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Meditation is a state of being rather than an action. We use certain actions or techniques, such as mindfulness, to help us experience meditation.
Put simply, meditation is the experience that remains once the activity of your thoughts, emotions and physical sensations have settled down and fallen away. In this state there is no activity, no effort, or doing; there is only being. It is a state of total rest with full awareness. It is a state of pure experience, which will give you a sense of who or what you are behind all the noise; it is inner peace.
Considering that most of our days are spent lost in mental and physical activity, never questioning that there is more to us than that, meditation gives us not just a mental understanding, but a deeply known and felt experience that we are more than what we are thinking, feeling, and doing. The good news is that whoever or whatever we are behind all this activity feels unmistakeably more peaceful and pleasant.
That is not to say that if you meditate your thoughts, emotions and external life are always going to be peaceful and pleasant. However, with practice, you will become more effective in positively managing your thoughts, emotions and the world around you from that place of meditation. This will improve your sense of clarity and well-being, allowing you to work around difficulties much more easily and avoid some difficulties altogether.
The health and performance benefits of meditation are well documented and are very much attainable. However, these are merely by-products of the experience of meditation itself and the profound nature of this experience should be acknowledged and respected.
There have been countless attempts to explain what meditation is and all fall short, including this one. It is like trying to explain the taste of an apple to someone who has never eaten fruit; words will never be able to capture the experience of meditation. Luckily for us there are as many meditation techniques as there are varieties of apple, it’s just a matter of trying them for yourself and, with the right guidance, finding what works best for you.