How do we prepare ourselves for meditation? By feeling at home, by being natural! If you are very formal, you can’t meditate. Meditation requires you to be informal and feel at home.
Today we will explore 'Why do we need to meditate?’, ‘How can we meditate successfully?' and different types of meditation.
Every human being has the need to meditate because it is a natural tendency of human life to look for a joy that doesn’t diminish, a love that doesn’t distort or turn into negative emotions.
Is meditation foreign to us? Absolutely not! You have been in meditation for a couple of months before your birth. You were in your mother’s womb doing nothing. You didn’t even have to chew your food, it was fed directly into your belly and you were there happily floating in the fluid, turning and kicking, sometimes here and sometimes there. That is meditation. You did nothing. Everything was done for you. So there is a natural tendency in every human being, in every soul, to crave for that state of absolute comfort.
You know why you want comfort? It is because you were comfortable at one point, because you have experienced a state of comfort called meditation. Meditation is absolute comfort. So getting back to that state which you have experienced before coming into the hustle, bustle of this world is very natural because in this universe everything is cyclic. Everything wants to go back to its source. That is the nature of the world.
During autumn, leaves fall and go back to the soil and nature has its own way to re-cycle them. The natural tendency to re-cycle all that you have collected every day of your life as impressions, to get rid of them and to get back to the original state that you were in when you came to this planet, is meditation. Becoming fresh and alive is meditation. Getting back to that serenity which is your original nature is meditation. Absolute joy and happiness is meditation.
A pleasure minus excitement is meditation. A thrill without anxiety is meditation. A love without hatred is meditation. Meditation is food for the soul. There is a natural craving for food. When you are hungry, spontaneously you eat something. If you are thirsty you want to drink some water. In the same way, the soul yearns for meditation and this tendency is in everyone.
There is not a single individual on this planet who is not a seeker. Just that they don’t know it, they don’t recognize it. We try to look for that food where it is not available, that is the problem.
Based on a series of talks entitled ‘Secrets of meditation’ given by Gurudev Sri Sri Ravi Shankar on April 20, 2012, California. These talks have been made into knowledge sheets.
