If you can sit or lie down in relative comfort, you can meditate—the only requirement is passive receptivity.

The biggest obstacle to sticking with a meditation practice is the false belief that you’re “doing it wrong” if thoughts arise while you sit. Unless you have a very mature practice (usually built over decades), the cessation of thought is an extremely rare event. Rather, the skill cultivated in meditation is remaining unattached to thoughts as they surface.

Set aside meditation for a moment and think about daydreaming. Picture yourself looking out the window, with thoughts passively floating through your consciousness like clouds in the sky. In that altered state of consciousness, you’re unlikely to remember any particular thought in great detail. This is what meditation can be like. As I sit, if someone were to rouse me and ask what I was thinking about a minute ago, I would likely not be able to answer. Thoughts were occurring, of that I’m certain, but the specific content dissipates quickly.

Image by ChatGPT, OpenAI

The skill of meditation is the practiced ability to quiet persistent thoughts until your mind defaults to passive, unattached thinking. There are many techniques for this. Some meditation teachers suggest following or counting the inhalation and exhalation of respiration. Others will have you focus on an external visual, such as a candle flame. Still others will encourage you to identify persistent thoughts and mentally place them on a shelf to deal with later. Try different methods and see what works for you.

My method is grounded in somatic awareness. Over the years, I have become conditioned to experience meditation as an awareness of every part of my body as one collective sensation. I’ve shifted my focus from transcendence to transformation. I could direct my energy externally, but that tends to lead to dissociation. While dissociation can be temporarily liberating for the troubled body-mind and has its place, I’ve found that the greatest depth of healing comes from being in a state of embodiment rather than dissociation.

Embodied awareness is not a peak experience that arises when the mind stills of all thought, but a feeling of equanimity alongside passive thinking. The few moments of true thought cessation I have experienced were precious, but so rare that I consider them more as artifacts of meditation practice. They seem to occur as an accident of grace. Meditation may make one more accident-prone, but seeking a non-dual state of blissful oneness is not the everyday experience of meditation for the average person in the spiritual dark ages.

It’s curious to think about what such peak experiences suggest about the nature of consciousness—that a shift to emptiness becomes an experience of everything. Seeking this is akin to trying to hold on to water. The harder you try, the faster it slips through your grasp. Instead, think of meditation as a profound reset of the nervous system and a resultant enhancement of body awareness. You don’t have to accomplish or fix anything. There is no goal, only the development of the skill of passive receptivity.

Do this, and you will have access to the great equalizer of lived experience.