Medita­tion

I have been sitting in meditation for 28 years. However, I can't say that I have been able to meditate for 18 of those years because I was trying to do what most everyone tries - "silence your mind". As I understood the concepts more, I realized that mind is just like any other organ, like heart and lungs, that start working when we are born, and they continue working till we live. So silencing the mind is not the goal here, the process involves identifying our awareness, and keeping that as our main focus. In India, there is a saying, "Guru bina Gyan nahin", which means, you can't get wisdom without a teacher. So as I spent more and more time trying to understand my process of meditation, I kept getting teachers who showed up at various times, taught me something, then moved on. There's another saying, "When the disciple is ready, teacher arives", which I experienced as truth.

I am adding this section about my meditation to my website, which was something I debated for a long time in my mind. It's my personal journey, and just like me, everyone has their personal journey, nobody can learn from my experiences, and I can't learn from anyone else's, unless it becomes my own experience. However, I do realize that I learnt a lot from other people's personal blogs, YouTube channels, and podcasts, that they didn't really have to create, but they did, so I decided to put this information out there, if it is meant to be for someone, they will find this.

Meditation is not relaxation. It is radical honesty about what is actually happening in the mind, moment to moment. The stillness is not the goal — it is the medium through which clarity becomes possible. My true sadhana began after I clearly saw the distinction between Me, my body, and my mind. Only once I experienced them being different, was I able to move forward into more subtle facts.

My
lineage

I have trained in Vipassana Meditation. My current practice includes mindfulness, and body scans while meditating, and also while going about my day. My brain is actually quite opposite to a peaceful meditator, because I have a very active imagination, which is one of my strengths and has helped me compose music, and write books, but for meditation, this was my strongest fear. One thing about meditation is that nothing external is a true danger, but the biggest danger, that resides in our mind is that when we start to meditate, at some point our mind silently takes control and makes us experience things, that we are not really experiencing. There's a very thin line between imagination, and insights. So I had to, and still have to, not discount that, and whenever I experience something, I have to double check whether it is true, or is my mind playing games with me. I can talk about this for hours and still not be able to explain to someone who has not experienced this, but to give you an example, let's say someone sits in meditation to do a body scan, and is trying to observe the subtle energy body (pranmaya kosha), you start to feel some sensations in your body, now are these sensations experiencable to you because your awareness is that sensitive, or is your mind creating those sensations, because somewhere deep within, you want to experience those. Similarly, even at much deeper levels, sometimes our mind makes us believe that we are at a certain level of sadhana, when the truth could be something totally different.