Can We Reverse Engineer Our Meditation Experience?

Can you reverse engineer your meditation experience and improve your life? The term reverse engineering is used when we try to deconstruct or to extract knowledge from an object, it’s mostly used in the tech industry. We can however, do the same not only with a product but with experiences and even relationships.

With meditation often beginner meditators wait for the experience to be an awakening, that the major benefits of the practice will improve and change their meditation practice as they create it as a daily habit. Often you may find meditators strategizing as they meditate trying to peel the experience to see through what they might think is the next level.

Meditation amplifies our sensory system, the most basic guided meditations focus on the breath, a sensation and / or visuals. You may even meditate in a place where your sense of smell is being pulled by the smell or food or freshly cut grass. In vipassana meditation we note based on sensory systems, we note / label the different sensations, thoughts or feelings that we experience.

In life when we are faced with a problem we tend to find the root of the problem, label the root of the problem in order to solve it. But what happens when you are not able to identify the root of the problem? Or if there is no easy way to solve the root of the problem. With meditation we deconstruct our patterns, our habitual behaviors, uncover our preconceived bias, and most importantly break down how these patterns were created and probably nurtured as you developed from a teenager, to young adult to an adult. All these can lead to living free, at ease and overall happier. As meditation becomes a daily habit you are exposed to your mind, to being with yourself more often than you would probably be otherwise. In interacting with the world around you, we never second guess how we interact with ourselves in our mind first and maybe we should. We interact with the world through our sensory system, but if we don’t understand how we react to situations that we may be exposed to, we repeat the same behavior, expecting a different result.

When dealing with real life situations, emotions come into play and those interact with our sensory system. For example, if you are angry you may feel your face getting warmer, your heart beating faster and your hands shaking.

By the time you realize how angry you are you have already embraced that anger and responded to the situation in front of you. With insight meditation the key components of this meditation practice help you label those emotions, those same feelings before you react. This helps us deconstruct our meditation experience and as a result improve our life experiences.

As for me, meditation has been a guiding light to improve mental clarity and overall self-awareness. It’s helped me identify behavior patterns that I was not proud of. It’s increased my ability to connect with others, as there would be times when I was desperate to be pulled away from conversations.

My mind would always wonder if those around me could see through this fraud of an extrovert. As a young adult, I would have been labeled as a social butterfly.

As I hyper focused on what I designed as my path of success, I completely disconnected from the world around me. I wanted to prove to myself and those who doubted that I could be successful—what this caused was alienation with my family, friends, and strangers.

My meditation practice has increased my ability to be more mindful and has helped me notice how I react to different situations. Allowing me to to work and improve those patterns that have been engraved in my persona.