Letting go beyond meditation

The key principle of Vedic meditation is letting go, or surrender (I use the two terms interchangeably). For those who haven’t learned to meditate yet, letting go means to release control, expectation or curation of our experience and to open up to however our practice may look in a moment. We allow thoughts, memories, feelings, any mental activity to surface, and any time we notice that we are thinking, we bring our awareness back to our mantra. So, we release concentration, we forget about trying to ‘do’ anything except let our practice unfold as it will. With this we can naturally transcend the active levels of thinking and move towards greater stillness, calm and clarity. We may even transcend thinking all together. Through this process of surrender, we begin to purify ourselves of accumulated stress, tension and fatigue (you’ll have to do the course if you want to know how that works!) as well as connecting with our innate inner stillness. 

But what about our eyes open state? Meditation alone is not enough to transform completely. Meditation gives us the opportunity to begin to identify with something other than our thinking. Over time, as we connect with this part of ourselves in meditation, it begins to seep its way into our eyes open state, until eventually the activity of the eyes open state is merged with the transcendence we touch base with in meditation. But we must be active in our own evolution; it’s not simply enough to meditate (that was a tough reality for me to come to terms with! Damn!). One of the ways we can help the process along though is by applying the principles of letting go or surrender in our eyes open state. We do this by stepping out of our thinking about the world, and into the world itself. When we notice our attention is placed solely on our thinking, we can notice it and instead draw our awareness towards something else. Toward what? The present moment. Toward the only truth that actually exists. We can step out of our thinking and into our body – the sensory vehicle we’ve been given to perceive this world through. And each time we notice we’re back in our thinking, we can come back to our senses. What we can hear, see, smell, feel, taste and touch. What it is like to simply be alive in this moment.

This eyes-open mindfulness practice is an opportunity to let the advanced state of consciousness that we are cultivating to have more and more opportunity to peek through into our experience of life beyond the 2 x 20 minutes with our eyes closed. If you’re already a meditator, you’re already practising this, though unintentionally, in your meditation. Your job now is to be guided by this principle of letting go beyond your practice, so that you may surrender to the magic of this very moment. If you’re yet to learn, give it a go – see if you can first notice that you are running along with the thread of thoughts, and see if you can dis-entangle yourself from them, even just for a moment, and drop into your senses. Feel the world around you, happening as it is, and drop into the only place where living truly ever occurs.