Curious about meditation?

What is meditation?

                                                                                          By Jeff Foster

Meditation is not only about getting yourself into altered states. Altered states are amazing, but they do not last. It’s about becoming intimate with this state – this present moment, this day, this Now, its textures, tastes, vibrations, contractions and aches.

Meditation is not an out-of-body experience. (Though it can also be that.)

It’s a full experience of the body and its ever-changing sensations, its clouds of shivers, tickles, undulations and pulsations, throbbings, its pain and its pleasure, its opening and closing, its ever-changing form.

Meditation does not always make you feel “good”. In meditation, you feel exactly as you feel, and you learn to love that, or at least to allow it, or at least to tolerate it a little more than you did yesterday. Meditation makes you feel more like… you.

Meditation is not about getting anywhere. It’s about discovering that there is nowhere to get to. That you are already home, and your body is the ground of all grounds. It is about discovering true safety in the feet, in the hands, in the pit of the belly. It is about finding a sanctuary in your chest, a sacred shrine between your eyes, a loving friend in the breath, a mother in the motherless places.

Meditation is not something that you do with your mind. In meditation, the mind relaxes into the heart, seeking relaxes into finding, and even the most intense anxiety finds its home. You cannot make it happen, but you can fall into it.

Meditation is not for experts, or the ones who know. Meditation is for absolute beginners, those who are willing to face their present experience with wide open, curious eyes.

Meditation is a field of love, an ever-present ground of safety, presence and stillness, that you remember, or forget, or remember again.

Meditation never leaves you. It whispers to you in the stillness of the night. And even in the midst of an activated nervous system, a full-on panic attack, suffocating claustrophobia or the urge to get out of your body… meditation is right there, holding you, loving you, gently kissing your forehead.

It will not abandon you, and ultimately, you will not abandon it.

And closing your eyes to sleep at night, meditation is there, snuggling right up to you.

Your soft pillow, the rising and falling of your own delicious breath, a light breeze coming in from the window, that billion-year-old sense of Being…

You are safe in your own body, my love. You are safe.