Why Buddhism is True: The Science and Philosophy of Meditation and Enlightenment

by Robert Wright

to give a talk at an annual conference called Poptech. The night before my talk I woke up at 2 or 3 a.m. with one of my little bouts of anxiety. After a few minutes of staying awake pondering the grave implications of staying awake pondering grave implications, I decided to sit up in my bed and meditate. I focused on my breathing for a while, but I also focused on the anxiety itself: the tight feeling in my gut. I tried to look at it, as I’d been taught to do at my meditation retreat, nonjudgmentally. It wasn’t necessarily a bad thing, and there was no reason to run away from it. It was just a feeling, so I sat there feeling it and watching it. I can’t say that the feeling felt great, but the more I accepted it, observing it nonjudgmentally, the less unpleasant it got. And then something happened that was much like my big overcaffeination breakthrough at the meditation retreat. The anxiety now seemed like something removed from me, something I was just looking at, in my mind’s eye, the way I might