The Miracle of Just Sitting

In deep meditation we discover the miracle of just sitting. Before I experienced this miracle, I could never have imagined that sitting quietly for extended periods of time could dramatically shift my sense of reality, but it can and did. If more people knew what was possible, I have no doubt they would be meditating.

When I describe meditation as just sitting, I’m speaking about sitting quietly and adopting a sense of divine indifference in relation to whatever your experience happens to be. We sit and remain completely unconcerned with anything that arises in our mind. As we sit and allow our thoughts and feelings to pass by, we feel a growing sense of joy swelling up inside us.

In the most important sense, spiritual liberation is freedom from being obsessively concerned with controlling the quality of our experience. We’ve all been conditioned by the pain and pleasure of life. We were taught to seek happiness by trying to control how we feel, and left constantly chasing positive experiences.

There is no way to feel happy all the time. Being human means our emotional experience naturally fluctuates. We feel good, we feel bad, we feel inspired, we feel defeated, we feel animated, we feel depleted – we are constantly cycling through emotions.

We all want to feel good and there is nothing wrong with that, but chasing after positive experiences, and resisting what is, causes anxiety and suffering. The constant hunt for pleasure and seeking out of the present moment, leaves a sense of lack and that something is wrong.

When you learn to just sit and be content with whatever experience you are having, you will realize something truly miraculous. However, if you are overly concerned with manipulating and controlling your experience in order to be OK, you will never be able to move beyond it.

In his famous novel Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance Robert Pirsing describes a deceptively effective monkey trap. It is a simple box chained to the ground with a hole in it. The hole is big enough for the monkey to fit its hand through, but not in a fist. Inside the box is a banana. The monkey reaches in and grabs the banana, but can’t remove its hand without letting go. Hours later, the monkey is still trapped when the hunters come to collect him.

The monkey trap is a powerful metaphor offering tremendous insight about our habitual state of consciousness. We obsessively fixate our attention on our current experience and all those aspects of it that are concerning us. The more we fixate on those troubling aspects of our experience the worse we feel.

There is a modern version of essentially the same metaphor in which a person walks into a psychologist's office with his hands around his neck saying, “Can you help me, I’m suffocating?”

Both metaphors imply the same thing – that our suffering is self-inflicted. While I would never claim that all suffering is self-inflicted, because it certainly is not. The harshness of life inevitably leads to pain for all of us. That is exactly why it makes so much sense not to add any more.

The miracle of meditation is discovered when we rest in the divine indifference of just sitting and letting go of all concern about whatever experience we are having. If you can do this for just 30 minutes a day, you will slowly learn to trust life. It doesn't matter if you are frustrated, bored, challenged or happy, you just rest at peace with it all. You practice having no problem, no matter what is happening. You practice truly just sitting and being with what is.

When you learn to just sit in this way, something extraordinary happens. An inner contentment that is not at cause and effect to your circumstances grows inside. This deep source of inner wellbeing means you can remain peaceful, relaxed and at ease through all circumstances no matter how you feel. You can be content even if we don’t feel content because you have discovered the joy of being alive.