Meditation as seen by Denis Robberechts

Describing the process of meditation and its place in spiritual seeking is a difficult task. This is particularly because it is not a single practice, but a set of practices. In this article, I will attempt to identify a few key aspects that are central to my way of meditating.

Letting go

We could start by saying that it is not mental gymnastics, nor is it a performance. You don’t gain anything, you don’t lose anything. You don’t become a better person. The idea we have of meditation is often what blocks us. All these ideas: ‘you have to empty your mind’, ‘you have to be focused’, ‘you have to be silent’. These are walls we build for ourselves. Cages.

So, what do we do? We sit down. Just sit down. Or lie down. It doesn’t matter. We don’t try to control our attention. We don’t force it. We let it settle. Wherever it wants. On the noise of the street, on our breathing, on the sensation of the air on our skin. That’s all.

There will be thoughts. That’s normal. Let them come. Don’t fight them. Don’t analyse them. Watch them pass by, like watching a cloud. Without clinging to them. Without judging. Judgement is the first enemy. ‘I think too much’, ‘I can’t do it’. Who is judging? The mind judges the mind. It’s just a game.

The key is to come back. Not to stay. Come back. To the sensation of the body. To breathing. To sound. Every time your attention wanders, bring it back. Come back, again and again, and savour the moments of silence, even if they are short. That is the practice. This back-and-forth movement. This movement is meditation itself.

Little by little, you will stop searching. There is nothing to search for. Nothing to find. Just be. Simplicity is there. It has always been there. It is the path that is not a path.

And then, one day, without warning, you realise. You don’t realise something big, no. You realise something small. A feeling of calm. A tenderness for what is there. For this body that breathes, for this mind that stirs, for this world that makes noise.

Meditation from the perspective of letting go is simply this: accepting life as it comes, without wanting to change it. Just being. And letting go.

Concentration

It is as necessary as letting go. ‘Focusing’ actually means ‘directing our attention in one direction’. It is no longer being present in a broad sense, where everything has a place and can come and go. On the contrary, it means excluding all aspects of the present moment except for the object we have chosen for our meditation. This object can be our breath, the flame of a candle, an emotion, a mantra, physical sensations, the sounds around us, a meaningful thought (yes, even a thought can be the object of our meditation), etc. In fact, anything that can be observed can be the object of our meditation.

Concentrating helps calm the mind. Our attention is freed from mental agitation, and this agitation diminishes because it needs our attention to continue. Have you ever noticed that if we pay no attention to our thoughts, they stop? The experience is one of a feeling of space and freedom rarely experienced before!

But in addition to being soothing, focusing on something allows us to know that thing. Because we cannot know something that never receives our attention. It is easy to understand that bringing our full attention to ourselves in this way is the only path to true self-knowledge, the rest being accumulated ideas, which often trap us more than they help us.

Finally, practising this aspect of meditation allows us to notice that whatever is in our field of attention is our reality at that moment, it is what we are experiencing. We can observe the unity between the object present in our field of attention and how we feel in that moment. Thus, meditating while watching a river flow will not have the same effect as observing our breathing; walking mindfully in the city will not have the same effect as walking mindfully in the countryside; visualising a joyful situation will create a very different inner feeling than that created by dark thoughts.

Visualisation

It is the ability to imagine a scene and experience it. Far from perceiving ‘the present moment as it is’, during meditation we can create stories in our minds and thereby experience them. For example, we can think of people we love and experience a present moment filled with love. It is very pleasant. Experiencing a feeling of love is probably the thing we all desire most in the world, whether we are conscious of it or not. It is the root of our thoughts and actions. It is very nourishing. When we do this during our retreats, the feedback is impressive, filled with sensitivity and peace.

But we can do more than that with visualisation: we can train our minds to let love flow more freely, which is blocked within us by a whole host of conditions (I love him if he is the way I want him to be, I love myself if I meet my own standards, etc.). In this practice, which uses concentration, memory, and imagination, we think of people we love, strangers we often encounter, people with whom we are in conflict (yes, even them, and it’s very useful for better managing conflict!), and ourselves as well (many of us forget ourselves; what do you think that means?). And, one person after another, we formulate benevolent wishes internally. In addition to generating love in our meditation, we train the mind to let the noble qualities of the heart flow through. For as we know, repeating an experience regularly transforms the brain’s structure, and benevolence, the ability to look at each person with a human gaze, becomes a natural turn of phrase, present by default in our gaze. This practice is called ‘the antidote’ in Buddhism because it heals us from the tyranny of inner criticism, stagnation, loss of meaning, and lack of love. In short, it is the antidote to egocentricity.

Experience our philosophies

Another aspect of meditation, less well known yet crucial, is to ‘experience our philosophy’. Like Einstein, who took ‘semi-awake naps’ sitting on his stool without back support (basically meditation!). It was by imagining himself sitting on a ray of light that he was able to discover the law of special relativity. And it was by imagining himself falling through space that he discovered the new law of gravity. Because, as we saw above, imagining something is experiencing that thing. For better or for worse. This is certainly true of the ego, which is nothing more than a mental construct that we experience every day.

So, in meditation, we can experience a different perspective on everything: we no longer see pain as pain, but simply as a physical sensation, and suddenly, the sensation of pain changes! Isn’t that incredible? What can we learn about ourselves from this? Or, as we have seen, by replacing an egocentric view with a benevolent one, our experience of the moment suddenly changes! And what do you think happens if, in the midst of a moment of silence, we imagine ourselves to be without memory? Or see all things as impermanent? Or feel, in the midst of meditation, as if the gaze we cast upon ourselves were not our own, but that of nature seeking and observing itself. The possibilities are endless.

From our earliest childhood, we have been taught ways of seeing and interpreting our experience of the world and ourselves. These interpretations, which are generally implicit, shape our experience of the world and enable us to make sense of it and find our way. Or not… In meditation, we experience new perspectives, often deeper and more open, which are liberating, meaning they generate less friction with life. And the perspectives we like best, those that calm us and release love, we repeat, making them familiar until they become our core values, our natural state of mind.

Conclusion

So there you have it, in a nutshell, a rough outline of what I mean by ‘meditation’. For me, these approaches are facets of a single approach that could be summarised as follows: learning to calm our minds, questioning our inner nature with curiosity, allowing us to see more clearly, to get to know ourselves better, and thus to adjust our philosophy of life.

Read Denis Robberechts’ portrait

This post is also available in: French