Meditation is experience. Visualizing. Questioning. Breathing. These are just different types of meditative experiences. Visualizing helps us focus on mental objects, but it also stirs memories and emotions. Questioning digs deeper into philosophical ideas, but it also spins and twirls the mind instead of quieting and calming it. Sometimes visualizing helps keep a drifting mind focused on imagining. Sometimes questioning meditation helps keep an active mind focused on processing. But focusing on the breath quiets and focuses any mind, whether intellectual, artistic, rational, emotional, young, or old. Even during one meditation session, we might use different techniques, but the purpose of every moment in meditation should be the same: to bring the mind closer to pure consciousness.

But what is pure consciousness? With our mortal eyes and ears, we each only ever witness a sliver of reality because we can't know what we don't experience. And of what we do experience, we only notice a fraction of it. So we make sense of what we know with categories. Labels. Boxes. As children, our boxes are few. Good and bad. Right and wrong. Over time, we expand our collection, and as our inventory grows, we spot patterns and start categorizing. We package ideas into boxes with bold labels, and often discard the ends that don't quite fit. Meditation helps end our reliance on mental warehousing. We learn to stop packaging and filing everything away, and instead allow new experiences to be what they are – not what we've come to expect from them. Likes and dislikes. Labels and categories. When we box and label the things we encounter, we live life as archivists. The many styles of meditation all help bring the same qualities back to our lives – clarity, attention, and readiness. They remove our lenses, they empty our boxes, and they let us start every moment as a new beginning.