Misguided meditation

I was once asked: “Can a meditation really be guided?” The short answer is yes. Meditation, as Samadhi, is not just a word descriptor, but a state of being and a way of inhabiting the present moment without interfering with it.

Yes, a meditation can be guided, but it is not about taking a spiritual excursion or taking a layer of our being towards anything other than the reality of the present moment – whatever it may hold for us as an individual or as a group.

If the reality of the current moment is laughter, then guiding the meditation would be to let it be laughter; if the reality is soothing the intellect, it will be that; if it is a revelation of a truth, it might be a description or a story that illustrates or points to that. If it is silence, the guidance will be silence – any form of expression can express Life’s truths, as long as it is allowed to come from the presence of life itself.

The current moment may bring many things, and as long as whoever is guiding is in it, the meditation will be guided towards it. The true guide of meditation is presence itself – that presence, which always inhabits every moment and every living being. It always possesses stillness, which it also is, and it always moves within stillness as it does not leave itself. Stillness, as a universal and ever-present backdrop of the present, is always the foundational practice.

Each moment within the eternal happening of phenomena brings movements and expressions of life with it, and as we abide in stillness, the expressions that stillness brings through its movements become the guided meditation. It is being here, now and sharing that with the ones who are being guided. If you just remain still and be in life, right now, you will be guided too – by the present moment itself, in which presence is alive.

Our connection to presence is what allows it to immerse us in itself, and thus we enter the deeper waters of meditation. The depth of meditation is the depth of our stillness in which the subtler movements of presence can be felt and allowed to commune with our being. The guidance deepens, and so our journey into Samadhi is furthered.

The guidance of meditation happens by this guide, and as long as presence is allowed to be, the expressions of it will always point to it. The guide of meditation is the “I AM” of presence, and we are all being guided by it. No person alone is the guide of meditation, but a person who is present points to Presence by the nature of his being.

The depths, heights and widths of Presence are for it to reveal to the ones who endeavour to inhabit its stillness – its peace – until we are immersed enough so that our very lives are the guided meditation and our very presence is in tune with the natural presence of life – as a unity.

A guided meditation is guided by the same guide, who guides the “unguided” meditation. Guidance implies connection to presence and the present. There exists nothing without presence, for presence is the breath of existence, stillness its home and peace its eternal state.

To sit in Samadhi is to let this triptych engulf our being and to allow our awareness to touch it back, to reconnect with Presence, until all being is being, all being is, and all is being.

For all sentient beings.