Meditation is the first effort on our part to understand that each and every moment of life can be truly new. But in our experience of life, each and every moment isn’t truly new. In fact, we rarely have new moments at all because we’re constantly in a kind of daydream, in some form of mental activity. What are we doing with this mental activity? Shaping the moment by hand-stamping it.

Life brings what it does, or a thought passes through our mind, and we’re troubled. Why? Because it doesn’t “look” — or feel to us the way we think it should. And so we meet these disturbed thoughts and feelings by struggling to make life conform to our pre-conceived image of it. In this way, an old desire dictates our present perception, and then that nature tries to manipulate everything around us in order to make it look like what we think it’s supposed to look like. In other words, we want nothing that doesn’t match what we think life is supposed to be giving to us.

It doesn’t occur to us that something much greater than ourselves is giving us what it’s giving us, and we’re receiving what we’re receiving so that in the awakened reception of that moment of reality, something new can be made in us… something can be shaped in us that is true change, that doesn’t just change the world around us, but changes the world within us.

Learn what it means to let life shape you — let God shape your life, your soul — until you’re in direct relationship with life, not with this hand-stamped shaping of everything, trying to make it fit what you think: “You’re supposed to be like this.” “This is supposed to be like that.” “My meditation isn’t supposed to be like this, it’s supposed to be like that.” All of that just leaves us sitting and fighting with what meditation is, which is the release of all of the ideas we have about how things are supposed to be.

Be willing to be still, to be watchful, and to notice how everything that comes up — every thought, every feeling — at the moment it appears, wants to bring something in to judge it, to think about it, to try to shape it so that it fits your ideal of what the moment should be like.

Learn what it means to participate with life as it moves through you, stirs you, reveals you to you, and then — if you’ll just stay out of the mix — change you. That is meditation.