Meditation is the art of quieting the mind. When the mind is quiet, concentration is increased and we begin to experience inner peace in the midst of our hectic lives. This inner peace is what attracts so many people to meditation and is a quality everyone can benefit from.

The most common benefits are reducing anxiety and improving one's health, making the mind more focused and becoming more connected with the inner workings of our body and mind.

This process of exploring to reach subtler levels of the mind and consciousness, eventually connects us to our primordial mind or our essence like nature, like a mother and daughter being reunited after so many years. 

Following birth, we interact with reality as a non dual or all inclusive experience, as the rational ego mind and psyche are still being developed. A new born baby does not experience any separation of their inner and outer worlds as we do. Look into the eyes of a new born and see how they experience their waking hours wrapped by a secure non dual heart and an open spirit free from the chains of the ego mind.

Look into the eyes of the same infant several years later and you will see major changes as they will now be interacting with reality from a dualistic mind, as a solid, permanent person separated from the outside world. This feeling of being a separate individual or "I AM" therefore "YOU ARE", is what perpetuates ignorance and suffering. It is only through a spiritual journey with the aid of tools like meditation, that we are able to awaken and see that the reality created by the ego and rational mind is a mere illusion. Without a spiritual path, we remain oblivious to the fact that the relative reality of the universe with its planets and living beings is more like a hologram.

 The ultimate goal of any spiritual path is to unveil this distorted sense of reality by cutting through the illusionary nature of material objects, despite the fact that matter will always appear so real and solid to both the eye and touch. Scientists have recently discovered, as did the Buddha over 2,500 years ago, that nothing in this universe is solid, permanent and existing inherently from it's own side. It is not surprising that the quote from the Heart Sutra "form is empty, emptiness is form, emptiness is not other than form, form is not other than emptiness. In the same way feelings, discrimination, compositional factors and consciousness are also empty ", is so central to Buddhist philosophy