5 lessons from 5 years of meditating

I’ve been meditating seriously for more than 5 years. In an effort to uncover who I am and what is going on. In this time I have gone from being religious to atheist and many things in between.

This exploration has taken me into the deepest parts of my psyche. I have gone through long patches of extreme instability, pain, confusion, and alienation. It has been the most meaningful journey I’ve been on.

Here are a few discoveries I want to share with you:

I’m not just a human.

Starting out, I believed I was this human character called Om. That I lived inside of this human body, looking out of my eyes to the external world. Where there exist real things, objects and landscapes separate and independent of myself.

With meditation, this distinct sense of self started changing. My entire perception of myself and who I was started blurring with the totality of experience in the moment. Until I was no longer my human self. I became the entire experience. Everything that is happening right now. I am it.

I am the wall in front of me, the chair on which I rest, the screen on which I’m writing, the sound of keys being pressed, the hands which are moving across keys, the sensations of blinking, the thoughts that arise as I write. I am all of it.

This is not an intellectual shift in belief or an analytical observation. This is a shift in how I experience myself to be moment to moment. Also how I experience this moment and everything it holds. I am the entire visual field, sensory field and everything in experience. It is a different quality of being.

The body has much more to it.

I have started seeing and feeling emotions in roughly the same space as my physical body. Each has its own unique texture which can be viscerally felt. I can often feel a thought forming in my body before it arrives in my mind. Most of what I think and do starts as a sensation first. Now I can catch it there.

It’s a whole new dimension of experience that has revealed itself to me. Living with this often means feeling more pain as I come face to face with the seemingly complete form of each emotion. Once emotions start presenting this way, it becomes more natural to tell the extent of unprocessed old material being triggered.

The emphasis shifts to seeing, understanding and releasing stuck old pains, rather than trying to rearrange the world so they never get triggered. It also makes it clearer to see when the outside world needs to change.

Pain wants to be felt.

Emotional pain is present throughout experience. It manifests in unending flavors. Like when the sound is too loud. When the wait in line is a little too long. When a friend says something mean. My knee jerk reaction to pain has been to escape into the external world. I tighten my grip on reality to force it to be some other way. This in turn suppresses the pain and keeps it coming back. It then creates involuntary thought and behavioral loops which are entirely driven by that pain. This is how I lived most of my life. In escape from pain into more pain.

The shift here has been going from being on the receiving end of pain to becoming the pain. As I become the entire experience, there is no “me” for pain to be happening to. It becomes easier to have much more pain linger in my experience without needing it to go away. Pain is often a natural reaction to stimuli. Hiding from it causes it to be there longer than it needs to. Letting it linger is actually what resolves it.

I’ve sat for hundreds of hours with feelings in the body space. Things I’ve been carrying for a long time have released and significantly elevated my life quality. With each release, awareness unclouds a little more. Unwanted patterns of thoughts, feelings and actions all dissolve. I become more free.

Life is happening on its own.

Experience is flowing. Always. Even in complete silence, stillness, and darkness, there is still experience. Whether I think something, feel something, do something, or not. And it is perpetually moving.

More importantly, it becomes clear that it is moving of its own accord. Thoughts come on their own. Feelings come on their own. Sensations. People. Places. All desires, motivations and inclinations come on their own. Every action comes on its own.

Awareness makes clear the illusion of a separate chooser. Anytime I made a decision or took some action, the sequence of experience that led me to choose and do what I did, just appeared in awareness. Every choice I make appears in awareness already formed. Not by some outside force, and not by a little “me” behind my eyes. It arises from the whole of what’s happening. Which is what I now am.

This sight makes it a little easier to surrender to the currents and outcomes of life. Not in defeat or loss of agency. In truth. Experiences I used to previously retreat from or force to change flow a little easier. Living becomes a little more effortless.

Reality is pure magic.

When I sit with existence, pull it so close, and become it, something opens. Its true essence and texture can be felt. It is pure magic. Even in pain or darkness.

Imagine eating a bar of chocolate. Feel as you chew it with your human teeth. Feel the sweetness and milkiness. Feel as you swallow and it goes down your throat. Now think about if you had to describe these experiences to a jellyfish if it could understand English. With no teeth, taste buds, or throat, it would be impossible to communicate to it the quality of any one of these experiences. This ineffability is the doorway to an endless sense of wonder for all of existence.

Relative to the theoretical infinity or nothingness that could exist, the dimensions of time, space, the senses and all the different classes of experience that exist are all inconceivably rich, complex, arbitrary, incomparable and indefinable. The boundless depth and beauty behind everything become especially clear. It is beyond words.

I did not choose this path. The more I evaded it, the closer it came to me. It all arose on its own, the way every thought and every step has.

This is my current read on reality, drawn from my own direct experience, and some of it is surely incomplete.

Don’t take my word for it. Look for yourself.

P.S. If any of this resonated, I’d love to hear from you.