The Best Meditation Is the One You Do: A Lifelong Practice

Sarah McLean's meditation story does not begin with a retreat, a teacher's bell, or a moment of enlightenment. It begins with a teenager sitting cross-legged on a ride into Harvard Square, hands arranged just so, waiting for something magical to happen. In a conversation with Shawn Marshall, McLean, who is approaching her 65th birthday and has spent nearly four decades practicing, walks through the detours that followed: the Army, a psychiatric hospital, a bicycle trip that was supposed to last two years, a chant she learned without knowing what it meant, and a daily practice that started as a response to crippling anxiety. Her conclusion, reached after years of hunting for the "best" method, is deliberately plain. The best meditation is the one you do. The talk then moves into what she calls her Five Essentials of Meditation and ends with a guided practice that rests in the simple sense of "I Am," being before name, identity, or circumstance.

Can you start meditating by pretending to do it?

McLean is candid about her first attempt. "I pretended to meditate. That's my very first experience of meditation," she told Marshall, describing sitting in a trolley car on the outskirts of Boston while skipping school with a friend. The two of them were escaping difficult home lives toward a world that felt like mystery and intellectual possibility. She had a Nancy Drew habit and a love of puzzles, and she treated the mind the same way: as something to be figured out.

That detail matters more than it first appears. Plenty of people approach meditation as a performance, a posture chosen before any understanding of what the posture is for. McLean admits she had no idea what to do with her mind. What she had was curiosity, and curiosity kept her returning to the question. Her own phrase for the pursuit was figuring out "how to meet my own mind and the mystery of the mind."

What did the Army and the hospital teach about the mind?

McLean's adult work took her into much heavier territory. She joined the Army, and her job as a behavioral specialist meant working with soldiers whose minds were under strain. She describes the task as helping people whose minds could turn against them after exposure to moral injury, horror, stress, or trauma. It was in that setting that she first learned a formal meditation, a simple body scan. She later worked in a psychiatric hospital's behavioral units, where many people carrying trauma end up, and she was careful to add that not everyone there is in that situation.

Those years set up a pattern that runs through the whole conversation. Meditation, for McLean, is not a technique for escaping hard experience. It is a way of relating to experience, including the difficult parts, without being swallowed by them. A body scan is a modest tool, but it begins with the body, the place where stress lives before it becomes a story.

How did a chant on a Greek mountain road shape the practice?

The most striking episode in the talk is the bike trip. McLean and her boyfriend set out to ride around the world, starting in Europe and then moving through Asia. They stopped about nine months into a planned two-year journey after he came down with pneumonia. Before that, they endured one of the hottest summers on record in Greece, along the Peloponnese, at a place McLean calls "the gates of hell," near the tip of the Mani peninsula. The heat, she says, left her delirious, to the point of wanting to throw her bike off a mountainside.

Her boyfriend gave her something to hold onto: a Buddhist chant. There were no phones or music, only the hope of reaching the next American Express office. She wrote the chant down and sang it to herself on every climb, every pedal stroke, every turn of the wheel. She was not yet sure of its meaning. As she recounts it, the chant gave her "a rhythm" and something for her mind to hold, in place of the questions that would otherwise have run on repeat: are we there yet, will this hill ever end, can I stop for water?

Only later did she learn what she had been singing. The chant, "Namu Kanzeon Bosatsu" in its familiar form, was addressed to Kanzeon, the Japanese name for Kuan Yin, the goddess of compassion. She admits she probably botched it slightly. She kept chanting for the next six months, up through the foothills of the Himalayas, through Pakistan, and into China.

"It also gave me a rhythm and it gave my mind something to hold on to instead of, 'Are we there yet? Is this hill going to stop?'"

— Sarah McLean, in conversation with Shawn Marshall (approx. 5:56)

There is a lesson in that story that goes beyond the romance of the road. The practice found her before she had the framework to understand it. A rhythm, a repeated phrase, and a body in motion were enough to steady a mind that was falling apart. Many people wait until they understand a practice before they begin. McLean's account suggests the understanding can come afterward, through the doing.

Why did anxiety turn meditation into a daily habit?

When McLean returned from the trip, the relationship ended, and she moved to Washington, D.C. She started going to a yoga class and enjoyed the physical practice, though she would not chant aloud. Then she met a man who meditated. Her anxiety at the time was, in her words, "very debilitating." He told her he would like to be her boyfriend but that she would have to do something about the anxiety, and suggested she might try meditating too. She agreed. She was about 27.

That is the point where a practice became a habit. McLean describes it as the start of a daily routine, part of what she calls her daily sadhana, a rhythm she still keeps. Her account is honest about mixed motives. She is not sure whether she began for the relief or for the relationship, and she suggests the two were tangled together. What persisted was not the motive that brought her to the cushion but the repetition that kept her there.

Does getting distracted mean you're doing it wrong?

This is the question McLean most wants to dismantle, because it is where beginners quit. In the description of the talk, she names the simple ingredients common to meditation as willingness and gentle attention. Distraction is not a failure of those ingredients. Noticing that the mind has wandered and gently coming back is, in her framing, part of the practice itself.

That reframing changes what a session is for. If success means a quiet mind, every thought is a defeat. If the practice is the returning, every wandering moment is a repetition, and the repetition is the work. It is the same logic that made the chant useful on the mountain road: the mind wandered constantly, and the rhythm kept calling it back.

What is the best kind of meditation, really?

McLean spent years searching for the "best" meditation. In the segment where she compares approaches, she moves through loving-kindness, mantra, and mindfulness and describes how each shapes attention differently. She is not dismissive of any of them. But her conclusion, offered as a simple one, is that the best meditation is the one you do. A method you practice consistently does more than a perfect method you abandon.

The talk also reframes attention itself. The description notes that Marshall and McLean explore why attention may be our most valuable currency. If that is true, meditation is less an escape from life than a decision about where to spend it. Each return to the breath, the body, or the sound in the room is a small investment in being present to one's own life. That is also why McLean frames meditation as a way to become both deeply relaxed and fully awake, rather than one or the other.

What happens in the guided "I Am" practice?

The conversation leads into the Five Essentials of Meditation and then into a guided session that unfolds in stages. The preparation and settling come first, with a bell marking the start. The guidance then opens with breath and body awareness, inviting listeners to notice the breath moving in and out and to feel the body as it is. From there it moves toward listening, where you might notice a heartbeat or the sounds around you, and then toward stillness, a quality the guidance invites you to find within the room and within yourself.

The final stage is the "I Am" practice, which begins around the one-hour mark of the recording. Its aim is to rest in the bare experience of being, before name, identity, or conditions. For someone who once sat in a trolley car trying to solve the mystery of the mind, the destination is a kind of return: the mystery was never a puzzle to be cracked, but the simple fact of awareness already present.

Where to go from here

If McLean's story has a single instruction, it is to start where you are and keep returning. You do not need a bike trip, a monastery, or a perfect posture. The pretend meditator on the subway eventually found a practice that had substance. The soldier's body scan, the chant on the Greek road, and the daily sadhana that grew out of anxiety are all small, repeated acts, not dramatic breakthroughs.

• Watch the full conversation and the guided practice, which begins at 47:02 and includes the "I Am" meditation near 59:59.
• Try a short daily body scan or breath awareness session for two weeks, counting the returns rather than judging the wandering.
• Pick one method and stay with it before comparing. McLean's point is that consistency is the measure, not the label.
• Notice when your attention drifts today, and treat the noticing as the practice.