I just received an email from a woman who said: "Most importantly, your guidance also helped me recognize that I already knew how to meditate, but that I just thought of it as 'being still' or 'paying attention.' " Eureka -- that's it! When we experience a meditative state during meditation, we tend to think it's something special that happens only in meditation. In fact, it's something we all experience from time to time outside of meditation, but don't notice. We could actually think of it as the mind's "natural state". It's a very simple form of awareness, uncomplicated by the mind's habits of judging and comparing. It's a state that's there when we are neither resisting or trying to change what is naturally coming up in our experience. It's a state of "simply being".
Much of the time, we are "simply being" but don't make note of that, because the mind isn't in the mode of standing apart and observing our experience at that time. Sometimes, however, we'll notice a dramatic shift into the simply-being-mode. As I mentioned in the previous post, meditation often happens spontaneously when something we see or hear or touch jars us out of the preoccupation with the past and future. The sight of a hummingbird at my feeder always does it for me. What does it for you?