I’ve been contemplating the meditation session at the yoga centre last week. It was all very pleasant and I will certainly go again even though it is not my flavour of meditation.

The teacher essentially guided us using a variation of Vipassana or concentration practice, mostly on the breath. All well and good but my preferred practice has no method or technique and is closer in style to Zen Zazen practice which means ‘just sitting’. There’s no method, no technique, nothing to do but be with whatever arises and simply allow everything to happen as it is.

This style of meditation has no explicit, immediate purpose or goal to attain other than the immediate awareness of all that is arising moment to moment. It doesn’t try to do anything in particular. It is not in of itself remedial or therapeutic (indeed it is often challenging) and yet over time it is transformative. You naturally and spontaneously recognise impermanence and inseparability, are able accept it all and flow with it.

Rather curiously you also find that what you ordinarily might think of as ‘self’ becomes increasingly tenuous and prone to disappear. The self changes from a fixed set of ideas to the perpetual flow of immediate experience.