20 Years of Meditation: Where Has the Path Led?

20. Enlightenment Milestones
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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-2005). 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 fear, 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

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Hi Josh, always good to hear from someone who has benefited from the practice! Thankyou for the inspiration!

I’m curious, how have you noticed your practice affecting others over the years?

:folded_hands:Tom

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Deeply inspiring. As someone early on the path, I find posts like these to be more valuable than any others I find on the forum.

Thank you Josh.

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Hi Josh,

Good to see you again! And glad to hear that you are doing well with your practice. Thanks for sharing.

:folded_hands:

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Thanks for chiming in again Mr Anderson, I recall you from the earlier years of the forum. The rising of inner silence and witness as we are disciplined in our meditation are absolutely a true consequence. In my dozen years of AYP, the spaces between words keep gaining weight and expansion. A few times I have experienced the odd paradox of being in a highly emotional/chaotic outer situation while simultaneously feeling deeply calm inside, both a participant and observer.

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Thank you good sir. I’d like to join an AYP retreat one of these days, I’ll see if I can make it happen.

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Hi Tom, yes I have noticed my practice affecting others. Something changes inside, because you don’t want anything from the people around you, you don’t need to get anything from anyone, emotionally or otherwise. You aren’t loaded up with thoughts accepting or rejecting them, judging and criticizing, instead, they are received in the space of open silence, with an open heart. There seems to be more warmth and love in the heart towards others. I feel like one can have more of an uplifting effect on others, and that’s ideal. I’m still learning a lot about relating to people from love though, so I’m obviously not always perfect! :laughing:

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Thanks Michael. I also have experienced that it’s during the times of the deepest emotional pain that divine love can touch your heart the most. Without practice, one might not have that access to the dimension of divine love during intense emotional anguish. It is my experience that during deep emotional pain, the presence of consciousness whilst always free, detached, spacious, undisturbed, can also feel like one is being held in the tender, loving hands of God. There’s a sense of embrace which is somatic, and the whole being can relax and open without resistance to whatever storm needs to pass through.

Much love to you.

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:om::folded_hands:t4:

Sunyata

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When I lost my dog earlier this year I had the deepening of the realisation (through constant re-remembering of the Self during inner turmoil ) that when I am truly present I lack nothing, and this coupled with experiences of sahaja samadhi I had previously meant that my dog was not gone really, whenever I missed him, I could be with him in a way by being still. This is how suffering can help us become more conscious. :folded_hands:

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Yes 100% Tom. When you’re truly present there’s no illusory sense of lacking something!

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