IN BRIEF: Going deeper in meditation
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How do I go deeper in meditation? It’s one of the most searched questions in meditation, and it stays unanswered because almost every answer sends you back into the thing that caused the plateau in the first place.
Matthew Zoltan is the pioneer of mind-body connection therapy in Australia and the creator of Natural Meditation, the only body-based meditation known to operate without technique or directed thought. Across 39 years of direct work with the body and over 10,000 clients, the meditators who arrive at his clinic and retreats share the same report. Decades of sitting, real commitment, genuine early progress, and then a limit that nothing gets past. This guide is his answer to that plateau and limit: why it forms, what depth actually is, and how to reach it.
Depth is not a spiritual achievement or a rank among meditators. It’s the difference between meditation that calms you for an hour and meditation that resolves what has been driving you for decades.
Shallow meditation manages your state. It quiets thinking for a while, lowers stimulation, gives you a temporary distance from the noise. Those effects are real, and they’re also the reason so many people stop noticing that nothing underneath has changed. The anxiety returns by mid-morning. The reaction under pressure fires exactly as it always has. The tension you’ve sat with for twenty years of sitting is still there when you stand up.
Depth is where that changes. Depth in meditation matters because depth is in the body, not in the mind. Deep meditation doesn’t add something the shallow version lacks. It reaches what technique never touches – the direct, felt experience of being you, beneath every idea about how that should feel. The meditators who describe their sitting as transformed by body-based meditation all reported the same shift. Meditation stopped being something they did to their state and instead became the direct contact with what they actually are. Everything that follows on this page, the plateau, the stillness, the discomfort that surfaces in long sits, comes back to one thing, the difference between managing experience and feeling it.
The plateau isn’t a failure of discipline, and it isn’t a failure of instruction either. It’s structurally built into the way meditation is taught and into the tools it’s taught with.
You’ll recognise it if you’re in it. Your sitting is established, maybe decades established. You can settle quickly, the technique is refined, the sits are mostly pleasant. And nothing new has happened in years. The same familiar quiet arrives, holds for a while, and wears off within hours of standing up. You’ve read more, done the longer courses, sat on the retreats, and each one returns you to exactly the same depth. Somewhere underneath your commitment is a suspicion that you’re almost too scared to say out loud, is this all there is?
It isn’t. But the way past it is not more of what got you here.
Every technique is a mental act. Watching the breath, repeating a mantra, scanning the body, noting sensation, observing awareness: each one requires you to direct attention, and directing attention is thinking. However refined the method becomes, you remain inside a thought process about your experience rather than in the experience itself.
That’s why technique can only take you so far. A technique can reduce thinking. It can narrow it to a single point. What it cannot do is take you beneath thinking, because the technique itself is made of thought. Once you’re mentally aware of yourself sitting there, focused and quiet, you’ve reached the limit of what any method can deliver. Repeat it for another twenty years and you’ll get better at the technique. You won’t get deeper. At best, repetition produces pleasant self-induced states with some short-lived effect, and because those states are also thought-based, they’re still shallow.
This is worth saying plainly, because it explains why the plateau feels like your failure when it isn’t. The people teaching these techniques are not withholding the deeper instruction. They don’t have it. Most have spent their lives inside the same method they now pass on, refining it, quietening thought with it, mistaking its flaw for enlightenment. A teacher who has only ever meditated through technique has no way of knowing what lies beneath it. The only tool they have for looking is the technique, and the technique is the thing in the way.
Matthew knows this from the being on the inside. He spent seven years as a yogic monk, he used the techniques and the discipline in their most rigorous form, and they took him no deeper than they take anyone. It was only when he challenged the techniques that he found what they had been sitting on top of the entire time: the body itself, already meditating, needing nothing from him. That is the discovery the traditions cannot hand down, because the very technique they teach is what conceals it.
So the instruction you receive when you plateau is always the same: more of the method, done more subtly, for longer. Not because it works, but because it’s all the tradition contains. The limitation gets handed down with the teaching, generation after generation, by people of complete sincerity. Nobody is lying to you. They simply cannot teach past the point they’ve reached, and the technique is what stopped them there.
Sit down to meditate and watch what happens within the first minute. You compare your experience against an idea of how meditation should feel. Too much thinking, not enough calm, not what the book described, not what it felt like on the good days. The experience of being you, as you actually are right now, gets treated as the wrong thing, an obstacle between you and the real meditation.
It’s meant to be the other way around. Meditation is meant to be the direct experience of yourself, and the experience you’re rejecting is that experience. There is nothing else to meditate with than the way it feels to be you in this moment, and every idea about what should be happening instead is another layer of thinking between you and the feeling of it. The meditators who go deepest are not the ones who achieve the purest states. They’re the ones who stop needing their experience to be different before they’ll feel it.
The deepest confusion in meditation culture is the belief in a meditative state: a fixed condition to attain, hold and eventually live in. No such state exists. Life is never fixed. From the day you’re born to the day you die you are in continuous sensory movement, and no living body arrives at a permanent condition of any kind.
What people call the meditative state is usually a mood conjured through repetition, closer to self-induced trance than to meditation. It feels like progress because it feels different. But anything you have to generate, you also have to maintain, and anything you maintain is a doing. Meditation is not a doing. The moment you’re working on producing an experience, you’ve left the only experience that was ever real: the one already happening in the body of you.
It’s meant to be the other way around. Meditation is meant to be the direct experience of yourself, and the experience you’re rejecting is that experience. There is nothing else to meditate with than the way it feels to be you in this moment, and every idea about what should be happening instead is another layer of thinking between you and the feeling of it. The meditators who go deepest are not the ones who achieve the purest states. They’re the ones who stop needing their experience to be different before they’ll feel it.
Here is the reorientation that changes everything. You have two ways of knowing yourself. There is who you are: the story, the history, the person you present, everything thinking can describe. And there is what you are: a living, sensing body, known directly through its own sensations, before any description begins.
Who you are is thought. What you are is felt. And only one of them is actually here. Right now, you know you exist not because of any concept but because you can feel it in the body of you. The same way you only know an itch when it’s itching, you only know cold when you’re cold. This is not intellectual knowing. It’s felt knowing, and it happens in the same instant as the thing being known. The feeling is the knowing. Nothing stands between them.
That felt knowing is the depth every meditator is searching for, and it can’t be reached by observing sensation from a mental distance, because observing is thinking. It’s reached by being the sensations, which requires no effort at all, since you already are them. This is the ground of Natural Meditation: not a subtler technique but the absence of technique, dropping beneath thought into the self-evident, living sensation of your own existence. At this level everything about you converges. The body and mind meet here, and what has been unconscious and unresolved becomes feelable, and through feeling, resolvable.
Nothing to conjure. Nothing to attain. No different way you’re supposed to be than the way you already are. The simpler and more immediate it becomes, the deeper it actually is. That is what makes this the most advanced form of meditation on the planet and the most accessible. It doesn’t matter how intelligent you are or how much you understand. Every person alive has the same thing in equal supply, the lived sensation of being themselves.
Sit physically still for long enough and two things happen. Thinking floods in, and discomfort surfaces in the body. Almost every meditator treats both as problems to overcome, and the entire time, both are the process working.
When you settle into stillness and stop feeding the day’s activity, thought doesn’t stop. Often it intensifies. Every meditator fights thinking, and the fight is the mistake. What’s rarely understood is what that thinking is. From the body’s perspective, everything you have lived through up to this moment is finished. The replaying, the rehearsing, the going over things, that is the body discharging thought it has finished with. It’s the way your body discharges anything it no longer needs.
Which means the content is irrelevant. You already know it. It’s surfacing precisely because the body is done with it. Follow the content and you re-engage it. Leave it alone and it empties, becoming thinner and less compelling the longer you sit. Thinking stops being an enemy the moment you understand it this way. You don’t fight it, suppress it or observe it. You let it off-gas in the background while you settle deeper into sensation, and it dissipates on its own.
Sit still for an extended period and the body begins to ache in places you can’t justify. This frightens people, and it’s the point at which most meditators pull back, adjust, move or end the session. Understanding what the discomfort is changes the entire relationship to it.
Through every difficult experience of your life, whatever wasn’t fully felt at the time didn’t disappear. It remained unfinished, held as tension in your tissue. Stillness is the condition under which the body finally begins to let that tension move. The ache that surfaces in a long sit is not new harm arriving. The harm happened years ago. What you’re feeling now is the stored charge of it on its way out. In Matthew’s observation across decades of his work, when a person stops resisting that discomfort and simply feels it, it moves through and completes. This is the body’s own resolution process, and it requires nothing from you except that you stop interrupting it.
The body works to its own schedule, and it’s slower than the schedule thinking prefers. Twenty minutes of sitting reaches what twenty minutes can reach. The purging of thought, the surfacing and completion of held tension, the settling beneath the reach of ideas. These unfold across hours and days of sustained stillness, not minutes. This is why extended sits change what depth of meditation you can reach, and why silent retreats of a week or longer get more results than daily sitting can reach. Remove the interruptions and the body simply continues uninterrupted, going deeper and deeper.
Not what most people expect. No lights, no dissolving, no permanent transcendent condition. What remains, as the layers of technique, ideas and effort fall away, is startlingly simple. It feels like nothing more than what actually exists. The living sensation of the body of you, moving and changing, moment to moment.
The senses come alive in a way thinking never allowed. Listening becomes just listening, the felt vibration of sound arriving, with no commentary about what’s heard. Looking becomes just looking. The skin registers air, temperature, contact, the whole surface of you quietly reporting what it is to be here. None of this is exotic. It was present the entire time, underneath the thinking about yourself that kept you from it.
And with it comes the thing every meditator was actually after – fulfilment. The reason being you has felt insufficient is that thinking about yourself disconnects you from the direct experience of yourself, and thinking always gets you wrong. It can’t capture the life of you, it can only produce a description, and a description is empty. Return to the felt sensation of your own existence and the sense of lack goes quiet, not because you gained anything but because you stopped leaving. This is not a state you hold. It’s what being you feels like when nothing is interfering with it, and it deepens for as long as you keep sitting. There is no final destination. There is only further in.
The Undo app is the most direct way to begin. It takes you through a structured 14-stage education on body-based meditation and the full breadth of its benefits. It helps you dismantle, one by one, the thought patterns and confusions that keep you on the surface, and grounds you in Natural Meditation as a daily sitting routine. Chapter by chapter, it does for your understanding what stillness does for your body, it takes you deep. Download it at undoapp.com.
Quiet Retreats is where the deepest work happens. Extended silent retreats of 7 to 21 days, facilitated directly by Matthew, built entirely on Natural Meditation. The retreat removes everything that interrupts the process at home and gives the body uninterrupted time to complete what it has been carrying for decades. Long-term meditators regularly describe a single retreat as reaching further than years of prior sitting. Meditation, once found this way, doesn’t need to be maintained. It’s yours for life. Book at quietretreats.co.
Work with Matthew directly. Where held experience is dense enough that it needs one-on-one attention, Matthew works with it through counselling, deep tissue massage and regression therapy, in person in Australia and online internationally.
Longer than you currently do, extended gradually. We suggest an hour each day or more. Depth isn’t produced by duration alone, but due to the level of interference and influence in our lives now, the body’s own resolution process needs more time than a short daily sit provides. Build up to longer sits, and treat extended silence, ideally in retreat conditions, as the environment where the deepest layers become reachable.
Yes, and it’s a sign the process is working. Stillness allows held tension and unfinished experience to surface, and surfacing is felt. What you’re feeling is not new damage. It’s old experiences completing. Felt rather than resisted, it moves through and resolves.
To a point, and then no. Mindfulness and mantra are techniques. Every technique operates through directed thought, so its flaw is a quieter version of thinking, not the felt depth of you beneath it. Going deeper means putting the technique down and returning to direct sensation, which is what Natural Meditation is.