What Is Meditation

Meditation does not mean emptying the mind.

That is the first thing to clarify. The image of the sage isolated on a mountain, motionless, free of thoughts, is a fiction. It does not describe the practice. It describes an expectation. An ideal that leads most people to believe they cannot meditate, because the mind keeps talking.

The mind always talks. That is its job.

Meditation in the Chinese tradition is called jìngzuò (靜坐), which literally means sitting in stillness. Not “don’t think.” Not “disappear.” Sit. Stillness. And stillness here is not the absence of thoughts: it is stability in the midst of them.

The term that describes this quality is jìng (靜). In the internal arts system, jìng is not a passive state. It is the capacity to remain centred while movement, external or internal, continues. It is the same quality trained in static postures, in zhànzhuāng 站樁, in rooting.

The working principle is simple: you do not fight the mind. You work with the body.

Instead of trying to stop thoughts (an operation that produces the opposite effect, as anyone who has tried knows well) attention is brought to physical sensations. The breath. Weight. Warmth. The contact of the feet with the ground. These are concrete anchors. A mind trying to control the mind produces tension. A body sensing the body produces presence.

There is a second principle, often overlooked: practice must become enjoyable.

Not in the sense of immediate gratification. In the sense that the nervous system must associate meditation with something worth repeating. A practice built solely on effort and discipline eventually exhausts itself. A practice that generates stillness, clarity, a sense of opening, this one consolidates over time. The mind is drawn to what produces wellbeing: the work consists in guiding it toward the right sensations, with patience, without forcing.

Meditation is, in essence, training to sense. Not to think less. Not to control more. But to perceive with greater precision what is already present: in the body, in the breath, in the moment.

This is the foundation upon which all internal practice is built. Qigong 氣功, Tai Ji Quan 太極拳, work with subtle energies: all of this requires the capacity to feel from within. Without this capacity, forms remain external gestures. Correct, perhaps. But empty.

Meditation is not an addition to practice. It is its foundation.