When you're little, your parents tell you not to touch the stove, that it will hurt, and the words go in your ears and you understand what they mean, sort of. Y

When you're little, your parents tell you not to touch the stove, that it will hurt, and the words go in your ears and you understand what they mean, sort of. You understand it conceptually. But of course you touch the stove and get burned. After that, having connected the action with suffering through direct experience, you have very little desire to touch the stove again. Those thoughts just don't arise, or don't have much pull. Buddhists say we're still touching stoves every day because we haven't connected cause and effect through experience. That's the point of this kind of meditation, to gain insight into important facts about reality that we might already conceptually accept, but have not yet experienced. When you experience these things, you are redoing the plumbing in the basement of your mind. So the point really is to attack the roots of the problem. It's not to relax, it's to understand what is going on.