For the past 20 years (give or take), the word “Zen” has been used liberally in association with some personal, commercial or business concept to suggest that the concept in question can be “mastered”, usually through a “formula” that someone “discovered”. Typically, though, this mental elixir is alluded to in a self-help book (or eBook), DVD or seminar — which, of course, will cost you some money to acquire.

Typing in “the zen of” (with quotes) in Google alone results in over 742,000 sites out there talking about the Zen of something. So if the true ideas about Zen as a distinct school of Buddhism are distilled to loosely — if at all — apply to anything from MP3 players to how to close a business deal “better”, it would only make sense that “meditation” would become the next logical buzzword that would be touted as a let’s-get-happy meme.

Meditation is probably one of the healthiest things you can do for yourself. Regardless of your religious beliefs (or non-beliefs), going inside yourself to examine yourself from a detached perspective can be liberating in that you learn to let go of control and rise above allowing your thoughts and emotions rule you, causing you suffering.

Some studies have shown that meditation can actually change the physical structure of the brain — presumably because certain regions are being “flexed” more while meditating, which would suggest that, perhaps, these areas are not used during the daily grind that most people have come to describe as “that’s life”.

But these articles tend to suggest that if you close your eyes and pose like the people in the stock photo accompanying the article, you’ll be “happy”.

So what will that mean, and how will you know it if it happens?

Meditation is hard to practice because it’s difficult to keep our mind from doing what it’s probably doing right now (especially on the Internet): wander from thought to thought, or, as it’s sometimes called, “monkey mind“:

Thoughts pull attention here and there and may seem to take us out of meditation altogether; they become obsessive. Feeding the monkeys is buying into the show of proliferating thought, reifying it, being led off by it. It is taking thought too seriously. A related metaphor is the allegory of a monkey stretching as far as he can to grab the reflection of the moon in water. He cannot understand that he is looking in the wrong place.

Based on the way a lot of people in Western society tend to live (or aspire to live), most folks would like to hang onto their mini-vans, plasma TVs and to climbing an imaginary ladder at work — but if they close their eyes and wonder, for a few minutes, if they’re meditating, maybe they’ll feel balanced. You might hear people say things like, “If I could just get my feelings under control, I’ll be OK… I’ll be happy”. But, really, isn’t this just part of the struggle for what can be achieved by letting go of the idea of control?

Shunryu Suzuki, a true Zen master, describes in his book, Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind — which is required reading for anyone serious about meditation:

“Zazen practice is not done to ‘achieve’ a certain state of mind. When we try this, the mind only wanders… if you try to calm your mind you will be unable to sit, and if you try not to be disturbed, your effort will not be the right effort.”

In other words, when you meditate… just meditate. It’s not about making parts of your brain bulge or being happy after X amount of hours. It’s not a quest for another acquisition (namely, the often-elusive state of happiness).

It’s just paying attention to your breathing and, if you find yourself following a thought that has blown into your mind like a leaf on the wind, just watch it as it moves on.