Teja Anand

Lifelong Meditation and Awakening Guide

The question, “How do I meditate in order to awaken to a fuller experience of life?” is one that gets asked by thousands of seekers around the planet every single day.

Yet, according to my podcast guest today, Teja Anand, author of Watching Your Life: Meditation Simplified and Demystified, meditation is not really something that you can do, it’s actually more of a non-doing. Paradoxically, in order to reach our “goals” in meditation, we can only “get there” by having no goals at all.

According to Teja, that’s because as people we already are in our natural enlightened state, and thus you cannot try to be something that you already are. It’s only because of our identification with the mind, including all our thoughts and feelings, that we feel separate from our natural state.

In today’s podcast, Teja shares some of his own experiences of enlightenment in order to help our podcast listeners shift towards an identification with our more authentic self, which is simply awareness and being. He said,

“Awareness can’t do anything but just be the witness. So when you ask the question, ‘who are you really?’ ‘who is ‘I’ that owns this mind, this body?’ it’s that thing that is just sitting still looking, watching, noticing. So when we say go beyond the ego, it would be simply shifting your perception from believing you are the things that you have to the you that has them.”

Show Highlights

How the purpose of meditation extends beyond mere health benefits
How meditation helps reveal to us our true nature
What changes you could experience as a result of committing to meditation practice
How meditation is not a doing, but a non-doing
What meditation methods you can implement, including…
- Meditation on an object (concentration approach)
- Meditation on no object (awareness approach)
How meditation is like tennis
How to surrender and let go of the need for all practices whatsoever
Why to consider living without goals, even in our Western goal-driven hemisphere
How to implement tools of spiritual inquiry, including the question “who (or what) am I”
Why the main form of spirituality in India is Bhakti, or devotion
A story about 3 people living in New York City who sought enlightenment
A personal account of awakening (very interesting story!)