I first started meditating when I was eight years old, and it wasn't because I had hippie parents or lived in a commune.  I found a book in my elementary school library and went home and practiced the meditation technique taught in the book.

That was the beginning of a 30 year meditation practice.

During that time I tried all sorts of meditation techniques — Zen meditation, insight meditation, healing meditation, peace meditation, compassion meditation, moving meditation, walking meditation, New Age meditation, Hindu meditation techniques, Kundalini meditation techniques, simple meditation techniques and difficult advanced meditation techniques.

Seriously (and obviously), I tried a lot of different types of meditation. I spent months on meditation retreats, watching my breathing for 14 hours a day or more.  I spent weeks doing Zen archery, a kind of moving meditation.  I've spent days and days chanting Sanskrit names for the divine.

But after 30 years of doing all of these techniques I realized that there was a fundamental premise underneath my practice, a basic idea that motivated my search and spiritual seeking.

And that core idea couldn't be more simple:

There something wrong with me and meditation will fix it.

Another way of saying the same thing is that I imagined a future where, thanks to the benefits of meditation, I would never have unpleasant feelings, thoughts or experiences.

Sometimes there were paradoxical beliefs in the mix, too, like: if I accepted things as they were… then they would change and I would live in this wonderful imagined future utopia.

When I was 38 years old I had the opportunity to take a very careful look at these ideas.  And I realized three things.  The first is that waiting for this imagined future was creating misery and suffering for me now.

The second is that I had no real evidence that there was something wrong with me.  In other words, when I looked at the evidence I had used to prove there was something wrong with me, I noticed that, as far as I could tell, every other human being on the planet had the same issues.

So, what I was treating like a computer bug, an indication that something was wrong, might actually have been a feature, something that just comes with this human package.

And I also saw, in part from knowing a number of 40+ year meditation veterans, as well as a number of teachers, that the evidence that meditation reliably creates a state of permanent equanimity was a bit iffy, too.

For whatever reason, I lost the ability to believe that there was something wrong with me that needed to be fixed. And I couldn't make myself believe that meditation was the ultimate medicine for whatever ailed me (or now, didn't ail me).

And so I stopped my 30 year meditation practice.  I walked away from my meditation cushion and didn't look back.

At that point I realized there was something else that had been fueling my practice for the last three decades.  Namely, a deep curiosity about how the mind works, and what the cause-and-effect relationship is between the mind and happiness, or satisfaction, or peace, or any of those pleasant states that would visit me sell frequently than I preferred.

So, while I was sitting in the hot tub or during commercials during late-night television, I'd find my attention drifting to the process of thinking, the process of awareness itself.

This wasn't actually new to me. My undergraduate research at Duke University was in cognitive psychology, where I studied the very subtle mental and cognitive processes that one went through while learning physical actions or doing various mental challenges.

What shocked me was that in looking carefully at the process of awareness, I found myself experiencing meditative states in a very simple, very rapid, very natural way. States that had previously eluded me or that were only rarely guests at my mental home, were effortless to slip into.

And so without any effort, or without any intention to try to improve myself, over the next seven years I continued to play with what I called "these thought experiments".

They were very entertaining. I didn't make much of them… in part, because they were so simple, so non-special.

Let me give you a strange example of what I mean: I want you to put your attention on your feet. Now, when I ask you to do this, it doesn't take any effort correct? And it was only after you moved your attention to your feet that you felt sensations in your feet, right? And it's not like your foot didn't exist prior to your attention moving to it (although that's a whole other conversation we could have).

In other words, by effortlessly moving your attention to something that already exists, you begin to experience something that isn't quite new, but, let's say, it was merely in the background.

We'll meditation can be very much the same way. Your current thoughts, sensations, experiences… all of these are like the foreground.  And there's a background that you can to turn your attention to. Something that already exists. A peace of mind, clarity, and relaxation, or maybe even mystical states that some people call "oneness."  And when you know where to look, it's no harder to find those states than it is to turn your attention to your feet.

It doesn't take any practice.  It doesn't take years sitting on the top of the mountain.  It's not something that you lose when you stop doing it.  It doesn't require you to steel your mind or take time out of your day.  You don't even need to make a daily practice of it (although, if you have the time, it's very enjoyable, and a lot of fun to do that). But this simple turning of your attention to something that's "already relaxed," can during your day in the middle of your busy life.

It struck me as paradoxical and a bit ironic that once I stopped trying to fix what wasn't broken, and stopped looking for something in an imagined future, the experiences I hoped to get then became more present now.

Another way you can get a taste of what I'm describing is to simply consider the following questions: What if your life were not a self-improvement project?  How would your life be different if you didn't believe that you were broken in any way, no matter what seeming evidence you think you have? How would you experience thoughts or feelings or sensations if you simply didn't believe that any of them were in an indication of her problem?

By the way, if you think that you would simply sit on a rock and never move again, I can only encourage a put that to the test.  You might discover something very interesting and very different than you imagine.  You might discover a meditation technique that really works.

Next Post: Overcoming Problems with meditation practice

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