I learned about “being” meditation, where the focus in not on my breath, rather just on focusing on the inner sense of being. What is interesting about this meditation is that the mind no longer has a job. There is no longer internal dialog of “I’m focusing on my breath. I’m focusing on my breath.” Rather it seems to quiet the mind so long as my focus remains on my internal sense of being.
What was interesting about it, is that I came to realize how much work keeping up my ego really is. The world that the mind creates is constantly changing and churning. And this is tiresome. So the welcome relief from not actually thinking about anything, was quite nice for a change.
I also noticed that my ego doesn’t want to just be; it wants to churn, since without the churning, my own sense of self that I try so hard to prop up dissipates. Who am I, if I am not anything, after all? Which is what the focus on being shows, that there is still peaceful existence that I can find outside of my own self.
Put another way, this meditation offers peace FROM mind, instead of peace OF mind. I’m guessing that peace of mind will come from better CBT work, or other methods of manipulating the assumptions that bring me pain. But meditation offer peace from mind, which is a more whole peace in many ways. It does leave me with a question of if this is truly peace, since I’m not sure there can be peace without war, so this experience might better be described as just touching life itself.
P.S. It is one of my foundational beliefs that much of that we search for outside of ourselves is due to the fact that we know from subtle internal queues that there are certainly internal truths. Due to the fog of our mind, we can’t quite reach these truths, but we know intuitively that they are true, and since we can’t finding them within, we search outside of ourselves. One of these internal truths is that we exist. We look outside for self validation that we exist, until we can find that truth for ourselves on the inside. The other three that come to mind are wholeness, love, and oneness.