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This post is part of a series. For the first part check out Unguided Meditation.

This post is a how to and what to expect from unguided meditation.

The first thing you need to know is that there is no wrong way to do unguided meditation. If you need to open your eyes for a moment, stretch out your legs, wiggle or fidget, or move your hand and arm position that’s fine. If you need to slouch, or you feel like sitting up erect, that’s fine. If you absolutely feel like you can’t focus on anything and you’re sitting there one chaotic moment to the next, that’s fine.

The second thing to know, is that there are good things that you can be doing, when you do have energy to do them. The key is to just go with the flow. Unguided meditation is all about going with the flow. In this flow however, different moments will vary from one another.

There are a variety of productive attitudes that you can take during your meditation. You can focus on breathing. You can have a single pointed focus on an arbitrary point that feels right to you, for example a spot beneath your nose. If you’re having a great train of thought, and you feel like you’re making sense of things that you previously couldn’t make sense of, it can be good to focus on continuing that train of thought. If you feel like you want to just let go of everything and allow time to pass, that is also a great effort to make.

There are also a variety of productive moments that can occur during meditation. I like to call these the fruits of meditation. The first and I would argue the best, but not necessarily the most enjoyable, is a philosophical mode of thought. This is essentially learning during meditation through spontaneous thought. Maybe you realize a better way to do your work, or something important to you about a relationship. Maybe you just connect some ideas that are spinning around in your head, or you have a new idea. The beauty of this fruit is that it compounds. The more philosophical thought you have, the more you know. This is why I think it’s the best of the fruits.

The second, which is quite enjoyable, but not the most enjoyable. Is what might be called returning to yourself. This is when your mind has been wandering, or you have been focusing on some meditative point for some time and all of a sudden something breaks the stream of consciousness and you realize “Ah, here I am.”  It might just simply be spontaneously becoming aware of the nerves in your head. It’s a localizing feeling, you realize the space you are in. This is productive, and gets more intense and clear the more you practice unguided meditation.

The third, which I think is the most enjoyable, is bliss. Once you’ve spent enough hours meditating (not in one session, but over the course of your whole practice, e.g. months or years), you can enter a state where you have no problems. You are overcome by a feeling of well-being, happiness, and like nothing matters except the current feeling of bliss. In this state you don’t even care if you have productive thoughts or return to yourself, you’re just happy to be meditating. Unfortunately all meditations come to an end, but don’t worry, the next time you sit you might return to the feeling of bliss, and if you don’t surely sometime soon it will happen again.

Finally I want to conclude that the best thing that can happen during meditation, is to gain self-knowledge. I would categorize this under the first fruit, philosophical thought, but instead of being broadly about learning anything, it is specific knowledge about yourself. When this happens it feels like you really learned a lot, and you’ll feel really good about it.