The Mysterious Power of Letting Things Be

“ What does meditation really have to do with life and how we live it?”

That’s a great question — and there’s an important reason why meditation is so essential for living a conscious, awakened life aligned with our deeper purpose.

Now, a lot of us already have some experience with meditation — or at least some notions about it.

We hear it can soothe stress, calm anxiety, relax our bodies and bring us peace and contentment. It can even evoke bliss or a sense of connection to spirit. And many of us have already experienced some of these benefits.

But even if you have had some positive experiences with meditation, you may also be wondering, well…it makes us feel good, but how will it help us DO good? This is an important question to ask once we’ve realized that for our spirituality to really mean something, it has to be lived in the world.

If we view meditation as a practice of stepping away from and out of life, then it’s natural to wonder what meditation has to do with having an evolutionary relationship to life — which involves aligning with the most dynamic and passionate force in the cosmos: the impulse of evolution itself.

But the truth is, meditation has everything to do with with active, engaged living. It just needs to be a specific kind of meditation.

You’re probably aware that, as human beings, we often don’t see things very clearly. Usually that’s because we’re invested in things going a certain way, in our ideas, or in maintaining the illusion of control. And that makes it hard to know the right thing to do — even when we really want to.

You can probably think of times in your own experience when, even though you really wanted to have an enlightened response — maybe at work, or in a relationship — you found yourself reacting unconsciously or automatically.

Our basic human “conditioning” can cloud or distort our perceptions because it compels us to grasp so tightly to what we already know that we may be unable to see what else is there.

Meditation offers us a direct practice of liberation from these dilemmas — including the universal human habits of identifying with our thoughts, feelings, desires, fears, and preferences.