A long time ago, my advisor in college asked me to help him set up some climbing ropes. They were all knotted up. He said, “instead of trying to pick the knots apart, just pick up the ropes and let them fall to the ground, and keep doing that over and over again — the knots will come undone.”

Thoughts can be like knots: if you try too hard, the knots just get tighter. If you find a way to let go and be loose, the knots can come undone on their own. (Funnily enough, my advisor had spent years in a Zen monestary when he was younger.)

I’ve had the opposite experience as the author and have actually worked through a lot of my own thoughts through meditation. Or, rather, many of those thoughts have worked themselves out.

The thing to remember is that mediation itself is the goal. It’s great that meditating can have a lot of positive side effects; but chasing those side effects kind of misses the whole point.