I started to meditate around 2 years ago. Since then, and particularly within this past year there are a number of changes in my day to day experience that seemed worth documenting for future reference and hopefully as motivation for others that may be considering starting a meditation practice.

A note of caution is that meditation is not the only thing that I've done during this time. My mom died earlier this year, and I had been doing a particularly intense form of somatic psychotherapy for a few months twice a week. I cannot claim that absent these other things I would have experienced what I have experienced. I am definately not saying "meditate for two years and you'll get to where I am". Certainly some people take a decade to get where I got and others make much faster progress than I have. But the place where I got seems to line up with the sorts of changes one is expected to get if one meditates, so the title of this post still strikes me as fair.

The sort of meditation I've been doing has changed over time: initially I was roughly doing what the book The Mind Illuminated prescribed, then I switched to just sitting (or shikantaza), then anapanasati. Along the way I did jhana and metta practice here and there but not regularly, and increasingly I've been doing some form of nondual practice that's kind of like just sitting but resting in awareness.

During this period of time I did 4 ~week long retreats and 3 shorter weekend ones. Two of those retreats were not strictly meditation retreats but rather something more embodiment/feelings oriented.

Lastly, here I focus on permanent changes in my state, not one-off attainments or experiences. I've had some of the classic insights one encounters along the way: impermanence, emptiness, no-self, and glimpses of nonduality and experienced particular flavors of altered states (jhanas). But my default experience does not have the full force of these insights all the time.

The starting point

I think it's useful to explain where my mind was at where I started, because minds are very different and this goes underdiscussed in lots of meditation writing.

• I had no inner monologue. I have never had one that I can remember, though I recently learned to "turn it on" at will, finding a bunch of self-hate in it, which I then proceeded to swiftly uproot. I guess that's why it was off to begin with.
• Accordingly, I would have replied that "Most of the time have no thoughts" if asked what do I usually think about. This is because I equated thoughts with "verbal or image-based internal simulations of reality". I am still grappling with this question. Can thoughts be sensations in the body instead of words one hears in the mind's ear or images one sees in the mind's eye? Can one have unconscious thoughts? Now I am inclined to say yes, but of course by their own nature this wasn't obvious to me when I started. I do have a sense of "background pre-thought brain noise" that can be higher or lower. Walking around San Francisco it seems fairly low and there's just the walking, the sun, the breeze, and my attention going around various sensations and objects in my awareness. There wasn't and isn't that much elaboration going.
• I started with fairly good attention control and meta-cognitive awareness. Back then I could spread it wide to just be with all of my experience or focus it narrowly like a laser to look at something, without losing track of the context I'm in. Perhaps I got this way spending my childhood reading books nonstop. I suspect this is behind why I am rarely late to things.
• I was and continue to be rarely bored. I can be going on a walk looking at what's around me without feeling the need to listen to music or an audiobook, or just sit there looking at trees without need to change anything. This is not explained by a low motivation to seek new novel experiences. I tend to rank really high in the Openess to Experience dimension of personality, enjoy learning new things, and enjoy weird party concepts, and had a great time at Burning Man.
• I was quite disembodied (poor coordination, difficulty feeling emotions in my body) and dissociated. I rarely cried.
• I used to feel a lot of blindingly intense anger sometimes that would leave me nonproductive for hours if not the whole day (especially in a work setting, whenever I thought someone wasn't doing, saying, or thinking the 'right' thing)

Changes

• There is a deep trust that meditation and awakening are very worthwhile things to pursue!
• I would summarize the effects of meditation overall as "oil for the gears of experience", everything feels more smooth. The "frames" of my experience flow more nicely: I am doing X then I'm doing Y without thinking back about X or projecting into the next thing Z.
• I am way less anxious, though back then I wouldn't have self-described as someone with anxiety, I thought I had the normal human level of it; I used to have this semi-permanent know of anxiety in my solar plexus (a weaker version of the same sensation I used to have before going into an exam in college), now that's mostly gone. In the past I would have seen anxiety as an unavoidable part of the human experience. Now I don't think so anymore. You can indeed permanently get rid of most if not all of your anxiety.
• I have fewer doubts and more trust in what's happening, there's a deeper sense that what I'm doing right now is what I "should" be doing. In fact I now see moments of doubt (Should I do X or Y?) as evidence of a stuck emotion or something like that. This probably contributed to me not being currently full-time employed; there was some fear in quitting which was overcome with some faith that I'll figure things out down the road.
• In a way that's hard to describe, the colors are brighter, the flavors more intense, and the space is more spacious. I might have a sharper sense of smell as well. Another way of saying that is that my experience is denser or richer.
• I used to speak very fast which was probably anxiety related, now I speak slower than I used to.
• I used to be sensorially overwhelmed in rooms full of people talking, seemingly with my attention trying to understand everything around me. Now I am better able to take that as a sort of social soundbath and focus my attention in the narrow slice of the conversational space I'm in, so I am far less overwhelmed.
• In social situations, sometimes I would experience a whole variety of stuckness at the micro (during a conversation) and macro level. Some examples of this sort of thing:
  • Macro: I would experience some discomfort to arriving at a party late, feeling awkward at joining something that had already started, wondering what to say. I then progressively noticed that coming to a party late involved witnessing human connection happening, then feeling sad I'm not yet in it, and that sadness getting stuck making it more difficult for me to join. Now, I mostly just walk in, I trust that I'll talk to the right person and say the right thing.
  • Micro: During a conversation if someone would be looking around past me I would feel bad at not being an interesting person and that sad aura would be with me for a bit. Now I just take it as a sign that the conversation is perhaps due for an end and welcome that as an opportunity to talk to a new person or do whatever else. This new action seems to just happen without me trying. Similarly I notice when I start doing that same thing instead of forcing myself to talk to the person in front of me.
• There's this vague sense that every frame of experience has a hidden teaching, an Easter egg, or something of that sort. Every frame seems more interesting.
• I feel more emotions and they get processed faster; they either get accepted (as in what good psychotherapy gets you to do, for the big stuck trauma-type stuff) or they turn into action.
• I don't even remember the last time I got triggered, I take things way less personally now
• My conversational approach has shifted closer to what Art of Accomplishment calls VIEW (though I haven't deliberarely tried to do this nor done that much of AoA work besides their Connection Course). For example if someone tells me about their trip to Barcelona and their experience of the Sagrada Familia I am less likely to jump in to yap about my own experience of that building but rather I'll be asking them about their experience. I guess as I've noticed and worked on my own insecurities (which meditation will eventually bring up) I have less of a craving to be seen.
  • Often what gets shared in a conversation has a "Look mom! Look! I made this! I did a thing!" quality to it that feels urgent and dismissive of what was said before. I have started noticing this sort of thing lately in myself and others.
  • Extreme case of this behavior: " Person A: I had a sad experience... :(" Person B: "Oh yeah I had a sad experience too! Let me tell you! 10 years ago...". [vs Enlightened person B: "Oh say more?"] Person B clearly has that problem. I claim here that this runs deeper and subtler than I previously thought.