Meditation: Practicing the Art of Failing

Exposure therapy, hedonic adaptation, and returning to your breath

Photo by Keegan Houser on Unsplash

I read something recently that I haven’t been able to get out of my head. It said the point of a meditation practice isn’t to learn thoughtlessness and utter stillness with the breath. The point is failing to do this.

Meditation is the art of attempting the impossible in order to relentlessly practice gentleness in how we talk to ourselves after failure.

There is no achieving meditation, no winning at it, no accomplishing a milestone or checking it off a bucket list. There is nothing envy-inspiring in sitting with your own breath, even though it’s more impossible than backflips and rocket science and having a radio single. Meditation is the double-edged reminder: all we ever have in a moment is our self and our breath, and we cannot successfully appreciate that.

I don’t think this benefit of meditation is universally accepted as the most important one — maybe not even as true — but it struck me as a framing that my own wiring really needs. Whether by nature or nurture, my instinct is to optimize, to work the most efficiently, to rest the best, to min-max my life into a machine.

But I can’t even breathe without experiencing failure. Isn’t that delightful? Like, truly. There’s no sarcasm there. Even though I’ve been conditioned to be terrified of it, failure is never so bad in the moment. It’s usually (although certainly not always) a continuation of the status quo. Not getting a promotion, not getting an agent, not getting a reading for my musical, not getting a romantic partner — the failure is one of reaching the next step. I want to get there, sure, but I’ve been handling this step of the staircase just fine.

Similarly, while failure never feels quite as bad for quite as long as we think it will, success doesn’t even feel as good as we think it will. We take the step up the staircase… and it immediately becomes the new floor. Thanks to hedonic adaptation, humans are quick to adjust their baseline — whether to a new level of success or a new level of failure. I’ve talked before about how fame isn’t something you can do, so we don’t appreciate it when we get it anyway. The moment of achieving an award is sitting in a stuffy room in uncomfortable clothes. The moments after achieving an award, it becomes decoration on a living room shelf. It doesn’t feel good. Not for long.

[embed]The Work Is the Point A reflection for 2026medium.com

Since we cannot “do” success, we may as well practice failing. If failure becomes less scary, and we begin to talk to ourselves gently, like we would a best friend or a child, it makes it easier to try for the things we want. In that sense, meditation is exposure therapy. It gives us a dose of failure in a controlled situation, where we can practice the art of failing.

Meditation, then, can be part of establishing grit. As explained by Margaret Perlis for Forbes, grit is made up of courage (e.g., not being scared of failure), conscientiousness, follow-through, resilience, and a strive for excellence (not perfection). Sitting alone with our thoughts relies on all five of these traits: the courage to fail at breathing, the focus on a single, boring task, the ability to return to it, imperfectly, day after day.

If we inevitably fail at breathing, of course there will also be failure on the road to what we most want out of life — success as an artist, or in the workplace, or as a partner. But we’ll be less scared of it. More able to sit in the moment, just breathe, fail at just breathing, and then, gently, return to the breath.