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So you remember a time when results came from your meditation practice almost daily, but now it’s been months since anything’s changed.
You continue to practice, and you think you’re doing everything right… But you can’t be sure, because your results have slowed to a crawl or even stopped altogether.
Maybe your practice is helping you “maintain” your current level of peace, clarity and happiness, but you can’t tell. And you’re afraid to stop and find out.
So what do you do to “get things moving”?
Well, what if that’s the wrong question?
What if what got you here won’t get you there?
What if you need a fundamental shift in perspective?
I’m gonna answer these questions for you right now.
When you started your practice, you used effort to great effect. The momentum of your worldly attachments was in full swing. Perhaps you were relying on booze to deal with work stress; perhaps you were using video games to address an unfulfilled need for accomplishment; perhaps you were having casual sex when what you really wanted was deep connection.
So you did something very wise: to interrupt your unhealthy habits, you committed to a healthy one.
Your old habits were like a current in a great river, flowing away from a majestic mountain in the distance that represented stability and peace. You were determined to reach that mountain, so you pushed against that current with a disciplined meditation practice. You gained strength, and started to make progress:
- You reduced stress
- You reduced attachment
- You reduced your need to indulge
This was a tremendous victory. You did something rare and remarkable. You moved away from vice and toward virtue. And I have no doubt that your life—and that of those around you—is better for it.
Nonetheless, you know there’s a level of freedom beyond your current experience. You’ve heard great spiritual teachers talk about it, and you’re aware that there is still some stress, some attachment, some overindulgence in your life. And you see the ways these lingering hindrances are still negatively impacting you:
- You still can’t focus without distraction for longer than 10 minutes at a time
- You still can’t be 100% comfortable in social situations
- You still can’t avoid falling down the occasional rabbit hole of unconscious thinking
So you swim harder. And harder.
Effort got you this far, so it must be the way to get farther, right?
Effort got you your degree, your promotion, your mortgage, so it must be the way to get Enlightened, right?
Wrong.
This river you’re swimming in, it turns out, isn’t an ordinary river.
As you continue to swim harder—as you get closer to the mountain of stability and peace—the current gets stronger in direct proportion to your effort. The harder you push, the harder it pushes back.
Paradoxically, what you must do now is the opposite of what you’ve been doing: you must relax. Only then will this magical current change direction and float you, effortlessly, toward the mountain.
But why did no-one tell you this? Well, because very few people know.
Most spiritual practitioners spend their entire lives applying effort in myriad ways, trying to push toward what can really only be relaxed into.
Here’s the nuance: if someone suffering heavy drug addiction comes to me for guidance, the worst thing I can say to them is “relax”. They’ll just go and score. They are lost in the current that moves them away from the mountain, and if they relax into it too much they will die.
But that’s not you.
You’ve already applied wise effort to abandon most of your attachments and, in doing so, you’ve earned the privilege to graduate to a different strategy.
Now, instead of trying to develop positive qualities, you must switch to simply recognizing your True Nature, which manifests positive qualities naturally when it’s unobscured—though this may still be difficult to see for the moment.
So how do I know? Well, I can certainly confirm it in my own experience. And that of my wife. And that of the dozens of students I’ve worked with who got out of their own way enough to find that peace, freedom, contentment and compassion are, in fact, their default mode.
You can glimpse this right now: simply recognize that this image of me, the sound of my voice, the sensations of your body and any thoughts, feelings and memories that are present are occurring within the basic space of awareness. They come and go, but awareness remains. It is the essence of and the space within which all experience occurs—and is unaffected, unblemished, unharmed by any of it.
Given that this space is what you are, fundamentally—and given that this space is naturally virtuous—all you need to do is recognize and relax into it. The need for developmental practices is cut through.
If you want to know where you’re at in this whole picture, take my 1-minute quiz—you’ll find a link below. And if you have a question, please drop it in a comment. I’ll either reply to you or make a video in answer.
If you enjoyed this teaching, do all the stuff that tells YouTube you want to see the next one. I’m uploading at least twice a week right now, so I hope to see you back here very soon.
With love from my sofa,
Dan 💙
P.S. If you want to know where you are in this whole picture, take my 1-minute quiz. I'll send you some personalized guidance based on your results.
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