Editor’s Note: Allan Regenstreif is one of the peer leaders of SBN’s Sunday morning meditation group, which meets weekly from 11 am to 12 pm US Eastern Time. Allan asked Linda Modaro, the guiding teacher of Sati Sangha, to be the guest teacher at the May 3rd meditation group meeting. You are invited to join. Click here for the Zoom link.

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Yes—the one that just happened.

You may be trained to let it go. Or simply in the habit of thinking nothing much happened. Perhaps it went about the same as usual. Maybe you mentally check meditation off your list for the day. And if you’re meditating with a group, it’s easy to forget as the conversation that follows may move quickly to general reflections or to the Buddhist teachings.

So what would happen if we stayed with that meditation a little longer?

In Reflective Meditation we say that your experience in meditation is a teacher, and your experience is your world. Meditation can reveal something about how you know the world. Yet what actually happens during meditation can be fleeting and difficult to articulate—shifting, repetitive, surprising, or not yet fully known. Many of us have never learned how to stay curious about that experience long enough to explore it, either by ourselves or with others.

At this group, I will offer a short dharma prompt followed by twenty minutes of silent meditation, where you can practice in whatever way you choose. After the meditation, we reflect on our own, together. You write down what you remember: pen to paper, fingers to keyboard, or even a quick voice memo or drawing. Capture it before the mind smooths it over or turns it into a tidy conclusion about what you think happened.

That meditation becomes your knowledge base. It’s easy for the teaching of Conditionality - how experience arises, unfolds, and eases through conditions - to slip right past us. Reflection helps us slow down and investigate our meditation for the uncertainties and unknowns within everyday experience. The effort of this practice: training ourselves in kind and curious reflection.

Bringing forward one example of an after-meditation conversation, I will show how to explore awareness in the meditation, to value and deepen your dharma understandings, to look for surprises, to focus on salient points that occurred and what attitudes to take in the investigation.

Participants will then move into breakout rooms to try the practice in dyads. After each person gets to share their meditative experience, the other may ask a gentle question or two; not to share their own experience, nor to give advice, quote a teacher, or recommend a book, but simply to explore the world that appeared in the other person’s meditation. It’s an act of generosity to restrain our usual responses and assumptions.

For there our worlds make contact and a different kind of dharma conversation may begin.