Contemplate This: The Spiritual Practice of Simple Meditation.

Simple meditation is the best meditation to practice. Simple meditation is sitting quietly for a specified amount of time. It need not be any more than that, but people try to complicate it with instructions.

Sitting quietly, you can watch the breathing. Sitting quietly, you can intend the body to stay completely unmoving. Sitting quietly, you can be aware of what is arising, passing, present and absent. But you can also simply sit quietly.

You can pray to know what the best meditation practice is for you. The best practice is the simplest, quietest, and commonest practice, and that practice is sitting quietly. You can sit for five minutes a day. You can sit for an hour a day. You can sit when you are on a bus or waiting at lights or in a meeting. You can stand quietly or lie quietly.

The best spiritual practice is simplest. It is simplest to do this practice simply, without dressup, heralding, or notice. In time it becomes common to everyone: because we all grow old and must sit for certain periods of time.

A meditation teacher was once asked what she taught. "We teach sitting quietly," she said.

"Yes," the questioner asked, "But what religion or school do you belong to?"

"We don't belong to any school or teaching or religion," she said. "We simply meet together and we simply sit together."

That is the simplicity of simple meditation. It is like the simplicity of God Himself. The fact that we can simply sit is a great good. Does it have any effects or rewards? No. The effect of sitting is sitting. The reward of sitting is sitting. And what that effect and reward is, is the sitting itself. Over time it becomes clear that sitting and the rest of life is not two things, but it also becomes clear that sitting and the rest of life are not the same as one another. From sitting, then, a tacit - that is, a felt or a sensed - understanding is born.