Meditation for Everyone
Meditation didn’t begin with wellness apps and breathwork trends. For thousands of years, people have used forms of meditation to direct their attention toward God, truth, the self, or the nature of reality. However, meditation has never meant the same thing to everyone.
Biblical meditation generally means pondering, rehearsing and living according to God’s words. Buddhist meditation may cultivate insight into impermanence and non-self. Hindu traditions may seek realization of the self or union with ultimate reality. These practices may overlap in stillness, repetition and focused attention, but they are not spiritually interchangeable.
Today, meditation has become an umbrella term for practices as varied as prayer, mantra, breath awareness, visualization and quiet observation. Their beliefs and purposes may differ, but many involve the same basic movement of attention: mind wanders, mind notices, mind returns.
Many people imagine a successful meditator sitting perfectly still with a perfectly empty mind. Then they try it themselves and discover that their thoughts have followed them into the room. The groceries. The argument from yesterday. The message they forgot to answer. What they need to do tomorrow. They assume they have failed. The problem may not be that you cannot meditate. The problem may be what you think meditation is supposed to look like.
“I can’t meditate. I can’t stop thinking.” Al Evans has heard this countless times during nearly 20 years of meditation practice. His response is simple. You are going to have thoughts when you meditate, everyone does.
The thought is not the failure. The moment you notice where your mind has gone and return to the practice is the meditation.
You Don't Suck At It
For Al, meditation is not an abstract interest. It is a practice he says changed his life and, in some ways, may even have saved it.
Meditation is not a wrestling match with your own mind. Trying to force a thought away gives it more attention. The practice is to notice it without following it and return to the point of focus.
In Secrets of Meditation: A Practical Guide to Inner Peace and Personal Transformation, David Ji addresses the belief that the mind must become completely silent. He teaches that thoughts are not interruptions to meditation. They are part of the experience.
Nothing extraordinary has to happen, either. You do not have to see colours, lose awareness of your body or enter a state of bliss. You might feel calm, restless, distracted or uncomfortable. You might hear traffic outside or remember something you forgot to do. Then you return.
A meditation does not need to feel profound to be worthwhile. Its value may become apparent later, when you notice your irritation before speaking, recognize that stress is building or pause before reacting. The practice happens in meditation. The effect appears in life.
The Breath Gives the Mind Somewhere to Return
For someone who does not know where to begin, breath offers a practical starting point. Breath is immediate, physical and always available. Following breath gives the mind something to do other than continue rehearsing the thought that is upsetting you.
Breathwork and meditation are related, but they are not identical. In breath-focused meditation, you may observe the breath without deliberately changing it. The breath becomes an anchor for attention. In structured breathwork, you intentionally change its rhythm by counting the inhale, exhale or pauses between them. Both can bring attention back to the present, but understanding the difference is important, especially when discussing scientific research.
A 2023 study published in Cell Reports Medicine compared mindfulness meditation with three structured breathing practices performed for five minutes a day over one month. The breathing exercises included box breathing, which uses equal periods of inhaling, holding, exhaling and holding, and cyclic sighing, which emphasizes a longer exhale.
The breathwork groups reported improvements in mood, with the strongest results found in the exhale-focused group. That does not prove that one conscious breath erases stress. It adds to the evidence that regularly directing the breath may influence mood and physiological arousal.
Research on meditation requires the same restraint.
A systematic review published in JAMA Internal Medicine examined 47 clinical trials involving 3,515 participants. It found evidence of small to moderate improvements in anxiety, depression and pain among people participating in mindfulness meditation programs. That is meaningful, but it is not magic. Meditation is not a cure for everything, a substitute for appropriate care or a promise that life will stop being stressful. What it can offer is practice noticing what is happening before a thought becomes an automatic reaction.
What Can Change in 16 Seconds?
One of the meditation exercises Al shares is David Ji’s signature equal-count breathing practice called 16 Seconds to Bliss. Begin by thinking of something that recently bothered you. Not the most painful experience of your life. Just something that left you irritated or unsettled.
Bring it to mind. Then follow one complete breathing cycle:
Inhale for four seconds.
Hold for four seconds.
Exhale for four seconds.
Hold for four seconds.
At the end of those 16 seconds, the problem has not vanished. But, for 16 seconds, you were not replaying the story. You were following the breath. And that, my friend, is the shift. You had a thought without allowing it to occupy every part of your attention. You interrupted its momentum and returned to what was happening in the present. If you can follow your breath for one cycle, notice when your attention wanders and return, you can meditate.
The Pause. Breathe.
Stress creates urgency. Answer now. Defend yourself now. Fix it now. Say the thing. Send the message. Meditation creates a pause between impulse and response. This pause does not deny what you feel or require you to suppress it. Pausing gives you enough room to notice what is happening.
What am I reacting to?
What story am I telling myself?
Does this require an immediate answer?
How do I want to respond?
Meditation cannot control what happens around us. It can, however, help us to become more conscious of how we respond. This is also why Al talks about meditation at O₂xy Wellness. Wellness isn’t one treatment, one practitioner or one way of understanding the body. Hyperbaric oxygen therapy is one of the tools available at O₂xy Wellness, meditation is another. One works with oxygen under pressure. The other works with oxygen (breath) to relieve pressure. Both work toward your healing.
Meditation and HBOT are not interchangeable, and they do not need to be. Both point toward a larger question at the heart of wellness: What helps a person participate more consciously in their own health and life? Sometimes it’s HBOT. Sometimes it’s becoming still enough to notice one breath over the course of 16 seconds.
If you have questions about HBOT and/or meditation, you know you better call Al 💙
O₂xy Wellness | Red Deer
Sources and Further Reading
davidji. Secrets of Meditation: A Practical Guide to Inner Peace and Personal Transformation, revised edition.
davidji. “Five Myths of Meditation.”
davidji. “Stress at Work: Breathe More, Stress Less.”
Goyal, M., et al. “Meditation Programs for Psychological Stress and Well-being: A Systematic Review and Meta-analysis.” JAMA Internal Medicine, 2014.
Balban, M. Y., et al. “Brief Structured Respiration Practices Enhance Mood and Reduce Physiological Arousal.” Cell Reports Medicine, 2023.
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