The meditative view is that it is only through the acceptance of the actuality of the present, no matter how painful or frightening or undesirable it may be, that change and growth and healing can come about.

The fact is, in many situations you really do not know what you are capable of doing at any particular moment. You might surprise yourself if you took on a problem, just for fun, and tried something new, even if you didn’t know what you were doing and even if you inwardly doubted your ability to do it.

Perhaps the most remarkable thing about yoga is how much energy you feel after you do it. You can be feeling exhausted, do some yoga, and feel completely rejuvenated in a short period of time.

On occasion, when guiding the body scan, I might even suggest, following Shakespeare, that we let our “too too solid flesh … melt, thaw, and resolve itself into a dew.”

We note their content and their “emotional charge”—in other words, whether they are weak or strong in their power to dominate the mind at that moment. Then, no matter how charged they may be for us in that moment, and regardless of whether they are primarily pleasant or primarily unpleasant, we intentionally let go of them and refocus on our breath

“stimulus-independent thought” or “mind wandering” appears to be the brain’s default mode of operation.

Dr. Seligman’s overall conclusion from these and other studies is that it is not the world per se that puts us at increased risk of illness so much as how we see and think about what is happening to us.

The point is that we don’t always know what our true limits are. However,

Meditation is not so concerned with how much thinking is going on as it is with how much room you are making for it to take place within the field of your awareness from one moment to the next.