What is meditation?
Most people think meditation is about clearing your mind and stopping your thoughts,
Taking you to some blissful,
Empty state.
And when that doesn't happen,
Which for most of us,
It doesn't,
We decide we're doing it wrong.
Or we're just not the meditating type,
Which is what happened to me after the first few times I meditated as a teenager sitting in my bedroom trying to focus on a candle.
Meditation isn't about controlling your mind.
It's about changing your relationship to it.
Learning to step back from the constant stream of thoughts and feelings.
To discover the awareness that watching it or ultimately that everything's arising within.
Think about it this way.
Right now,
Thoughts are arising,
Sensations are arising.
You might have feelings in your body that you can feel.
And that's all the content.
Of your experience.
But there's something quiet and unchanging.
We could call it the context.
In which this content is arising.
Meditation is the practice of finding that,
Of returning to that over and over again.
It's not that your thoughts are wrong or bad.
But when you know what you are beneath your thoughts,
Then you're no longer at their mercy.
They can't control you in the same way.
Meditation has the power to change your relationship to everything in life.
And thus with it your entire experience of being human.
This is what ancient traditions have been pointing to for thousands of years.
It's not about stress relief,
Although that can happen.
It's not for better sleep,
Although that can happen too.
It's really something much more fundamental than that.
It's coming home to a place of true peace and happiness.
One where you're not fundamentally separate.
From it,
But you're interconnected with it.
Everything and everyone.
And then meditation is the practice of discovering that.
And then learning to return there and live from there.
We're not here to become perfect meditators.
We're here and we meditate to awaken to a life of thriving,
Of true peace and well-being.
That's the ultimate freedom.
That's what meditation is.
Truly is about.
