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

No spiritual practice is more misunderstood than meditation. It is the core of all awareness-based exercises and its purpose is to connect to the energy of our life, as it is, now. Meditation shifts our view of life from mental to experiential. This is important 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 resonant energy. It makes no difference if it is physical, mental, or emotional. Our mind/body is a bio-electric receiver/transmitter, continually processing the impressions (energy) of life. Meditation allows us to connect to this innate capacity, so that we experience everything as it truly is.

The 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 associate with meditation such as relaxation, calming the mind, overcoming anxiety and stress, are natural results, but not the reason we meditate. This is very important to remember, 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.

The key to true 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. Ego is really the activity of controlling (editing) our experiences. 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.