The Ultimate Meditation for Performance

Alec Rasmussen · September 2024 · 4 min read

In recent years, meditation has been packaged as a tool for performance enhancement.

It’s a misunderstood practice.

In the West, it has been swept into the same wave of commercialization that modernized and diluted once-sacred practices like yoga.

Meditation has become a prescription.
And when it is treated like medicine, its true power fades.

Let me offer a few insights about meditation that you may not have encountered before.

Meditation is not about gaining anything.
It’s about losing everything.

If you approach meditation as a means to achieve, it will fail you.
For it is meant to strip away the unnecessary, not to add.

Meditation is not a path to somewhere.
It is the road to nowhere.

And nowhere is where peace resides.
Somewhere always leads to more destinations, more distractions.
It leads you further away from yourself.

Meditation is not an activity; it is a state of being.
If it is treated as just another task, it reveals none of its secrets.

What is the ultimate meditation?
It is to not meditate at all.
The ultimate meditation is to be meditative.

Meditation is a quality, not an act.
If you allow this quality to permeate your daily actions,
your play,
your work,
you will experience the effects of true meditation.

This is the Ultimate Way of Being.

When you are meditative, you merge with your surroundings.
Your relaxation deepens.
Your actions become fluid.
Even the tools in your hands seem to respond to your meditative presence.
Your instincts become actions.
And when your instincts become actions, those actions are pure.
And complete.

When your actions are pure and complete,
you will naturally produce the outcome the moment requires.

Search for “meditation” online, and you’ll be overwhelmed by instructions.
How to sit.
How to breathe.
How to think.
How to place your fingers.

All you will find is form, form, form.
But meditation, in its deepest essence, has little effect on the vast majority who practice it.

Think of the people you know who meditate.
How many of them are truly calm, no matter the circumstance?
How many are in control of their emotions?
How many are living in a constant state of bliss?

Look to the monasteries and temples, where heads are shaved and vows are taken.
How many Buddhas have you seen walking out of those walls?

Let us end this charade.
Let us stop worshipping the form and delve into the truth.

The world today idolizes appearance.
It bows at the altar of a painted god.

Whether they are athletes, artists, or leaders, I do not instruct my clients on how to meditate.
I immerse them in the very essence of meditation—what it truly is, and what it is not.

When they grasp this understanding, meditation becomes not something they do,
but something they embody.

And just like mastering any craft,
unless you become it, you will never experience it fully.

For those who are serious,
meditation is about becoming far less than you ever thought you could be.
And the irony is, as a man becomes less, he grows more powerful.

His talent comes fully under his command, and he gains equanimity.
Why?

Because he is no longer subject to interference.
Interference from what?
Interference from the false persona he has created.

Meditation is not about the act of meditating.
It is about becoming meditative.

Meditation is not a pill.
Forget the idea of “10 minutes of meditation a day.”
That is for the unserious.

Your work must become a meditation.
Then you will create masterpieces.

Your existence must become a meditation.
Then you will not be swept away by the moods of the mind.

There is a principle that applies to all things, but let’s start with meditation so that you may understand it.

Here it is:
As long as there is a meditator,
there can be no meditation.

This is the crossroads where I spend most of my time with my clients.
Artists tend to understand this intuitively.
When they create their finest work, they become what they do.

If, while meditating, you see in your mind “the meditator meditating,”
you are simply going through the motions.

As long as the meditator and the act of meditation remain separate, there is no union.
And without union, there is no alchemy.

When the meditator becomes the meditation, there is meditation.
When the meditator disappears, magic arises.

Is this not the case with the greatest artists?

The concept of the doer is the ultimate interference.
It stands between instinct and its pure expression.

I do not believe in “change.”
I work on transformation.

Those who change, change back.
Those who transform are made anew.

You have seen a caterpillar become a butterfly.
But have you ever seen a butterfly become a caterpillar?

For those dedicated to a life of unbroken bliss, meditation will no longer be a task.
It will become their new skin.
It will be worn every day.

It will protect them from the whims of the mind, and from the pains of circumstance.

Whatever they do—whether mundane or complex—will approach perfection.
This new life will be their benediction.

They will walk as Kings among men.
For they will have become Masters of Themselves.