In This Episode…

“One reason meditation is such a powerful tool on the spiritual path is that it’s a safe place to completely give up control. You can sit down, and just let go…and let go…and let go. You can let go of every attempt to control reality, every attempt to control your inner experience, every impulse to control how you feel, every attempt to control the mind. This radical practice of relinquishing control in meditation is a very direct way to start to get a taste of what it means to be truly natural.” —Craig Hamilton

Spiritual teachings often describe the goal of the path as entering into a “natural state”—a way of being that’s utterly easeful, uncontrived, and completely genuine. This natural state allows us to simply be ourselves, without effort, flowing with life as it unfolds.

But how do we achieve this profound simplicity? Though it sounds like it should be easy, being natural is often challenging in practice. Most of us have spent a lifetime cultivating habits of control, striving to shape reality to fit our will. How do we let go of these tendencies and truly embrace a natural way of being?

In this episode, Craig shares an approach to meditation designed to easefully open the door to this profound naturalness. By learning how to let go of any attempt to control your experience, you’ll discover what it means to surrender to life without resistance.

The podcast includes a guided meditation, so please set aside a quiet space to be fully present and open to this transformative journey.

If you’re interested in exploring more of Craig’s approach to meditation, you’re invited to tune in to a 90-minute online workshop Craig will be hosting called Meditation 2.0 – The Miracle of Direct Awakening. Register for free at: FreeMeditationWorkshop.com

Discover More about Craig’s Awakened Life Membership Program

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

One way of understanding the goal of spiritual life – what spiritual awakening ultimately points to – is that we’re awakening out of everything that’s unnatural. In other words, we’re awakening out of everything that’s conditioned, habitual, and rooted in erroneous ways of seeing the world. We awaken from our false assumptions about who and what we are and what reality is.

These are the roots of what has traditionally been called “ignorance” in spiritual circles. We live in ignorance of our true nature and of the nature of reality when we are embedded in our relatively unconscious, reactive human condition.

Waking from the Trance of Ignorance

Awakening points us to the potential to wake up out of that trance and into a way of being that’s truly natural, free, open and easy. We’re able to meet each moment with a response to what’s truly happening, not to all the projections our mind is imposing on the moment. We’re able to freely and fully be here, seeing things as they are and responding with strength, courage, care and wisdom to whatever’s coming up. And all of that can happen very naturally if we can get that historical momentum out of the way and just let ourselves be natural.

One way of conceptualizing being natural is that we begin to live a life where we’re no longer struggling to try to control everything. We’re no longer trying to control our mind, our actions, and the world around us. We step into a natural, easeful, fluid dance with life, relinquishing the insistence on having control.

But that’s not something most of us are ready to practice in daily life – just completely letting go of control, abandoning our self-control, internal censoring mechanisms, and the management function in our psyches. If we let go of control, we might show up in a fairly unconscious way because we have so much primitive conditioning and instinctual, habitual kinds of programming. All of that will rapidly take over if we completely abandon control – or so it seems, and probably would be, in most cases.

Letting Go and Giving Up Control in Meditation

That’s a difficult experiment to undertake in life. This is one of the reasons meditation is such a powerful tool or opportunity on the spiritual path: it’s a place where we have the ability to completely give up control. You can sit down and just let go… and let go, and let go, and let go. With every attempt to control reality, you just keep letting it go. With every attempt to control your inner experience and how you feel, we let it go. We let go of the mind and let go of any attempt to control the mind.

So, we can do a radical practice of relinquishing control in meditation. It’s a very direct way to start to get a taste of what I mean by being natural. That’s the case because if you’re not controlling anything – if you have relinquished control, and let go completely – you are being natural. You’re just being. The whole gamut of the human experience occurring in your mind and in your heart and in your life is all there, but you’re having an unfiltered, unmanaged relationship to it all.

For this practice session, I want us to really see how radically and fully we can each let go of control of our meditation.

Guided Meditation on Letting Go of Control

I want to invite you into your meditation posture, allowing yourself to be in this moment, just as you are. Allowing the moment to be as it is.

Just allow yourself to let go of any need to control anything about this moment.

We often try to control our meditation because we believe that there is a specific kind of goal we’re trying to achieve in meditation – that we’re trying to relax, or we’re trying to become centered, or we’re trying to be mindful, or get to some state of consciousness that’s very clear and lucid, calm, or content. Since we have an imaginary end-goal in mind, we then try to control our meditation to achieve that goal.

So, to help you let go of control, allow yourself to let go of any idea of what meditation is supposed to feel like or be like, and any ideas about what type of content is acceptable to have in your mind. Let go of what’s acceptable emotional content, how your body should feel, and just let your experience be as it is.

Letting Go of Any Outcome

Even as we practice letting go of control and letting things be as they are, if we look, we’ll notice very often there’s a way in which we’re subtly trying to steer our meditation toward a desired outcome. We have an idea of what it feels like to let things be, and what that calm, easeful place is like. When we feel more ease start to emerge in our meditation, we try to steer toward that. When we feel tension or discomfort, or an agitated mind, we try to steer our meditation away from that.

This is where we start to see the subtler levels of control that we’re exerting on this moment. And as we see this subtler ego activity, we just keep letting go of control more and more deeply. Every time we see an attempt to control occurring, we just let it go.

Gently allow yourself to ease out of the meditation.

Cultivating the Art of Being Natural

So, the art of being natural is a subtle thing. It’s not something you can easily figure out how to do with your mind. It’s not something you can get your head around. When I say letting go is subtle, I’m inviting you into your own inquiry, your own experiment, your own exploration of what subtlety might mean.

And the subtlety of letting go also means that the process has layers. The discovery of naturalness tends to come in layers. By doing the practices we’ve just been doing, we might initially start to experience, “Wow, I can see all the ways I’ve been trying to manage and control my experience. I can see layers of conditioning in ways I habitually react to things that aren’t very natural.”

We start to peel a layer of the onion off, and we get a sense of how by practicing being more natural in my meditation, it’s revealing things about the unnaturalness of my relationship to life. It’s gradually unfolding itself, and I’m discovering things.

Then after a while, another layer reveals itself, and we go, “Oh, I can see that I’m still in a subtle way trying to get my meditation to feel a certain way.” I’m trying to have a certain experience that I deem to be a better meditation experience. Therefore, I’m still rejecting the moment as it is, on the quest to get to what I envision to be a better moment.

Naturalness Means Being Yourself

The invitation is to see that letting go is an art. I’m emphasizing the art of letting go of control as something that we have to find our way into. We never assume we fully understand it, and never assume that there’s not – to use a Buddhist term – some fabrication occurring that we’re imposing on this moment. Fabrication means something that our mind made up as opposed to the authentic, unfiltered, unfabricated experience of reality, right now.

We’re each on our own journey into naturalness. And in the end, we each discover that naturalness just means being myself, as I am, and letting my mind function completely naturally.

That sounds simple, but it’s really not. It’s like a treasure when we find it. We realize this natural way of being was always so close, and yet it was continually eluding us in many different ways because of these habits we’ve inherited as part of the human race, which we’re trying to wake up out of.