When the retreat center I co-founded, the Insight Meditation Society, first opened, someone created a mock brochure describing a retreat there, with …a wonderful made up motto for us: “It is better to do nothing than to waste your time.” I loved that motto, and thought it exemplified a lot about how meditation serves to help us unplug. Although that motto never made it into our official presentation, it actually was an accurate description of mindfulness meditation. Basically, we enter into mindfulness practice so that we can learn how to do nothing and not waste our time, because wasting our time is wasting our lives.

We come to meditation to learn how not to act out the habitual tendencies we generally live by, those actions that create suffering for ourselves and others, and get us into so much trouble. Doing nothing does not mean going to sleep, but it does mean resting –  resting the mind by being present to whatever is happening in the moment, without adding on the effort of attempting to control it. Doing nothing means unplugging from the compulsion to always keep ourselves busy, the habit of shielding ourselves from certain feelings, the tension of trying to manipulate our experience before we even fully acknowledge what that experience is.

Sharon Salzberg, How Doing Nothing Can Help You Truly Live