The Meaning of Meditation

These sessions were recorded in the Montreal Area during Winter workshops 2006

The word ‘meditation’ usually conjures up images of sitting in a candlelit room in silence or chanting, visualizing yourself in another time or place. As appealing as that might be, it buys into the notion of meditation as escape – a view I can never discourage emphatically enough.

Whether you’re looking for ways to manage daily stresses or to discover the meaning of life, meditation is no more and no less than the process of understanding your mind and how it works. This requires facing up to reality in ways that may sometimes be calming, but aren’t necessarily so. Sitting in full lotus position doesn’t guarantee you can meditate, and being tied up in a meeting – even an argument – doesn’t mean you can’t. It’s a matter of integrating and balancing both peace and conflict into the full experience of life.

Our society’s at a turning point. We have more than enough, but satisfaction slips steadily through our fingers and we fear that life may be meaningless. Technology is increasingly burdensome and our minds run constantly. When we try to stop, the silence is deafening.

This dilemma isn’t all bad. It primes us to be open and willing to change – and meditation is all about change. In order to meditate you don’t have to quit your job, contort your body into bizarre postures or believe in some strange reality. Meditation is a profound shift in perspective and an unblocking of your inner resources, but it doesn’t have to show. Sometimes it’s too simple for words, at other times too much to wrap your head around. Expect both these reactions and more, because meditation includes the downs and the ups, confusion as well as clarity and pain as well as joy.

These recordings are the digested essence of what I learned thirty years ago at the feet of the last of the great masters to be trained in Tibet. From them you’ll learn that concentrative meditation is balanced by reflective thought, and insight into emptiness is the flip side of life’s tangled inter-dependencies. It all works together