Meditations with Lance not Marcus Aurelius

01-26-2026

True Meditation: The Presence That Never Leaves

True meditation isn't something you practice for 20 minutes and then forget. It’s a presence that stays with you at all times.

Pause for a single moment.

Notice this simple fact: you are here and now.

Not as a name. Not as a story. Not as a memory. Not as a role you play in the world. Just as the quiet sense of being that is already present before any thought appears.

You don’t have to create this. You don’t have to sustain it. You don’t even have to understand it. It is simply here.

This is where everything begins.

There is a widespread misconception that meditation is something you do for a period of time. You sit down for 15 minutes, try to quiet the monkey mind, follow the breath, repeat a mantra, wait for a timer to ring or a video to end, and then return to your usual lifestyle of distraction, urgency, and autopilot.

This is not bad or without value. This type of meditation can calm the nervous system. It can bring clarity. It can soften the edges of a stressful life, but it still doesn’t free you from the deeper burden that quietly sits underneath the whole effort.

The moment meditation becomes a practice, a hidden assumption is born:

I have to do something regularly to feel okay.

As if being whole is a result you earn through discipline.

As if true presence is a reward for consistency.

As if peace is something you achieve in the future.

This single assumption has shaped not only how we meditate, but how we live. We begin to see life itself as a project. A journey toward becoming something better, calmer, wiser, more complete. In doing so, we quietly postpone wholeness into "later".

Later never arrives.

It only appears as a thought now.

Most people don’t turn toward meditation because life is flowing beautifully. They turn toward it when something feels off. When the mind feels scattered. When peace feels distant. When they sense that something inside needs to be fixed.

So meditation becomes another form of escape. A brief refuge from pain. A small island of calm in a turbulent sea. It's like a bandage applied to a wound that is not on the surface but at the root.

Real meditation is not escape. It is return.

It is not a technique to get away from life. It is a way of meeting life so completely that there is nowhere else to go.

What most people call life is, in practice, a continuous stream of thought. An internal narration made of memories, expectations, judgments, and stories. This stream quietly pulls attention away from what is actually here and places it into what was or what might be.

Listen to the inner dialogue of an ordinary day:

“I have to pick up my kids from school” (future)

“I can’t believe Lance said that about me” (past)

“I can’t wait for my holidays” (future)

“I shouldn’t have said that to John” (past)

The mind moves almost exclusively between what has already happened (past) and what has not yet happened (future). In doing so, it rarely touches what is actually happening now.

Here is something subtle and strange: even the future is past.

The moment you imagine tomorrow, you use yesterday’s memories to build it. The moment you predict what will happen, you assemble it from old experiences, old knowledge, and old patterns. The future only exists as a thought appearing now, constructed out of what has already been.

So the story of “me” is also past.

Who I think I am.

What I believe I have done.

What I think I should become.

What I hope to avoid.

What I want to achieve.

All of it is a bundle of memories and projections, repeated so often that they begin to feel solid, personal, and real.

But the past does not exist in the Now.

It only appears when you bring it back as thought.

This is the quiet mechanism of the ego. The ego is not a thing. It is an activity. It is the continuous movement of attention into memory and imagination, followed by identification with what is found there. It lives by recycling yesterday and rehearsing tomorrow.

Your senses meet the world directly. But your mind interprets what the senses reveal through old lenses. Through conditioning, through experience and through habit. Then it tells a story about what it thinks is happening.

That story becomes “my life”.

So what does this have to do with meditation?

Meditation is not something you add to this process.

It is what reveals it.

Meditation is the return of attention to what is here before the story begins. Before the label appears. Before the judgment forms. Before the memory or the expectation takes over.

Lance, how do you meditate?

Not by forcing the mind to be silent. Not by fighting or rejecting thought. Not by trying to reach a special state.

You simply observe the totality of life unfolding in the now.

You simply notice.

You notice the breath as it moves.

You notice a sound as it arises and fades.

You notice a thought as it appears and dissolves.

Through noticing, something deeper becomes clear: there is an Awareness in which all of this is happening.

This Awareness does not come and go.

Thoughts come and go.

Sensations come and go.

Emotions come and go.

Even your sense of being a person comes and goes.

The Awareness that knows these movements remains.

This is why the sages say: meditation is not becoming something. It is remaining as you are.

No effort is required to be what you truly are. Effort is only required to be what you are not.

To remain as simple Being requires nothing.

To become a “someone” requires constant work. Constant thought. Constant reference to memory. Constant comparison, defense, and projection.

In this sense, ignorance is not passive. It is active. It is sustained by attention.

Imagine a clear, open sky. From that sky, clouds begin to form. The clouds are not separate from the sky. They are made of the same substance. But when attention fixes on the clouds, the sky seems to disappear.

The ego is like this.

It is a pattern of thought arising within Being. When attention becomes absorbed in that pattern, Being seems to be lost. But it was never actually gone.

Real meditation is the recognition of the sky, even while the clouds move.

This is why meditation is not limited to sitting.

You can be present while walking.

You can be present while working.

You can be present while speaking.

Thought can function. The body can move. Words can form. And yet, the background of Awareness can remain undisturbed.

Life does not need to stop for presence to begin.

Presence is what allows life to move without becoming a struggle.

This is not something you do for 15 minutes.

This is not something you schedule.

This is not something you achieve.

This is something you recognize.

And once recognized, it does not belong to time.

When presence is unbroken, time has nowhere to stand.

When presence is all-pervading, space has nowhere to begin.

Remain here and now. Nothing else is required.