The I Am Meditation

The Indian Yogi and guru, Sri Nisargadatta Maharaja was instructed by his guru to relentlessly focus on the feeling of I Am.

At first it seems like a strange thing to do, and it is unclear even how to do it. 

What does this mean I Am?

I am, as in, I exist.

I am something, here I am.

What am I, not sure, but I Am.

This is the baseline feeling of being alive, of just being conscious and nothing else. 

People identify as many things based on what has happened in their life - their profession, their activities, and their place in a family, for instance. These are labels of things that they do, and these can change - one would lose them if they lost their memory, for instance. 

The I Am that Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj was encouraged to focus on is the I Am that is absolutely us, without any labels - just the feeling of existing as we are. 

If we lost our memory, we would still access the feeling of being conscious, being alive. The goal is to forget or ignore all your labels and focus on this feeling.

While really concentrating on this feeling, one does not focus on anything else. Our total capacity of awareness is focused on our own being. 

Contemplation of what we are is a very interesting investigation.  It really is asking - what is everything, what is all this? 

There may not be answers, but the consistent focusing on these questions, and the focusing on the feeling I Am of being alive, will bring about a change in the overall state of being for the practitioner.

Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj discovered a lot just from focusing on this I Am, and many many others have as well. By focusing on this, you don't focus so much on your problems and suffering, and eventually your problems and suffering seem less important, and you can choose to give them less importance.

This focus on I Am is a state of meditation, so you achieve a concentrated focus on it. Eventually, this leads to other states of being called realization and awakening.

You realize you are just a being in the world, separate from the persona in the game of life you always played, and were strongly attached to. You awake from that state of being where the game of life is all there is, and the game is all that you are.

When the game is all that you are, you suffer when it goes in a way you don't like, and you have little relief from that. When you have the focus on I Am as an alternative state - the focus on what it feels like to be alive apart from the game of life - then you have relief.

There will always be situations in life to potentially cause anxiety, stress, and suffering. How we react in these situations determines how much anxiety, stress, and suffering we will experience from them. When we can give ourselves an alternative focus - one that sees that we are really just some type of being, in some type of body, having some kind of experience somewhere, and we don't really know the facts behind any of it, for instance - then we can choose to put less importance on these potentially troubling situations.

Check out the book I Am That, it is a compilation of talks that Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj had with visitors to his home. His philosophy is explained, which he called Nisarga (Natural) Yoga.

More information about Nisarga Yoga is available on this website.