In this article we will be discussing how to meditate and why meditating without techniques and methods is preferable.
I will be helping you learn:
- The vast difference between using meditation techniques, mantras and other methods to try to meditate and simply experiencing and understanding yourself in meditation.
- How to experience and understand yourself without using techniques and methods to meditate
- What goes on while you are meditating and how to approach it
I use the term ‘learn’ loosely, for learning meditation is very different to learning any other mechanical activity. Real meditation is more a discovery of yourself that expands and deepens as you go, rather than a method you learn and then apply to yourself.
So let’s begin…
The differences between trying to meditate and actually meditating.
Meditation is seen in society as a technique-based activity. You sit down cross-legged and start saying a mantra or use your thinking to create a certain state that this technique says is the desired state. A state that is the result of that mantra or that thinking…
This technique is proposing that the current state you are in right now is somehow wrong or bad and needs to be fixed or changed.
So the focus becomes so much about achieving this certain state in order for us to be ‘meditating’, that we overlook and squash what we already are, and also completely lose touch with what we are actually doing; the physical act of meditation.
We become fascinated by the technique we have been told we need to be using, focusing on what we need to be thinking, trying to feel how we need to be feeling and pushing down or getting rid of our current state because it is seen as wrong or ‘unenlightened’.
So by using these techniques we are escaping or losing touch with how we actually feel by applying all these thoughts and ideas and goals, to the point where we are no longer experiencing the meditation itself. In fact we are no longer experiencing ourselves, which is what meditation is all about. We are trapped in the repetition of the technique.
Real meditation is really about experiencing the physical sense of you, not imposing ideas or ways of being on yourself.
While using a technique or mantra, we are experiencing the effect of that technique or that mantra and we are distracting ourselves from the real experience of us.
So if these techniques take us away from the physical experience of ourselves into an idea or goal of how we think we should be feeling….
And meditation is about experiencing the sense of ourselves…
Then these techniques are not meditation.
These techniques are thinking about meditation.
It may seem the same, but like thinking about driving a car or thinking about having sex…
It’s very different to the actual activity, isn’t it?
And that’s the problem; you are thinking, when you need to be feeling, sensing, experiencing.
And here’s the kicker…
These techniques to meditate, these mantras or whatever you’ve been told to do, is as far away from actually meditating, actually experiencing yourself, as watching a movie is from you being the character in the movie.
Or driving a car is from pretending to.
Or having sex is from imagining it.
Or sitting in a hot bath but not truly feeling it is because you are lost in thought about something else.
You could be sitting in a nice hot bath. You start out feeling the soothing heat of the bathwater, sensing the smell of the bubbles, the sound of the water… when suddenly, returning from some distraction, you feel how now the water is cold, the bubbles are gone. You have lost time thinking and forgotten where you were, and forgotten to actually experience it.
This is exactly the same with meditation techniques – you spend the whole meditation trying to meditate, trying to experience yourself, trying to achieve a certain state, you forget about the actual physical act of meditation.
So rather than trying so hard to meditate, to achieve some state or goal. Come back to the physically felt sense of yourself in your body, and there you have it.
Meditation isn’t about achieving anything or trying to be a certain way. It is about feeling however you are feeling in that moment. And your understanding of yourself comes out of that.
So how do we meditate?
In order to understand ‘how to meditate’ we must understand that ‘meditation’ has to be separated from the techniques to meditate. Separate from the mantras, the humming, the thinking, all the imagining. That should be left at the door.
And if you haven’t got that by now maybe you should re-read the above…
Got it?
So as I said, learning ‘how to’ meditate, is very different to learning any other mechanical activity.
It’s different to learning ‘how to’ drive a car or ‘how to’ clean your teeth, etc.
This is because with any normal mechanical activity you are adding information to yourself that you need and didn’t already know. Before you start learning how to drive a car you don’t know how to use the gears or the side mirrors, this is all new information that is being added to all the information you already know.
Are you still with me..?
BUT with meditation, you are actually subtracting that type of information. Not in a bad way, not in a ‘I knocked my head and now I can’t remember my times tables’ way.
Meditation is more; we take something we do every single day of our life and we subtract the complications.
For example; basically half our life we are sitting – however that maybe – but we will be fidgeting or on our phones or watching TV or writing. In so many ways we will be distracting ourselves from ourselves by constantly doing things as well.
When you meditate, you take the sitting and subtract the doing – the distracting – and you just sit physically still.
That’s it, simple.
We take away the distractions of constantly doing things and thinking about other things and we stay with what is left. The physically felt sense of yourself in the body.
Now what is that, felt sense of yourself, you’re probably asking yourself.
The physically felt sense of yourself, or the sense of yourself in the body, is basically that.
It is how you are feeling in every moment.
Whether it’s; sad or happy, sick or nervous, or a mixture. How you are feeling in this exact moment, that is the physically felt sense of yourself. And that is all you feel when you’re really meditating.
So what happens when you’re sitting physically still?
There is a lot more to meditation then people realise. It goes deep without you trying to. This goes deeper than any traditional, technique-based meditations ever have or can.
It’s about understanding and accepting. Fully understanding what is going on, right there as it is going on, is what naturally happens in the deeper sensory – feeling – level of you. And when you have understanding, acceptance is inevitable.
Why? Because your feeling, sensory level goes deeper than your thinking and complaints about how you are. It goes deep into how you really feel, without those complaints.
And that’s really cool because at that depth you discover you are fine with yourself as you are and that your complaints were just stopping you from finding that out.
Truly feeling your physical sense of yourself leads to accepting what is going on inside you, rather than slapping on a technique and hoping for the best or trying to change.
So you sit physically still.
Feeling the physically felt sense of yourself in the body.
Your thinking will go on, just let it.
Your thinking is just the smoke from the fire of your feelings. Just the off-gassing from how you feel and the healing that’s happening by you being in the physical sense of yourself in the body. The release of energy or distress from the purging of unresolved feelings.
And as you sit, the longer you sit physically still, more sensations will start to arise as they release from deeper inside you. Such as pain, disturbance, annoyance, resistance, numbness.
These are normal. These are just part of your meditation. These are the feelings that we have ignored in day-to-day life, that are now having the opportunity to come and have their say.
Let me explain;
For years I used to get frustrated with the feelings that would come up when I meditated, these annoying feelings that I recognised from day-to-day life that I had avoided on purpose because they felt horrible.
Feelings like; anxiety, fear, sadness. Feelings I had purposely squashed because I didn’t like or want the feelings.
It wasn’t until I got older (currently I am 21…started sitting on meditation retreats at 13) that I realised that these feelings are part of me, and in trying to ignore them or squish them down, I in turn was ignoring and squishing down a part of me. Which I can’t do, these sensations will always be there with me because they are me.
I can’t avoid myself, I can’t squish myself down, I am myself, I am always here. So these sensations were always going to be there until I took notice of them.
And so I started to understand the benefit of staying with these sensations. The longer I sat with them, the more they would dissipate and I soon realised that in day-to-day life, these feelings were no longer there, no longer prominent in my life, no longer inhibiting parts of my life.
Would you like an example?
Of course you would…
So for years I struggled with anxiety, which unfortunately was making it harder for me to do certain things, socialising, meeting new people, going out in public alone, travelling, clubbing; the whole ordeal.
So one day I was mediating, I was about 18 at the time and this feeling came up, this feeling of absolute terror, pressing down on my chest, I felt like I couldn’t breath and my first instinct was to jump up and get as far away from that feeling as possible.
But I couldn’t, because that feeling was me, there was no escaping it.
So I decided to stay with it, I was curious to see what that feeling was, where it was coming from and although it was scary, I wanted to know why I was so scared of it and more importantly I was sick of being anxious.
So I stayed with the feeling. I sat physically still and felt this terror inside of me and soon, after a while the feeling started to fade. And then back in my daily life, and as time went on, the more I sat with this feeling it soon/eventually vanished altogether, and I noticed that my fear to meet new people, talk to strangers, travelling, clubbing, all seem to fade. And other fears dropped away as well. All these changes were showing up in me in my daily life. It was great.
So in turn I realised that not only was this fear attached to my anxiety, it was also attached to other issues I had in life. The fear of being alone, the fear of death, my claustrophobia.
All these feelings wanted was a chance to have their say, a chance for me to accept and understand them, without judgment or fear. I needed to understand that they are just another part of me, like the feeling of happiness or joy or nervousness, they are all just feelings.
I’m not saying I was completely fearless. No, not at all.
What I’m trying to share with you is that these feelings; these feelings that we avoid in day-to-day life, just want to be heard.
We judge these feelings/our feelings too hard, we label them; terrible, horrible, gross, depressing, because we don’t like how they feel or how they make us act, so we push them down. We judge them and we think there is something wrong with us because of them.
This is also why using meditation techniques never work. Because in using techniques we are viewing these feelings as bad and wrong and that we need to treat them with mantras and techniques in order to change them. When really we just need to feel them and acknowledge that they are just another sensation that’s a part of us. In doing so they will fade and stop holding us back in our lives.
As it did for me.
Why would I be encouraging you to sit through these feelings that come up for you, if it wouldn’t help you?
I guarantee, that you sitting with these feelings, whether they’re small or medium or big, will have a drastic change in your life.
Meditation is about understanding. By this I mean…
Once you understand that these feelings are just a part of you wanting to have a little chat, your resistance to them will also fade and in turn you will be able to heal them for good.
Okay, now it’s your turn.
Now it’s your turn to take this information and use it to your advantage.
Sit down, every day for at least ten minutes, sit with any feelings that arise within you.
If you don’t feel anything at first, that is fine. You are just feeling the numbness from every time you have pushed down these feelings.
Soon the numbness will fade and you will be able to experience yourself, without the distractions, without the judgment, without you trying to change how it feels to be you. This is how your understanding will grow and this understanding will come from what I am asking you to do for yourself. You won’t get it from others, or from anywhere else. It has to be from you, from your feelings.
This is not some technique, or spiritual cliché. This is you discovering and then understanding and accepting every part of you without judging it to be wrong and trying to change it. This will only happen from feeling your feelings wherever they are inside your body. But don’t try to get rid of them. They will fade, but only by feeling them like they are now. If it gets too much just have a slow quiet walk or pat your dog, but stay quiet and slow while you are feeling this way, at least for a while.
This is extremely beneficial.
It won’t always be easy to be with the sensations that you feel inside of yourself, sometimes it will be difficult, or even painful.
But the important thing when this happens, is to recognise your resistance to that pain, to that disturbance and come back to the feeling without judging it OR the resistance to it.
And understand that this resistance too, is an important part of your meditation. And treat your resistance as just another sensation by understanding it is just a sensation, and accepting it.
The more you feel this as a sensation in the body, you will actually experience dramatic changes in that and that will bring about dramatic changes in your life and your capacity to be way more at ease with all that life throws at you.
Whatever is going on in you while you meditate is going on for good reason. Whether it be pain, happiness, resistance, disturbance. Understand and accept it by feeling it as it is without judgment.
And this is the massive difference between you really meditating and you using techniques, mantras and methods to meditate. This is just our natural ordinary way to heal and accept and really understand ourselves.
Using Undo App with your meditation.
Throughout the foundations of Undo are guided meditations that are based on topics of that foundation.
For example; Foundation 2 is Reactions, so the guided meditations are based on your reactions to meditation, pain, life, etc.
In these guided meditations you are able to pick times from 5-minute meditations to 40 minutes and in Foundation 8 (Meditation) there is even an hour-long meditation.
I have found these guided meditations extremely helpful throughout my meditations. Even though I have been meditating for 8 years now, I still sometimes find it hard to feel motivated to meditate, so these guided meditations help me just stay with how I feel in the body rather than drift off into thinking and moving around etc.
So if you are having trouble starting or getting motivated to meditate, I would 100% recommend checking them out.
I sometimes even listen to them on the plane or on public transport if I am feeling a little stressed or all over the place and I just need a little help coming back to the sense of myself.
