True Meditation is Warm and Friendly

February 12, 2018 Meditation, Mental Growth No Comments

To-the-core friendliness is what meditation amounts to. It is the reason for and also the practice of meditation.

It is a warm and friendly invitation towards slowing down your thinking.

So your thoughts themselves can get more ‘space.’ They can follow their course without being disrupted by the ‘next thought.’

Meditation is about being friendly to your thinking and feeling itself.

This is at the same time straightforward and not so straightforward. It’s ‘nothing special’ and yet it’s quite special in leading you into more gentle thought formation. There is more room for unconscious associations. Fuzziness, you might say. It’s like inside yourself, you keep many things – thoughts, feelings… – a bit longer ‘in the air’ before settling down. You don’t rush. You don’t coerce. You… are friendly to yourself.

Having more time to settle down, your thoughts eventually have occasion to find deeper stability. However, you should take care. Fuzzy thoughts might get fuzzier and thus, disconcerting. That is not the purpose of meditation of course. Therefore it’s all the more important to be friendly.

If you have experience, the following is not gibberish: meditation is not going away from things, but going into things. Into emotions. Into the clouds in the sky. Into your own inner beauty, with kind, inner attention. Then you can also mentally go into another person because the other is you. Please try to understand this through actual meditation.

Being friendly to yourself and to others, becomes the same friendliness.

Meditative friendliness is the basis for all else in meditation. For instance. focusing on your breathing, let it be a natural, organic breathing. You don’t need to force it into ins and outs. You can let it be, flowing naturally. Even if you put emphasis on ‘discipline’, let this naturally arise from within you. You can be attentive to how it arises. Your attention then gives it a whole new quality. No coercion. Discipline emerges because you are friendly to the core of yourself.

This is also the best source from where to feel a warm compassion. Loving kindness? Indeed, from deep inside. At the same time, your meditation is then truly – as Buddhist meditators like to say – ‘for the sake of all sentient beings’.

Let’s go ‘ZEN’…

OK? You sit on a cushion. Eyes almost closed. You put your body in a way that your body likes – maybe not immediately but after a while. There may be some pain but also the feeling of ‘being there.’ It is a feeling of realization, attentive in mind and body to the slightest movement and with no effort. You are totally there for your body. Strangely enough, your body may thus feel like ‘vanishing’, like dissolving in a kind of purity.

And then this invitation to your body flows into an utterly gentle invitation for your mind to also enter this purity. Nothing is needed. The invitation is openly free and full of compassion. Emotionally, this feels like a deep ‘warmth.’ A spontaneous smile may appear. And you realize: