It’s time to stop “doing” meditation.
Many of us believe what our mind tells us, so we believe that meditation is a practice — something we should “do.” We chant mantras, use mudras, try visualization or breathing techniques, to help us “get there.”
We believe it’s about reaching states of “higher” consciousness and raising our vibrations. Or it’s about stopping thoughts and silencing the mind.
We see meditation as a way to change and transform — to end our suffering, to become more spiritually evolved, and ultimately, to achieve the promise of that coveted enlightenment prize.
Many of us have diligently practiced meditation for a lifetime, carefully honing our technique over the years, but we can never maintain those bliss states, and that sense of lack and unfulfillment continues to gnaw away at us in the background.
This is because true meditation is not about “doing.” It’s about “being.”
True meditation has nothing to do with “getting rid” of unwanted thoughts or emotions. It has nothing to do with “trying to become” something other than what we are. It has nothing to do with “achieving” altered states, higher vibrations or increased love and bliss. It has nothing to do with “becoming” more whole, healed or abundant. It has nothing to do with “controlling” our minds and our reality.
It’s about meeting and accepting each present moment as it arises, with a complete non-resistance to its truth, and a radical embrace and surrender to what is.
Trying to “do” anything in meditation — to fight, change or control whatever arises — is a form of deep resistance, and a form of self-rejection, which keeps us trapped in separation and seeking. If we judge and reject unwanted or “negative” thoughts and emotions, we are simply rejecting those parts of ourselves. And if we cling to desired states of bliss, expansiveness or peace, we are again rejecting the parts of ourselves that are not in alignment with these states.
We will only experience the unconditional love and wholeness that we seek by abandoning all efforts to seek, practice or do, and by fully embracing every aspect of ourselves and life, as it arises in each moment. Only then do we recognize that we already are the unconditional love and wholeness that we seek, that we are the alive awareness that creates and witnesses all of life — the eternal choreographer and dance of creation, which continuously unfolds now, moment by moment. All thoughts, feelings, emotions and desires arise and fall in the dance of awareness that we are.
Any act of “doing” takes us further away from true meditation and the recognition of what we are.
When we stop “doing” meditation, we suddenly find ourselves free to “be” a space for meditation, at any time, anywhere, whatever we are doing, and however we are feeling. We can simply allow all thoughts and emotions as they arise and fall within the space that we are, knowing that we are not those thoughts and emotions, because they rise and fall — and yet we remain, as the eternal dance of awareness in which they take form.
As we fully embody this truth, we realize that there is no separate self who “practices” meditation, but rather, we are the alive awareness — the beingness — in which everything arises to dance the choreography of life, including the practice of meditation itself.
