the mind has drifted off, you can greet it with that same half-smile or inner chuckle—“Ah, thinking”—and then come back.
This is the practice of mindfulness. Not forcing the mind to be still, but learning to relate to it with attention, patience, and care. We begin to see its patterns more clearly, without turning them into a problem or a personal failing.
Like many of us, I can be pretty hard on myself. So, learning to meet the habits of my mind—patterns I didn’t consciously create but am responsible for working with—with a bit of humor and kindness softens the whole experience.
It’s just the mind chasing its own tail.
There’s nothing wrong with me or my mind.
When we relate to the mind this way—“There you go again, spinning around. Come here, sit beside me. Let’s just rest together for a moment”—we begin to befriend it. And in that befriending, the entire experience naturally settles.
Over time, we start to see the nature of our thoughts, and really of all our experiences. They are impermanent, they can’t offer lasting satisfaction, and they are not who we are.
Thoughts, feelings, sensations, even the objects of meditation themselves—they arise and pass in the same way. When we work with the mind like this, even distraction becomes part of the path. It shows us, directly, that the thinking mind is no different in nature from the breath, from sound, from sensation. All of it is simply arising and passing.
When the mind wanders off again (and it will!), we know what to do. We notice, we smile, maybe even chuckle, and we come back.
Again and again.
That’s the practice.
Please remember to be kind to yourself, my friend. You are enough.
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