I have been practicing meditation for many years, trying out various approaches or techniques over the decades. It turns out that for me, they are just different ways of “practicing” to do something – the question is of course; “Practicing to do what?”

A common myth is that it is trying to learn to shut off “thinking” while staying awake. That seems to be close to it – but not quite right. This weekend I started wondering if it is perhaps something a little different than that. It seems that perhaps it is, in part at least, practicing to find that place between two thoughts (after watching one thought finally winds down and before the next one comes into focus) where there is no internal dialogue – and then practicing to expand the duration of that space. It isn’t exactly an experience of not thinking, but rather it is a place of experiencing, but not talking to yourself.

For many years I have been working on being able to experience observing myself without judgement – just observing what is happening, what I am feeling, my reactions – but not necessarily interfering, evaluating or judging. In the Buddhist jargon I believe this is referred to as “the witness”. The thing that I realized this weekend was that the practice of meditation where I observe and experience without dialogue is the same as the observer that I have been working with all of those years. Once I noticed that, I also noticed that it isn’t actually necessary to stop my internal dialogue to experience life from the point of view of the observer/witness. That point of view is always there, but it gets hidden from view because of all of the chatter, emotions, and activities in “normal” life. I noticed that I have been doing this so long that I am aware of the observer pretty much all of the time, not just during meditation, and not when I do something specifically to get myself to “stop and smell the roses.”

Maybe that is what we are practicing to do during meditation, practicing to become aware of the witness during sitting, and during all other times too. I think that is the path to personal freedom, freedom from all of the negative things we tell ourselves that are actually not true – they are just judgements of ourselves based upon experiences that we had over our lives, but none of the stories are actually true – they are something like our dream of what is really true. In many cases, we use someone else’s truth (or what they think is their truth) to reinforce negative judgments that we make of ourselves.