In this article, we will be discussing both broad and specific views on what is meditation and how does meditation work.
I’m going to introduce you to the only meditation I know of that is not based in or somehow connected to religion, tradition or spirituality. It comes from my own discovery of how nature and the body that we are self corrects, heals itself and generally works. It is the meditation our body does naturally whenever it needs to recover, repair or change in some way.
I have held over 200 meditation retreats and discovered cures for the most complex mental and physical problems. Approaching mental and physical health as one integral issue I have treated over 30,000 people, with unprecedented success over the last 35 years.
It is due to my unique discoveries that I can offer a very useful and unique approach to meditation and to your own healing and understanding of yourself. This includes my discoveries of the significance of pain, illness and distress to be nature’s (the bodies) indicators of our need to evolve and develop.
From this article, you will gain an understanding of:
- How the meditation our body does naturally has the ability to trigger profound, life-altering changes, whenever we need it, because it directly affects the foundation of us as living organisms.
- How traditional meditation skims the surface of what we are, and relying so heavily on thinking, it can never penetrate deeper than that.
- Sensing, feeling, thinking, meditation without thinking, and what is required for change to occur.
Some of this may come as a surprise and will be challenging at times, but this is often so when what we have come to trust and believe is exposed as flawed…
For thousands of years, we (humans) have been misled by the mysticism of religious and traditional meditation and the goal of self-improvement or enlightenment.
It’s been a part of my life’s work to demystify this ideal and expose the evidence discovered.
And in this article, I’ll be sharing some of these discoveries with you.
So firstly you’ll need some understanding of…
What is traditional meditation?
And why it can’t deliver what meditation really can and should.
So let’s dig in…
As the traditional meditations are rooted in religious or spiritual beliefs, by design, they are very effective for unconsciously instilling their particular values, just by your regular practice of them.
Which is great if you are a believer but an unwanted imposition and side effect if you are not.
By applying meditation techniques, traditions have unknowingly modified meditation by turning it into a technique to achieve something or gain something, either aligned with that tradition or with a personal goal.
And that desired achievement or gain is either a state of ‘enlightenment’ or a way to better or improve yourself, which is (perhaps unintentionally or by default) based on the belief or view that you are somehow lacking and need to improve, which I will go into later.
Due to the underlying belief of needing to improve, the primary problem becomes the same for everyone.
Traditionally, spiritual goals of self-improvement or enlightenment have been viewed as more respectable pursuits than material or financial pursuits.
The spiritualist viewed material pursuits as unimportant, trivial desires, unworthy of their attention and even beneath them.
On the flip side, and until recently, the down to earth materialist tended to frown upon and disregard these spiritual pursuits as meaningless woo-woo, and possibly overlooked the massive benefits of looking within and bringing these two worlds together.
But when you go into the deeper motivation behind both spiritual and material pursuits you discover they are, in fact, one and the same.
Superficially, the final goals may seem different, one spiritual and the other material, but the motivational urge driving both is the same – to feel better about yourself and to improve upon yourself according to your view of improvement. Both the spiritualist and the materialist have the same urge to be better and different to what they are, based on what they have been taught to believe is worthwhile or important.
However, for both the spiritualist and the materialist this is an insatiable struggle.
So, whether you meditate on becoming enlightened or aspire to becoming a millionaire, it is essentially the same.
In both instances you have the goal of becoming something different to what you are,revealing the spiritual goal as no more lofty than the material one.
Both are driven by a sense of something
lacking and a self-orientated ambition.
But fulfilment from trying to improve upon yourself is impossible, because driving this is your deeper belief that you are not enough as you are. This belief is all that is making you feel lacking. So this belief must end for your feeling of lack to end.
When you have a deeper sense of appreciation for yourself, as you are, this feeling or felt sense of you fulfils you and then forms the basis and quality of your thoughts, words and actions, and a very different quality of life emerges from this.
It is important to realise, how this alternative is unique. It’s not to achieve something you don’t already have inside, or an improvement on what you are. But a deeper sensed recognition and appreciation of what you already are on the inside. And then, this is what determines your life on the outside.
How do you know you even need to improve?
The truth is, you cannot even know whether you need improvement until you first know yourself as you truly are.
Because you have been taught to not like things about yourself as you already are you feel dissatisfied and want to be different. The problem is, if what you have been told about yourself is not true, you will still unconsciously agree with what you have been taught and that will be causing your skewed experience and dislike of yourself.
So before you unintentionally pass judgement and undermine yourself by applying meditation techniques to improve, it is firstly essential to experience and know yourself as you are.
But when you apply a meditation technique, this prevents you from experiencing and knowing yourself as you already are. So if you simply don’t add this in to start with, you’ll already be way ahead, and ready to begin experiencing and knowing yourself as you are.
Know that when using a technique, you’re thinking about meditating. You are trying to meditate. But you’re not meditating.
So where does it go wrong?
People use meditation to make themselves feel ‘better’. Which is understandable when feeling distressed in everyday life. But usually, you don’t really know why you feel bad or whether you should be changing that.
What if you have been conditioned into disliking things about yourself?
What if you are supposed to feel these different ways and for good reason?
Should you be trying to change the way you feel into something better, and does that ever last? What if the way you feel is important and for a really good reason? And you just don’t know that yet.
You don’t change by avoiding how you feel.
To avoid how you feel, you can smoke a joint and get high, but after a while the effect wears off and you’re back to feeling the way you felt before, or even worse now, due to the after-effects from damage to your system, and also due to the comparison between being high, and then being how you really are when the high wears off.
And it’s the same with a meditation technique.
To avoid the way you really feel, you can repeat a meditation technique and feel better in that moment. But underneath, you are still the same and so it will soon wear off. And then you’re back to feeling the way you felt before, or even worse, due to the comparison between your meditation high and how you really are – the way you actually feel.
It’s a trap.
Soon you’ll be relying so much on that technique and the way that technique makes you feel, that how it really feels to be you becomes more disturbing or less fulfilling than it originally was.
This is the dilemma, the paradox, and the result of unintentionally judging yourself by trying to improve. It only compounds your mistaken dislike of yourself and how that then feels to be you.
And when the technique inevitably fails to deliver, you blame yourself and keep repeating the meditation technique…and the cycle continues.
But it is the techniques that are flawed, not you.
So what’s the solution?
To understand what meditation really is…
And what is meditation without tradition.
Real meditation is purely physical.
Meditation is to experience yourself, as you are, without the burden of thought or judgement (which is just another form of thinking), and without the goal or desire to change or improve yourself.
It’s just you – feeling how you feel in your body each day.
Because a body is all that you really are, all you can ever know of yourself is already there to be found in your deeper sense of that.
It is essential that you are not trying to get anything more out of whatever makes up your meditation – which is all the naturally occurring activities of your body, like breathing, sensing or feelings, from emptiness through to fulfilment, pain or pleasure.
Even feeling sick from illness or hurt from injury is simply to be felt, rather than resisted.
Whatever your body is already doing is how you already are and need to be, it is already happening. You don’t need to then deliberately focus in on it or think about it. You don’t then need to meditate on it. Leave it alone and just feel what is naturally occurring in your body already.
You only focus on it or think about it to try and change it or to try to get something more out of it. But you don’t need to. It’s enough as it is. You just don’t know that yet.
If you stop trying to do it right or better or get something more out of it than you are already feeling, your thinking will decrease dramatically and eventually fade away entirely.
Thinking only increases when you want an achievement from your meditation. This is why techniques to improve increase thinking and make thinking the problem it does not need to be.
Give yourself a chance to find out for yourself that what is already happening ordinarily and already felt in your body, can totally fulfil you.
Techniques to focus on or do what is already happening and known to you naturally don’t make sense. Does it help you to taste, see, feel, smell, hear, or breathe by thinking about it? It doesn’t. In fact, it distracts you from it and lessens it.
Try feeling something and thinking about it at the same time.
So if you just sit still, and do nothing more, after a while however you feel in the body will become apparent and known to you. Either as pain or comfort, warmth, or cold, itching or agitation, as sadness, hunger or fulfilment, or sounds, smells, tastes and so on. Any of these sensations that are happening will automatically become apparent to you just by you sitting still and nothing more.
And all of this happens before thinking becomes involved and without any technique to make you aware of it. You are naturally aware of these as a bodily sensation or feeling.
If you do not try to get more out of it, or make it better or different to what it is, then you won’t be adding extra unnecessary additional thinking in trying to do so and your meditation will continue to deepen.
You will then discover all there is to you. You will begin to discover the deeper meditation of the body. And eventually, you won’t want for anything else.
In this you will discover fulfilment.
And you are going to discover all this from yourself, just from sitting still.
This physically felt, real and existing experience of you differs from the false experience caused by learned views about yourself.
To purely feel this felt sense of yourself deeply disproves and ends your self-dislike and leaves you fulfilled with how you really and already are.
It is this bias of learned views that changes, not you as you really are, for you are actually complete as you are. But you need an end to your bias to feel and know that.
Thinking about yourself doesn’t tell you about yourself.
Because your thoughts about yourself are influenced by what other people have told you or taught you to think about yourself throughout your life, they are not accurate descriptions of you at all. They are just ideas from others. They are not truly about you.
But we rely so heavily on what others have told us that we don’t really know who we are anymore.
We’re out of touch with ourselves because we try to find ourselves through these ideas. We believe that what we or others think about us is how we will know who we are. But it isn’t who we are.
So we need meditation…which is going beneath all the thinking, and influences, and bias, and finding out by experiencing who you are from the deeper felt sense of yourself, in your body. The body that you are.
Sensing is our primary knowing, thinking is a secondary interpretation of that.
Because life is fully experienced through our bodily senses. It’s a completely physical experience. We see, we taste, we smell, we touch, we hear… We don’t need to question what we physically experience. It’s known to us.
Everything you can experience in any moment is experienced through your bodily senses and not without these. This is part of the natural meditation of the body.
Anything other than that is thinking, imagination and conjecture. Which is only an interpretation of what we sense and then a description of that interpretation.
Our thinking is not the experience itself, and it’s not how we really know it.
For example: When you are in a hot bath, you’re already feeling it, sensing it in your body. Your experience is real and physical, which is how you already know it. So you don’t need to think about it, you know it. In fact, if you think about it, you lessen your direct sense experience of it.
In this same way using techniques actually decreases your living in the moment experience, by unnecessarily thinking or being mindful of what you already physically sense.
First there is physical sensing and then you become mindful – thoughtful of that which has just been sensed.
To be mindful, or aware, is achieved by thinking about the moment, which you cannot do until it passes. You can only sense it whilst it exists. You do not and cannot think in the same instant of sensing something, only after you have sensed it.
Thinking is too slow to capture the sensory experience of each moment of life. That is not what thinking is for.
Try it for yourself. Feel something and try to think about it at the same time, and see how the feeling lessens or slips away. Or just listen, and try to think about it (what you are hearing) at the same time without decreasing or losing your sense of it.
Words or thoughts cannot capture, contain or become the deeper feelings they describe, and neither can meditation techniques contain or become the deeper sense of meditation which they aspire to.
Use your senses more and you won’t need to think so much.
When you simply use your primary bodily senses to experience life – which is the only way you can experience life – you are immediately and fully connected to life, to reality and to you. When involved in the secondary process of thinking, you are engaged in ‘memory about these’, which is imagination, and so you can be distracted from your own immediate reality. So that’s when life can get really confusing.
This direct sensory experience of life removes your perceived need to think about what you’re experiencing and leaves you in direct contact with the experience itself. This makes life way less confusing and you don’t need to think so much because – you just know it.
This is what it really means to be ‘present’ or to be ‘in the moment’. Only the body is in the moment. Thinking cannot be in the moment it describes, it only describes something after the fact, which it then recognises and describes. But don’t think too much about this.
The difference between feeling and thinking.
So the simplest way to define this (Undo) approach to meditation from techniques is – it’s the difference between feeling (which is primary and in the moment) and thinking (which is secondary and after the moment, in memory of it).
It is important to understand that feeling and thinking are two separate
functions with separate purposes.
The words happiness, or sadness, or grief, or cold describe the feelings, but words do not contain the feeling. Words are just a description.
When you think about being cold, you don’t really feel cold. It’s just a thought-description of the cold.
But when you’re feeling…
And I mean really and only feeling; there are no thoughts or words to go with these feelings. The feelings are enough. They’re complete, and you understand them fully as the feelings they are.
The only thing that can cause you to misunderstand your feelings is when you start thinking about them – placing importance on one feeling over another, or describing one feeling as incorrect and another as correct, or better or worse…
But this causes your experience of your feelings to morph into emotion.
Emotion is a feeling that you’ve tainted by thinking about it (whether you’re aware of it or not) and thinking exaggerates feeling or causes it to feel uncomfortable or disturbing. It’s a reaction to the feeling, and is not the pure feeling itself. Emotion is this confusing mix of thinking and feeling.
A feeling is your physical response to something real in your life.
A feeling is in your body and exists whether you think or not.
And so with this approach to meditation…
When you meditate, and you’re feeling the sense of yourself, as time goes on this takes you deeper than your thinking, deeper than your thoughts about yourself or things, into how you really feel in the body.
Go deep into the felt sense of your body.
This is your direct experience of yourself, which is life itself.
In the direct experience of yourself you have immediate contact with life as it’s happening. And with this you’re able to navigate life more intelligently, with more clarity, in every area of your life.
From this sense of yourself, you’re able to resolve problems with ease, simply because you’re able to see (sense) any situation for what it is before your thought-reactions distort or confuse you.
It is from your body’s response to life, from this deeper sensing, that you will know how to respond to all life’s various challenges, immediately and without the need to think so much about it. And you can act with confidence, with a knowing sense of all the facts.
This is the inherent intelligence of the living organisms that we are. This intelligence, this deeper knowing is often referred to as ‘gut feeling’ or ‘instinct’. And there is a lot more to this than we at first realise.
Compare this to our attempts to navigate life through the use of ‘thinking’ – which is the default of nearly all humans – you are constantly thinking about and describing everything that’s happening and comparing it to other experiences that you’ve had, weighing up and analysing all the options…in an ongoing struggle to work-life out.
Is it any wonder people become overwhelmed with life!
And then we avoid the way we feel.
So why do we avoid our feelings?
It’s a good question so let’s answer it.
We have been taught to avoid discomfort or painful feelings, and taught to disregard all our physical sensations and to rely on thinking to explain or fix everything. But thinking is not for fixing feelings. Thinking is only for simple things, mechanical daily things.
When once you begin to realise how your feelings are the key to unlocking your deepest intelligence and understanding of yourself and life, the desire to avoid or ignore them no longer makes sense.
The beliefs we hold about ourselves or about the world distort our view of ourselves and the world, making it feel uncomfortable for us. Because they are often tied to disturbing life experiences and traumas, these feelings can be extreme and overwhelming.
For this reason we develop an aversion to feeling them. And we try to avoid them altogether, wherever they come up or activate within us.
This keeps us from ever going deep into ourselves, and from healing them and so we don’t get to unlock our true potential in life.
Feelings are meant to be felt, not thought about or analysed. Feeling is how you will understand yourself or know yourself as you are, day by day. Feelings are the active internal process you feel in your body all the time.
This process of feeling is important. It is the ongoing healing from the effects life has on you each day. If you think about this or react to these different feelings by trying to change or improve them, you interfere with and massively inhibit this natural healing process and prevent change.
What stops us from changing?
It doesn’t matter what you think about yourself or what you want to change about yourself, there is no way to change who you actually are. Not intentionally and not through thinking.
Change will happen, but only if it really needs to and only of its own volition.
Our problem and the correct question is not how to change but how to get out of our own way and allow change to happen.
Ironically, these thoughts or ideas about wanting to change yourself are the thing that prevents change. These ideas and techniques resist the natural process of change, but change is inherently active and going on inside the body of you all the time.
When you attempt to enforce change, you are resisting the way you are and feel, which is already in a natural process of change and correction. That’s why it hurts, why it is uncomfortable or disturbing. You are going through a change. Your need is to get in touch with that. And feeling that is how you will.
Then there are these things people have told you over the years, about how you should or shouldn’t be, what you should or shouldn’t feel – these ideals have made you feel uncomfortable with how you naturally are, and this misunderstanding has caused you to interfere with change. Because of this you have tried to force change upon yourself.
This is not how change happens and this is not how nature works.
The body is nature and therefore you are nature.
The only unnatural thing is what you have been taught to think, to believe and to impose upon yourself.
So be as you are for a while. Just try it, for a little while.
Leave yourself alone.
That means don’t think about yourself but go deeper into the physical and living sense of yourself as you are in the body, however that feels, and let nature – the body – take care of things, and it will.
And that is the only meditation there is that will heal and truly relieve you.
