4 Years of Meditation — The Mesmerizing Present
In the present moment, I found peace
In search of the mystical
In my last year of high school, I was becoming increasingly interested in having a mystical experience. I didn’t know the term yet for what I was looking for, but I had an urge to look for more. I was reading in different books about this feeling that you might get at some point following a religious practice, some called it communion with God, others called it Enlightenment, there are many names for this experience.
I was raised as an Orthodox Christian but I hadn’t associated myself for that long with this particular religion. It was more because I didn’t understand it even after multiple years of practice. My family wasn’t religious in any sense, they practiced it but not in a very formal or serious manner.
At some point, I started to read about the corruption associated with different religious figures from my country (I’m from Romania). At the same time I was reading philosophy and I questioned deeply everything associated with this particular belief and its implications. I found a lot of contradictions that I didn’t like, so I decided after 18 years of practice that I won’t follow this belief anymore.
It wasn’t an easy choice. I still believed that some, of what I’ve learned through this religion was true. I believed that there was a spiritual world and possibly a God, but not the one portrayed here. I reluctantly stopped praying and doing other Orthodox practices. I succumbed to a lack of belief and I was started to embrace science as a way to know this reality.
A lack of belief
I experimented with Atheism but It didn’t suit me. I had moments, really difficult moments in my life, where I thought that nothing in this world could help me. When I encountered serious health issues, I started to need to believe that there was something more to this world than simply the physical. The urge for the mystical started to encompass again my field of consciousness
When something terrible starts making its way into your life you may feel the need for meaning. I couldn’t stand the idea that what was happening within me was random.
I couldn’t reverse back to my Orthodox self because I had decided that this belief wasn’t something I could follow. It didn’t help me, and it didn’t resonate with what I experienced. I remembered that at some point I read about Buddhism, I thought that it was really interesting.
I searched to understand more from the Buddhist teachings and practices. After a good amount of research, I decided to try a meditation practice. It wasn’t only Buddism itself that made me try meditation, I was also in my first year of college studying Psychology, and I heard a lot about meditation and what benefits it could have.
I found a comfortable spot in my room, I sat crossed-legged, eyes closed, and I focused only my breathing for 5 minutes. It was the start of a beautiful journey into understanding the nature of my psyche.
Embracing the present
I loved to observe my thoughts and try to manipulate the direction of my thoughts. Even since I started reading and I developed a sense for my inner voice I tried to create a direction for my thoughts. Meditating shaped that inward focus, made it better and clearer.
I tried to do 5 minutes of meditation every day in the morning. I wasn’t that hard as I just spontaneously started to do it, as I was doing my morning routine.
The meditation itself didn’t only bring a calmer inward focus, but a sense of the mystical. As I was focusing on my breath I could notice a feeling of peace and love growing inside me. It was blissful, even though I was fairly sick when I started to meditate, I could find peace by looking inward.
After about a year of doing meditation, more or less consistently, I would skip a day every once in a while. At times I found the fact that I was skipping the meditation practice frustrating, but I realized that it’s normal for your routines to not go perfectly. Something happened after one year of practice, I had a beautiful insight.
I realized with the help of meditation that the practice itself wasn’t simply a way of achieving a more peaceful state, but something more. It was a teaching, that allowed me to bring that state almost everywhere in my day-to-day life.
Embracing the present allowed me to focus better, to let my worries slip away, and to be able to see what was in front of me. I understood that part of my suffering was because I wasn’t focusing on the present but the past and the future. I was hoping for better, dreaming about the day that I would feel better. I would also look into the past when my life wasn’t that bad and complicated. I felt stuck between the past and the future, I couldn’t accept my life as it was and live the present. The meditation practice unshackled my spirit and let it roam free once again in the present
Deep into the abyss
I was meditating every day, I increased the time from 5 minutes to 10 and had weekend days when I tried for an hour. As I progressed through college I found new information and I was deepening my understanding of meditation, Buddism, and the human psyche. It had passed 3 years since I started and I’ve seen a real change in myself. I had days when I slipped and didn’t do it and regretted it afterward. Meditating allowed me to accept that, as normal fluctuations that are part of life. You can always see while meditating that thoughts come and go, sensations come and go, and sometimes even you come and go.
The deepest transformations occurred in my last year, when I switched the type of meditation I was doing, I started to do Zazen meditation. It’s different than Vipassana ( the meditation I was doing for the past 3 years) which implies focusing on your breath. In Zazen, the idea would be to not focus on anything. This type of meditation was harder, but it came with a much profound realization.
I was doing this meditation for months and I hadn’t noticed that much of a difference in how it impacted me, until one day. I tried doing meditation fasted before, but I wanted to do a better experiment and meditate for multiple hours while doing a water fast. I realized that even after I meditated for years I couldn't do it for more than 2 hours, so that was my goal.
I was standing there, embracing the emptiness, the present, and myself. I gradually lost contact with the world, I could only sense tiny disturbances. I felt my field of consciousness expanding. It was a sense of enlargement, of vast space, a deepening into the abyss.
For what felt like an eternity in a split second I felt Oness. I instantly knew that what I had was my first mystical experience. I opened my eyes, I checked my phone and an hour and a half had passed. It was a tough process to meditate for that long but I didn’t feel tired, I felt happy, peaceful, and hopeful towards my future. After 4 years of meditating, I reached what I thought to be mystical, even for a brief moment. It was an exhilarating experience and it marked my life forever.
