Why is meditation not a technique, not a posture and not just breathing? In this episode, I look at a common mistake.
People very often want to be shown how to meditate correctly. They say: “Show me the technique, show me the posture, show me the breathing, show me what I should feel.” But there is an incredibly serious mistake built into this.
If you can be shown how, then most often what we are talking about is not meditation but an exercise — like push-ups, like ten thousand steps, like a body scan, like concentrating on the breath. It may be useful in some ways and may even work. It may even balance your system and bring you some pleasant sensations. But it is not meditation. Meditation cannot be understood through a single exercise. That is the incredible essence of it.
Meditation is not sitting down, closing your eyes, turning on music and feeling calmer twenty minutes later. That may be a state of recovery, it may be a good thing to do.
But meditation in the true sense is the expansion of your own perception of life.
The meditative state in everyday life
You can be in a meditative state when you are talking with a child, when you are walking here in town, when you are drinking coffee, when you are working, when you look at another person and suddenly begin to sense what is really happening.
And then the question becomes completely different. Not which technique is better, but what am I perceiving right now, what am I not perceiving, where am I caught in an illusion? Where do I simply want to calm down so I can go on living the same way? And where do I really, truly want to see the truth?
Meditation is not some separate, beautiful little corner of your life; it is not a refuge. It is not a spot in some cave that people endlessly search for. Meditation is life itself. If, of course, you begin to truly perceive it.
That is exactly why you can’t simply go and buy the right technique and settle the matter. That is exactly why you can’t simply start going to some gatherings with mats, in particular postures, with particular music or a particular sound. You can learn to breathe, you can learn to sit, you can even learn to relax. But the question of meditation begins where a person starts to see: I live, I perceive, I am a spiritual being.
What truth surrounds me? What causes and effects surround me? What can I sense and perceive simultaneously in different states? A person senses that everything happening around them is not separate from their real life. That is where true meditation begins.
🎥 Video for this article
Original video · Russian audio