When Meditation Follows You Into Life

When I first began meditating, meditation had fairly clear edges.

I would sit down, close my eyes, spend some time there… and eventually get up and continue with my day.

There were experiences during those early years that caught my attention. Stillness. Changes in awareness. Different ways of noticing what was happening internally. At first, though, they belonged mostly to meditation.

That gradually began to change.

I started noticing that some of what I was finding while sitting was still available after I got up. It wasn’t dramatic. There wasn’t one particular morning when meditation suddenly followed me downstairs.

It happened through repetition. I would find a certain place internally, return to it again, become familiar with it… and eventually recognize something similar while I wasn’t meditating at all.

That became very interesting to me.

Something was remaining

Looking back, I think one of the most important things meditation gave me was awareness. That sounds simple now… At the time, I don’t think I understood how significant it would become.

The more familiar I became with my internal environment, the more I could distinguish within it.

A thought could be noticed without immediately following it. An emotional atmosphere could be present without completely becoming the identity of the moment. Stillness could sometimes be recognized underneath activity.

And eventually, energetic movement became increasingly visible to me as well. Years later, this would become important during my experiences with Kundalini and eventually in my Reiki practice.

Yet awareness came first.

I sometimes wonder how much of what I eventually became capable of recognizing had always been there in quieter forms… I don’t really have an answer to that.

What I do know is that my ability to notice changed. And once something became recognizable, I could begin developing a relationship with it.

Practice started losing its edges

Over time, meditation became less confined to the place where I meditated.

I could be walking and recognize stillness. I could be somewhere busy and notice what was happening internally. I could feel something beginning to change before I had language for what the change was.

Eventually I didn’t always need to close my eyes and reconstruct the conditions of a meditation session to find that relationship again.

This didn’t mean I was walking around in some permanent meditative state. Life was still life. I simply had another way of meeting parts of it… and that changed what practice meant to me.

The interesting question became less:

What happened during meditation today?

And increasingly:

What is still here afterward?

Experience became relationship

This distinction followed me for years. Meditation eventually led into experiences I never anticipated when I started. Kundalini became part of my life. Reiki came later. My relationship with energy became increasingly detailed.

Yet underneath much of that development was something considerably quieter.

Recognition.

Something would become noticeable. I would encounter it again. I would spend time with it. Eventually it became familiar enough that I could return without starting from the beginning every time.

That is different from having an experience. An experience can be meaningful and still end. A relationship develops because something can be recognized again.

I didn’t have those words for it at the time… I was simply following what I was noticing.

Looking back

Years later, when Arrival Field began taking shape, I found myself returning to this same pattern again and again.

Recognition. Relationship. Return. Continuity.

I hadn’t begun meditating in order to develop those ideas. They came from living through the questions underneath them.

What happens after something meaningful becomes recognizable? Can you find it again? Can you become familiar with it? Can something discovered during practice begin participating in ordinary life?

Those questions eventually became part of the foundation underneath Arrival Field.

And perhaps that’s why I still find this early period so interesting.

Some of the most important changes in my meditation practice weren’t the unusual experiences. They were the things that quietly stopped staying in meditation.

If you have practiced for a while, it may be worth noticing sometime…

What gets up with you when you’re finished?

— Jason