The Effortless Freedom of Consciousness

A meditation retreat always involves some degree of contemplation. Meditation instructions are always starkly simple, and yet practicing them is often more challenging than we expect. Inevitably we find ourselves thinking through exactly what those instructions mean and how we can best follow them.

During the first few days of the two-month retreat that transformed my life, I was immersed in deep contemplation. The meditation instruction I had been given was to let everything be as it is. On the second day of retreat, I wrote down the question that had seized my attention: What is the relationship between making effort and letting everything be as it is?

It seemed that letting everything be as it is shouldn’t require any effort at all, and yet in the intimate silence of practice I found myself exerting great effort just to try. Finally, out of sheer frustration on the third day, I wrote: How much time in meditation do I actually spend doing the practice; not just having increasingly subtle insights about it, or thinking about doing it, but actually doing it?

My honest answer was: not much. Most of my meditation time was spent thinking about how to let everything be as it is. But the next day, a breakthrough came. I realized that I simply needed to sit still, be awake, and be relaxed. If I was doing that, I was meditating. Nothing else mattered. The thoughts moving through my mind were irrelevant. My frustrations were irrelevant. Even my insights were irrelevant. All that mattered was sitting still, being awake, and being relaxed. Those three simple injunctions were the beginning, the middle, and the end of meditation.

In my journal I wrote: Meditation is simply resisting the temptation to move away from where you already are. I was already still, awake, and relaxed. The habit of moving into some story about my meditation and winding myself into knots was strong, but I always started still, awake, and relaxed. There was nothing to do but resist moving away.

For the rest of that day and into the next, I just sat still, awake, and relaxed, unconcerned about what happened as a result. My experience was exactly the same as before, but now I wasn’t worried about it. I didn’t let anything convince me that something was wrong or needed to be fixed. My mind kept tying itself into knots; my identity kept getting caught in them. But I was free. I was simply sitting still, awake, and relaxed—letting everything be as it is.

The implications of what I was experiencing unfolded as a cascade of insight. We are all already free. We only experience ourselves as bound when we engage with thought processes that make us feel bound. If we refrain from engaging those thought processes, we remain free. When we do find ourselves tangled in mental knots—as we inevitably will—we can simply allow them to be without making them a problem. The knots can exist; they do not make us less free.

In the private inner world of meditation, nothing can make you unfree except your own choice to see yourself that way. What I discovered in those first few days of retreat was that within my own mind, I could always be free if I chose to be.

Yet my initial flurry of realization was not complete. On the fifth day, I had an insight that changed my relationship to meditation forever. In my journal that day, I wrote: Today I realized that meditation can occur without any idea of “me” to support it.

What I saw was that there was no “me” meditating. In fact, meditation was consciousness free of any idea of “me.” When thoughts of “Jeff” were absent, consciousness remained—still, awake, and relaxed. It was only the idea of “me,” the identity of “being Jeff,” that became agitated or lost in thought. Consciousness itself was always present and always free. When I let go of all thoughts of myself, there was freedom. It wasn’t even me who was free; it was consciousness that was free of the idea of being me.

That insight changed everything. Consciousness is always already free and peaceful. Meditation is simply resisting the temptation to be anything other than that.