It’s Sunday morning. The neighbours are asserting. The birds are singing. I took this body to bed 11 hours ago and it is still exausted.

Meditation is so very useful and it’s not necessarily what happens during meditation. Although the stilling of the mind does help. But here’s what I think for what it’s worth.

A common view is that practice has two wings:- emptiness and compassion. I think there’s another way of looking at it, which are the three marks of existence:- impermanence, selflessness and suffering.

It goes something like this. Our suffering is cause by clinging to a sense of self. You feel anxious or stressed, there’s a sense of self behind it. In other words “I am the direct cause of my suffering,” or put slightly differently “When I cling to a self, I suffer.”

Here’s the irony in the situation. The I is an illusion. No matter where you look you can’t find it. Meditation on emptiness, or even meditation on being reveals this. The I is a construct, even a constellation of constructs of beliefs and views, an impermanent phantasm created within our own minds.

The instrument of our suffering has no inherent existence.

In other words. You are free.

Now the nice thing is that meditation develops the precious treasure of mindfulness and extends the time between impulse and action, giving us a spaciousness within action. That’s how we can see that anxiety is linked to self while we’re feeling anxious.

So, if there’s no self, what is there? Whatever it is…

And that’s why right now I’m going to go and sit on my mat.