WHAT'S MEDITATION?

I get asked all the time, “what is meditation?” For so many of us, we were conditioned to think it means silencing EVERY one of our 60,000 thoughts we have each and every day. Oh, and all while wearing a beautiful gown, sitting in a cave and burning incense. Sounds impossible, right? Especially given the fact that there aren’t many, if any, caves within driving distance from most of us.

As described by my teacher Deepak Chopra,

”Meditation is not a way of making your mind quiet. It’s a way of entering into the quiet that’s already there - buried under the 60,000 thoughts the average person thinks every day.”

Or in the words of the famous David Rapin (yup, that’s my dad),

“Meditation is emptying out your mind and thinking about positive stuff….like winning the lottery.”

Now I can’t guarantee you will win the lottery if you meditate, but you never know. And his definition is a little off, so let me clarify.

Meditation is a tool for rediscovering the body’s own inner intelligence that has been practiced for thousands of years. So as Deepak says, it isn’t about forcing the mind to be quiet, it’s about finding the silence that’s already there and making it a part of your life. It’s the progressive silencing of the thought process, until you get to the source of thought.

Let me continue to simplify this. You do nothing. Seriously. You do nothing.

And when we do nothing we experience silence. This silence is the birthplace of happiness, creativity, and infinite possibilities. Who knew!? Then from this field of infinite potentiality we get our bursts of inspiration, intuitive thoughts and our deepest sense of connection to the Universe.

Meditation is a state of being that gets us in touch with our true self, not something you should be able to check off your to do list. Or as the wise Sadhguru describes it,

“This is not something you can do because you can become meditative. But you can never do meditation. It is a quality. It is not going somewhere. It is a homecoming. It is getting back to your original nature.”

I promise it’s way simpler than we all make it out to be. Plus Ray Dalio, the founder of the world's largest hedge fund, says that mediation is the single biggest thing he can trace back to his success, so we should probably all do it too.