Meditation and the Source of Life
When I was asked recently what first drew me to meditation, I said I thought it was the fact that I always knew that I wanted to come to life! The fact that I was aware of this wish at all in my 20’s, means I must, at some level, have also been aware that I was not yet fully alive, and that some more deepening, learning, or wisdom was necessary. So it was probably this desire to get to the source of life, that attracted me to meditation.
What I learned in the Zen Centre back in the 1990’s, was that meditation wasn’t so much about solving all my problems, or getting a new personality, or acquiring special experiences. It was, on the contrary, something quite simple, and intuitively, I sensed that this simplicity could help me. The stillness of the sitting posture felt somehow familiar and refreshing; I dropped into it quite naturally. I breathed more easily. It was as if I’d come home.
Basically, meditation introduced me to rest. We need to be introduced to rest apparently, because the mind doesn’t know it can come to rest. In coming to rest, I intuitively recognized that there’s more space here than I thought. This simple realization quenched my thirst, without me ever having realized that I was parched.
We talk about meditation as a practice, but meditation in its deepest meaning is to rest in our real nature, to be what we are – knowingly. 1
Meditation is not always a serene experience of course. If you continue to meditate regularly, and for long enough, you become more aware of the mind-chatter and daydreaming. You will start to hear yourself complain: There’s nothing here! This is boring! I don’t have time for this; there are more important things to do! This litany of complaints is quite normal, it means the process is working! You are getting to know yourself – or what you had thought was yourself. You are coming into simple, direct contact with life; the present moment, “just as it is”.
Meditation is the discovery that the point of life is always arrived at in the immediate moment. 2
Understandably, people often ask what exactly you have to do in meditation. The Buddha actually had more to say about the “how” than the “what”. And the “how”, at the centre of all meditation practice, is a quality of attention and receptive noticing. Noticing is a natural human capacity, one which our species developed very early on. It is what helps keep us, and others around us safe. We all have access to it, and it can be trained. The intention of meditation is that you learn to notice all the thoughts, feelings, sensations and perceptions as they arise. You don’t have to get rid of them, only notice them, because as the witness, you are no longer caught up in these fluctuations, you are that which is observing them. In this way your attachment to them, and your identification with them, is gradually dissolved and this, in turn, leads to relief, and a lightness of being.
What I didn’t realize all those years ago when I began meditation, is that I didn’t really have to get life at all. I just had to be willing to see that the life I had been conditioned to call “mine” – my identity – was not life at all, but the weight of a suffering ego.
As the illusory identity is gradually surrendered, another kind of energy becomes more directly available: this is the energy of universal life, sometimes we call this energy Light, or Love. As you are freed: … from... your sorrow, your fear, your anger… you are alive, fully present in the here and the now. And that is the basic condition for you to touch the wonders of life… 3
Being fully alive is the realization that life is all there is; and that it’s not actually possible to be anything else!
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1. Billy Doyle, Yoga in the Kashmir Tradition: the art of listening, New Sarum Press, 2014, p. 128
2. Alan Watts, Alan Watts Organisation, https://alanwatts.org/2-5-4-meditation
3. Turn Every Cell On: Dharma Talk by Thich Nhat Hanh, 11 December, 2005, Youtube
