How to Meditate” Without Techniques
What is meditation to you? For most people and mainstream media, the focus often lies on “how to meditate” through technique-based activities.
In this approach, you sit or lay down and apply a specific technique to put yourself into a certain state or try to achieve a particular goal.
But what if you could meditate without techniques? Let’s explore…
The differences between trying to meditate and actually meditating.
Meditation Techniques: Focusing on achieving certain states
Meditation techniques often imply that the current state you are in is somehow wrong, and needs to be fixed or changed. Making the focus of your meditation about achieving a certain state. As a result, you become caught focusing on what you need to be thinking, how you should be feeling, both disconnecting you from the experience of just meditating.
Natural Meditation: Experiencing the natural physical sense of you
Natural meditation is about experiencing the natural physical sense of yourself, and just being with that without trying to change or fit it.
Comparison
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, then these techniques are not meditation. They are thinking about meditation, and you are just sitting there trying to meditate.
Trying to experience yourself, trying to achieve a certain state, and you forget about the actual physical act of meditation.
It might seem the same, but it’s like getting into a car and thinking about driving it.
True Meditation: Just feeling
So rather than trying so hard to meditate and 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 to meditate without all that?
Learning how to meditate is very different from any other mechanical activity. Like learning how to drive a car or brush your teeth.
Normal mechanical activities add new information to yourself that you lack, unlike meditation, which focuses on present awareness. Before driving, you lack gear and mirror knowledge. New information supplements what you already know. Similar to meditation.
However, with meditation, you are actually subtracting that type of information. Not negatively, not like forgetting times tables after a head knock.
Meditation is more; we take something we do every single day of our life and we subtract the complications.
We mostly sit in life: on phones, and computers, working, driving, or watching TV. The list is extensive. But in all of these ways, we are distracting ourselves from ourselves, by doing something.
When you meditate, you take the sitting and subtract the distracting and you just sit physically still.
That’s it, simple.
By removing constant distractions, we are left with what remains, free from continual actions and unrelated thoughts. 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.
So what happens when you’re sitting physically still?
There is a lot more to meditation than people realize. It goes deep without you trying to. It goes deeper than any traditional, technique-based meditations ever have or can.
It’s about understanding and accepting.
Deeper within, understanding unfolds naturally at the sensory level, leading to the inevitable acceptance of ongoing events.
Why? Because of your feeling, the 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, the more sensations will start to arise as they release from deeper inside you. Such as pain, disturbance, annoyance, resistance, and numbness.
Embracing Unsettling Emotions
These are normal. They 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.
Facing Past Anxiety
For a simple example: When I was younger I had pretty bad anxiety that I would do my best to suppress or avoid in my everyday life. But inevitably it would come up during my meditation, this feeling pressing down on my chest making me feel like I couldn’t breathe.
Confronting the Unavoidable
My immediate reaction was to get up and run away from that feeling. But that feeling is in me, it is me, so I can’t run away from it, it’ll just be there the next time I sit quietly. So I took the easier route and I just sat with it.
Honestly, I was curious. The longer I sat with it and let it have its say the quieter it became.
Listening to Your Feelings
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. And rather than just constantly running from them, all you need to do is listen to them and they’re gradually fading away.
Reframing Judgement
We judge these feelings too hard, we label them as horrible or depressing because we don’t like how they feel or how they make us act, so we push them down. Judging them and thinking there is something wrong with us because of them.
The Pitfall of Techniques
This is also why using meditation techniques never works. Because in using techniques we are viewing these feelings as bad and wrong and 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.
The Power of Understanding
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 big, will have a drastic change in your life.
Meditation’s Path to Healing
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.
Unlocking Your Inner Potential
Now it’s your turn to take this information and use it to your advantage.
Whether you’re a beginner, or a seasoned meditator just sit down, every day for at least ten minutes, with any feelings that arise within you.
Breaking Through Numbness
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. As you feel the numbness it’ll fade and you’ll be able to experience what is beneath the numbness.
Self-Discovery Through Stillness
As you experience yourself without distractions or judgment, or trying to change how you feel, your understanding of yourself will grow. This understanding you will only get from yourself – not from someone else or outside influences, techniques, or mantras, just from feeling your feelings wherever they are inside your body. 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.
Navigating Discomfort
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 recognize 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 it as just another sensation.
Transformative Sensations
Feeling this bodily sensation yields significant changes, enhancing the ease with life’s challenges, ultimately transforming both your experience and capacity.
Whatever is going on in you while you meditate is going on for good reason. Whether it be pain, happiness, resistance, or disturbance. Understand and accept it by feeling it as it is without judgment.
The Essence of True Meditation
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 Undo there are Body Connect Meditations, Deep Meditations, and Reset Meditations. These meditations can be found without the Core Chapters, the Body Tension Translator, and on the Home screen.
These guided meditations vary from 5 – 40 minutes and you can pick what time suits you.
I have found these guided meditations extremely helpful throughout my meditations. Even though I have been meditating for 11 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 listen on planes or transport when stressed, needing to regain self-sense. It’s a helpful way to refresh.
