In my years of teaching meditation and working as a psychic and medium, I have come to believe one thing with total conviction: most people have never actually meditated. They have relaxed. They have breathed. They have sat quietly with a lovely image in their mind’s eye, a beach, perhaps, or a forest clearing. All of that is good and useful. But it isn’t meditation. Not in the deeper sense of the word. And I want to spend this article making the case for why that distinction matters more than almost anything else in a spiritual life.
I say this not as a critic of relaxation techniques, but as someone who has watched thousands of students, over decades, stop just short of the door they were actually looking for.
The question we don’t ask often enough
In mediumship development circles, psychic training groups, spiritual gatherings of every stripe, meditation is treated almost universally the same way: ten or fifteen minutes at the start of the evening, a way of settling the room before “the real work” begins, the linking, the sensing, the psychic exercises. I have run rooms like this myself, more times than I can count. But I want to pose a question to you now, and I’d ask you to actually sit with it rather than answer it quickly: what if meditation was never meant to be the warm-up act? What if it was always meant to be the main event?
People have meditated for four thousand years. Across the ancient Middle East and far beyond, seekers sat in mantra and chant for hours at a time, not to calm themselves before something else, but in pursuit of epiphany itself. Real, sustained, life-altering states of awareness. They weren’t preparing. They had arrived.
So here is the second question I want to put to you. If those who came before us were capable of that — genuinely capable of touching something vast and transformative through stillness, what have we, in our modern hurry, quietly agreed to settle for instead?
I don’t ask that to unsettle you for its own sake. I ask it because I believe the answer changes everything about how you sit down to meditate tomorrow morning.
What meditation is actually for
Let me be direct, as plainly as I know how, because I think spiritual teaching is too often wrapped in more mystery than it needs. The purpose of meditation is connection a real, felt bridge between mind, body, and spirit. Not belief. Not hope. A knowing. A lived recognition that you are already part of something vast, intelligent, and entirely well-disposed toward you. Whatever name you give it, God, Source, Spirit, the Universe, meditation is the practice by which you remember you were never separate from it in the first place.
This is why I would ask every meditator, however experienced, to sit with a further question before their next practice: am I meditating to feel calmer, or am I meditating to remember who I actually am? Both are worthwhile. Only one of them will change your life.
How to actually get there, my guidance, step by step
I want to offer something practical here, because I have found over the years that people are hungry for structure, not just philosophy. This is the progression I teach.
1. Begin with stillness, not performance. You do not need incense, a perfect cushion, or forty uninterrupted minutes. You need five minutes and the discipline to remain physically still. Sit with your spine reasonably upright. The lotus position is pleasant if it suits your body; it is entirely unnecessary to the work.
2. Use the breath as a door, not a destination. Slow the breath in through the nose, held briefly, out through the mouth. This is where most teaching stops. I would ask you to go further: once the body has settled, let the breath fade into the background. It got you to the door. It is not the room.
3. Set a real intention. Before closing your eyes, state inwardly: I am opening to connection. Not a visualisation. Not a goal. A single, quiet declaration of purpose. This one sentence, in my experience, is the difference between a session that relaxes you and one that transforms you.
4. Release the idea of emptiness as the goal. So many of my students have told me they feel they are “failing” at meditation because thoughts keep arriving. I would ask you to consider a different measure of success entirely: you are not trying to reach a void. You are trying to reach a presence. Let thoughts pass like weather. Do not chase the empty mind, it was never the point.
Deepening the work questions for the serious student
Once the daily habit is established, the work changes character. It stops being about technique and starts being about depth. I would put these questions to any student who feels ready to go further:
Are you willing to let this take years? Depth cannot be rushed. Lengthen your sessions slowly, five minutes to fifteen, fifteen to thirty, over months, not days.
Have you considered sound? Chant, mantra, or simple toning can carry you further than silence alone, exactly as it did for the ancient practitioners I mentioned earlier. Even one repeated word, spoken softly, can open a door that silence cannot.
What happens when you stop demanding an answer? Bring your biggest questions, why am I here, what is my purpose, into the stillness, and then let them go, rather than mentally pursuing them. The answers that arrive this way tend to come as feeling, not language. This is not evasion. It is how the process actually works.
What is your body telling you? Over time, many meditators report a physical sense of lightness or expansion. This is not imagination. It is the body beginning to register a state most people never allow themselves to reach.
Sustaining the practice for a lifetime, not a fortnight
Here is where I have watched the greatest number of sincere people fall away, not because the practice stops working, but because life intervenes and meditation quietly becomes optional. If you want this to last decades rather than weeks, I would ask you to consider these final questions honestly:
Are you treating this as maintenance, or as a one-time achievement? You do not meditate once to become “connected” forever, any more than you eat once to never feel hunger again. It is a daily act of remembering, repeated for as long as you live.
Are you willing to let your own technique change? What serves a beginner, breath counting, guided imagery, will likely feel too structured five or ten years in. The willingness to loosen your own method as your connection deepens is, I believe, a mark of real mastery.
Can you carry this quality of attention outside the sitting itself? A moment of the same stillness while walking, while washing up, while watching the sky, keeps the thread alive between formal sessions.
When it goes stale, and it will, occasionally, will you return to the intention, or abandon it? Go back to that opening line. Mean it freshly. This alone has saved more meditation practices than any technique I have ever taught.
The natural progression, and the biggest question of all
For those drawn toward mediumship or psychic development, this deeper meditation is not preparation. It is the foundation everything else grows from. The sensing, the linking, the awareness of spirit, all of it becomes more natural and more reliable once mind and spirit already know how to meet in true stillness, rather than a hastily rehearsed calm.
But even without any interest in that path, I would leave you with the same progression, and the same final question. We move from technique, to depth, to a lived, daily sense of belonging to something far larger than ourselves. Meditation, approached this way, becomes a curative for a tired mind, a curative for a strained body, and, I believe, the clearest available answer to the oldest question we carry: why am I here, and am I loved?
I have sat with that question in stillness more times than I could count. The answer I have found there, every time, is yes. I would ask you to sit long enough to find out whether you arrive at the same one.
Please feel free to visit my website, which is: Tonystockwell.com
