Your Life Will Teach You Everything

“A certain brother went to Abbot Moses in Scete and asked him for a good word. And the elder said to him: Go, sit in your cell, and your cell will teach you everything.”
—Wisdom of the Desert

There is a very advanced form of meditation called “choiceless awareness” which Matthew Flickstein taught me on retreat last year. Well, it’s advanced for me, anyway. I’m sure there have been many others who have plumbed the depths of the spirit and experienced things far beyond what I can imagine. But choiceless awareness is a practice that is at the far reaches of my own experience. I don’t recommend it for beginners.

In this practice, you just sit. You don’t try to use a sacred word to focus your attention. You don’t follow the breath. You don’t intentionally peer into the nature of the mental phenomena that arise in the mind. You don’t look for the “self.” You just sit there, and observe whatever comes and goes, without comment, judgment or reaction. It feels like you aren’t doing anything, which is exactly the point. There is no manipulation of the mind’s experience whatsoever (which is a radical shift from our normal perception of the world). And when the tendency to comment, judge or react subsides, there is just this vast, deep acceptance of everything, just as it is. This, to me, seems to be the nature of unconditional love that the traditions say we are to make manifest.

Now the deeper task: to keep loving like this, even when we get up from the meditation seat.