by Kelvin Chin, Meditation Teacher and Life After Life Expert
It’s our birthright to know ourselves. Knowing ourselves is inherent in being an immortal soul. So, we should have no barriers to that, including anything related to a technique — call it meditation, call it whatever you want — that purports to connect our conscious mind with our larger sense of self, i.e., that is supposed to allow our mind to experience itself in this different way.
Let’s talk about this idea of effortlessness in meditation a little bit more.
It is easy to say that meditation should be effortless. But what if you feel like it’s impossible, that there is no way it could actually be effortless for you?
You might feel like, “Yeah, that makes sense. It is my birthright to know myself in this different way. But I know my mind. And there’s no way I could ever get it to settle down.” Have you ever thought that?
You might feel like you can’t access your birthright, you may feel blocked. It’s like you’ve inherited money at a bank and you feel like you don’t have the key to the safe deposit box.
Meditation is the key.
Learning to meditate effortlessly “unlocks the door,” unlocks this safe deposit box easily. And the key to meditating effortlessly is learning how to set up a situation where the mind is conscious yet undirected. If you learn how to set up those initial conditions properly, then the natural tendency of the mind will take over, and the mind will settle down. That is the key to learning meditation.
And after you learn this key, i.e., the technique of how to do that, you can keep using the key, or you can “leave the door unlocked” for access anytime. Since it is your own mind, it’s up to you!
In other words, you can continue practicing the technique as you were taught by your teacher, or…you may find that after some weeks or months of meditation that it becomes so automatic that whenever you close your eyes, your mind simply and effortlessly settles and experiences itself — the proverbial door has been unlocked, and access is easily granted whenever you choose.
Meditation can become that automatic.
When you first learn meditation, there is a technique that you follow. But, after you learn the technique, like all “techniques,” it may eventually drop away.
I remember when I first learned to drive a stick shift, a manual transmission. I was helping some good friends move from Boston to Clinton, NY. We had a U-Haul truck and a manual transmission Toyota. At one point along the Massachusetts Turnpike, I was asked to drive the Toyota…but I had never driven a stick before. So, we took a slight detour to a large parking lot, and after some fits and starts, and some patience by my friends, I figured it out. Fortunately it was a straight highway with no hills! But, the point is that whenever I shifted for the next several weeks, I had to stop my conversation in midstream until I finished that stage of shifting — I could not talk and shift at the same time — because I was too engaged in “the technique” of shifting (coordinating both feet and both hands, etc.). But after that initial learning period, I could give a lecture if I wanted to, while I was driving the stick!
The technique dropped away when I was so comfortable with shifting while driving. It became automatic. This happens with all techniques.
And don't be surprised if this happens with your meditation technique as well. Eventually you can let it go — it may drop away.
Your mind will likely at some point become so used to experiencing itself in this different way during meditation (different from waking, dreaming, and sleeping) that the technique falls away. And you become so easily connected with yourself every time you close your eyes to meditate that you simply — and literally effortlessly — experience your own mind in this way.
That is true effortlessness of meditation.
Kelvin H. Chin is a Meditation Teacher, Life After Life Expert, and Author of “Overcoming the Fear of Death.” He learned to meditate at age 19, and has been teaching Turning Within and coaching others in their self-growth for 40 years. He helps people understand their life challenges through their individual belief systems, and helps them find their own solutions. His past life memories reach back many centuries, and he accesses those memories in his teaching and his coaching in the same way all coaches draw on their own available experiences for perspective and effective analogies. He can be reached at www.TurningWithin.org.