Meditation is my meditation

The funny thing about having a Google alert for ‘meditation’ is I hear about art. This painting is a meditation on compassion; that poem is a meditation on modern loneliness. Art is never just art and it doesn’t just carry a message. It’s always “a meditation” on something.

When you see this every day, it starts becoming a little pretentious.

(Hard to believe, I know.)

Amazing art can explore, expose, reflect, magnify, distort, enhance and consume. For the artist, I have no doubt that creating the piece was a meditative experience. If a painter says their latest work is a meditation on emptiness, I will gladly spend all night picking their brain about that.

But when every review, article, discussion and forum posts describes it as a meditation… well, that’s true emptiness right there.

It reminds me of when people say that exercise is their meditation. Like the artistic process, I can see how this is meditative. For some people, it’s all struggle and effort. For others, these are the moments they find peace.

Art, exercise and a hundred other things can be meditative.

But there’s a hierarchy to these things.

There are meditative activities… and then there’s meditation itself.

The activities can only get you so far – which, to be fair, is further than most people ever get.

But for the real benefits of meditation, you should meditate. That’s my official stance on the matter. Accept no substitutes.

Because when you combine art or exercise with meditation, everything becomes so much more powerful.

And if you’re one of the many people who tried meditation, it didn’t work, then you found the state you were looking for elsewhere?

I know there are a lot of you…

Well, for you, I wrote a meditation guide. It has dozens, if not hundreds of exercises you’ve never tried before.

It’s not all sitting still with an empty mind, my friend…

No, it can be a lot more active than that. More active than anything else you’ve done this month, perhaps?

To find out, you can get it shipped to your door here:

https://amzn.to/2Pe0jVN