What Meditation Is
pc: everydayhealth.com In 1976 I left my job to spend three years in a small town in India studying meditation. When they hear of my experience, people often ask me, “What do you do when you meditate?” Of course in one sense, meditation means “not-doing;” we have to stop all the things that we do in ordinary life, and start doing the opposite. The meditation which I studied is called Vipassana. This is a word from Paali, the language spoken in India in the time of the Buddha. Its meaning is insight—seeing the reality, the truth; understanding reality by experiencing the reality inside oneself. All our lives we are busy looking outside. We are only interested to see what others are doing; we aren’t interested in ourselves. When we meditate, we have to change all that, and start to observe ourselves. We sit down, stop moving, and close our eyes. There is nothing to hea...