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Yes, I chose those words deliberately.
If your meditation practice leaves you believing, "I meditate every day. I'm more evolved than other people," then I would say this without hesitation: Kill the practice.
Meditation isn’t the problem here, but whatever you're calling meditation is strengthening the very thing it is meant to help you see through. One of the quietest traps on the spiritual path is spiritual superiority. And it sound something like this -
"I meditate.” "They don't."
"I understand.” "They don't."
"I'm more conscious.” "They're asleep."
The ego is remarkably intelligent. If it can no longer inflate itself through wealth, status, power, or achievement, it will happily reinvent itself as a spiritual ego. It will simply add "meditator" to the list of identities it has already created. It will collect retreats, techniques, teachers, and philosophies to feel different from everyone else.
I know this because I've seen it. Although I came to formal meditation relatively late in life, I've always been deeply interested in observing people, questioning my own mind, and trying to understand what it means to live consciously. When I finally began learning meditation through different teachers and traditions, I assumed that experienced meditators would naturally be grounded, humble, and deeply respectful. Some were. Some weren't.
I met people who could sit in silence for an hour but couldn't listen to another human being for five minutes without judgement. I met people who spoke beautifully about awareness while treating others with surprising arrogance and disrespect.
At first, it confused me. Then it taught me something that meditation alone is not enough. A technique can calm the mind. It can sharpen attention. It can improve concentration. But if it isn't slowly softening the heart, something essential is missing. The longer I practised, the more another journey quietly unfolded alongside meditation. I found myself reading more, questioning more, learning from different traditions, and recognising how little I actually knew. Real practice made me curious. And the deeper I looked, the more one quality kept appearing across traditions, teachers, and genuine practitioners - Compassion.
Not as an ideal. As a consequence. Compassion towards yourself when you stumble. Compassion towards others when they do. Because the more honestly you observe your own mind, the harder it becomes to judge someone else’s. You begin to see that everyone is carrying fears, conditioning, habits, and suffering that you cannot fully understand. And from that understanding, arrogance begins to lose its grip. Today, I don't judge a meditation practice by how many years someone has practised, how many retreats they've attended, or how long they can sit with their eyes closed.
I ask a much simpler questions. Has the practice made them kinder? Has it made them more patient? More humble? More willing to admit they might be wrong? More compassionate towards people who don't think, live, or believe as they do? Because if meditation is strengthening your identity instead of loosening it… If it is feeding your ego instead of revealing it… If it is making you feel superior rather than more deeply connected to the humanity you share with everyone else… Then I stand by what I said.
Kill the practice.
Not meditation itself. Kill the version of it that is strengthening the very illusion it was meant to dissolve. Then begin again. This time, not with the intention of becoming a better meditator. But with the courage to become a more compassionate human being.
