Happy 2025,

It’s been a little while, but I am excited to say the newsletter is returning for 2025. This year I am determined, by popular request, to make this an audio email for those who prefer it that way. I get audio emails from some people that interest me, and I find myself connecting to them more powerfully by letting myself listen, rather than look yet again at the same old screen.

So you can read it, or you can listen to it. They are nearly the same, but when I stand in front of the microphone, sometimes spontaneity take me over, and the content is phrased differently.

Resuming what we started back in 2023

We paused our newsletter in 2024 as we took on the reorganization of our meditation program. Now, after fifteen meditation retreats and three seminars, we can resume, and today, we do.

For this first email of 2025 I hope to put things in place for those stepping into the practice of meditation, or even thinking about it. Quite a few of my readers have expressed again and again that they want to take up meditation, but they just can’t seem to get started. I want to help them over that hump. This is an important year, and I think starting meditation is about the best thing you could do at the outset of it.

So let’s look at a few key points that matter most in this journey, whether you are taking it for the first time or starting again with a fresh motivation.

First, let’s reconsider what meditation is so we can appreciate it with a fresh perspective. We’ll become meditation virgins once again, shake off the assumptions about it that solidified over time, dragging it down to seem like just another thing we can do. Because it isn’t just another thing. For many of us, meditation has been stripped of its magnificence simply by the mundane deadening effect of overmarketing. And now it has been degraded into the world of tips, tricks, and lifehacks that fuel the wellness industry and the impatience of a distracted world. So we will revitalize the very notion of meditation over the next several minutes.

Then, we’ll look at how we engage meditation to make a difference in our lives, which means having a plan and a method. Meditation becomes a part of life, not just something we do. That’s how it has such a profound effect in all those who engage it.

What is meditation, really?

At it’s heart, meditation is a plan.

This is an important point to start with, because we have all been witness to a frenzied effort to market meditation as a technique. This causes people try it for a month or two and then move on to something else, to some other technique or tip to fit in their routine. This is all part of the impatience of our modern mindset, which drives us toward quick and easy fixes in a repeating cycle of the next hot thing.

People may go looking for true transformation and seek out meditation, but in their naiveté learn from someone who never learned anything themselves. And that is how they are handed a technique. It takes nothing at all to learn a technique. Oh, follow the breath and relax in the present moment? Fine, I’ll start to teach that tomorrow. This is an empty offering, it has no juice, no context, no wisdom, no culture or community, it’s just another five-minute-a-day technique. They are given the smallest possible version of the biggest possible thing. I think the word for this is tragic.

Cutting a technique out of a living system to take to the market doesn’t seem to work, and no meditator with experience would be surprised by that. Giving a person a technique and leaving it at that is like giving a lonely child a steak instead of a pet. Or like creating a language of verbs but no nouns.

Meditation has techniques, of course, but it is much more than a technique. It is a plan.

Specifically, meditation it is a plan for putting into effect a systematic reorganization and clarification of our mental functions. In plainer terms, meditation rewires us, it rebuilds the parts of our mind that we use to live our life: these include attention, intelligence, emotional regulation, attitude, and especially our understanding of what we are and what life is. Meditation changes our worldview, and we become brighter, more inspired people because of it.

As a plan, it is thorough. It addresses the parts of us that need addressing, whether we are even aware of them or not. And as we’ll see in a moment, it is also a method. It is sequential: there is an efficient strategy to it that respects the brevity of our lifetime and the magnificence of the changes possible to us.

No matter where you are in your life, meditation will bring you to a better place. And that better place isn’t somewhere else, it’s right here in the very life you are living. But for some reason unknown to us, we don’t access that betterness, we simply struggle and time passes without change. Meditation knows the reason why we struggle. It knows that better place is already within you, and it knows the way there, even when you don’t.

If you engage it with a mature intention, it will absolutely, 100% change your life in the way you long for but probably don’t believe can happen.

So back to the plan. What is a plan?

A plan is a route to positive change.

You probably know all about planning. Maybe you’re good at it, maybe you’re terrible at it. But you know that it makes changes come to life.

Every New Year tempts us to make a new plan so we don’t keep going in the ways that didn’t work before. So maybe we are thinking of adopting a new plan.

But what plan? What kind of plan can really make a lasting change?

With meditation, we have a plan that is itself a very powerful agent of change. And it is a unique kind of plan, because meditation doesn’t really have competitors, because nothing else is what meditation is. Really, anything else that does what meditation does is indistinguishable from meditation.

That explains why we can have so many hundreds of genuine meditation lineages that developed on there own over centuries or longer, which do the same thing in almost the same way. They’re all meditation systems, and therefore they resemble one another in more ways than they don’t. I’m thinking of Japanese traditions, Chinese traditions, Indian traditions, Burmese traditions, Tibetan traditions, and so on. They’re all part of the same family.

And every single one of them is a way of unfolding a plan. Because meditation, as I said, is a plan.

It is a plan for your awakening, your transformation from fear and confusion about your life and eventual death to wisdom and joy about the same. A transformation like that doesn’t just happen because of a technique, it takes a plan.

With a meditation plan, we follow a curriculum of change.

Luckily, this curriculum has been ironed out for us. We don’t have to invent it, we don’t even need to tweak it. Whether we work night shifts or morning shifts or are young or old, whether we have a big family or live alone, it doesn’t interfere with meditation if meditation is what we have decided to engage.

Meditation is already well supported and well mapped. Centuries of people just like us (except for the clothes), have come together through one generation after another to keep the practice fresh and vital. And they passed it into our hands. And we, in turn, will pass it into the hands of the next generation.

All we have to do is make the commitment to ourselves that now is the time. Then we follow the curriculum, and change unfolds. It really is that straightforward.

It won’t take as long as you think.

Meditation teachers are often cautious when talking about progress or results. This is fine in a traditional environment where meditation has already become part of the culture, because it encourages people to start with humility and patience. But I think we aren’t there yet. We need to understand that results do occur, and that the path is a step by step adventure through genuine milestones of discovery. This positions meditation as the important opportunity it is.

When asked about starting, I have always told people to give it a year. If you are going to try it at all, a year is the smallest timeframe to consider. This is different than what people expect to hear, coming from a world of 14-day money back guarantees and 30 day challenges. If meditation could show itself in 30 days, that’s what I’d recommend. But I don’t.

But meditation doesn’t actually take a full year to show itself, it just benefits from that much time to settle in and become part of your life. If you really need to see evidence sooner, you can bank on six months.

That means that if you are ready to engage meditation and begin early this new year, provided you stay on track and give it your sincere best, you will be surprised and inspired before Summer. That may sound cute, but it’s the plain truth.

You will change in ways you won’t be able to deny. And by Summer, you will see convincing evidence that meditation is working. And for most, that’s all it takes to make it part of the rest of your life.

I’ve done it myself. My friends, and some of my family also have done it, and I have helped countless people go through the same process in all these years as a teacher. So when I say this, I speak from witnessing it too many times to entertain doubt.

Life before meditation is a life of reactive habitual patterns, strongly influenced by the messaging of the world around you.

Life within meditation is a life of powerful development, movement toward increased inspiration, independent of what the world around you is doing.

So if deep, meaningful change is what you’re looking for, meditation is probably where you are headed. Best to start now, while you are still alive!

Invest the time to learn the method. Don’t cut corners.

Taking up meditation means taking up a curriculum of positive change. We’ve talked about it as a plan, and now we should talk about it as a method. Method is more than technique. Methods are built from many components, including techniques.

Method is essential. Meditation is not something we already know how to do, it is something we learn to do. And everything we learn in meditation will be new to us. The knowledge, the practice, the results will all represent a new take on how to be a healthy human being.

And we find, usually a month or two in, that we never, ever, could have stumbled upon this ourselves. It is valuable because it is unexpected.

I’ve encountered hundreds of people who “do meditation their own way”. But following a little inquiry, it turns out that they aren’t meditating at all. They are like kids setting up a lemonade stand in the front yard. It’s cute, but it doesn’t pay for college.

When they decide, after 20 years of circling in a small pattern, to take on actual meditation instruction, if they make it through the first 3 months or so, they all say the same thing:

“This has already changed my life. I wish I started this 20 years ago.”

That is what meditation does: it changes us. And this isn’t a byproduct of meditation, it’s the point of meditation. We have full meditation systems in our world because over thousands of years of trial and error, every single generation has reconfirmed that it works as advertised, and they made sure that we had it too.

One Million Days along, what do we know?

It is now 2,548 years since meditation took its modern form. That is when a new stream of organized, progressive practice was set in motion in India, combining the hard won knowledge that stretched back even further into the ancient world.

With all that history to help us, we can distill a few points.

Two things make transformation through meditation possible.

The first is that you are sincerely motivated to make this journey. The second is that you connect with the method for doing it.

And that, friends, is it.

This year is just beginning. If you take up the challenge of a new life, you will reward yourself with a new life.

If you would like to make 2025 the year that you begin your path of meditation, we would love to help you. Finding Ground Meditation is a strong support system for exactly this.

And you can begin right now, either by joining our January weekend program on the 25th and 26th, or by enrolling in our new from-the-ground-up curriculum that will begin following this retreat. The retreat is optional, but it is a great way to begin.

This winter, in addition to our January weekend retreat, we are expanding our Finding Ground Meditation training with a new online platform that gathers every stage of training for you into an integrated portal.

Live interaction

In Finding Ground we make a priority of live interaction every month, with opportunities for you to ask meditation questions and get help and support with what your journey is doing right as it is happening.

This is so much better than having to wait for a yearly retreat to ask a teacher our question, which is what many of us have had to do. And it is also a very effective way of keeping the inspiration of regular contact.

Online training is impressive at this point. Because of the availability of online platforms like Circle (which is what we use) we are able to provide in-depth study and practice in an ongoing curriculum with live interaction.

From your side, you are able to meet live when you can, or watch high quality replays of talks and teachings. You can also follow our guided meditation sequences, to give yourself a week every month or so of new instruction.

In early 2025 we will introduce retreats and online courses that help you develop specific dimensions of meditation experience, such as developing stability or beginning a path of insight.  We will also be doing deep dives on challenging topics such as karma and emptiness, and host a book club of sorts that bring us together with the classics of modern and traditional meditation.

Well, there is a lot going on for us at Finding Ground Headquarters. We are a team of two, myself and April. Both of us have been meditation teachers for decades, and we are here every day communicating with meditators and developing the curriculum. In the future we hope to invite some of our friends who are also long time teachers, but for now we are starting simply.

If any of this sounds like what you are looking for, please visit FindingGroundMeditation.com to learn more. You are already on our mailing list, you will hear more about our upcoming launch date, with an early-bird price promotion for our first members.

I look forward to making 2025 a year of profound transformation, both for myself and those who practice together in the Finding Ground world.

I hope to meet you soon in the Finding Ground Meditation community.

Much love and respect in the new year from both of us,

Jeffrey & April Stevens