Have you ever tried to meditate regularly but had trouble sticking to it? Have you told yourself that you just don’t have enough discipline to sit and tame your mind, rest in the space between thoughts, or achieve a completely blank mind? Dean Sluyter advocates what he calls natural meditation. He tells us not to worry about thoughts during our meditation. When we find ourselves getting carried away by our thoughts during meditation (and it happens to everyone) he says, “Okay, there are some thoughts going on, there are some sounds going on outside, there is some traffic rolling by. Fine. It doesn’t matter. It’s all a texture of the silence, which actually you are at your core. It’s just resting in what you are in your own essence.” We can tap into the nature of our beingness by allowing ourselves to rest our attention in the heart center or on the breath and let this natural gravitation take over. He says that we’re not “creating silence,” we’re discovering the inner silence that underlies all the thought. The door to this inner silence is everywhere and, after a while, you begin to experience it everywhere such as walking in the park or riding the subway. One size doesn’t fit all when it comes to meditation.
