This is my basic meditation cheat sheet. It consists of four simple processes. The first three are about clearing, releasing, and opening. The fourth is about enjoying the spaciousness that results. The whole thing can be done in about 20 minutes. With practice, it can take even less time.

There are innumerable techniques that fall under the umbrella of "meditation". They each have their merits. Very few, however, are what I consider to be true meditation.

True meditation, from my perspective, can be thought of in a few ways:

• An opportunity to remember your true nature
• Opening the spotlight of attention until it becomes as wide as all of awareness
• Taking a break from fixation on the foreground (the contents of experience)
• Identifying instead with the background (the context of experience)
• Enjoyment of the infinite, of that which never changes

Nearly everything in life encourages us to identify with and fixate on the contents of experience. We contract around sensations in the body, emotions that seem important, and thoughts that capture our attention. We are captivated by the drama of daily life and current events in the world around us.

When I meditate, I like to begin by clearing the field of all those contents. I am taking a break from experience, returning to the totality of what I am. To do so, it helps to catch myself being contracted and caught up. I want to release my habitual sources of tension, one letting go at a time. No matter how far I get in this process, each opening along the way provides more relief.

Here is the sequence of four steps:

1. Bring awareness to your breathing
2. Release subtle tensions throughout your body
3. Release the identifications that have been defining your sense of self
4. Rediscover and enjoy the infinite spaciousness in the background

Each of these four steps is simple, yet each is its own art form. You can spend years discovering how to deepen into each of these processes, but you already know enough to benefit from them now.

Allow me to offer you some cues and pointers for each of the four phases.

1. Breathing With Awareness

If you could choose only one practice to master over the course of your life, I would recommend breathing with awareness. Breathing is autonomic. Your body takes care of it for you, so you never need to remember to breathe. But you can take conscious control of it any time you want. This makes it the easiest access point to change your state of consciousness.

The first thing to do is notice how you're already breathing. Is your breath fast, or slow? Shallow, or deep? Is it even, or does one part of the breath get all the energy? You find out the answers by following the breath. From the first moment of the inhale, what are all the sensations you can register in every part of your body that moves as you breathe? Attend to the entire sequence: the inhale from bottom to top, any holding before you exhale, the release from top to bottom, and any pause before the next inhale. Along the way, are there any places where it sticks, skips, aches, or disappears? What is the overall quality like of each breath?

Before you do anything to change how you're breathing, awareness already works its magic. Once the body notices that breathing is constricted, or depressed, or sped up, it will immediately self-correct. The body prefers to be fully oxygenated, and it prefers to fully expel all spent air. So all you need to do is bring awareness to how you're breathing, and the quality of your breaths will spontaneously start to improve. You want to take note of how your breathing changes with the application of awareness.

Now you can help it along. Whatever the body is already trying to do to improve your breathing, you can lend your support to that process. Gradually, over several successive breaths, allow your breathing to become slower and longer and deeper. Breathe more fully into any places that feel tense or numb. There's no rush. If each breath, for several breaths, is incrementally better than the one before, your whole system will start to slow down and calm itself.

The key to breathing with awareness is gentleness. There is no need to force anything. You really just want to invite the breath to extend and expand. There is no limit to the number of breaths you can take, so allow it to change at its own pace. You are nudging and encouraging. Awareness is the primary intervention. You're helping awareness work its magic by making subtle and persistent suggestions. Could that exhale extend a little longer? Could the next inhale start a little further down in the belly? Could the whole thing slow down a tiny bit more?

There are many reasons to begin with breathing, but I will highlight one. You are cultivating the attitude of allowing. Rather than imposing an idea of how things should be, you are noticing how they already are, and then noticing how they wish to adjust. You slowly support the change that spontaneously wants to happen.

This attitude of allowing is essential in the next two phases of the meditation.

2. Releasing Somatic Tensions

Muscular tension probably doesn't work the way you think it does. When you stretch or get a massage, you're helping contracted muscles to open up again, to relax and lengthen. But there's a much easier way to release all of your muscular tension all at once. Just go to sleep. Even better, get knocked unconscious or go under anesthesia.

You ever pick up a sleeping child to transport them to their bed? They're totally floppy - no tension at all. It can be a little more complicated for adults, but the general release of muscular tension during deep sleep provides a clue about how tension works. Tension is habitual. We reproduce it on waking and maintain it throughout the day.

For this second phase of the meditation, you want to discover the subtle tensions throughout your body. Some tensions are obvious and not so subtle. For our purposes, you don't need to worry about those. Once you discover the universe of subtle tensions, you'll find that they underlie everything else.

Start by letting your attention be drawn to any notable sensations anywhere in your body. You might notice discomfort in your belly, or the air on your skin, or some body part that just seems to stand out. You will never be aware of your entire body at once. Some parts or areas come into your awareness, while others disappear from awareness. It doesn't matter why some places draw your attention. Just allow your attention to go to them.

In any body part you bring your awareness to, can you find any tension there? Is anything held in place? Is there any clenching, straining, bracing, squeezing, or grasping? Is there any compression, suppression, or containment of energy? Is there any sense of effort, trying, or forcing? Is there any feeling of urgency or protection?

I encourage you to relate with these sensations merely as patterns of tension or energy. It doesn't matter why the pattern is there. Don't get distracted by ideas about it. Just be with the body and how it has configured itself.

Scan for tensions in your pelvis, trunk, neck, and head. Are you clenching the sphincters around your anus or genitals? Are your abdominal organs free to expand, or are you containing them? Are the subtle muscles around your eyeballs able to be at ease? What about the back of your skull? Could the surface of your body, even your skin, become less solid and more diffuse?

As with breathing, the magic of awareness is sometimes enough to initiate a change. Noticing a subtle tension already helps it to release. Now find out how you might invite the tension to release a little bit more. Can something open, or unclench, or ease? Could it let go, no longer trying to control or protect anything? Can it diffuse, or evaporate, or subside?

A natural way to release any tension is to let it go as you exhale. Every exhale is already a natural letting go. Imagine that the energy holding the tension in place takes a ride out of your body along with the air you no longer need.

If you are inexperienced at tracking subtle body sensations, this process can be frustrating at first. You may even need to tense and release parts of your body deliberately so you can remember what releasing even feels like. You will quickly discover more with practice, so trust the process.

Remaining open, without tensing up again, is strange at first.

It is only through your mind that you know anything about your body. You habitually construct your experience of your body by holding tensions and exerting effort. Staying open fundamentally changes how you make sense of having a body. Mental tensions produce somatic tensions, but it also works the other way around. If you can learn to progressively allow your body to remain open and without effort, your mind will open and relax as well. Your very sense of what you are will expand into something unfamiliar.

3. Releasing Identifications

This third phase has a more abstract set of instructions. The breath and the body are sensed through the concrete experiences of movement and sensation. Your sense of what you are is more abstract, bridging into the realm of ideas and identities and concepts. It is a worthy area of study. For purposes of this meditation, however, I will strip the process down to a minimum set of instructions.

In the second phase, you scanned your body for sources of tension. Now you'll scan the entire field of your experience. Let me offer you a simple framework for how to do that.

There is something about you that never changes.

The circumstances of your life change. Your thoughts and feelings and activities change. On any given day, and in any given phase of your life, you will have different ideas about what you have, what you need, and what you fear. Even as all of that changes, something about you remains consistent. What is it that persists?

Let's imagine that some very benign aliens pluck you out of your life, take you away from everything you've ever known, and deposit you on a far away world where everything is pretty great. After a period of adjustment, you will no longer be concerned with any of your projects, goals, relationships, or responsibilities back in your old life. You will be free of all previous involvements, both the ones you liked and the ones that caused you suffering. Yet it will still be you - you without the trappings, you without any of the stuff you had once identified with.

Over the next few minutes, you will be transporting yourself to that alien world.

Start by noticing anything that has been preoccupying you. It could be a feeling that dominates your experience. It could be a judgment you have of yourself, or that you imagine someone else has of you. It could be something incomplete that you conceive of yourself as on the way to completing. It could be a need you are working to meet. It could be a role you consider yourself responsible for playing. It could be a memory you find yourself reviewing. It could be something you're trying to prove, something you're trying to prevent, something you're trying to fix, something you're hoping for, or waiting for. It could be a story you've been telling about yourself.

All of these kinds of preoccupations are what I'm calling identifications. Your identity is made up of who you think you are, and what you think you are. Whatever you repeatedly give your attention to becomes part of your identity.

If you somehow could strip away each of these identifications, one by one, you might be pretty disoriented. But it would still be you adjusting to that disorientation. You would still be you. You, it turns out, are actually the space in which all that content is occurring, no matter how much the contents change.

In the same free-form way you scanned the body for somatic tensions, scan the field of your self for any preoccupying identifications. Some will be positive, some negative, some neutral. Each time you find one, you want to make a distinction. The identification is the current object of your attention. You are the subject giving attention to the object. You wish, for this moment, to let go of the object. Doing so will not dent or damage or diminish the subject. It will not harm you in any way.

Invite the identification to unhook. You are not that feeling. You are not that relationship. You are not that story. You are not that character. You are a kind of infinite capacity in which all of that stuff is momentarily appearing. Allow the stuff to disappear.

Remember, this is only a step in a meditation. After the meditation is over, you can resume as many identifications as you want. Your concern now is not about what happens after the meditation. Trust that you have very strong habits of identification. Anything that seemed important before the mediation will probably seem important again after, whether you want it to or not! Don't worry about any of that now.

For now, as you examine each identification, invite it to disentangle, or vanish, or slip from your grasp. You are choosing, for this moment, to let go of these importances and these concerns. You are letting each piece of your identity float off into the ether from which it was formed. You are returning, bit by bit, to your unconditioned, original nature, free of any contents or concerns.

There is no one right way to release an identification. You will probably want to experiment as you go.

Notice that you were caught up in something. It seemed important. You thought it was part of you. Now you are finding out what you really are when you let go of your ideas about yourself. You may need to remain disoriented or undefined.

Keep breathing. Keep inviting the body to remain open. Let go of what you thought you were, and resdiscover what you are.

4. Enjoying Spaciousness

Each of these previous phases is a process of opening, releasing, and expanding. In a certain sense, you are becoming more spacious. Really, though, you have always been this spacious. The real difference is you are clearing away the contents of experience that have been captivating you and narrowing your focus. You are expanding your attention into the vast space that has always existed behind and around and between all the contents of consciousness.

I have yet to find any limit to how much awareness can expand. The mind can't conceive of the infinite, but it doesn't need to. That's not its job. It doesn't matter whether or not you have achieved any particular standard of spaciousness. There will always be further to go. What matters is that you are expanding.

For this phase of the meditation, you simply want to remain open without contracting, to whatever extent that's available to you.

When you turn your awareness away from the contents and toward the context, you'll find that there's literally nothing there. Anything you might experience there would only be more content. You might think that turning toward nothingness would be the most boring thing imaginable. Somehow, it's the opposite.

There is a vast amount to be discovered about infinite, changeless, empty spaciousness. It is always there, even when you are absorbed in the contents of experience. It is, and always has been, the context of everything you experience. You have spent your entire life developing a relationship with the contents. Now you are developing a relationship with the context.

There is one feature of spaciousness that is always available. It is fundamentally enjoyable.

It is a different kind of enjoyment than the pleasure you get from the momentary fulfillment of a desire, so you might miss it at first. That's okay. You have all the time you want to find out more about it.

Find out about it right now. Open into the spaciousness and find out for yourself what is enjoyable about it. It might be evocative of something sublime, like love or bliss. It could be the much more subtle quality of peace that comes from quiet, or from the cessation of activity. You're not looking for a peak experience or an extreme state.

All there is to do here is remain open and enjoy it, in whatever way you do. You are remembering, or returning to, something of your true nature.

Even a minute spent enjoying spaciousness can change the context of everything else you experience. So why not give yourself the luxury of several minutes?

You may have already guessed the real secret to enjoying spaciousness. You don't need to start with any of the other steps. You don't need to clear the field or release tensions or release identifications. Those are helpful steps in finding your way back to the full scope of your true nature, beyond the character you play. But the context of your true nature is always there, regardless of what's in the foreground. Taking time to clear away some of the contents, and expose the background, helps you rediscover a relatively unfettered awareness of spaciousness.

The more you practice hanging out and enjoying the spaciousness, however, the more you start to become aware of it all the time.

Instructions in Brief

1. Start by bringing awareness to how you're already breathing. Notice how simple awareness already allows your breathing to self-correct. Help that process along by inviting your breath to gradually become deeper, and longer, and slower.
2. Scan your body for subtle tensions. Allow awareness of the tension to support it in gently releasing. Invite the tension to gradually soften, releasing it with the breath. Seek for increasingly subtle internal tensions. Encourage the body to remain open without contracting.
3. Scan your sense of self for identifications. Notice anything that you think is you, and find out how you might release it back to the ether. Release each source of temporary identification, and open up to the unchanging background of your self. Allow your self to remain open without contracting.
4. With your body and self open and expanded, enjoy the spaciousness that has always been available. Discover what is enjoyable about the background, the empty space, or infinite nothingness. Take as long as you wish to enjoy it.

If you have 20 minutes available in which to meditate, you might spend 2 or 3 minutes beginning with breathing, 3 or 4 minutes releasing somatic tensions, 5 or 6 minutes releasing identifications, and whatever time remains enjoying the infinite. However far you're able to get in the time available is a good amount. Going through these phases over many different practice sessions is far more valuable than making any one practice session long.

In the end, the goal is to enjoy the spaciousness of true meditation. The initial steps are just one way to clear the foreground, in service of making contact with the background.