It Took Me Years to Notice the Difference
I’ll be honest about something that embarrasses me a little. For a solid stretch of my meditation practice, probably close to a year, I was spending a significant portion of my sits in a pleasant, vaguely dreamy state that I mistook for deep stillness. I’d sit down, close my eyes, settle into something soft and quiet, and forty minutes later I’d come out feeling rested and calm.
But I wasn’t growing. Nothing was shifting in my awareness. I wasn’t gaining insight or depth. I was, to put it plainly, spacing out in a comfortable position and calling it meditation.
The moment I realized this was not during meditation itself but during a conversation. Someone asked me what I was noticing in my practice, and I couldn’t give a clear answer. Not because the experience was beyond words, I’ve had those moments too, but because there was genuinely nothing to report. It was blank. Soft, pleasant, but blank.
That distinction, between genuine stillness and pleasant blankness, is one of the most important things a meditator can learn to recognize. And almost nobody talks about it explicitly.
What Genuine Stillness Actually Feels Like
Stillness, in the contemplative sense, isn’t the absence of experience. It’s the fullness of awareness without movement. Everything is present, sounds, sensations, the feeling of being alive, but nothing is agitated. The mind isn’t reaching for anything or pushing anything away. It’s awake, open, and completely at rest simultaneously.
Yogananda described this state with characteristic precision:
“In perfect stillness of body and mind, you experience the joy of just being. Not doing, not thinking, being. In that stillness, the soul begins to reflect the light of Spirit.”
– Paramahansa Yogananda, “How to Be Still”
The key phrase there is “the joy of just being.” Genuine stillness has a quality to it. It’s luminous. There’s a quiet aliveness, a vibrancy. When you come out of it, you feel refreshed but also sharpened, more present, more perceptive, more here.
Spacing out has none of that. You come out of it feeling relaxed, maybe, but vaguely foggy. Like waking from a nap you didn’t mean to take.
Why Spacing Out Feels So Good (and Why That’s the Trap)
Here’s the problem: spacing out during meditation is pleasant. Your mind drops below the threshold of active thinking, muscle tension releases, and you enter a kind of low-grade trance. It’s restful. It reduces stress. It’s probably better for you than scrolling your phone.
But it’s not meditation. It’s what the yogic tradition calls laya, a sinking of awareness into dullness. And the danger isn’t that it’s harmful. The danger is that it can go on for years, feeling like practice, without producing the actual fruits of practice: clarity, insight, self-knowledge, and deepening presence.
I think the trap is especially potent for people who come to meditation stressed and exhausted, which, let’s face it, is most of us. When you’re running on fumes, the first thing meditation gives you is relief. Your nervous system finally gets to downshift. That relief feels so good that your system learns to go straight there every time you sit down. It becomes a conditioned response: sit, close eyes, drift.
Joseph Murphy, writing about the subconscious mind, touched on something related:
“The subconscious mind works continuously, day and night, whether you give it a specific task or not. If you do not direct it with clear intention, it simply follows the path of least resistance.”
– Joseph Murphy, Chapter 3
That “path of least resistance” is exactly what spacing out is. The mind, given no clear direction, just goes slack. It’s doing what it does naturally when left unattended. Meditation, by contrast, is the most attended experience there is.
How to Tell Which One You’re In
Over time, I’ve developed a few reliable checks that help me distinguish genuine stillness from spacing out. These aren’t theoretical, they’re things I actually use during practice.
The Awareness Check
In genuine stillness, you know you’re still. There’s a witness present. If someone asked you “Are you aware right now?” during the experience, the answer would be an immediate, clear yes. During spacing out, that question either wouldn’t register or would jolt you back from somewhere you’d drifted to.
The Continuity Check
After a period of genuine stillness, you can generally trace the experience. There aren’t gaps. You were present the whole time, even though nothing dramatic was happening. After spacing out, there are missing chunks, periods you can’t account for. Five minutes disappeared and you don’t know where they went.
The Quality Check
This is subtler but might be the most reliable. Genuine stillness has a brightness to it. An alertness. Even though everything is quiet, the quality of mind is crisp and clear, like a still lake on a cold morning, perfectly calm but utterly transparent. Spacing out is more like a still lake covered in fog. Calm, yes. But you can’t see through it.
What Causes the Slide into Spacing Out
There are a few common culprits, and I’ve fallen into all of them at various points:
Exhaustion. If you’re sleep-deprived, your body will hijack meditation for rest. This is actually reasonable, your body needs sleep more than it needs insight. The fix isn’t to force alertness but to address the sleep deficit. Meditating while deeply tired is almost always going to produce laya, not stillness.
Lack of intention. Sitting down without any clear sense of what you’re doing, no anchor, no method, no direction, invites drifting. This doesn’t mean you need to effortfully concentrate every second. But there should be a gentle sense of purpose. A thread to follow.
Over-relaxation. Some meditation instructions overemphasize letting go to the point where you let go of awareness itself. “Just relax” is incomplete advice. “Relax while staying awake” is closer to the mark.
Posture. This sounds mundane, but it matters. A slouched, collapsed posture sends signals to the nervous system that it’s time to wind down. An upright, dignified posture, spine straight, chest open, chin slightly tucked, supports alertness. I noticed an immediate improvement when I stopped treating my meditation posture like a nap position.
An Exercise: The “Brighten” Practice
This is the simple technique that pulled me out of my spacing-out habit. I use it at the beginning of every sit now, and periodically throughout.
After settling into your posture and closing your eyes, take three slow, deliberate breaths. Then, on an inhale, mentally say the word brighten. As you do, gently lift your attention. Not with strain, but as if you’re turning up the dimmer switch on a light. Feel the quality of your awareness become slightly more vivid, slightly more awake.
You’re not adding tension. You’re adding luminosity. The difference is important. Tension grips. Luminosity opens.
Hold that brightened awareness for a few breaths. If you feel yourself starting to drift during your sit, that familiar softening toward blankness, use the word again. Brighten. One gentle adjustment.
Over time, this becomes less of a technique and more of a baseline. The mind learns what alert stillness feels like, and it starts going there naturally instead of defaulting to drift.
Both States Are Part of the Path
I want to be clear that I’m not vilifying the spacey, dreamy state. It’s a natural part of practice, especially in the early years. It’s your nervous system learning to downshift. It’s valuable in its own way, you’re training your body to access relaxation, which for many people is a genuine achievement.
But at some point, if the practice is going to deepen, you have to learn to stay awake inside the stillness. To be both deeply relaxed and utterly alert. That combination, effortless awareness, restful wakefulness, is what the traditions are pointing to when they talk about meditation’s real fruits.
It took me longer than I’d like to admit to learn this. But I’m grateful for the spacing-out phase, because it taught me something about myself: I have a deep tendency to check out when things get quiet. That tendency doesn’t just show up on the cushion. It shows up in conversations, in relationships, in moments that ask me to be fully present when being fully present is uncomfortable.
Meditation, when done with real awareness, doesn’t let you hide. That’s what makes it valuable. And that’s what makes the distinction between stillness and spacing out worth paying close attention to.
