Meditation helps us access and internalize the good in the universe, letting it expand within us and become a resource we carry around all the time. The way we first learn to do this internalizing of any kind of presence is through our relationships with others. The people around us when we are growing up help us form some initial internal framework of what people and reality are like. We learn others are harsh and scary or that there is great good in the world – maybe both. We then carry around these internal representations and they “help” us interpret all the other things we experience. They also help us form “rules” or “models” we unknowingly consult while interacting with the world. This all happens most of the time underneath our conscious awareness, so these internal models are having an effect all the time without us knowing it.
Luckily, no matter what your early models were like, you can form and shape these internal models over time through practice. The way we do that is by imagining and practicing a helpful presence – locating it and then letting it expand and seep into all the parts of our being. Think of someone you know has a calm confidence – not someone who is pretending, but who really has some gravity to them. Most of us are able to filter through our experience and find one person who is strong. We have a certain magnetism inside us that leads us to find these folks. I have also spoken with people who, even though they haven’t had great external models, have found real goodness and compassion inside themselves. Sometimes it seems to have spontaneously generated. The fact that we can conjure up these images of goodness whether from fragments of a few different external figures in our lives or a spirit buried deep within ourselves means there must be good somewhere out there. Just don’t forget it’s actually inside you, too.
The next thing to do, once you locate a model that is helpful, is what some have called “practicing presence.” It is practicing the presence of the good – calling up the essence of those good and trustworthy humans you have known and allowing the goodness they embody to expand in your being until it is also who you are and has helped reshaped those previous internal models. Even if you have already had somewhat good models in the past, practicing the presence of the good and compassionate, in all its forms, is helpful.
The goal is that this goodness ceases to be attached to any one person, but is just goodness itself that overtakes your being. You will find that there is no one person or character that represents good perfectly, but you can take different things from different people – the ways they are specifically good. You will also want to move from complete dependence on one specific person to practicing the “Spirit” of goodness, unattached and freeform. We are never fully independent of others, but in this way we move from needing to look to others for our security to becoming one of the responsible ones to whom others look for their strength. That is what happens when you take to practicing this Presence within yourself: you become a helpful figure for someone else to carry around inside themselves.
If we take part in practicing the good Presence, we can stop blaming others for not giving us what we need and stop waiting around for them to come and make things right. We will then have no more excuses. We will have to take responsibility and become substantial ourselves – from within. Careful: through meditation, you will become powerful. For some reason, that is scary. It is probably because we are so used to looking outside ourselves for strength and not within.