When I first started meditating, after yet another trip to India and a visit to the Isha Yoga Center in Coimbatore, I assumed that getting distracted meant I was failing.

That attitude comes from our habit of chasing achievement and quick, tangible results. We want to deepen our practice as fast as we can and reach the extraordinary states of consciousness we hear about from great yogis and Tibetan lamas. So we get angry when a stray thought pulls us out of a blissful state, and we count the time it takes to settle back into dhyana as wasted.

Meditation research sees it differently. The key concept is meta-awareness: knowing what is happening in your own mind right now. The term grew out of the concept of metacognition, which the American psychologist John Flavell introduced in the 1970s. Jonathan Schooler, who studies mind wandering, gave it its current meaning in the early 2000s, and Antoine Lutz, Richard Davidson and Cortland Dahl brought it into the science of meditation.

The opposite state is called experiential fusion. We merge with our thoughts, and no one is left to observe them. That is distraction, the autopilot we all know.

What matters most is the moment we notice we have drifted. The brain’s salience network, which flags what is important, lights up. When we bring our attention back, a second network takes over, the executive network. Notice, return. Each repetition strengthens both networks, and what began as a fleeting state gradually becomes a stable trait.

The Tibetan tradition has a metaphor for this moment. Return to the object of meditation, or in objectless practice to awareness itself, the way you would return to a jewel you found after a long search. There is no resentment that it was lost, only the joy of recognizing it and the care with which you hold it.

Science and tradition agree here. Distraction is not an obstacle to practice but its raw material. And the moment of returning is the practice itself, not time lost on the way to it.

Once I changed my approach, I began watching thoughts as they arise. As soon as I notice one, I let it go and come back to the object of meditation. That keeps the mind from wandering off after it.

Practiced this way, meditation stops being a fight with your own mind. It goes deeper and does more good, off the cushion as well: when you need to stay with something important, make the right call in a hard situation, or really listen to someone you love.