a fresh perspective...
I’ve spent decades chasing enlightenment like a moth drawn to flame. Years upon years of sitting on cushions, chanting mantras, opening chakras, drinking in divine qualities – searching, always searching for that elusive state of peace and Love that felt just beyond my grasp.
And you know what? All that seeking, all that spiritual striving… it was actually taking me further from what I most deeply longed for.
Today, I want to share something that’s been stirring in my heart – a perspective on meditation that might shake up everything you think you know about spiritual practice. What I’m offering isn’t another technique to master or state to achieve. It’s simpler than that. And harder. And easier. And more profound.
Let me start by telling you a story. One that might feel familiar…
A Familiar Story
Let me start with a story. Maybe you’ll relate to it.
Once upon a time, there was a woman. She was a seeker who had tried every meditation technique under the sun. She tried:
- Watching her breath
- Repeating mantras
- Quieting her thoughts and getting very still
- Cultivating loving-kindness
- Saying prayers
- Focusing on objects
- Chanting divine qualities
- Practices to open her third eye
- Opening her heart to love
- Taking plant medicines
- Using psychoactive drugs
- Going on meditation retreats
- Being facilitated through soul journeys
Sometimes with these practices, she discovered moments of peace. She had breakthroughs where she felt connected to love, where she received guidance or experienced an opening – delicious glimpses of something deeper.
But as she went out into the world, she found herself back at square one, needing another practice, another experience, the next insight, the next cycle of seeking calmness or spaciousness or love. She found herself on a roller coaster of spiritual highs and lows, meditative insights and practical struggles, never quite arriving at the lasting peace, love, ease, spaciousness, and fulfillment she craved.
Often she felt like she was doing it wrong – that she didn’t get it, that something that was supposed to happen wasn’t happening. She kept expecting some big event, some big breakthrough while practicing so intently, not understanding why it wasn’t working. “Why am I still here? Why does this feel so hard when I’m putting everything I have into these practices?”
She had periods where she gave up on meditation completely, but then she started to miss it. She would go back and have those moments again, but they were always fleeting and the struggle continued.
Does this story sound familiar? I know it does for me. I have been this person, caught in the endless cycle of striving and seeking – or as I like to call it, the cycle of evasion and pursuit. In other words, trying to get away from things that are uncomfortable while pursuing things that we desire.
I’ve watched countless others get caught in these cycles, thinking that if they just meditate harder or better, if their spiritual practice is just more consistent, they’ll finally get it, finally break through, finally achieve the thing they’re seeking.
But what if we’re starting in the wrong place? What if meditation isn’t about achieving some special state or transcending our human experience?
Traditional Approaches
There are many traditional approaches to meditation – way more than I can share here. I am not a guru or teacher of any of these, and none of these practices originate with my ancestors – they’re all pulled from other cultures that are not mine. I am not an expert at them, nor will I convey them fully or accurately in the manner they might deserve. The way I talk about these are at a very rudimentary level.
I want to discuss four of them. In doing so, I want to make it really clear that all of these are beautiful practices that can be very supportive. My approach to meditation, which I’ll share later, is not meant to diminish or exclude any of these traditional approaches. Rather, it can include and enhance them all, or perhaps bypass them completely by inviting you into a more direct path to experience what you’re seeking (minus the seeking part).
1. Contemplative Emptying
This is a widely known approach to meditation. It involves sitting on your cushion or in your chair, relaxing, quieting the mind, and observing thoughts, exploring meaning, and deepening understanding with openness, curiosity, and intentional reflection. This can be really valuable – there are many studies quantifying its benefits. The ability to quiet the mind and observe what arises can lead to beautiful states of bliss or spiritual insight, ease or peace.
It can often become another form of spiritual achievement. The way many teach and practice contemplative meditation, there can still be a pursuit, an evasion of the busy mind, an attachment to becoming empty enough, quiet enough, still enough to receive the relief or insight you’re seeking. While beautiful and helpful, it can still contribute to the cycle of evasion and pursuit – still chasing some state or trying to evade another.
2. Mindfulness
This is perhaps the most widely taught meditation approach in the West today. The mindfulness approach emphasizes being present with our experience without judgment – noticing thoughts, feelings, and sensations as they arise and cultivating acceptance of what is.
This practice is beautiful and helpful, and still, it often gets reduced to stress management techniques or a way to “cope better” with life’s challenges. Mindfulness training frequently becomes another self-improvement project – something we need to get better at, another skill to master, another way to fix ourselves.
Even when practiced skillfully, mindfulness can sometimes keep us caught in the subject-object split – “I” am being mindful of “my experience.” This subtle duality maintains the sense of separation that veils our true nature. We remain the observer trying to accept our experience, rather than recognizing ourselves as the awareness in which all experience already freely arises.
3. Devotional Filling
This is a practice I’ve long engaged in myself – it’s very nourishing. I’m particularly referring to the Sufi practice of Remembrance: opening the heart and drinking from source, whatever Divine Quality we might need – ultimately, love. Drinking in love and developing the perfect thirst so that we never stop drinking.
This is a beautiful practice, and yet it can also reinforce the illusion that love is something we need to acquire, something we need to pursue, something that isn’t already here. It creates and reinforces the illusion of separation – that I am this incomplete, needy being who must rely on some external source for what I need, instead of recognizing unity and oneness as the default state that is already present. This practice can unintentionally reinforce separation, even while it hopes to lead us into Oneness.
4. Transcendental Meditation
Transcendental meditation is amazing and beautiful, with profound impacts when practiced effectively. It often uses mantras, focus on objects, and other specific techniques to access transcendent states. In these states, we can experience amazing things – beautiful clarity and profound connection that feels magical, moving above and beyond ordinary experience.
While beneficial, this approach can also become another form of seeking special experiences. Most people aren’t able to walk around in a transcendent state. And we might ask: are we meant to? Or are we meant to be having a human experience? Are we trying to escape the experience we’re meant to have here as a human body-mind in objective reality?
A transcendent state often gives us relief – “I was able to get out of that horrible fucking hell that is my life, or the world, or the political scene.” While that relief can be beautiful and sometimes really important, it can become another way of reinforcing this cycle of trying to evade our experience and pursue something beyond our human experience.
A Different Perspective
The way I think about meditation is inclusive of all these approaches – not exclusive, but more inclusive.
What I’m sharing points to something even deeper – the recognition that there is no separation between the meditator and the meditation, between awareness and experience, between consciousness and its content. This understanding, sometimes called non-duality, reveals that we’re not actually a separate self trying to achieve a particular state or experience. We are the awareness itself in which all states and experiences arise.
This isn’t just philosophical – it’s deeply practical. When we recognize our true nature as awareness itself, we stop trying to get somewhere else or become someone better. We see that the peace, love, and fulfillment we seek isn’t something to achieve but rather our essential nature that’s always here, just veiled by our belief in separation. All our spiritual seeking, all our meditative practices, are really just different ways of trying to get back to what we already are.
What if meditation wasn’t about:
- Quieting the mind
- Filling oneself with love
- Accepting what’s here
- Achieving a special state
What if meditation didn’t require so much effort?
What if it’s really about recognizing what’s already here right in the midst of our beautifully messy lives?
What if meditation is about letting the veils that cover our natural, essential state of being fall away – allowing the Love to shine through?
In traditional meditation, there’s so much effort. It becomes another task we have to do, another practice we have to engage in. Yet think about your own experience. Your awareness is already present – it takes no effort. You’re already there, already aware. Your thoughts are already being witnessed, sensations already being felt, sounds already being heard. All of your experience is already happening effortlessly.
You don’t have to:
- Put in any effort
- Create presence
- Make anything happen
It’s all unfolding on its own in each moment.
This isn’t about bypassing or transcending our human experience or denying our challenges. It’s about recognizing that even in the midst of those challenges – the chaos, struggle, uncertainty, unknown – there’s an awareness that’s always here, a loving presence always holding it all.
It’s the awareness you refer to when you say “I am.” We usually follow “I am” with words that describe our experience, but the experience isn’t what you are. We know this because experiences change – feelings change, sensations change, sounds change. Everything changes except the awareness that holds it all.
This awareness, this loving presence that you are – you are not separate from it. It is the very essence of your being. Thoughts, sensations, sounds, and experiences tend to veil our connection with it. But truly, it is our most intimate experience. It’s not even an experience – we have to use language to try to describe something indescribable.
But you can always go back to your own personal experience and notice that your awareness, this loving presence of who you are in the deep essence of your soul, has always been who you are. It’s this same “you” that observed yourself growing up, going to school, getting your first job, falling in love, having sex, having a child, adoptin a pet, planting a tree. You have always been here.
If we stripped away all the stress in the world, all the need to pursue things, the need to evade danger – if you had everything you needed and it was all exactly as you wanted it to be – who would you be? You would be you. Your heart, your light would shine through with ease. All these thoughts, sensations, sounds, feelings, perceptions – all this experience just veils and distracts us from the essence that we are.
A Radical Shift
This understanding invites a radical shift. Instead of using meditation to escape our lives or improve ourselves, we can see it as an invitation to be fully present with what is – to actually let go of the practicing, let go of the efforting. We can release:
- The idea that we’re doing it wrong
- The need to change something
- The pressure to achieve some ideal state
- The idea of becoming a better meditator
- The concept of transcending anything
The truth is, there is no right way to meditate. There is no special state to reach. Can we reach special states? Can we transcend? For a moment, sure – but that’s not where we live. And maybe that special state is actually already here; we just can’t see it.
The special state that comes through in transcendental meditation, or the special feeling of relaxation, spaciousness, peace, love, or whatever guidance comes through when we do these meditative techniques, is really just the veils of separation falling away so that who we naturally are – this loving presence – can shine through.
It’s like when clouds part in the sky and the sun comes through. The sun was always there – it didn’t go away. The sun is like the light of our being. And when we let go of trying to make something happen, when we surrender into the simplicity of being, a profound relaxation can occur. We start to recognize the natural ease, openness, and light that’s always been here.
It’s the end of evasion and pursuit, and the beginning of true meditation – not as a practice or technique, but as a way of being, a way of knowingly being this loving presence that we already are.
Practical Application
So what does this look like in practice? How do we bring this understanding into our daily lives and into what we might call (because we don’t have other words for it) a meditation practice?
Here’s the good news: it’s not about adding another technique or trying to hold a certain state. It’s about a fundamental shift in how we approach meditation altogether.
When we sit down to practice, we can let go of:
- Any agenda
- All expectations
- Striving for a clear mind
- Regulating our breath
- Seeking particular feelings
We can simply allow whatever arises to be there without needing to change it.
Now, if you’re anything like me, this is surprisingly difficult. What I’ve come to understand in my own experience is that we are so conditioned as humans to do anything at all except being here. Doing nothing and allowing whatever arises to be there without needing to change it can feel really unsafe.
And the feeling of being unsafe is okay. We can allow that without needing to change it. We don’t have to escape the feeling of being unsafe – it’s a feeling. Feelings change. It will go away.
What if you could bring love to the feeling of being unsafe, as if it were like a little baby bird that fell out of its nest? You hold it in your cupped hands – “Oh little baby bird, this feeling of being unsafe – my goodness, it’s so precious, so vulnerable.” Can we just hold it for a moment with love, with presence? We don’t need to change it.
There’s nothing you can do for the baby bird in your hands – it’s just a baby bird. It’s going to do what baby birds do. It might poop on your hands, and that’s okay. We don’t flick it off – it’s a baby bird. We expect a baby bird’s going to do what a baby bird’s going to do. We just keep holding it. We don’t throw it. We give it a second to gather itself, and before we know it, it shakes, hops up onto our finger, and flies away.
That’s what feelings do. And what they need is to be held, not healed.
Whatever comes up for you – restlessness, boredom, frustration, distraction, joy, peace, love, anger, confusion, disorientation – it’s all welcome. It’s all happening within this vast spaciousness of loving presence, of awareness.
Common Pitfalls
This takes practice. We are not used to this being our meditation – we’re not used to being, even though it’s our most natural state. I want to highlight some common pitfalls to watch for:
1. Achievement Mindset
Thinking we need to achieve a certain state or experience. I promise you, if you’re used to meditating in a traditional way, you’re going to wonder “What’s the point? What am I doing here? This doesn’t feel like I’m doing anything” – because we’re so oriented towards doing things, towards objectives we’re supposed to achieve.
Remember: there is nothing to achieve. There is no state or experience we’re after. We’re simply being here.
2. The Enlightenment Trap
Believing that more practice will lead to permanent enlightenment or a permanent state change. I’m certainly not claiming enlightenment as it’s often perceived, but based on my experience and many teachers I follow, enlightenment is one of the least noticeable experiences on the planet. It is absolutely and profoundly unremarkable.
The whole idea of enlightenment can become just another cycle of evasion and pursuit clothed in spiritual robes. Chasing enlightenment continues the cycle: “When I become enlightened, when I achieve that state, then I’ll be happy, I’ll be okay, I’ll find peace, things will get easier, I’ll find fulfillment, life will be meaningful.”
Some elusive state of enlightenment will not bring those things. Those things are available right now. They don’t feel like they are, but that’s because we are not knowingly being.
3. Bypassing Emotions
Using meditation as a way to escape or bypass difficult emotions. There’s not much education about meditation and trauma, especially complex trauma. Often when we go into meditation, whether traditional or as I’m sharing, some of the veils that arise are protective mechanisms covering over pain.
When we begin to lean into and surrender to our being, this loving presence that we are, often those veils start to open and the pain comes out. Some meditative techniques and teachers tell you to go into the pain. From a trauma-informed perspective, I encourage you to be very careful if you have trauma.
The meditation I’m recommending doesn’t exclude our human experience. Trauma is real, feelings are real – these are things we experience, they matter. The goal isn’t to bulldoze through them to get to some state of ease or peace or enlightenment. The goal is to be with.
But we can’t be with if being with overwhelms us, shuts us down, causes more harm, or reinforces trauma. If difficult emotions come up during meditation, use your own discernment about whether you have capacity to be with them or if you need support to hold them.
Almost always, trauma happens in the company of other people, and so very often trauma heals in the company of other people. It is not a failure if you need human support to meditate, to be with difficult emotions that come up – someone skilled and trained who understands how to hold this with you, to help you work with it, walk through it, hold it.
Remember: you don’t have to heal it. That’s a big checkmark, a big objective. Learning how to hold it – not hold onto it, but hold it like that baby bird. Sometimes it’s more like an aggressive raccoon we have to handle carefully so we don’t get scratched up or bitten. Sometimes we need someone trained with raccoons so we don’t get rabies, metaphorically speaking.
4. Self-Judgment
Getting caught in cycles of judging yourself or your practice as good/bad, or thinking “I can’t do it” or “it’s not working.” You can include the judging of your practice in this meditation – be with the judgment. The pitfall in traditional practice is that there’s all this judgment because you can do it right or wrong, measured by whether you achieve special states or experiences.
What I’m recommending means there is no objective – there’s just being with, allowing your loving, aware presence to hold all of it. Whatever comes up, even if it’s judging (“I think I’m not doing this right”) – be with that. There’s room for that too. It’s part of our experience. We get to be with that.
If we get caught in these traps, meditation just becomes another form of self-improvement – another project, another way to reinforce our sense of lack, inadequacy, or shame. The meditation I’m recommending is an invitation away from shame. It can include shame because we can hold it – and shame dissolves when it’s held.
A New Way Forward
When we approach meditation as an invitation to be present with what is, as a celebration of our inherent completeness and wholeness, it becomes a joyful exploration rather than a burdensome task.
The beauty of this understanding isn’t limited to any one tradition or approach. It’s really the heart of meditation, whether you’re in a Buddhist monastery, a yoga studio, or your living room. This isn’t about dismissing various techniques or teachings. All these practices – concentration, focus, mindfulness, compassion – they’re beautiful expressions of our natural wisdom. We can use any or all of them. But here’s the thing: we can approach them from a place of wholeness rather than lack, seeing them as expressions of what’s already here rather than something we need to acquire from outside ourselves.
Because ultimately, no technique or teaching can give us what we already are. They can only point us back to this ever-present reality of our loving, aware being.
The Simplicity of Being
In the end, meditation is really the simplest thing in the world. It’s about being exactly where you are, as you are. Saying yes to this moment – not because it’s perfect, but because it’s here. It’s about seeing the extraordinary hiding in plain sight within the ordinary, finding beauty and power right in the middle of the mess.
It’s about resting in the awareness that you are – this spacious, loving presence that’s always here, always holding you. There’s no striving, no achieving, no becoming. There is just this, just as it is.
What if, just for a moment, you let go of trying to meditate “correctly”? What if you released the idea that you need to empty your mind or feel blissful all the time? What if you allowed yourself to be exactly as you are right now – restless or bored or anxious or content or whatever is here?
This isn’t something to believe in or achieve. It’s an exploration, a curious inquiry into the nature of your own experience. You might be surprised at what naturally arises when you stop trying to make something happen and simply allow what is.
It’s a subtle shift, but oh so profound – from doing to being, from seeking to allowing, from resistance to acceptance. This is what I’m inviting you into – not as a practice or a path, but as a way of being. An invitation to stop, to let go, to do less, to allow.
There’s a profound okayness to this moment, a completeness that’s always been here. This invitation is always available, in every breath, in every experience. I know it can feel radical, even scary, to let go of our familiar patterns of seeking and striving. But what if, just for a moment, we trusted the simplicity of our being? What if you could finally rest in the awareness that’s always here, the love that you already are?
I invite you to explore this for yourself – not as a belief or concept, but as a living, breathing reality. Wherever you are in your journey, whatever you’re experiencing, it’s all happening within this vast embrace of loving awareness. You are that awareness. You are that love.
And that, my friend, is the deepest meditation of all.
A Final Note
I’ve purposefully not included specific instructions or steps. This isn’t about creating another practice, another checklist, another thing to achieve. Instead, I’m inviting you to experience it – to see what happens when you try to do nothing, when you simply be with what’s here.
You don’t have to get rid of all the distraction, all the veils, all the sensations and thoughts and experience. Just step behind them, ever so gently, and touch into that loving presence of light – that awareness that you are, that you’ve always been. It’s in every cell of your being.
If this calls to you, if you’d like support in touching into this being that you already are, in understanding the veils and being with what’s here, in navigating the discomfort and stopping the cycle of evasion and pursuit – I invite you to join us in The Village. Together we’re exploring this territory, this field of loving hearts, trying our best to try less, to do less, to simply remember our being.
Because in the end, that’s what this is all about – remembering who we already are, who we’ve always been.
Everything else is just the play of consciousness, the dance of form.
And we get to be here for all of it, holding it all in this vast field of loving awareness.
