You Are Already Meditating - A Case for the 5-Minute Return

​My background in meditation spans four decades. It began not as a spiritual pursuit but as an act of love. My wife was dying of a brain tumor and used meditation to manage pain. I sat beside her — no idea what I was doing — forcing myself into lotus position for an hour at a time, ankles aching.
From that torturous beginning I learned three things: pain could mysteriously dissolve during meditation; meditation offered an inexplicable release from anxiety; and meditation had a timeless quality that ordinary experience doesn't.
Over the following thirty years I found myself in the company of remarkable teachers — Dhiravamsa, Osho Rajneesh, Teertha, H.W.L. Poonja, and Andrew Cohen. Each gave me new insight. Each contributed a piece to the puzzle I was trying to solve.
Dhiravamsa revealed that meditation is not a particular experience. On a three-day retreat in Western Australia, sitting ten hours a day, a woman excitedly described the colourful lights exploding in her mind's eye. He admonished her: she was not meditating. Then he looked at me and said quietly, "You are a good sitter." Thirty years later I understood what he meant.
Osho made clear that meditation sometimes requires radical, even cathartic action to see beyond the mind's powerful fluctuations. Teertha revealed that the commitment to meditation is a commitment to living differently. Poonja could make such light of thought that I would find myself in deep ecstatic joy in his company. Cohen distilled everything into a single insight I've never forgotten: theory before experience is meaningless; theory after experience is obvious.
Later I trained at the Kripalu School of Yoga, where I found new tools to teach what thirty years had shown me — that we are always, already meditating.

So how do I teach it?
I begin by saying: we are already meditating. We relax to experience the meditation that is already present — we don't meditate in order to induce relaxation.
This distinction matters enormously. Without it, we spend our practice seeking a preconceived state — some signal that we've done it correctly. That idea of right and wrong in meditation is a setup for ego and inauthenticity.
I use the eye of a hurricane as my central metaphor. A hurricane's winds revolve around a perfectly still centre. Without that stillness the hurricane has no integrity — it simply wouldn't exist. The closer you move toward the centre, the quieter everything becomes. That still centre is you. The whirling winds are your thoughts and emotions. They are not the problem. Witnessing them from the centre — that is meditation.
As Max Picard, the twentieth century philosopher, wrote: a person who has lost silence has lost their very structure. Meditation is the remembering of that silence. It is not something you acquire. It is something you recognise.

Seven Buoys
To help students settle into that recognition, I offer seven points of attention — buoys to return to whenever the mind drifts. I've drawn five from Kripalu's B.R.F.W.A. model and added two of my own.
P — Posture. Not rigidity, but alert comfort. A well-supported seat that allows you to remain present without fighting your body.
S — Smile. On a ten-day retreat in the Berkshires — up to seven hours of sitting a day — I discovered that a simple, slight smile was a surprisingly powerful anchor. Even a Mona Lisa smile interrupts the mind's habitual insistence that something is wrong.
B — Breath. The breath is always happening now. Notice its four parts: the inhale, the exhale, and the two quiet turning points between them. Some traditions make this the sole object of attention, and it is enough.
R — Relax. The body is the canary in the coal mine. Unconscious tension reveals where the mind is caught. Find it, breathe into it, soften it. Relax the body over time and you relax the mind.
F — Feel. Simple physical sensation is always present-tense. The weight of your feet on the floor. Your sit bones on the chair. Air moving across your skin. As sensitivity grows, subtler feelings emerge — your heartbeat, a faint inner warmth.
W — Watch (or better: Notice). Notice what you haven't yet noticed. Sounds arriving and passing. Your own breath. Then the inner sounds — thoughts, moving like birds between branches. The aim is not to stop thought. It is to notice that thought comes and goes, and that you are the one noticing.
A — Allow. Let your experience be exactly as it is, without judgment. This is both the path and the destination. All tension arises from non-acceptance. When you stop wanting your experience to be different, you taste witnessing — and that is meditation. Yoga calls this Santosha, contentment. I've found it to be my natural state: quiet, free of worry, and the source of a blissfulness that has nothing to do with circumstances.

Why start now?
Here's what I've observed over forty years, in myself and in others: the people who benefit most from meditation are not the ones who sit longest or practise most perfectly. They are the ones who show up daily — even briefly, even imperfectly.
Five minutes every morning, before the day gets its hands on you, is worth more than an occasional hour. Not because quantity doesn't matter, but because regularity builds something that intensity alone cannot: a remembered familiarity with your own stillness. The more often you return to that centre, the more readily it's available when life's winds pick up.
You don't need a cushion, a lineage, or a technique. You need only the willingness to stop — and notice that the stillness you were looking for was never actually absent.
You are already meditating. Daily practice is simply how you remember that more often.

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