One of the commonest question asked about meditation is, “How do you do meditation? or how do you meditate.”  We think of everything as an actionable item.  We want a step by step direction.  It does not work with meditation and it does not work with sleep either.  

You can prepare for meditation, sit on a certain cushion, close or half close your eyes, watch the breath or chant a mantra and so on, but you can not bring meditation to you.  Meditation happens by itself.  It is similar to sleep, you can lie down, count sheep, close eyes, put out the light and so on, but you cannot bring sleep to you.  Sleep arrives by itself once the surroundings are right.  Meditation is not a doing, It’s a happening.  

We have to allow meditation to happen to us.  Similarly, we have to allow sleep to happen to us.  One of the meditations I practiced was to bring awareness to sleep.  It is such a profound and beautiful feeling when you can bring awareness to sleep.  Awareness just slides in, the sleep surrounding you from all around – such a wonderful experience.  I will go over details of the technique at a later date; it is one of Osho’s techniques that is also described by him.  

All meditation techniques are preparations of one form or another that then allows meditation to happen.  Many of them appear to be a lot of work, but meditation may or may not happen while meditation is being performed.  It may happen several hours or even several days after that time.  We still need to go through the techniques, but be aware of the nature of meditation.