From an interview on Lifehacker’s How I Work series:
… our expert on the show was Andy Puddicombe, the guy who helped start [the meditation app] Headspace. And Andy’s story is a super interesting story, because he had serious psychological issues and went to India to try and figure it out. And that’s how he discovered meditation.
And his approach to meditation is that meditation is a practice session to try to let things go. It’s work, it’s not relaxation. By the end of this episode he literally had not said any advice that I had not heard at least two dozen times before, but all of a sudden it really sunk in, hearing this story. I was like, “oh, no, I’ve been doing meditation all wrong.” I’d been trying to relax, and empty my brain, and focus on my breath, but that’s not really what it’s about. It’s work. It’s practice. You have to be able to say “here’s a thought that’s bothering me, I’m going to like wrestle it into a corner where I can turn my back on it.”
And it transformed how I fall asleep. And again, he didn’t tell me anything new; he just told me it in the context of a story about himself and suddenly I was able to hear it really for the first time.