What Most People Get Wrong About Meditation: Wisdom from Gelong Thubten

If you’ve ever tried meditation and given up after a few frustrating sessions, you’re not alone. Buddhist monk and meditation teacher Gelong Thubten spent years struggling with his practice before discovering that most beginners make the same critical mistakes. In a recent conversation, he revealed the misconceptions that stop people from experiencing meditation’s true benefits.

The Myth of the Empty Mind

Perhaps the biggest misconception about meditation is that you’re supposed to completely clear your mind of all thoughts. Thubten admits he fell into this trap himself. “The first few times I tried meditation I hated it,” he explains. “I felt like a failure because my mind is so busy there’s so many thoughts and then you’re trying to silence those thoughts and the more you try to silence them the louder they seem to become.”

The truth? You’re not trying to kill your thoughts or enter a blank state. Instead, meditation is about observing your thoughts and stepping back to watch your mind rather than being consumed by it. Your thoughts aren’t the enemy. They’re part of the process.

Waiting for the Magic Moment

Many people approach meditation like they’re waiting for a drug to kick in. They sit down expecting rainbows, profound revelations, or at least a pleasant buzz of happiness. Thubten describes how this expectation turned meditation into misery for him in the early days.

“I was sitting there and wanting to feel great and ending up feeling a kind of sadness and disappointment,” he recalls. When he brought this to his teacher, the response was eye-opening: “You’re meditating like somebody taking drugs. You’re waiting for a hit.”

The desire to feel something special creates a cycle of craving and disappointment. Real meditation isn’t about chasing experiences. It’s about showing up and doing the practice, regardless of how it feels.

The Comparison Trap

Just as you wouldn’t step off a treadmill after ten minutes and judge whether you “did running well,” you shouldn’t evaluate your meditation sessions. Yet this is exactly what most people do. Was it a good session? Was my mind busy or calm? Did I do it right?

Thubten emphasizes that even a session with a busy mind gives you more to work with. “Non-judgment is crucial,” he says. The training in letting things be without evaluation becomes the foundation for having a more loving, compassionate mind, both toward yourself and others.

Only Meditating When You Feel Like It

One of the most damaging habits is waiting until you’re in the right mood to meditate. This puts your mood in control instead of your practice. Thubten advocates for the opposite approach: “I find it really helpful to meditate when I feel sick, when I feel tired, when I feel stressed.”

By meditating no matter what, you learn that you can access that inner calm even when falling apart. This becomes particularly important when facing life’s biggest challenges, including death itself. If you only meditate when everything feels great, you’ll never be able to activate that skill when you need it most.

Missing the Point of Getting Lost

When your mind wanders during meditation and you suddenly realize you’ve been lost in thought, most people see this as failure. They angrily drag their attention back to the breath. But Thubten flips this completely: “That moment where you notice you got lost, for most people they take that moment as a moment of failure, but actually the best way to do it is your mind gets lost and then at some point you notice you got lost and then you can see that as now you’ve regained your awareness.”

The wandering isn’t the problem. Noticing you’ve wandered is the meditation. Coming back to the breath is also meditation. The thoughts that pulled you away actually enabled you to practice returning, which is what builds your mental strength.

The Transactional Mindset

We live in a culture obsessed with inputs and outputs. Put in this much time, get that much result. Draw me a graph. But meditation doesn’t work this way, and approaching it transactionally guarantees frustration.

Thubten uses love as the perfect analogy: “If you really love somebody you just love them. You don’t have to keep a list of all the things you’ve done for them and then expect them to do that back for you.” Meditation should work the same way. You practice not to get something, but simply to practice.

Like going to the gym, you won’t see results after one session. But over weeks and months of consistent practice, the changes creep up on you. You become less stressed, more present, better able to handle life’s challenges.

Thinking It’s Only for Spiritual People

For too long, meditation has felt like the domain of Buddhists, mystics, or people on intensive spiritual journeys. Thubten is passionate about changing this perception. He’s brought meditation to movie sets (including working with Benedict Cumberbatch on Doctor Strange), hospitals, prisons, and schools.

“Meditation isn’t just for people living in retreats or monasteries,” he insists. “It’s something you can bring into the most busy, most stressful situations of lives.” Whether you’re a doctor, teacher, parent, or anyone dealing with daily stress, meditation offers practical benefits backed by extensive scientific research.

What Meditation Actually Is

So if meditation isn’t about clearing your mind, feeling blissful, or achieving some mystical state, what is it?

At its core, meditation is about giving your mind freedom. It’s like the sky observing clouds pass by without trying to block them or change them. You give yourself something to focus on (usually the breath), and every time your attention wanders, you gently bring it back. That’s it. That’s the practice.

The bringing back is what makes you strong. The noticing you’ve wandered is awareness. The acceptance of your busy mind is compassion. Do this daily, without judgment, without expectation, and the benefits naturally unfold.

Getting Started the Right Way

Based on Thubten’s insights, here’s how to approach meditation as a complete beginner:

Set a specific session time and stick to it, even when you don’t feel like practicing. Start with something manageable, perhaps 10 or 20 minutes. Use your breath as an anchor, something for your “monkey mind” to hold onto. When thoughts arise (and they will constantly), don’t fight them. Simply notice when you’ve drifted and return to the breath.

Release all expectations about how you should feel. Let go of judging whether a session was good or bad. Think of it as exercise for your mind. You’re building a skill, and like any skill, it develops slowly over time through consistent practice.

Most importantly, approach your practice with compassion. Be kind to yourself when your mind wanders. Forgive yourself for not being perfect. This gentleness with yourself is the seed of compassion that will eventually extend to everyone around you.

The Real Promise of Meditation

Meditation won’t make rainbows shoot out of your head. You probably won’t have mystical visions or profound revelations (though Thubten notes he’s never had these either, and he’s spent years in intensive retreat).

What meditation does offer is something more practical and perhaps more valuable: a way to be with yourself without constantly running away. A method for staying calm in the midst of chaos. The ability to respond thoughtfully rather than react automatically. A foundation of inner peace that nobody can give you and nobody can take away.

“The ultimate purpose of life is to love others and to help them to suffer less,” Thubten says. Meditation provides the wisdom and strength to do exactly that, whatever your path in life may be.

So forget everything you thought meditation was supposed to be. Stop waiting to feel something special. Release your judgments. Just sit, breathe, notice when your mind wanders, and gently return. Do this daily, and let the transformation happen on its own timeline.

That’s meditation. Everything else is just noise.