Meditation isn't about going, doing, or achieving anything. It is looking in to the nature of life as it as, how we think about and feel about it, without trying to change any of it.
This is not so easy for us. We put a lot of effort into getting what we want and avoiding what we don't want. We only turn to meditation when we can't do either. The Buddha taught that nothing is wrong except that we deny three essential facts of life. Life is unsatisfactory, impermanent, and lacking in a self.
We get dissatisfaction pretty well. We've had plenty of that. And we've been through enough disorienting change and had enough loss to understand the pain of impermanence. The idea that there is a not a self is a bit of a mystery. Each of us has a center we call and cherish "me" and each of us enjoys the gift of a very unique life.
Douglass Harding developed a series of novel experiments that point to selflessness with a direct simplicity. Point your finger at your face and ask yourself, based only upon the information of your senses, just what it is at which you are pointing.
Of course you are pointing at yourself. But the question asks you to base your answer upon sensory evidence alone. Based upon that you are just pointing at a clear, aware space. It is in that clear space that you and everything you know appears. His experiment demonstrates how fully we depend on what we think we know. We instantly and unconsciously classify everything that happens into categories of good, bad, and neutral.
We don't have any kind of a feeling that doesn't come with an interpretation and a plan to fix it. The plan is always based upon a sense of self that compulsively imagines improved realities.
This makes life more difficult than it needs to be. We'd like just turn our attention to awareness and drop the stories running through our brains but we can't. Our story comes right along, wondering why in the world we are just sitting there not doing something, anything for distraction. Meditation is the simple but challenging act of turning attention away from the plan to the feeling of the breath moving through the body again and again and again.
Feeling your body breath is relaxing. More importantly, the attention to feeling rather than thought invites a shift to a non-verbal awareness. Non verbal awareness is an interesting and overlooked part of who we are. It is our basic program from which all else flows. It is completely impersonal. It is no self.
We suffer enormous stress when our field of awareness is narrowed so that we can't see beyond what we think. When we are aware of awareness we have a large field in which our stories play themselves out without harming us.
We suffer from an artificial sense of self made up of stories that define us and limit us. Meditation practice is often misunderstood as a disengagement from life. It is disengagement but it is a disengagement from our personal hard luck stories. Dissatisfaction and impermanence don't happen because we messed up or because someone else messed us up. Everyone experiences this. When we don't understand the universality of the experience we become a danger to ourselves and to others. Understanding opens our hearts. Meditation is the path to a compassionate life.
