To Meditate is to Mediate. MEDIATING between ALL the DIFFERENT sides of ourselves—the good, the bad and the ugly—promotes CLARITY, especially about our dark side.
This is why Meditation needs to include, as the Dalai Lama calls it, INTELLECTUAL INQUIRY. He says, “Meditation without intellectual inquiry is a pacifier.”
Meditation with INTELLECTUAL INQUIRY leads to DEEP Positive Changes in our lives and ourselves. Challenging our very way of being in the world helps to set our thinking straight. After all, crooked thinking leads to crooked actions.
Straight thinking, according to the Yoga Sutras (wisdom literature of Yoga) makes our ‘rascal’ mind quiet. Then we are naturally pulled into the stillness of Samadhi.
“Samadhi” translates as sam, “to bring it all together” and dhi, “in our own way.” Understanding why things happened to us, in the way they did, we become more AUTHENTIC.