The Year of Watching: What Six Hundred Hours of Meditation Revealed About Engagement, Control, and Peace
Six Hundred Hours of Meditation and the Dissolution of Engagement
I realized last week that by the end of this year, I will have spent close to 600 hours in meditation. I learned this from a phone app I use as my meditation timer. And of course, pretty much like everything else today, the app tries to gamify meditation: track hours, award badges, broadcast milestones to social media. All of which feels contrary to what is essentially an inward discipline, but that is neither here nor there.
Six hundred hours represents something more significant than the number suggests. I have not missed a single day this year. Not one. The commitment was simple: show up, sit, watch. Everything else is optional.
This was not a goal.
It was not a New Year’s resolution.
It was not a self-improvement project.
It was simply a quiet accumulation of minutes, days, weeks. A year of sitting, watching, and learning not to interfere.
Learning that engagement with whatever the mind produces is a choice, a choice any of us can access if we are willing to develop the machinery to exercise it.
If anything, meditation has been less a practice of gaining something than a year-long apprenticeship in losing illusions.
Not achieving calm,
but watching restlessness. Without becoming restless.
Not cultivating positivity,
but observing the mind’s shadows. Without getting lost in them.
Not “manifesting” anything,
but quietly letting reality be as it is. Simply being.
It has been a year of contact, a year of exposure to the machinery of consciousness.
Few metaphors have clarified this journey for me as much as the one I introduced in an earlier essay: thoughts as trains arriving at a station¹.
Each thought is a train.
Each emotional surge is a train.
Each memory, impulse, regret, fear, or fantasy is also a train.
Alongside this metaphor, a personal ritual that prepares me for practice has also evolved. Before I meditate, I set a deliberate intention: “I am moving inward now; the external world can wait.” I visualize my mind as a katana², sharp, precise, indispensable, yet not always required. I picture myself sheathing the blade and putting it away, consciously choosing not to wield the mind as a tool for the duration of the meditation. This small gesture has become unexpectedly powerful. It signals clearly: this is not the mind's time to work. The analytical machinery that serves throughout the day is being deliberately set aside. The blade is sheathed; only observation remains. I will explore this aspect in more detail in a subsequent essay.
This has been a year of learning when to board a train, consciously and deliberately, and when not to.
If my Undoing journey³ began in an ER in December 2023, this past year has been the continuation of that unraveling. Not through crisis, but through stillness. Meditation revealed some new insights and, more importantly, a deeper, experiential confirmation of the three core Unlearnings that have shaped my life since:
- I am not my identity.
- Growth comes from subtraction, not addition.
- Control is an illusion.
Meditation has become the laboratory where these truths moved from intellectual insight into lived experience. It underscored, sharply, the difference between intellectual understanding and embodied knowing. They are not the same. One is a map. The other is the territory itself. Six hundred hours in this lab collapsed that distance.
1. Watching the Trains: The First Unlearning in Practice
In Before the Learning, the Undoing³, I wrote about the dissolution of identity and how the scaffolding we mistake for the self can eventually fall away to reveal something deeper. Through meditation, this dissolution stopped being a philosophical idea and became something visceral and unmistakably real.
The mind produces thoughts endlessly: ambitions, fears, memories, tasks, self-images. For most of my life, I assumed I had to engage with every one of them. I boarded every train the mind sent into the station.
Now, most of the time, I simply watch.
Thoughts arise as phenomena, not pronouncements.
Self-images appear as projections, not truths.
Narratives reveal themselves as constructions, not identity.
This quiet watching does not strengthen identity.
It erodes it.
It helps to visualize thoughts as trains arriving at a platform:
The “to-do list” train
The “irritation with a colleague, spouse, or relative” train
The “memory from 1984” train
The “fear about the future” train
The “grand idea for a new project” train
Most of us board the first train that arrives without even noticing we have a choice. What meditation reveals is that we do not have to board every train. We can choose to stay on the platform and watch.
Six hundred hours of meditation does not eliminate trains.
I have noticed, though, that they arrive less often now.
There are longer stretches when no thought presents itself at all, when there is awareness without commentary.
There are longer periods when the platform is empty.
This is not something that can be pursued as a goal. The moment one reaches for it, the reaching itself becomes another train. These quieter intervals arise only as a side effect of watching the mind without interference.
Research in neuroscience points in a similar direction. Studies⁴ of long-term meditators show reduced activity in the brain’s default mode network (DMN), often associated with spontaneous thought and self-referential mental chatter. The mind is not being suppressed. The machinery simply runs less automatically.
Sometimes I still board by reflex. The deeply ingrained neural patterns of a lifetime, what we casually call “mental muscle memory,” are powerful. But now I catch myself more quickly. The moment I realize I am on the train, there is enough space to step back onto the platform.
It is astonishing how much of our suffering, including what the Buddha described as the Second Arrow¹, comes from this unexamined habit of boarding trains that never deserved a ticket in the first place.
Every unboarded train is another piece of the old scaffolding that falls away.
2. The Weather of the Mind
Most writing on meditation glosses over dark periods, as though deepening practice is a steady ascent into serenity.
This is simply not true.
The mind has weather patterns.
Some days bring clear skies.
Other days bring thick fog.
Other days bring sudden storms.
Darkness comes.
Melancholia descends.
Restlessness surges.
Old fears resurface.
None arrive on schedule.
None respond to negotiation.
None yield to force.
Over the last twelve months, I noticed stretches of inexplicable heaviness, melancholia unmoored from any event. Not depression in the clinical sense, but a low, persistent shadow, a contraction of the inner world.
Earlier in life, I would have interpreted this as though something was wrong. Perhaps even as a sign of failure. I would have tried to fix it, manage it, or think my way out of it. That is the machinery of the illusion of control ⁵ I have written about elsewhere.
Six hundred hours taught me something very different:
I cannot control what arises spontaneously.
I can only control whether I engage.
This is the lived truth behind the principle I called The Third Unlearning⁵: that genuine control exists only in three domains, what we put into our bodies, what comes out of our mouths, and what we allow to continue in our minds.
Meditation is the daily rehearsal of that third domain.
Not: What arises?
But: What do I allow to continue?
Not: What appears in awareness?
But: What do I feed?
This distinction has altered everything.
Now I see these dark periods as cognitive weather, passing systems rather than personal verdicts.
I sit.
I watch.
The heaviness moves through like a rain front.
And, most surprisingly, it leaves no stain.
The storms matter.
They are where the real undoing happens, where the practice proves its worth. Watching restlessness on a calm day is one thing.
Watching melancholia arrive uninvited and choosing not to board that train is something else.
That is where the machinery gets tested.
This alone has changed how I relate to difficult emotions. I can now feel them fully, not suppress them, not avoid them, but experience them without engagement. I can feel melancholia without becoming melancholic, anger without becoming angry, fear without becoming afraid.
The emotion is experienced and moves through.
I remain.
A necessary caveat belongs here. Not everyone’s experience with sustained or intensive meditation is manageable through observation alone. Research by Willoughby Britton⁶ and others has documented cases where extended practice can lead to significant psychological destabilization. While such severe outcomes appear to be the exception rather than the rule, they are real and serious when they occur. Contemplative traditions sometimes refer to this territory as the “dark night.” Clinical psychology may recognize it as acute distress that requires professional intervention.
My own experience included intense emotions surfacing at times. Some were difficult, at times borderline overwhelming, but they remained workable through continued observation. I have been able, so far, to engage this material without external support.
If meditation brings up experiences that feel unmanageable, such as severe anxiety, dissociation, intrusive traumatic memories, or thoughts of self-harm, it is important to stop intensive practice and consult a mental health professional who is familiar with contemplative practices. Some psychological material requires therapeutic support rather than meditative observation alone. Treat yourself with kindness, and seek help if you need it. This is not failure. It is recognition that different tools serve different purposes.
But the darkness also revealed something else, something deeper that I had not expected.
3. When the Past Walks Out of the Basement: The Second Unlearning Emerges
Meditation has a way of unsealing old rooms.
This year, memories began surfacing without warning. Not because I sought them, but because the mind seems to recognize when there is finally enough space for them to rise and fall without destabilizing anything.
Some of these memories were neutral, ordinary moments long forgotten: the first time I played cricket, the pattern of sunlight on a desk, a conversation from decades ago.
Others were painful.
Some were embarrassing.
Some were traumatic in ways I had not fully acknowledged at the time.
In earlier years, these memories would have taken over completely. I would have collapsed into rumination, let old narratives reassert themselves, and replayed the past with all its original emotional force.
Now, the extraordinary part was not their content.
It was my relationship to them.
They appeared like scenes from a film, crisp and vivid, yet strangely distant. Emotionally weightless.
No rehearsal of the story.
No attempt to fix or redeem what happened.
Just arising.
Being seen.
Allowed to pass, without engagement.
This is the clearest expression of the Second Unlearning I have experienced: growth through subtraction.
Instead of adding new coping strategies, new narratives, or new therapeutic frameworks to process the past, the mind can simply let go.
The memory plays.
The memory ends.
No residue.
A thought is a thought.
A memory is a memory.
Its emotional charge belongs to the past. The present moment is untouched.
This year brought a clarity I had never viscerally understood before.
The past is useful only for the lessons it contains.
Everything else is noise.
There is no would-have.
No should-have.
No could-have.
Those belong to a universe that no longer exists.
The mind, when watched carefully enough, reveals this truth with remarkable precision. It brings up memories not to punish us, but to relieve us of them, provided we do not engage, embellish, or sink into identification.
I began to see that memories are not there to be solved or redeemed. They are simply phenomena rising and falling in awareness, no different from a sound, a breath, or a stray thought.
This realization dissolves decades of accumulated psychological sediment.
Traditional contemplative practice describes this as the fading of old impressions, latent patterns losing their charge. But none of that terminology is necessary. Everyone knows what it feels like for a memory to lose its emotional hook.
Meditation accelerates that process. I observe without interference, which itself becomes a quiet refusal to rehearse the old stories.
And it was in this space, as the past loosened its grip, that something unexpected began to open.
4. Melancholia Without Catastrophe
Here is the most unexpected part. Darkness becomes bearable, even instructive, when you stop insisting that it should not exist.
Some days the melancholy still comes.
Some days it doesn’t.
Some days it arrives for no discernible reason.
But meditation rewires the relationship to it:
The darkness no longer implies failure.
The heaviness no longer demands interpretation.
The emotional contraction no longer carries existential weight.
It is weather.
And weather passes.
The hardest part, and perhaps the most liberating, is the recognition that melancholy has no moral meaning. It does not mean you are broken. It does not mean you are regressing.
It simply means the mind is doing what the mind does.
And the less you fight it, the faster it moves.
This year brought an unexpected test of that recognition. For decades, my birthday carried a peculiar weight, an annual reckoning where I would tally achievements against some vague and shifting standard I could never quite meet. Each year, the ledger came up short. Each year, melancholia followed.
This year, as my birthday approached, I felt the familiar shadow beginning to form. The old pattern started to execute: the achievement audit, the inevitable shortfall, the emotional contraction.
But something different happened.
I saw it clearly. The melancholia arrived, faint and recognizable, like an old acquaintance at the door. But I did not invite it in. I did not engage with the ledger. I did not run the numbers. I did not compare this year to last, or present achievements to imagined potentials.
I simply watched the impulse arise and let it be.
The melancholia flickered, lingered for a moment, and then vanished. Not through suppression. Not through reframing. Not through positive thinking. Simply through non-engagement.
The train arrived.
I stayed on the platform.
It departed.
This quiet reversal of a decades-long pattern revealed something essential. The forces that once shaped my emotional life were not permanent features of the mind. They were habits. And habits lose their power when we stop feeding them.
5. The Subtraction of Self
People often imagine that meditation adds something: calm, focus, clarity, compassion, bliss.
In truth, it subtracts.
It removes compulsive engagement.
It dissolves narratives.
It reveals the emptiness of identifications.
It thins the veil between thought and awareness.
Six hundred hours simply made many of my previous illusions untenable.
I no longer believe every thought that appears.
I no longer mistake emotion for instruction.
I no longer confuse memory with meaning.
I no longer assume that my random thoughts, arising spontaneously in awareness, say anything about who I am.
This is what growth through subtraction looks like: an ever-widening gap between the arising of a mental event and the reflex to act on it.
And then, occasionally, not every day and never when reached for, something else becomes visible.
Thoughts arise.
But the “I” who once claimed them is nowhere to be found.
There is awareness.
There is experience.
But the old sense of a self at the center weakens, giving way to something wider and less bounded. Immense, even.
The compulsion to identify collapses when the mind is observed rather than obeyed.
This is the same dissolution I described in The First Unlearning: The Undoing of Identity⁷, but lived rather than analyzed. In meditation, the scaffolding does not merely lose meaning. It loses solidity. What once felt fixed reveals itself as provisional.
Awareness does not require a narrator.
It requires only itself.
Meditation does not change the mind’s content.
It changes the relationship to the mind’s content.
And that changes everything.
6. Control, and the Quiet Release of the Past
A strange thing happens when you watch the mind for long enough.
You begin to see how little you command.
Thoughts arise without consent.
Emotions surface without invitation.
Memories return without permission.
Melancholy visits without explanation.
Six hundred hours forced me to confront, repeatedly, the truth I have explored elsewhere. Control is an illusion, and a seductive one.
And yet, here is the paradox.
When the fantasy of controlling the inner world is relinquished, something more subtle becomes possible. You gain the capacity to respond intelligently to what arises.
This is the heart of the Third Unlearning.
You cannot control what appears.
You can control whether you engage.
You cannot control the weather.
You can choose whether you walk into the storm with an umbrella or with gritted teeth.
Meditation teaches this not as a philosophical position, but as lived reality.
Awareness expands precisely because control contracts.
And in that expansion, something unexpected happened with the past.
As memories surfaced during meditation—neutral, painful, embarrassing, traumatic—something quietly changed in my relationship to them. My younger selves who made mistakes no longer appeared as failures. They now appear as people doing the best they could with what they knew, and with the emotional capacity they had at the time. Deserving of compassion rather than judgment.
This echoes what I explored in Unlearning the Inner Assault: The Case for Self-Love⁸, the subtle psychological violence we inflict on our own selves. Meditation made this compassion instinctive rather than conceptual.
The realization clarified with surprising simplicity.
The past is not a judgment.
It is an archive.
Its value lies in the lessons it contains.
Everything else can be released.
This, more than any dramatic insight, has been one of the deepest liberations of this year.
7. The Shape of Peace, and the Year of Undoing
The peace that emerges from this kind of practice is not bliss.
It is not euphoria.
It is not the absence of difficulty.
It is room.
Room around thoughts.
Room around emotions.
Room around memories.
Room around reactions.
A widening of the internal space in which everything happens.
A decoupling of stimulus and response.
A quiet recognition:
“I do not have to board this train.”
Some days, I still do.
But far less often.
And with far greater clarity.
I am more at peace not because the mind is quieter. It often isn’t.
But because I am less compelled to believe whatever it says.
This is not transcendence.
It is intimacy with reality.
Looking back, the six hundred hours were not a practice in the self-improvement sense. They were a continuation, a lived extension of the three Unlearnings that have quietly reshaped my life.
The first Unlearning: I am not my identity.
Meditation reveals this in real time. The self is not an entity to be discovered, but a story the mind tells.
The second Unlearning: growth lies in subtraction.
Meditation does not add techniques or traits. It strips away. Fewer labels. Fewer compulsions. Fewer narratives.
The third Unlearning: control is an illusion.
Meditation makes this unmistakable. You cannot control what arises. You can only control whether you engage.
These are not philosophical claims. They are the simple mechanics of watching the mind.
And the longer you watch, the more these mechanics quietly reshape your life.
8. Creativity as a Side Effect?
One more change belongs here, though I hesitate to interpret it too strongly.
Over the course of this year, there has been an unmistakable increase in creative output. Essays emerged more readily. Ideas arrived effortlessly. Connections formed without being hunted down.
I cannot claim that meditation caused this. I have no causal evidence, and I am wary of making claims that outrun what can be responsibly known.
But I can say this much: as engagement loosened, something else seemed to move more freely.
When the mind was no longer occupied with defending identity, managing narratives, or rehearsing old stories, there appeared to be more available space. And into that space, ideas began to arrive.
Not because I chased them.
Not because I tried to generate them.
But because there was room.
This may be correlation rather than causation. It may be coincidence. It may be the natural result of other forces converging at this stage of life.
But the pattern is difficult to ignore.
Creativity, like peace, seems less like something to be produced and more like something that emerges when interference subsides.
This is something I intend to return to, and explore more carefully, in future essays.
9. The Year of Watching
I will not pretend that meditation has made me permanently serene or unshakably wise.
I still get irritated.
I still sometimes awaken at three in the morning with episodic existential dread.
I still board trains I had no intention of boarding.
But something essential has changed.
Between the arising of a thought
and the reflex to engage it,
there is now a gap.
Between emotion and interpretation,
a gap.
Between memory and identification,
a gap.
That gap is where peace lives.
Where watching becomes possible, without engagement.
And where engagement, when it happens, is deliberate.
Not bliss.
Not ecstasy.
Not transcendence.
Just room.
Room around experience.
Room around thought.
Room around self.
The storms still come, but they no longer carry me away.
The past still appears, but it no longer binds.
The mind still speaks, but it no longer terrifies.
The darkness still visits, but it no longer defines.
And most days, I find myself returning, almost without effort, to a quiet, steady place behind all experience.
The place I first encountered in a hospital hallway, when everything else fell away.
The place that remains when identity, memory, fear, and narrative loosen their grip.
Call it awareness.
Call it presence.
Call it Consciousness.
Call it nothing at all.
The name does not matter.
What matters is that it is unmistakably here.
And more often than not,
I find myself at peace.
Your Turn:
You don’t need six hundred hours of meditation to notice what this year revealed to me.
You only need a moment of watching.
The next time a thought arrives, notice the impulse to follow it.
Notice the space where engagement becomes a choice.
Nothing else is required.
Footnotes:
¹ See my earlier essay, “The Platform and the Trains: A Rational Case for Meditation,” for a fuller exploration of this metaphor.
² A katana is a traditional Japanese sword, characterized by its curved, single-edged blade. In Japanese culture, it represents both a weapon and a spiritual object requiring discipline and reverence.The ritual of sheathing it symbolizes the transition from active engagement to respectful rest.
³ See my first essay, "Before the Learning, the Undoing"
⁴ A growing body of neuroscience research suggests that long-term meditation practice is associated with reduced baseline activity in the brain’s default mode network (DMN), a network commonly linked to mind-wandering, rumination, and self-referential thought. Importantly, this reduction is not understood as suppression of thought, but as decreased automatic engagement of these networks. See, for example, Brewer et al. (2011), Meditation Experience Is Associated with Differences in Default Mode Network Activity and Connectivity, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Link: https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1112029108 (publisher page)
PDF: https://www.pnas.org/content/pnas/108/50/20254.full.pdf
See also Farb et al. (2007) and subsequent reviews on meditation and DMN activity.
⁵ See my essay, "The Third Unlearning: Control is an illusion"
⁶ Willoughby Britton, PhD, is a neuroscientist and associate professor at Brown University and directs the Clinical and Affective Neuroscience Laboratory. Her research has examined adverse and challenging effects associated with meditation practice. One notable study, “The Varieties of Contemplative Experience,” systematically documented a wide range of difficult experiences reported by long-term meditation practitioners in Western Buddhist contexts. See: Lindahl, J. R., Fisher, N. E., Cooper, D. J., Rosen, R. K., & Britton, W. B. (2017). “The varieties of contemplative experience: A mixed-methods study of meditation-related challenges in Western Buddhists.” PLOS ONE, 12(5).
Link: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0176239
⁷ See my essay, "The First Unlearning: The Undoing of Identity".
⁸ See my essay, "Unlearning the Inner Assault: The Case for Self-Love"
With quiet thanks to Zoltan Tasi on Unsplash for the image.
