The Magical State of Allowing

When I first started to meditate decades ago, I gradually began to see that meditation is nothing more or less than simply allowing everything to be as it is.

It really is that simple.

Like most people I believed that I needed to quiet my mind, transcend my desires and feelings and be completely aloof from all the grit and grind of everyday life.

Only my mind didn’t get quiet, I didn’t transcend all my desires and feelings and completely failed at remaining aloof from all the grit and grind.

Slowly, I began to realize that it was not a matter of transcending or changing or fixing or overcoming. In fact, that approach actually made it worse.

What did work was exactly the opposite. The goal of meditation and the attaining of the true state of peace was not a process of elimination. It was the fruit of allowing.

• Allowing thoughts
• Allowing feelings
• Allowing desires
• Allowing experiences
• Without resistance
• Leads directly and quickly to peace

Paradoxically enough, at first, allowing was a struggle. It was actually difficult to not struggle, to not try, to sink into effortlessness.

The very fact that attempting to just allow, without struggle and strife, was effortful really opened my eyes to how deeply engrained resistance is, in all of us.
As I began to allow more and more, a whole new world started to open up to me. It wasn’t merely the calm and equanimity that came to me. It was the profound insight into how the nervous system actually works and how conditioned we all have been into struggle and conflict.

Conditioning became, for me, not just an interesting psychological concept but a constant inner energy that needed to be understood and redirected.

I discovered that it was totally robotic in nature. It was simply the way we were trained to be before we had the power or the insight to decide what we would take in.

And, what makes it worse, is those conditioned patterns become so automatic we don’t realize they are not inane in us. We actually think we ARE those patterns. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Allowing provided both the insight into how the inner world really worked and the means to overcome and reprogram the system.

To simply allow things to be as they are, without resistance, judgment or even trying to change things, was the key to genuine meditation, healing and spiritual growth. Yeah, that is a pretty big deal.

Now, I am not saying that you should accept everything as it comes, never make plans, never choose what is good for you, never reject things that aren’t working for you.

The focus here is on allowing yourself to feel whatever you are feeling without trying to change it. What I found over the years was, if I really did get the sweet place of equanimity with any inner struggle, the struggle miraculously resolved itself.

You see, it is our resistance to our own feelings, our own inner world, that creates our suffering. Resistance literally holds the distressed energy in place. Why, because resistance creates inner conflict. And, if you resolve inner conflict, what do you have?

Inner peace.

That is the real motivation behind meditating and allowing. And isn’t inner peace what we are all seeking?

This article originally appeared in the Autumn 2019 issue of CHOICES Magazine