Meditation Town Hall: Awareness Without Inside or Outside

On a Sunday afternoon, morning, or evening, depending on where you are, a small circle of faces appears on a screen. A bell sounds. Voices rise in Tibetan and then in English, reciting the refuge verses and the bodhicitta dedication, the lines a practitioner speaks to commit the mind to waking up for the sake of all beings. Longtime students Elizabeth Dabney Hochman and Jon Hochman are guest hosts this week, and they are not performing anything. They are simply making time, which they call very precious, to sit with a teacher, Lama Surya Das, and with everyone else who has logged on. What unfolds over the next hour is a meditation town hall in the most literal sense: unhurried, conversational, anchored in practice, and built around a few ideas that are deceptively simple and very hard to stop thinking about once you have heard them. This is a close look at those ideas: the paradox of being "already accomplished," the classical wisdom of going within, the strange power of beginner's mind, a field-of-awareness practice that dissolves the boundary between you and the room, and the Dzogchen view that the whole thing is what Lama Surya Das calls the natural great perfection.

Why does a four-year-old's sense of accomplishment matter to a meditation teacher?

Lama Surya Das opened not with doctrine but with a family story. He and John had been visiting dear friends in Cleveland, and the friends told him about a moment with their granddaughter Margo, about four years old. Margo was talking with her grandfather and announced, "I'm crushing it, Grandpa, and piano, too." The teacher found the line delightful, and his reflection on it is the hinge for the entire session.

What struck him was the feeling underneath the boast. A child that young, he suggested, has a sense that something is already complete, that nothing needs to be added. Meditation, in his framing, asks adults to recover that felt sense of already being enough. He moved from the anecdote to the present moment directly: "just as we sit here and turn the spotlight in and just feel into this moment, just this moment, and it being already accomplished."

He then complicated the sentiment with the kind of playfulness that runs through his teaching. It is also true, he noted, "that there's nothing to crush and no one to crush it, but that's a different matter." The laughter in the room came from that tension. The adult mind wants a goal, a finish line, a measure of progress. The teaching says the goal is already present and the self that would do the crushing is itself a construct. Both statements point at the same freedom from effort, and the session returns to that freedom again and again.

What can Marcus Aurelius teach about escaping to your own mind?

Before the practice began, Lama Surya Das read a passage he had been enjoying in Marcus Aurelius's Meditations. He noted that the text was never meant for anyone but its author, a set of exhortations the Roman emperor wrote to himself. The passage he chose is one that many people who have never heard of Buddhism will recognize as a spiritual classic:

"People try to get away from it all to the country, to the beach, to the mountains. You always wish that you could too, which is idiotic. You could get away from it all anytime you like by going within. Nowhere you can go is more peaceful, more free of interruptions than your own soul."

— Marcus Aurelius, as read aloud by Lama Surya Das in his Meditation Town Hall, October 25, 2026

The teacher's gloss was practical. The inner refuge, he said, is something you can return to, and "keep it brief and basic. A quick visit should be enough." This is a useful correction for anyone who imagines meditation as a grand retreat requiring hours of uninterrupted solitude. The instruction is to visit the back roads of yourself often, briefly, and without drama. The stoic and the Buddhist meet here: the mind is the place you keep returning to, and its peace is not located in a landscape or a schedule.

What does beginner's mind look like in practice?

The most revealing passage in the session came when Lama Surya Das described an ordinary morning. He and his community had introduced meditation to friends who had never sat before. He gave them basic instructions and found the exchange powerful. Reflecting on it afterward, he traced the power to beginner's mind, the freshness that appears when experienced practitioners stop assuming they already know what meditation is.

He broke down the basic instructions that beginners tend to hear, and that seasoned practitioners often forget they still need: letting go of the struggle, not trying to change anything, not trying to achieve anything, leaving things as they are, and watching what arises "with no idea how that's going to unfold." These are not complicated directions. They are, however, nearly the opposite of how most adults approach their own minds, which is why he invited the listeners to imagine sitting in the presence of people who have never sat before, and then to feel into what that is like for them, and therefore what it is like for you.

This is a serious pedagogical point. Teachers in many traditions repeatedly say that the first experience of meditation is unusually clear precisely because nothing has yet been layered onto it. Lama Surya Das's invitation is to borrow that clarity on purpose. You do not need to become a newcomer in your life. You can practice imagining the newness and then notice what the mind does when it is given no task.

How do you practice awareness with no inside or outside?

The central practice of the session was a three-stage exercise attributed to a teacher the speaker calls one of his favorites. It is worth doing slowly, even if you only do it once, because it is a practical demonstration of a view that might otherwise remain abstract.

First, bring awareness to the body and fill the entire body with a field of awareness, so that every cell, bone, muscle, and sinew is awake and alive, full of feeling and sentience. Second, shift attention to the space outside the body: the air in the room, the ambient sounds, everything that is not inside you. Imagine the whole field of awareness as everything else, with only a small empty cutout where your body is. Third, bring both together into one vast, undifferentiated field of awareness, everything awake, no inner and no outer. Sensations, feelings, and thoughts simply hang in that space, appearing and disappearing by themselves.

The instruction is precise without being rigid. The first two stages build a sense of the body as both sensed and sensing; the third asks the boundary to go soft. Many people experience the third stage as a moment of relief, because the effort of maintaining a separate self-observer begins to ease. It is not a trick to induce a special state. It is a way of noticing that the mind already contains sound, sensation, and thought without needing a wall between "me" and "everything else." Lama Surya Das also framed awareness as the common ground of all experience: "awareness itself," he said, and whether one is distracted or undistracted on some level, "it's absolutely all the same."

Is everything already the natural great perfection?

The session's most philosophically dense moment came as the teacher returned to his own joke about crushing it. He framed it through Dzogchen, the Tibetan teaching he calls the natural great perfection. The question he posed is one many listeners ask: how can you speak of an ultimate reality of natural great perfection in a world full of suffering and trouble?

His answer was that everything is always "crushing it" in the sense of being exactly what it is. Appearances, as they show up in consciousness, are consciousness and its manifestations and ornamentations. What we call reality is simply awareness being aware of that play. In that view, the natural great perfection is not a state reached after the struggle ends. It is the nature of what is already happening, including the struggle itself. This is why the teaching can be both a comfort and a challenge: it refuses to make the present moment wait for improvement, and it still does not pretend that suffering is absent.

The session closed with a dedication. Lama Surya Das asked for a page to be shared, read the English translation, and offered the merit of the practice toward the realization of the natural great perfection, and toward bringing all beings to complete realization. The dedication asked that the pure brilliant son of bodhicitta dawn in every heart and mind, dispelling the darkness of suffering. It is a traditional closing, and it reframes the whole hour: the practice is not private self-improvement but a gift extended outward, which is what dana, the generosity the free offering is supported by, is meant to honor.

Where to go from here

The fastest way to take this session into your week is to start with the small things it asks for. Pick one moment a day to sit for two or three minutes, and treat it as the "quick visit" Marcus Aurelius recommended. Before you begin, notice one thing that is already complete, the way Margo did, without turning it into a performance. Then try the three-stage field of awareness: body, then the space around the body, then both together. If the boundary softens, let it. If it does not, simply notice that too.

If you want the full experience, the video of this Meditation Town Hall is available on Lama Surya Das's YouTube channel, LamaSuryaDas. The description notes that the weekly meditation town hall is free to attend, with registration and dana donations handled through dzogchen.org. Watching a session from start to finish, including the refuge chant and the long silences, gives you something a summary cannot: the sound of a room full of people deciding, together, to be still for an hour.

Finally, take the teacher's invitation seriously. Imagine sitting with someone who has never meditated before. Feel into what the first breath feels like to them. Then notice that you can sit with the same freshness yourself, and that the mind you are looking for is, as the teaching suggests, closer and more ordinary than the places you imagined going to find it.