What is Meditation?

What is Meditation? 🧘🏼

Meditation is the practice of stillness. I discuss, What is Mind, in a previous blog. But in Meditation, we find that who we think we are is just a thought. Before the thought, we find a spacious expanse of being, that holds the potential for all our identities, reactions and everything we think we are. It is in this space that we meet the truth of ourselves. And in the truth of ourselves we find an unflinching, unmoving awareness. Meditation is a rehoming of ourselves to this place. We take our sense of self, pack it up, and move back home.

Why Do We Meditate? 

We meditate because it is very easy for our minds to slip back into the supposed “reality” of ourselves as “woman”, “worker”, “bill-payer”, “body”, “personality”, “emotional reaction”. The identities are endless. And neither of them will ever feel totally comfortable because none of them will ever be the whole truth. We think if we give ourselves more identities, we will have more comfort in ourselves, more security in who we are, but these identities take enormous effort to build, defend and maintain. And in the end, we know they are never really true.

Why Do We Call Meditation a "Practice"?

Awareness takes time to align with. We call meditation a practice because like building a muscle at the gym🏋🏼: the more regularly we build that muscle 💪🏼, the stronger it becomes and the easier it becomes to use. Meditation is the same. Meditation is the gym, awareness is the muscle. But to make awareness "stronger", instead of lifting weights to build muscle, we put down the weight of our thoughts.

It is a practice to put down the weight of our thoughts because we easily pick them up and identify with them, and when we do, we suffer. We practice putting down the weights of our thoughts as many times as we need to until, we no longer pick them up to begin with. And in doing so, we can rest in true, unmoving awareness.