Meditation Techniques—And Beyond

There are many techniques for meditation. A very small list would include:

Making yourself relax.
Telling yourself to feel peaceful, joyful, or some other positive thing.
Tracking your breathing, perhaps slowing it down and making it very regular.
Concentrating your attention on one point—staring at a candle flame, for example.

And there is something else that you could do.

Nothing.

There is a remarkable result from this.

When you do nothing, there remains only being.

There is no technique for being. You know this, because you exist without trying and without calculation. You are just here.

When you drop into pure being, then these things can begin to happen automatically:

You relax.

You feel peaceful, joyful, and positive.

Your breathing becomes more regular.

Your ability to concentrate becomes stronger.

These are the effortless, automatic by-products of pure being. But they have been turned into meditation techniques in an attempt to reach the cause by imitating the effects. And yes, even though that’s kind of doing things backwards, apparently you can benefit from these techniques, and I support any results that you get from them.

Here, try this non-technique: Stop.

Stop.

Just—stop.

Stop doing anything.

No, I’m not saying that you should hold your breath. I am just saying that you should interrupt your activity, and do nothing, and simply be.

And here is a footnote: There is an important distinction here. It’s not that you make other things stop. Only you stop. Everything else keeps going.

And here is a common issue: The “everything else” that keeps going might even include your thoughts. And one of those thoughts might be that you haven’t stopped if they haven’t stopped. But there’s a solution.

Answers From Silence says, “You are not your thoughts. You were here before they were.”

Because of this, you can stop while they keep going. When this happens, you separate your identity from them. They become part of the scenery.

They may even fade into silence. Or not.

Either way, welcome to pure being.

—JC