29 May

When people meditate, they’re being ‘in the present moment’. The problem with this for me though, is that you can’t be anywhere else. I think much of the time peope mistake meditation for relaxation, which is why they do it. They want to relax. But relaxation is just a contrast experience to stress or tension. It’s not a thing in itself. You will quickly end up yo-yoing between feeling tense and feeling relaxed, if you go down that path. That yo-yo will never end. The thing is, you are already present to everything. You are already ‘whole’. Any attempt to try to be more present or be more whole, will just lead to you ‘trying to be present and whole’, using meditation or whatever other method. Again, that trying will never end, because it’s bootstrapping. If you just allow yourself to be open to the things in your life, and live freely, any ‘negative’ feelings or tensions you get will tell you, within that totally open free living, how to adjust. No need to withdraw from life at all, to meditate. In fact, the opposite. The more you dive IN to life, the faster you’ll learn. Even something as basic as a muscle tension will tell you how you’re out of balance, somewhere, and how to adjust to get back into balance, from *within* that totally free, open living. Or the modern scourge of anxiety. Plug that feeling back IN to an open and free life. The context of that living will dissolve the anxiety, automatically. Anxiety is a feeling decoupled from lived experience, that’s all.