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When we start meditating it feels unusual.
We’ve been shuffling through life doing as we were told; thinking as we were told for 20, 30 years when, finally, we decide it’s not working for us and we’re going to sit and watch our breathing instead.
But if we continue long enough to find out what meditation is really about; if we become interested in irreducible truth, then we discover something amazing. What we call ‘the meditative state’ is actually our default mode, and it was the anxious, hurried, worried state that was the weird thing all along!
In my early 30’s I was carrying a lot of tension in my body—so much, actually, that I was causing myself chronic pain! But the idea that this pain was of my own making never crossed my mind. Yet the doctors I saw could find no pathology. Eventually, I invested $25,000 studying a little-known discipline called Alexander Technique. Over 5 years, my incredibly skilled teachers showed how to stop activating the mental processes that caused my tension which, in turn, caused my pain.
At the same time, I was studying the dharma. Alexander Technique taught me to stop the mental processes that turned on muscles. The dharma taught me to stop the mental processes that turned on fear, worry, shame, guilt, doubt, desire, apathy, selfishness.
Before I started practising those two disciplines, there was nothing anyone could’ve said to convince me that my problems were my own doing. It seemed obvious to me that tension, anxiety, self-loathing were my default mode; were normal. But once I’d understood and practiced enough; once I’d glimpsed relief enough times, everything changed. It then became obvious that I’d been deeply deluded; that there was nothing ‘normal’ about the awful condition I’d been in for 10 years to that point.
If you sit on a bicycle, the default position is stationary. You have to activate the mental processes associated with pedalling if you want to go anywhere.
In the same way, as a human being your default position is rest. Not laziness; not inactivity—for the rest I’m talking about, what we might call ‘spiritual rest’, is the underlying basis of all activity as well as relaxation.
>Without the mental processes of desire, aversion, fear, worry, etc. you are at peace.
Now, here’s the takeaway: you can spend a lifetime trying to create peace. But if you do, you’re like one who goes in search of diamonds, not realizing your pockets are already full of them.
When you recognize what I’m telling you here, your practice is transformed from one of effortful cultivation to one of simple recognition.
Recognition of what? Recognition of those mental processes as ‘object’; as ‘extra’; as ‘fabricated’. Recognition of your true nature as the aware, pure space in which those processes appear. When you make this recognition more and more often; more and more deeply, those mental processes begin to look absurd. Why would you perpetuate any of this once you become aware of how you’re doing so?
In another way of speaking, through this recognition your practice is transformed from an additive process to a subtractive process. An additive process depends upon the fallible thinking mind, which is what got you into all your messes in the first place! Because you must choose—either for yourself or by trusting a teacher or teaching—*what* to add and how to add it. For example, you might practice metta to cultivate loving-kindness. This is a wonderful and wholesome practice! But here’s the problem: what if metta is not the most appropriate practice for you right now, and how are you to know? What if, on the relative level, you’re already a bit of a softy and you’d be better served doing zazen? Modern practitioners spin out on these kinds of questions for years at a time.
>Here’s the good news: you’re already loving and kind by your nature! Millions of practitioners before us who simply got quiet enough have realized this.
So, you can ‘stack’ loving-kindness ‘on top’ of your deep psychological and spiritual afflictions, which may remain unresolved… Or you can go the other way and focus on seeing those afflictions as they arise, recognizing that they come and go, and that ‘you’ remain as the knowing that is present in both their appearance and their absence. This leads to their dissolution and the revealing of natural loving-kindness, along with natural clarity, wisdom and effectiveness—AKA Awakening.
Here’s some even better news: this practice of recognition requires no special posture, no rituals, no formal lineage. If these help you, great. If they don’t, great. It need only be practised for a brief moment, as often as you remember. This is how you learn to meditate all day every day—not through effort, but by relaxing into natural meditative stability. Which, believe it or not, is another facet of your fundamental nature.
I’m not condemning deliberate, relativistic, additive practices. They have their place. Rather, I’m making an invitation to drop those practices as soon as you’re ready. And how do you know if you’re ready? Just try what I’ve recommended here. If it’s accessible to you, congratulations! If it’s not, keep doing whatever formal practices you need until you can access it. Then try it again. I strongly suspect you’ll be thrilled at how little energy this practice requires and, thus, how much more often you’ll be able to practice until, finally, the apparent boundary between ‘practising’ and ‘not-practising’ is dissolved. Then, you’re both practising all the time and none of the time. You’ve revealed that natural meditative stability; you’ve won the cosmic lottery.
With love from my sofa,
Dan 💙
P.S. If you want to know where you're at in your spiritual journey, take my 1-minute quiz. I'll tell you what to do next, then email you to see if I can help.
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