Very often we have a subtle judgment that can play out when we meditate. It often comes along with the very intention to meditate in the first place. In some form or another, we meditate to alleviate the suffering or unsatisfactoriness in our lives that we already experience. Some anxiety, some pain or discomfort leads us to seek out some way to escape from it all. We begin practising meditation with an automatic unconscious perspective of “in order to make this ‘bad experience’ go away”. But the irony is, that this ‘in order to’ mindset itself is what often creates the suffering we so desperately seek to cure.

By learning to lean into our experience with a guiding mantra such as “peace with anxiety” or “peace with sadness” or even “peace with joy” we can begin to find that elusive quality of equanimity that allows us to hold whatever it is we are experiencing, in a spacious and accepting way. We lose the need to ‘get rid of’ the anxiety or ‘negative’ feelings we originally thought to be the source of our suffering and instead learn how to be with them in a harmonious and peaceful way.

If we cultivate an aggressive spirit towards our experience here today we will always find a new enemy no matter where we go. True peace will never come from war and judgement. So let’s begin here now with this simple mantra “peace with experience”, not “without”.