The Miracle of Meditation

My first book was called The Miracle of Meditation and that title perfectly describes exactly what I feel unendingly inspired to share with people.

My own practice of meditation has blessed me with the experience of a miracle, a miracle so beautiful and life transforming that I’ve been tirelessly sharing it with people all over the world nonstop for over fifteen years.

So what is the miracle of meditation?

Simply put, it is the discovery that life is an unfolding process guided by a universal source of wisdom and love, and the further discovery that the direct recognition of that life source is immediately available to any of us as soon as we stop being distracted by anything else.

To a much greater degree than any of us ever suspected our attention is limited to a very small range of experience. What we normally have access to as consciousness is merely a speck in an ocean of possibility.

Our awareness has been caught in a loop like a dog tied to a tree. The small circle defined by the length of our mental chains becomes the limit of our world and life.

The big cosmic joke is that there is no chain binding us. We are penned in by an invisible fence that consists only only in our mind. The fence that defines and limits our life is nothing more than a collection of ideas about who we are and what is possible for us.

When we sit to meditate we don’t do anything. We stop trying to manipulate or control our experience in anyway. We simply allow everything to be exactly the way it is.

It took many years of diligent practice before I was able to give up control for even a few moments in meditation. Yet those few precious moments of freedom were enough to change everything.

We tend to assume that when we give up control everything is going to stop, but the truth is that nothing stops when we give up control. That’s all part of the miracle – the recognition that we weren’t in control of anything. It was all just happening.

What you discover in these moments of total release is that everything you thought was you was part of an unfolding process of life. Your own self, the seemingly independent choices you made, and all the effort you’ve expended to get to where you are, was a naturally arising part of the life process. You were never the one doing it all. It was all happening spontaneously and effortlessly.

When this miraculous state of awareness descends what you find is that all of the thoughts and feelings that are so familiar just keep going. Your aspirations and dreams, your fears and concerns, the helpful coaching that you always offer yourself, everything just keeps going. And you realize that all of the voices you used to think were you thinking and talking to yourself were just habits of mind.

Suddenly you don't know who you are. None of those voices were ever you.

Can you see how liberating this is?

All of those voices are just habits running along prescribed paths. The longer you sit in meditation and watch them the more you see that they just keep going in predictable patterns. You realize you've been trapped in mental loops because you had mistakenly thought they were you.

Now you're a free floating point of awareness. You see and hear all the thoughts and feelings, but you aren't caught in the belief that they are who you are.

As I said, even a moment or two of letting go this deeply changes everything.

Some people may protest and want to protect their current sense of freewill and choice, but the miracle of meditation doesn’t take your freedom away. In fact, it is an exercise of the greatest freedom there is – the freedom to choose to give up control and bring yourself into direct contact with the ever present process of life.

Before experiencing the miracle of meditation we felt like an isolated individual struggling to navigate through the confines of a busy mind, now we see ourselves as a mysterious locus of awareness floating in an ocean of consciousness that is much bigger than any mind we have ever known.

Everything looks different and the problems we thought we had start to disappear – not because we’ve solved them, but because our attention is becoming riveted on a reality so awe-inspiring we can’t take our eyes off it.

We are captivated by the true nature of life, by the love and wisdom that has always been guiding it, and by the unfathomable reality of who we are.

That is the miracle of meditation.