Beyond Calm: What Meditation Can Really Do

What if your ordinary life isn’t the thing getting in the way of your meditation practice?

What if your ordinary life is the meditation?

In this episode, I explore a different way of thinking about meditation. You don’t have to escape your life, go to a monastery, meditate for six hours a day or wait until everything is calm and peaceful before you can make progress.

Your busy life, difficult relationships, racing thoughts, anxiety, frustration, boredom and uncomfortable emotions can all become part of the practice.

I call this “monasticising your life”: taking the skills you develop during formal meditation and bringing them into the moments that actually make up your life.

At the heart of this approach are three simple words:

Stay. See. Allow.

Stay means learning not to immediately run away from whatever is happening.

See means becoming curious about your direct experience, rather than getting completely caught up in the story about what is happening.

Allow means dropping the struggle with your experience and learning not to be pushed and pulled around by every thought, feeling and emotion that arises.

These three skills correspond to concentration, sensory clarity and equanimity, and together they provide a practical framework for bringing mindfulness into everyday life.

So instead of asking:

“How can I get rid of my anxiety?”

You can start asking:

“Can I be free while anxiety is here?”

Instead of trying to stop every thought, you can learn to see thoughts clearly without automatically believing them.

Instead of trying to eliminate uncomfortable emotions, you can learn how to experience them without becoming completely identified with them.

And instead of seeing meditation as something that ends when the timer goes off, you can start using your entire life as the practice.

Walking the dog. Eating a meal. Driving. Working. Listening to someone. Having an argument. Feeling criticised. Lying awake at night. Experiencing anger, sadness, anxiety or joy.

All of it can become an opportunity to practise.

This is where meditation can move beyond simply helping you feel calm and become a path towards deeper insight, wisdom and inner freedom.

Eventually, the investigation can go even deeper:

Who am I?

What am I?

Who is experiencing all of this?

You don't have to believe any of this. The invitation is to test it for yourself through direct experience.

Your life is the laboratory.

Your difficult experiences are the material.

And every moment gives you another opportunity to Stay. See. Allow.

I'm Jimmy Wightman, also known as That Meditation Guy, and I teach meditation and mindfulness through the Unified Mindfulness approach.

If you want to go deeper, you can find out more about my work and 1:1 transformational meditation coaching at DelveDeep.com.

Instagram: @that_meditation_guy

Website: https://www.delvedeep.com