Why do you need a meditation practice?
You are intimately familiar with the experience of being flooded with thoughts and their accompanying feelings throughout the day. Worse, when you are working on something, your mind wanders off, thinking about other things.
It is disastrous for both efficiency and effectiveness in your work.
A mind that operates like this, restless, distracted, unsettled, and wandering is also often a confused mind. It gets worried, fearful, anxious, and stressed out.
It is disastrous for your overall wellbeing.
Eastern traditions have referred to this as "Monkey-mind" - jumping from one thing to another, often without a sensible reason to do so, like a monkey jumping from branch to branch, tree to tree.
Peace, clarity, wisdom, courage, strength, and creativity will be spotty, if not distant, as long as Monkey-mind rules. Stresses, fears, worries, and anxieties will lurk and affect your wellbeing as long as Monkey-mind continues to run out of control.
You need to tame this Monkey-mind.
How to tame Monkey-mind?
An authentic meditation practice can help with taming Monkey-mind.
But first, it is important to dispel a common misunderstanding - that you can learn to control your thoughts.
Through over 20-years of my personal meditation practice, it became clear to me that you cannot control the Monkey-mind.
Trying to control thoughts is like trying to control clouds in the sky - impossible.
If thoughts cannot be controlled, how to tame the Monkey-mind?
Simple!
Remove its power-source.
What is this power-source? How to remove the power-source that powers thoughts?
To understand this, you need to look a bit deeper into that nature of your experiences and how you get to know them in the first place.
The power of attention
You know about any experience in your life only because you pay attention to it. If you did not pay attention to something, it cannot be your experience.
Picture this familiar scene. You are in a meeting room, and someone is droning on with their extremely large PowerPoint deck, full of bulleted text in their slides. You tried hard to concentrate, but soon enough your mind begins to wander to better pastures, or perhaps to other things you should attend to, or simply running amuck. And then in some time, you hear the presenter say, "Do you guys agree?" You wonder to yourself, "Agree to what?" You missed that "what" because you didn't attend to it.
What you attend to, only that is your experience.
In the operation of Monkey-mind, you are attending to a stream of thoughts. That is why being flooded with thoughts is your experience.
Attention is the power source behind all experiences.
When you lend attention to a thought, or in other words, when you attend to a thought, you get to be aware of the thought, i.e. you get to know the thought.
What if you could withdraw the power source that is attention from thoughts? Logically, if you could do that, Monkey-mind cannot function.
So, let's say that you could withdraw attention from thoughts, where could you place your attention?
I recommend placing attention in silence.
Introducing silence
Where is silence present?
Behind the ever-changing stream of thoughts, there is silence. You don't have to believe me - pay attention to thoughts but don't follow them. You can notice that there is a gap between one thought and another. Be curious about this gap between thoughts! What is in the gap?
Silence.
Between when one breath is complete and another breath begins, there is silence. Again, you don't have to believe me - observe it for yourself. Notice with your attention, breath coming into the body and then going back out. Before the next breath begins, there is a tiny gap. Be curious about this gap between breaths! What is in the gap?
Silence.
In this way, when you keenly look at all your experiences in the course of the day, thoughts, feelings, body sensations, sights, sounds, tastes, smells, touch, and more, what looks like a continuous analog stream of events are in fact a discrete series of events with a gap in-between them. With single-pointed attention, it is easy to notice this phenomenon at work. Be very curious about this gap between all experiences! What is in the gap?
Silence.
Now the reality is this. It is not that you have a series of experiences with gaps in them. Rather, the substratum is silence, and on top of that silence, experiences rise and fall.
Silence is the canvas on which all experiences are painted.
This is a vital discovery. What it points to is that your own nature is not the coming and going experiences - that is just the painting and its innumerable variations. Your own nature is silence - the canvas which remains as it is, always.
Your real nature is silence.
It is ironic isn't it?
Here you are, thinking that you HAVE a Monkey-mind, and perhaps you may just BE this Monkey-mind! A little artful inquiry and observation reveals that you are not the Monkey-mind - Monkey-mind is merely what is happening on the canvas of silence.
The common experience of yourself is full of changing experiences including the Monkey-mind. This is the "you" that you think you are.
In reality, who you really are is this silence, the canvas on which your life experiences are painted.
You, the real YOU, is silence.
In the continuous, mesmerizing drama of life experiences, you've forgotten silence, the real YOU. Consequently, you've lost touch with the real YOU.
So, the next logical question is this - what is the benefit of resting attention in silence?
The nature of silence
While all your experiences of life are ever-changing, silence is unchanging. It is as it is, always. Again, this is not a matter to believe - you can observe it in your own experience. Whenever you take your attention to silence, it is always there, and it is always the same.
If you could rest your attention in silence, what would that experience be like?
Calm. Peaceful. Serene.
Why? What we call inner peace exists where silence is! That is why when we rest attention in silence, we feel peaceful. We are experiencing the peacefulness.
The implication is profound.
If the source of inner peace is silence, and silence is unchanging, then inner peace is unchanging. It is as it is, always.
If silence is the real YOU, then inner peace is the real YOU.
This is why you should choose to rest your attention in silence. It unleashes inner peace, which always exists where silence is, into your experience.
When you withdraw attention from thoughts and feelings and such, and rest attention in silence, you experience inner peace.
This is the essence of the simple meditation I offer called The Peace Practice.
The Peace Practice
Since March 2020 at the peak of the first wave of the pandemic, I have been helping people cultivate inner peace through a very simple meditation called The Peace Practice. I have led this meditation online for 294 days since its inception, often multiple times a day, offering 592 live meditation sessions so far.
This simple meditation is centered around helping you cultivate silence by resting your attention in it.
The Peace Practice is a simple meditation that helps you cultivate the art of resting attention in silence.
When you undertake this simple meditation practice to cultivate inner peace, initially, you will feel less fearful, less anxious, less stressed, less judgmental, and less angry. When you regularly invest in this meditation practice, you will anchor in your inner power. This is because Inner Peace is Your Inner Power.
With that background in place, let's get to the central purpose of this article.
How to start your meditation practice?
Do you want to cultivate a meditation practice? Have you found it intimidating to do so? Have you found it hard to start and harder to keep going?
Here's my recommendation.
1. First, get clear motivation for why you should invest in a meditation practice:
There is a vast silence within you. It is the home of inner peace.
The Secrets of Inner Peace, my new eBook, reveals in simple, clear language why inner peace is not just a nice-to-have experience. Inner peace is something vastly deeper and more powerful than what you may know.
When you cultivate inner peace, you feel calmer, happier, and more loving. Not only that, all the ingredients that you need to succeed in life, such as clarity, wisdom, courage, strength, creativity, and compassion - all these get unleashed into your life too. Intrigued? Check out The Secrets of Inner Peace.
2. Second, begin with a 30-day meditation practice:
If you are new to meditation or have not had success so far in establishing a consistent meditation practice - here's what I recommend. Start with a 30-day meditation practice to get a taste and feel for this simple meditation and how it helps in your daily life.
Meditations for Inner Peace - Volume 1 is now available for you to begin your meditation practice. It contains 30 meditations for inner peace (audio tracks + text transcripts) which provide pointers to wisdom and guidance in cultivating the art of resting your attention in silence. Each meditation track is just 15-minutes long - perfect for starting a 30-day meditation practice even if you are very busy.
3. Third, continue cultivating your meditation practice regularly - Get ongoing support and motivation to meditate every day
The presence of a community and daily guidance can make a world of difference to your ongoing meditation practice.
Join us in The Peace Practice - live meditations on weekdays, just 15-minutes each session, offered online. Best of all, it is free to join. It is life-changing.
If the timing of our live meditation sessions is not suitable for you, you even have an option to subscribe to receive fresh daily meditation recordings, so you can meditate every day on your schedule, while still being connected to the community.
Is this simple meditation practice enough?
There are a plethora of meditation techniques available to a person these days. Many people try one technique and then jump to another, collecting some knowledge and some experience of different meditations. It is akin to going from one flowering plant to another, picking a flower or two to make a bouquet. As beautiful as the bouquet is, the enjoyment of its beauty will be short-lived, as the flowers in it will wither away.
I should know. I was this kind of person for a while during my journey. I had learned many different types of meditation, but was still hungry looking for more - searching for something more powerful, something with the magic to trigger heightened experiences. Sigh! For a while there in my journey, I did not learn the benefit of sticking to a single practice and getting really adept at it.
Bruce Lee said this quite powerfully and elegantly about the power of practice:
I fear not the man who has practiced 10,000 kicks once, but I fear the man who has practiced one kick 10,000 times.
It is the same with your meditation practice. Practice. Practice. Practice. Until it becomes natural to you.
If you practice resting attention in silence regularly, you will get adept at rooting in inner peace. This is how you unleash your inner power into your daily life experience in the form of peacefulness, contentment, compassion, clarity, wisdom, courage, strength, and creativity. These are the ingredients you need to succeed in your life. This is what you need to make wise decisions and take powerful actions.
If you practice resting attention in silence regularly, you will get adept at being the real YOU, the one that has no struggle or suffering, the one that is beyond fear and worry, the one whose essence is wholeness. What can be more valuable than that!
Summary
To recap …
Wandering attention is the reason for the experience of Monkey-mind and its consequences.
Meditation can help bring calmness, peacefulness, and freedom from anger, worries, and stresses.
Meditation can be simple.
The simplest meditation is the resting attention in silence. This simple meditation is powerful because it helps you cultivate inner peace.
Inner peace is your inner power.
You can get help to start your meditation practice and cultivate your meditation practice regularly at The Peace Practice.
This one practice reconnects you with your inner power, the real YOU.
In the end, meditation isn't something you do. Real meditation is being who you really are. Real meditation is being the real YOU.
And the simple meditation that gets you going in the right direction from the beginning, is resting attention in silence, the essence of The Peace Practice.
Inner peace is your inner power. Cultivate inner peace regularly.
Additional Links
You can find broader resources for your self-transformation and Self-Realization at Being YOU with Sundar Kadayam.
