What is Meditation? Why you should do...or shouldn't do...

What a challenge it is to define not doing!

Simply put, meditation means stopping. Stopping thought, in particular.

The goal of true meditation practice, whatever its form, is to still the mind.

Why would you want to still your mind? Most of us have had the experience of having thoughts go around and around in our heads. At particularly troubling times, our incessant, repetitive thoughts may even keep us awake.

Have you ever been just completely sick and tired of your thoughts? Sick of them repeating the same old thing? At times, it is like a movie that you’ve already seen a thousand times. There is no new information being presented. It’s not entertaining anymore, it’s boring at best. Worse, your thoughts may not be your friends. They may tell you that you are lacking in some capacity, which is obviously not helpful.

The basic trouble with thinking is that it is limited. Thoughts are your thinking brain repeating things it already knows, or thinks it knows, and in a sense, that’s its job. The problem is that we’ve forgotten that we are more than our thoughts. We have much, much more at our disposal for engaging with Life.

The functions of thoughts largely, are recalling the past, or imagining the future. We look to our intellect, or thinking mind, to solve our problems, which, as you probably have figured out by now, doesn’t work when facing a new situation, or when you want to approach an old problem in a new way. You most likely already understand this limitation or you wouldn’t be interested in learning about meditation.

I like to think of meditation as a vacation from my thinking mind. That might sound ridiculous, unless you meditate. If you meditate, you come to know directly that there is a difference between consciousness or awareness and thinking. You don’t have to think at all to be fully conscious, and in fact, thinking can be rather a distraction from the fullness of all that is right here, right now, in this moment, available to you to experience.

Being fully conscious is meditation. Meditation is wakefulness, it is focus, clarity.

Meditation is not contemplating, sleeping, or even, in a sense simply relaxing. Not to say that there is not a necessary place for all of that, but as we embark on starting a meditation practice, it’s important to be clear about this. We will learn some meditation techniques that will help us give our focus to our conscious mind, and collect and quiet our thinking mind.

The conscious mind (as opposed to the thinking mind) is innately conscious. It is innately quiet. You don’t really have to do anything, or get anything to be fully conscious, at peace, whole.

Meditation is the simple awareness of existence that is already full, already content, and already happy, in a deep yet simple way. Meditation is becoming aware of all that you are.

In discovering this limitlessness, you come to discover all kinds of things that really help to clarify your life. You come to realize the choices that you have in taking responsibility for your life and your energy – what you live, what you practice, and what you bring to others. Meditation makes you strong, strong in mind and heart and spirit.

As you discover that what you truly are is alive and present and unconditionally yours, then it is clearly also something that you can never lose. What else can you say that about?

In addition to thought, emotion also can cloud awareness, or color consciousness. While we are more than our thoughts, we are also so much more than the chemicals running through our bodies and brains that we call emotions. It can be difficult at times to make a conscious choice in whether we let our emotions affect our state of mind; emotions can at times seem to control us.

Gaining a healthy amount of control over one’s emotions is certainly advisable. We are all aware of the power of positive thinking; there is an entire industry around it. It is certainly true that what we focus on, we tend to become. We tend to keep re-creating the state of consciousness that we are focusing on. So, if we are positive in our emotional outlook, and expect the best, certainly that is going to have a more positive result than negative thinking or feeling.

Jealousy, anger, fear, resentment – focusing on these feelings is an express ticket to more unhappiness. Patience, kindness, acceptance, gentleness, forgiveness – of course choosing to focus on these instead makes us happier.

To be honest, some time ago, for me personally, it bothered me that so much of what seemed to make me happy or unhappy seemed to be beyond my control, kind of like the weather. I felt that there must be something more to life, something else, something more profound. That was over twenty years ago, that was when I started meditating.

We live in a world that tries to sell something they call happiness. If only we have some product, look, lover, lifestyle, or situation that is supposed to make us blissfully happy. On the flip side, if we can avoid certain situations or avoid losing what we’ve gained, that is supposed to ensure our continued happiness. This is a lot of work, it requires ceaseless effort. When we “fail” at happiness, despite our best efforts, we feel that there is something wrong with us. Of course this is all complete B.S. and it’s no surprise that such a system leads to a lack of peace, a lack of happiness.

Really, this is nothing new. Buddhists for thousands of years have talked about this as the traps of desire and aversion. Other spiritual traditions have their own vocabulary for describing this cycle of suffering. The trouble, or course, with this whole desire and aversion system is that it’s all smoke and mirrors.

Happiness could never come from outside of us. If your happiness is at the whim of things that you can’t control, then that is a really insecure position, isn’t it? If someone can give you happiness, or someone can take it from you, then I don’t think that is really happiness, not of the profound kind. That’s more like a child’s happiness – happy when they get the candy, sad when it gets taken away.

So to tie this all together, if you really consider it, desire, fear, wanting, wanting to avoid, these are actually only thoughts, thoughts about the past or thoughts (fears) about the future. And the truth is that much of what we call emotions, are actually thoughts about emotions. We keep the feelings going with our thoughts.

There is a really great book that I highly recommend called My Stroke of Insight by Jill Bolte Taylor, who describes first hand, as a brain scientist, what it is like to suffer and recover from a stroke. It’s about a lot more than that actually. It’s interesting and helpful for lots of reasons, but one of the significant things she says in this book is that an emotion – that is, the chemical stream of a feeling, dissipates within 90 seconds, if it is not “grabbed” onto by our thoughts, more precisely, by our identification with the emotion.

When we do that, when we focus on an emotion to the point of identifying ourselves as the emotion, then we keep it going and churning and playing us, taking us for a not necessarily fun ride.

What this means is that our feelings, our emotions can come and go. They do come and go, and we can simply allow that. They may come and go many times, but we don’t have to consciously keep them going. We can observe them, we can enjoy them, we can not enjoy them, but we don’t have to be them.

None of that has anything to do with right here, right now, which is where your life actually is, where your awareness could be.

You might have to take this on faith for a short while, but it’s true – the past does not define you. Through meditation you can learn to let go of the past. You can learn the difference between rejecting something, fearing something, trying desperately to keep it away, and just letting it go. Letting it go as something that happened, but not as something that limits or defines who you are. The deepest and truest part of you has never been touched by anything that has “happened” to you in this life. It remains pure, clean, awake, self-fulfilled, connected, whole, as it always has been.

While it may require some faith in the beginning to encourage you to practice, the important point is that this is not a belief system. While we can learn tips and share beneficial recommendations with each other, this is not just another philosophy for your brain to subscribe to.

Meditation is experiential. If you practice it, you will experience positive changes. You can read up on the “proven” benefits of meditation such as improved immune system function, reduced blood pressure and the like. There are many positive side effects, but those aren’t why you practice. You practice because it feels good. Nothing feels better than experiencing peace.

Taking up a meditation practice is very much like embarking on a fitness program. You can go see instructors or read books about what to do, and how to do it. You can have all the “knowledge” in the world about fitness, but unless you actually do the exercise regularly, you won’t get the benefits. But if you do the exercise regularly, and follow a healthy lifestyle, you will get stronger. It is cause and effect.

So, in summary, meditation is finding our way to clear and full consciousness where we are already fulfilled, and always have been. This is coming to know the biggest part of ourselves. In fact, it’s the limitless side of our being, inseparable from Creation.

If you have that, then, you know, the other stuff comes and it goes, and it bothers you sometimes, but still, there is something that you know, something deeper that you have that you can never lose.

The secret is that contact with the inner light of consciousness is what truly creates happiness.

Feeling inspired? Good, now let’s learn how to meditate.