I just received an email from a woman who said: "Most importantly, your guidance also helped me recognize that I already knew how to meditate, but that I just thought of it as 'being still' or 'paying attention.' " Eureka -- that's it! When we experience a meditative state during meditation, we tend to think it's something special that happens only in meditation. In fact, it's something we all experience from time to time outside of meditation, but don't notice. We could actually think of it as the mind's "natural state". It's a very simple form of awareness, uncomplicated by the mind's habits of judging and comparing. It's a state that's there when we are neither resisting or trying to change what is naturally coming up in our experience. It's a state of "simply being".

Much of the time, we are "simply being" but don't make note of that, because the mind isn't in the mode of standing apart and observing our experience at that time. Sometimes, however, we'll notice a dramatic shift into the simply-being-mode. As I mentioned in the previous post, meditation often happens spontaneously when something we see or hear or touch jars us out of the preoccupation with the past and future. The sight of a hummingbird at my feeder always does it for me. What does it for you?

Someone found this blog by searching on "letting go meditation". Letting go is an essential element of all of our meditations. While many of them have a focus, such as the breath or awareness of the body, the focus always occurs on a background of letting go, so it made sense to do a meditation with this theme. Even though it's a variation on other themes I've used, such as "simply being", each theme gives us a slightly different angle and allows us to refine our meditation experience.

Letting go has to do with allowing whatever happens to happen. It has to do with not resisting thoughts, noise, emotions, sensations -- not resisting anything. It gets tricky, though, when we try to allow things to happen. If we are in meditation with the intention to allow, chances are we will be manipulating our experience in some way. Everything will be buffered through the filter of the idea of allowing. It's more a matter of noticing when we are resisting what is happening or trying to manipulate our experience in some way. When resistance or manipulation is noticed, it can be let go of quite naturally.

The value of guided meditation is that it can allow us to let go more, because we don't so much have the sense that we are steering the process. It can allow us to relax more into the meditative state. Of course, guided meditations can have many different styles and approaches, so I am speaking about my own. Hopefully once you've used these meditations for awhile, you will be able to enter into a similar process on your own. If you are meditating on your own, you can always go back to the guided meditations anytime if meditation has become difficult and you need a refresher.

We'd love to hear about your experiences with meditation. Please feel free to comment on the blog!

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