One of us built himself a meditation. He wrote the whole thing out, worked with an AI tool to shape it, then recorded it in his own voice so it played back as though someone else were guiding him. The finished recording runs forty-two minutes. He told us he loves it once he gets right into it, and that he does not do it as often as he would like. Then he repeated what he knew was true, which was that he had probably been too ambitious.
Our meditation course is built the other way round. Three minutes first, then fifteen, then longer once the ground is under you. Forty minutes after four months of practice is good training. Forty minutes on day one can be a wall we build for ourselves.
Underneath that exchange sat the theme the session kept returning to. When something is not working, do we add, or do we take away?
We opened on pivoting, which is the most useful skill I know after meditation. Byron Katie asks a question first, is this true. The honest answer is usually that it seems true, because there is a reaction in the body and something has us. Then she asks whether it is really true. It isn’t. It is a story we made up, forcing an opinion that is hurting us. My own version of pivoting is shorter. I say thank you, and then work out why. Find our way back to thank you. Simple, and profound when understood.
I had to use it that morning. An email came in from someone who was not coming to an event, and I felt the twitch. I have watched this person do it before, and I know they want a different outcome. I wrote the reply. Then I sat there, closed my eyes, said thank you, worked through it, and deleted the email. The reply was never for him. It was my interpretation of him, not him.
A few years ago I was told that to be free I would need to let go of control and attachment. Driving into a place in Bali, watching a woman note down the registration of each car, I heard it as clearly as anything I have heard. “The illusion of control”. I have been considering it ever since. Some months later, waking up, I heard and saw a line I had been asking for. “In the silence of a quiet mind is intuition recognised”.
That quietness is not built. It is what is left when the noise is let go of.
Another Member has come at it another way. He spent years moving from one meditation to the next, and told us that the searching made his mind busier rather than quieter, because every day he was out looking for a new one. He has now done the same meditation for almost a year and nothing else. He described it as using the same shower every day rather than picking a different one. Why would you use a different shower daily? What landed for him was the instruction to stop searching.
Another Member, newer to the room, could not tell his intuition from his own old stories. His gut feel might be fear, he said, might be not wanting the difficult conversation, “so how does anyone separate the two?” He started meditating, and on the days when his mind was not racing, in that quiet, he could see what he was actually looking at. He was scared of a conversation. That was all it was. He was clear he is hardly a meditation master. He did not need to be.
Another Member has taken it into his business, with a room set aside where anyone can take ten minutes whenever they feel like meditating. Most of the leading organisations in the world do the same thing. If we are doing this work ourselves and not giving our teams access to it, we are missing out on the additional leverage available within the team.
Then we came to visualisation. A Member described using it before basketball games years ago, picturing the exact play, then going out and watching the shot drop. He was clear that it worked, and I agreed.
It does work. I did it for years. What I put to him is that it works on the ego’s terms. It says I want this thing, in this way, and it must look and feel like this, because I have decided that is what will finally give me the feeling. Then it arrives, and not too much longer later we stand there holding it feeling much as we did before, and off we go on the next mission. Someone buys a car or a pair of shoes and feels wonderful for an afternoon or a little longer. The good feeling was never in the car or the shoes. It was in the moment the searching stopped.
The feelings are the actual want, and the fastest route to them is not construction. It is removal. We let go of everything that is not that, and what is left is what we already were.
This might be your experience too. Some of us learned to spell the word business as busyness, and wore it proudly. Freedom sits at the opposite end of that. Busyness is a way of staying distracted, because sitting still with nothing to chase is unfamiliar, and unfamiliar gets coded as unsafe. The system then sends up seemingly perfectly reasonable messages asking us to stay exactly where we are.
A Member brought back something from a retreat in Bali, where an instructor closed every class the same way, telling the room they were perfect as they were. What struck him was the second thought, which was that if it were true of him, it had to be true of his children as well, and that he could stop worrying about them.
None of this is a case for doing less work. Every person in that room is running something significant and doing it well. One reported another record month. One is putting his business through three accreditations while rebuilding it around systems rather than around himself. One is working through a restructure, moving a colleague out of operations and into the people-facing role he is actually built for, and had already had the conversation he had been dreading.
What changes is the direction of the effort. We keep adding, and the thing we are adding towards is already underneath everything we have piled on top of it. The willingness to take some of that off is the whole practice.
“Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.” — Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
