"Practice is to help us get used
            to our indestructible quality,
                        to our fearless quality,
                                      to our complete Great Perfection."
His Eminence Shyalpa Rinpoche
Tibetan Buddhist Dzogchen Master

Meditation is the core of all awareness based practices. We meditate primarily to connect to the energy of our life, as it is, now. By learning to meditate, we learn to shift our view of life from mental to experiential. The reason this is important, is because we can only know the truth of anything by experiencing it directly. By experiencing we mean, being aware of all our senses, feeling everything kinesthetically, as an energy resonating, throughout our mind/body. It makes no difference if it is physical, mental, or emotional. Our mind/body is like a bio-electric receiver/transmitter, continually processing the impressions of life. Meditation allows us to connect to this innate capacity, so that we experience everything as it truly is.

The instructions and explanations below are of an introductory nature. There are more profound, non-dual instructions for more advanced practice and realization, but these are what is required to get started and are complete in themselves.

So the first, most important benefit of meditation is to perceive things as they really are, not as our conditioned mind would prefer them to be. All the normal benefits that we normally associate with meditation such as relaxation, calming the mind, overcoming anxiety and stress, are simply natural results, but not the goal nor reason we meditate. This is very important to understand, because the intention we bring to meditation, determines how deep our experience will be. If we meditate to avoid a certain experience, we will never move beyond our resistance to that experience. If our intention is a willingness to experience whatever is there, just as it is, then there is no limit to the depth of realization of the truth, we can have.

So the key to successful meditation, is to stop trying to control our experience. When we can do this, we see directly into the mechanism of conditioned ego mind, and understand how it resists what is, and therefore causes us to suffer and become stressed. So ego is really the activity of controlling(editing) experience. In order to free ourselves from this habit, we invite a single intention to our meditation: To allow everything to be as it is, without exception.

Awareness is the way that we experience everything, without exception. In practice, it receives data from our senses, kinesthetically, as movement of energy. In meditation there are really only two things present. The first is the impression or object of meditation, the movement of energy, the thing that is experienced. The second is Awareness, or that which is experiencing. There is nothing else. Anything else, such as a meditator or a self is simply another impression, an idea generated by our conditioned mind.

Awareness can be in one of two postures.The first is what we all experience all the time, awareness identified with our conditioning, believing that our thoughts, feelings and sensations are who and what we are. The second is awareness free, not identified with any experience at all. This is the natural state of awareness and it is our true nature as well. This is what is commonly referred to as the meditative state. So we do not have to cultivate awareness, we simply have to allow everything to be in order to experience it. So meditation is also about remembering that what we truly are, is this awareness.