I came from the Zen Buddhist tradition; the Zen tradition has a long history of meditation being the primary practice. In Zen, you often meditate for hours a day in the sitting meditation posture, for as long as it’s prescribed. And what I found after many years of practicing this style of meditation was that I was actually not very good at it.​​

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I think a lot of people, when they first start meditating, find that they’re not particularly good at it—their minds are busy, their bodies want to shuffle, and they find it hard to calm down and be still.

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So my experience from the beginning was that I actually found meditation very difficult. And I find that a lot of people actually find it very difficult.

A lot of times, my meditation was anything but meditation. It was a lot of fighting, a lot of trying to calm my mind, a lot of trying to control my thoughts, and a lot of trying to be still, with little success—except for a few magical moments when meditation just happened.​

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One day I was talking to my teacher, and she said,

"If you try to win the war with your mind, you'll be at war forever." That really struck me.

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At that moment I realized that I had been thinking of meditation as a battle with my mind. I was trying to calm my mind. Suddenly I thought, 'Oh my God, forever is an awfully long time. I need to look at this differently.' If I was going to be at war with my mind forever by continuing this way, I had to find a way not to be.​

Without even realizing it, I began to quietly and deeply explore what it would be like to not be at war with my own mind, with what I was feeling, with my whole experience as a human being.

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I began to meditate differently. I let go of the idea of ​​what meditation was supposed to be. There were all sorts of ideas about meditation in my mind. I was supposed to be peaceful; I was supposed to have a certain feeling, mainly one of calmness. Meditation was supposed to bring me into a state of exalted being.

But because I couldn’t master the technique of meditation as I was taught it, I had to discover another way of meditating, one that didn’t rely on a technique. I sat down and just let what I experienced be there, very intensely.

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I stopped trying to control my experiences.

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That was the beginning of discovering for myself what True Meditation is. From that moment on, the way I meditate has been inspired by that shift—by actually letting go of technique and discipline instead of trying to perfect a technique or discipline. ~ From the book True Meditation by Adyashanti