Expectation vs Reality
12th July 2025
In Saturday’s online meditation class, I talked particularly about one of the pillars of mindfulness: letting go. This refers to the fact that when practising mindfulness - maintaining non-judgemental awareness of the present moment - we are often attached to certain ideas or thoughts we may have about the practice, and so we need to let go of these in order to be truly present, and to enable us to see the moment for what it is. For many (myself included) the expectation could be that sitting to spend 15 minutes of meditation *should* make me feel relaxed and calm. Or it could be that you’re more of a skeptic about the whole idea of meditation, so you’re anticipating not feeling any different afterwards, or thinking it’s all a bit ‘woo-woo’. Our experience of the reality is then clouded by this lens through which we see our present moment - meaning we don’t see the moment for what it truly is, but as a biased view based on all our attached thoughts about the situation. Let me give you an example…
Let’s say you’ve had a busy day at work and it’s been a generally stressful week so you’re feeling very tired and fed up, but you’ve planned a nice meal out with a loved one to end the week, which you’re really looking forward to - it’s a restaurant you often go to and like, because it serves delicious food and the service is always good, plus you really didn’t want to have to cook dinner. When you arrive at the restaurant, it’s very busy, and the table you’re given is next to a big family with noisy children, but there’s nowhere else you could move to so you don’t have a choice in that matter. Then the waiter is generally quite slow, no doubt because it’s so busy, and the food you ordered isn’t quite as tasty as you remember it from before, so you end up coming home feeling a bit disappointed and with a headache thanks to the feral children who were sat at the table next to you.
This is a very simple example, but do you see how it was clear you’d set an expectation in your mind about how the evening would go based on your previous experience, as well as your mood at the time, then the reality of how the evening turned out was quite different to those previous experiences and didn’t end up making you feel as good as you’d hoped, so all in all it wasn’t a pleasant experience. This will also then shape your expectation if you were to book to return to that restaurant in the future - it may cause you to book a later dinner time when there may not be young children around, or even a different day of the week so it wouldn’t be so busy.
The lens we live our lives through
These are the lenses we live our lives through - we don’t see anything objectively; everything is put through our lens and is subjective to our perceptions, which have formed over the course of our lifetime and include influences from our childhoods, our life experience, our personality traits, our state of health, our mood, our current circumstances and so on.
This is not a fault, it is a normal part of what makes us human - we learn and adapt as we experience new things, and our brains form connections and pathways that give rise to certain thought patterns within us when we experience certain triggers, and each of these are totally unique to us. No other person on the planet will think in exactly the same way as you - isn’t that incredible?!
If we go back to the restaurant example, we were looking at it through ‘your’ perspective. But we could also consider the loved one you were going with - they would have their own lens through which they are experiencing the evening. It may be that they’ve never particularly liked that restaurant but always agree to go because you really enjoy the food and it makes you happy. So they are arriving expecting to be disappointed, and perhaps the reality just reinforces that belief. And they may even come away feeling a little smug that you didn’t enjoy the evening, because maybe it means you won’t have to go back there for a while!
You both had the same objective experience - going to the restaurant to eat a meal - but a totally different subjective experience because of all the attached thoughts and feelings around it. And so it is the same in every situation we find ourselves in, we are always seeing life through our unique lens.
Letting go of our expectations
So when it comes to mindfulness, ‘letting go’ means to try and detach from that lens we are seeing the situation through - the expectations, the assumptions, the influences that are perhaps causing bias to what we perceive. ‘Letting go’ comes hand in hand with another pillar of mindfulness which is ‘having a beginner’s mind’ - seeing things as if for the first time, like a child, perhaps, with an open curiosity to whatever might unfold.
In the context of meditation, it can be very easy to feel you are ‘trying’ to reach a particular feeling, of bliss perhaps, or deep relaxation - whether this be based on a previous state you’ve managed to reach or not - and therefore when you close your eyes and focus on your breath, or mantra, or whichever technique you are using, and that feeling doesn’t come to you, or you find there are a lot of distracting thoughts coming to your mind, it can easily lead to feeling frustrated. You may feel you’ve failed in some way. But here’s the catch - you cannot fail meditation.
Failure implies being unable to achieve a specific goal, yet in meditation we’re not aiming to achieve something, there is no goal we’re trying to reach. We are ‘being’ rather than ‘doing’. So if your ‘being’ means that you notice many distracting thoughts, that is your experience. You can let go of a sense that being distracted is ‘wrong’ or somehow a failure, and instead open your curiosity, noticing that you seem to have a busy mind today, and that’s ok.
Can you recognise your lens?
There used to be quite the trend on social media showing expectation vs reality photos; usually these were situations where you thought you looked the picture of aesthetic perfection, but the reality was a poorly lit photo at a slightly skewed angle of you looking like you’ve got something in your eye. This is a comical representation of the lens I’m talking about - we see things as we want them to be, and often our reality does not match that, which can lead us to feelings of disappointment, upset, annoyance, even anger. Of course it is not always this way around - sometimes we expect something to go badly and in reality it goes well, so you’re surprised and much happier with the outcome.
Ultimately, we can never truly predict how any situation will go, and so by letting go of assumptions and expectations and allowing ourselves to accept the reality that unfolds, we can be curious to see what we might experience with fresh eyes. Perhaps while reading this, you can already identify some examples in your own life where you’ve noticed becoming frustrated or upset because a situation didn’t go the way you’d imagined. Consider how you responded - were you able to easily move past it, or did it eat away at you, causing you to ruminate over it, perhaps telling yourself all the things you should have done instead?
Mindfulness can help you learn to let go
Practising mindfulness can cause subtle mindset shifts that help you recognise when your expectations are masking your reality, by strengthening your ability to be present and identifying when you’re not. You may be thinking, what does ‘practising mindfulness’ look like? It can be meditations like mindful breathing or a body scan, or mindful movement practices like yoga or qigong - but really, any activity can be a mindfulness practice! And with that practice, over time, being mindful and present in everyday life becomes easier, as you become better able to control your thoughts and your responses to the varying experiences of life.
As Eckhart Tolle aptly puts it:
“The primary cause of unhappiness is never the situation, but your thoughts about it.”