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 speaking with 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 viewing meditation as a battle with my mind. I was trying to control my mind, to pacify my mind, to try to get my mind to be quiet. Suddenly I thought, 'My goodness, forever is an awfully long time. I must come up with whole different way to looking at this.' If continuing this way meant I was going to be at war with my mind indefinitely, I needed to find a way not to be at war with my mind.​

 

Without even knowing it, I started to investigate, in a quiet and very deeply way, what it would be like to not be at war with my own mind, with what I felt, with my whole human experience.

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I started to meditate in a different way. I let go of the idea of what meditation was supposed to be. My mind had had a lot of ideas about meditation. It was supposed to be peaceful; I was supposed to feel a particular way, mostly calm. Meditation was supposed to lead me into some deep state of being. But because I could not master the technique of meditation as it was being taught to me, I had to discover a different way of meditating, one that wasn’t oriented around a technique. So I would sit down and let my experience simply be, in a very deep way.

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I started to let go of trying to control my experience.

 

That became the beginning of discovering for myself what True Meditation is. From that point on, that shift—moving from trying to perfect a technique or discipline to actually letting go of technique and discipline—started to inform the way I engage in meditation.

~ From the book True Meditation by Adyashanti