The Key to Meditation: Just Do It

When it comes to teaching meditation, it's all about sharing the experience.

As a meditation teacher I often wish I could hand over to my students the experience of peace and wholeness that I feel in meditation so that they would be encouraged to practice regularly and benefit from the many gifts of a steady meditation practice. But alas, I can only share, encourage, guide, and hope that something will spark the longing to connect with their own true nature on a daily basis.

As much as one meditation session can be rich and fulfilling in and of itself, for the practice to be maximally transformative it needs to be practiced on a regular basis and become as much a priority as eating, breathing, and sleeping. It took me several years to come to arrive at a place where meditation is now a twice-daily practice so my patience with students comes from a place of knowing that a regular practice happens when it happens, usually when we’ve had enough of suffering.

But still I wonder: “What more can I say, what more can I do to encourage my students to take their meditation practice seriously?” For me it has been the most transformative element in my life for undoing my ego through insight and acceptance, accessing intuition, and touching on the stillness within me that is beyond words. It has been the foundation for deep physical healing, creativity, authentic choices, and learning from my challenges.

A regular practice begins in earnest when we deeply connect to the longing to know our true selves. We know without a doubt that nothing in the material world will fill the emptiness that is part of the human condition. We often spend the first part of our lives filling this emptiness, this feeling that something is missing, that what we have is never enough. We fill this void with partners, education, exciting experiences, material objects, homes, money, trips, children, food, drugs, clothes or a new hair style. For many of us, we have to exhaust every possibility until we finally realize that what we’re looking for is already here, within us, and we can connect to it most easily in stillness.

I often call my meditation practice my date with the Beloved, and the Beloved is me!

I love the sweetness that moves through me after just a few minutes of settling in meditation, particularly when I have been caught in the throes of a difficult challenge. The more we spend time in meditation, the easier it is to access that spacious presence that feels free and open and accepting of our lives exactly as they are. In time it begins to seep through into daily life and we notice that we don’t react in the same way that we used to, there is less drama, and we tend to recuperate from challenges more quickly.

As the Course in Miracles says with respect to spiritual enlightenment, it’s not a question of if, it’s a question of when. We will all eventually be drawn to discover our true nature, which is love, because it’s the strongest force in the universe.

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