Dear AYPers,
I am sending you all so much love. I love this community, and the many people I have met in person from it. 2025 is the 20 year mark of daily meditation (with perhaps a couple of additional years dabbling, pre-25). A lot of my practice has been AYP-related, although I’ve been drawn a lot to the Dzogchen teachings and breath meditation, and the deep Buddhist explanations of concentration and insight practice, too.
I would describe the outcome of this 20 years of meditation, and devotion, and self-inquiry, as having reached an extremely happy, free, state of being, and such a resiliently happy one (it copes very well amid even the extreme challenges of the world). Every facet of my life has changed. I am in meditation, inwardly centered on awareness, in virtually every moment I am awake.
I wanted to share my thoughts on this stage of the path, in the hope it might inspire others! If anyone wishes to meditate together, via Zoom or however, I would be happy to, feel free to contact me. I live up in the mountains in Panama now, in a very peaceful place, after years of NYC and London.
Completing 20 years of meditation
I began meditating every day in 2005, twenty years ago. Now I am 40 years old. Back then, my consciousness was a furnace of unhappiness and suffering. Now, my life is permeated by a deep sense of peace, and an ecstatic feeling of bliss, every single day, almost every single moment.
When life throws me challenges, my mind creates not negative thoughts, but useful ones, which help me wisely address whatever situation I face.
I have become the conscious user of the mind, able to direct its activities at will.
If a negative thought transpires, it is seen that engaging with it offers no benefit, and thus it quickly passes, creating minimal disturbance.
The negative tendencies, addictions, anger, fear, anxiety, depression and unhappiness: these get thinner, less and less, with each passing year of daily practice.
I feel that divine guidance increasingly steers my life (and increasingly, I am receptive to it), rather than egoic will. There is minimal attachment to outcomes.
Each moment of life seems to be flow, and I don’t have much sense of time anymore. Feeling bored or impatient is very unusual.
My sense of identity has expanded, from being a separate self, to being pure consciousness, free from name and form, time and space, yet manifesting itself in name and form, in time and space, as an individual being.
I have experienced this constant sense of unconditional peace, love and freedom, and the ecstasy it engenders during deep grief, due to the passing away of my sister, at only 46, from cancer.
I have experienced it being constant and consistent during agonizing physical pain (a long-term back injury, that took years to recover from), when I was unable to walk or move around.
I have experienced it remaining constant whilst being exposed to extraordinary levels of stress and pressure in my personal life.
I have experienced it changing my whole life.
This is where the path of meditation, self-inquiry and inward devotion lead to (and beyond). The cessation of suffering. Unconditional peace, even in the midst of tragedy, disturbance, and chaos. Unconditional love, when faced with a vacuum of lovelessness. Unconditional happiness, amid heart-rending grief.
**Pause, breathe deeply, relax, and sense into the background of stillness, awareness, peace and freedom which is always present.**
**Let your devotion carry your intention and attention so deeply, that you become rooted, in every single moment of existence, in the ever-present peace and freedom of awareness, Consciousness, The Self.**
Meditate deeply, frequently, and keep progressing on the path. I have not reached any final destination yet, and in my experience, spiritual awakening is the beginning of an entirely new chapter of one’s life, an entirely new trajectory of psychospiritual development as an individual made manifest in this world.
Morally I have changed. You see the truth of things, and truth of your own words and actions, and those of others, more clearly. You can’t act in adharmic ways, only dharmic ways, and one’s sense of what is a dharmic use of one’s intention, attention, energy, time and action, and what is adharmic, becomes increasingly refined.
There’s an increasing sensitivity to karma and the importance of using each and every second of existence, in a wise and beneficial way.
This trajectory of development that is characterized principally by the absence of unhappiness and the presence of unshakeable inner happiness. The absence of fearless, and the presence of unshakable fearlessness. One becomes a lot stronger inside.
I wrote this in the hope that it might inspire and encourage someone on the meditative path.
So much love to you all!
Josh
Tom