When I work with people, I notice that many think meditation is all about having a quiet mind. But it is so much more – it’s a journey. Here’s how it unfolds:

Facing your noise

Meditation makes your inner noise known and brings your deepest wounds to the surface. With nothing to distract your awareness, the discomfort you’ve been avoiding emerges. When this happens, you may think you can’t meditate or that you are doing something wrong, but having everything bubble up to the surface is the gift of meditation. It’s a call to be willing to feel your pain, to stop trying to make it go away, and in doing so, to break the loop.

The shift

When you watch your mind’s attempts to understand or escape the confusion, pain and discomfort, a shift begins to happen. It’s not thinking itself, it is believing, following and thinking about the thoughts that consumes your vital life’s energy. The moment you stop feeding the mind’s belief that it can solve, fix, avoid or improve anything, that energy is freed. Sometimes, this release is gradual, and other times it can be sudden and transformative, leading to permanent shifts in your state of being.

From Pain to Art

When your vital life’s energy is allowed to rise, it takes hold of your mind and paints with it, giving birth to true creativity and your human imagination. Not from a place of trying to fix anything, but by allowing it to evolve naturally into something else.

Meditation can then bleed into painting, writing, or any other form of telling the story of what is inside of you. Ideas aren’t just ideas, visions aren’t just visions, and pain isn’t just pain; it transforms into art, meant to be expressed. It becomes a medium through which alchemy happens within you.

Beyond a practice

Meditation, then, is more than quieting your mind as a practice; it’s a journey beyond yourself. It’s a path that leads to the field of possibilities, to the very Source of life. Through it, you find the courage to face pain and discomfort, the wisdom to stop trying to fix anything, and the inspiration to express what you find inside of you into something beautiful, novel, and valuable.

Born out of this alchemical process that is continuously evolving, true art is born, and your purpose discovered.

So, let go of the idea that meditation is just sitting in quietude. Let meditation be the journey itself, art itself and life itself.