The benefits of meditation begin almost immediately, in a greater sense of calm and focus. But gradually, over months and years, meditation opens up a spacious quality- a sense of including more and more. Things begin to spontaneously fit together in our meditation - and also in our ordinary daily experience. As thoughts and feelings and events arise in this spaciousness, we don't separate them, judge them, engineer them: they begin to fit together as they are. What holds the contrasting and sometimes conflicting arisings together (love and hate, ease and disease, for example) is our learning to not interfere, to see through them, to allow them to settle on their own. We learn to allow everything to arise together in naturalness and begin to see our own preferences and continual tweeking of what comes up as unnecessary, as distractions. What begins to open up in this spacious experience is the ground, the background, the context of what arises. And that is experienced as more powerful than the arisings themselves.
This growing meditative process is like a new parent who is anxious about all the dangers facing his/her newborn - trying to adjust every detail of the baby's clothing, room temperature, and so on, so as to provide the comfort the baby needs. Gradually the new parent learns to relax, to see that discomforts do arise, but they are part of the whole: the whole system works, and can be counted on. Trust develops, and alertness deeper than anxiety. It is this quality of the parent that the child most deeply needs to discover. The parent can relax into the safe ground of experience, and so can the child.
Joel Baehr
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