There is a mystery about their top-secret recipes and even a sense of the sacred in how it is disseminated.
The truth is real meditation is water. It is free and pure and available to all. It is not mysterious or requiring ritual, water is the foundation of everything.
To be a little controversial, my view also is that both these brands in an effort to be mainstream put too far much emphasis on the mind. Meditation is an experience of the heart not one of watching the mind. If we give importance to thought than thoughts become important, where in real meditation, thoughts are just the entrance way to the far deeper, intuitive 'aah' moments of the heart.
Put very simply all we do in meditation can be summed up in 2 words, focus and presence. There is no magical one way, in fact, every endeavour uses the same process. The focus part is about us concentrating on one thought. It could be anything but the most powerful seem to be those thoughts that evoke feelings of the heart, such as love or peace or joy.
Presence is about being here, now, not
thinking about the past or future. This is harder than it seems
because most of the time we are making plans about the future
or reflecting on the past. We are focussed on the world of doing,
what we have done or what we are going to do.
Meditation is the transition between "doing" and "being".
If you think about that for a second you might realise that everything we do in the end becomes meditation, becomes a state of being. A ballet dancer will describe the ultimate experience as being present in a concentrated effortlessness, as though the universe was powering the dance.
A painter will speak of being intuitively guided, a musician as though the music composed itself. This is meditation being water.
It is the endpoint of everything. A golfer, a surfer, a poet, a car driver will also experience moments of meditation at those flashes where the doing becomes focussed and present.
We will feel ourselves entering a "zone" where one pointed thought transitions to intuitive experience, feelings of love, where we "are" the doing in every atom of us, and the "doing" is now "being".
Real meditation is water because it says to us that wherever
I am, whatever I am doing, I can meditate. I can be.
There is a place for the discipline of a daily meditation practise of at least 20 minutes. The sitting in silence with focus and presence powerfully shifts the meditator closer to 'being'. As we go through the day we will find it much easier to be present and focused in all of our activities. This engagement in life brings fulfilment.
We sometimes will find ourselves stuck in the doing without connection to 'being', this is the time for the conscious meditation practise to realign us.
Try to start seeing everything you do as meditation, that water is everywhere in our lives and you will find yourself continuously invigorated..
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Everything I do should really be about being
This meditation exercise is about recognising that the things we do in our life become more meaningful when we transition them to being, when we get focus and presence, when the doing becomes an act of love.
This is basically saying every moment can be a meditation, no matter what we are doing, we can do it with love.
We can be.
"There is a master key. You. Now."
Please sit quietly and reflect on anything you were doing today.
Try and find something that you do often. See yourself doing. IT might have been riding on the train, or sitting at your office desk, or welding a piece of steel, or doing the work of a president or prime minister or a famous rock star or perhaps washing the dishes.
In fact, if you are having trouble, imagine a time when you were washing the dishes.
Just watch yourself for a second as you play back the moment. Smell the fragrances, hear the sounds. Enlarge what all your senses were feeling in your minds eye.
Then notice where time was. Were you thinking about the future or something from the past while you were doing?
So now lets work on doing this action with love.
First focus. Focus entirely and only on the action you are doing. See yourself doing that action with love.
See yourself being present. That is make the timeframe that you were doing the action, then and there. Don't let your mind wander.
To be the action, that is to do the action with love, feel yourself connecting with something larger than just yourself.
Perhaps imagine you are the world's best at what you are doing, or that there is a perfect doer of this action and you are channeling them.
You might imagine that there is a force like in star wars, an energy that guides you and enables you to connect to a divine energy. Or you might imagine that you are connecting to God and allowing that energy to fuel your doing.
The better you get at this, the more you will feel the action is becoming effortless as love starts to power it.
Let love power it. Let it be.
1. Grounding In