We can only make one choice. Throughout our lives, we do only one thing – again and again, moment by moment, year by year. It is how we live our days, and it is how we shape our lives. The choice is this: what is the next right thing for us to do? Where, in this moment, shall we choose to place our time and attention? Do we stay or move, speak or keep silent, attend to this person, that task, move in this or that direction? …Our choices are small, quiet, intimate things that flow from us as water from a mountain spring, simple, endless, each thimble of water tumbling into the next, creating a small stream that somehow…inevitably, finds its way down the mountain to the sea.
Wayne Muller, A life of Being, Having and Doing Enough
The sitting practice of meditation is a powerful means to get to know yourself, to introduce yourself to yourself. Meditation is a discipline, a technique to transcend technique. You sit down on a cushion or a chair and simply experience yourself: your body, your breath, and your thoughts. You just be there, very simply. There are several aspects to meditation that are part of establishing friendship with yourself. One is mindfulness. Mindfulness is keeping track, or keeping a pulse, of being there, in a nonjudgmental way. There is no good or bad. Everything is allowed to be. Among other things, mindfulness is a stabilizing or pacifying influence. The panic of everyday life and every expectation laid on life can subside. This is a huge relief. It is called the discovery of peace.
The most important form of distortion fundamental to the way our minds operate has to do with creating the notion of self out of what is essentially an impersonal process. Selfhood is the expression of a particular kind of distortion of view, a situation that develops gradually from basic misperceptions, to the casting of whole sets of misinformed thoughts, and eventually to a deeply rooted belief system that becomes imposed upon all further perception and thought. Here again we see a cyclical pattern. Perceptions give rise to thoughts, which congeal into beliefs, and which then influence perception. When the system operates optimally, it allows for growth, learning, and transformation. But when it is fundamentally misinformed, it can also give rise to a considerable amount of delusion. Trouble arises when the constructed self becomes the main organizing principle, when it is unrealistically invested with qualities it does not innately possess, and, most importantly, when it becomes the node around which maladaptive behaviors coalesce. The self comes to be experienced as a central and dominant element of psychic life, mistaking what is a series of contingent patterns in constant flux for an enduring entity.
The source of forgiveness lies in the realization that we are not solely products of what was done to us, the realization that there is something essential within us that is not necessarily tarnished by calamitous experience…. There is a [… ] capacity for joy or love that is not dependent on external circumstances, not compromised by trauma or mistreatment, and capable of surviving destruction. 
As the holidays season approaches we may be finding time to wind down, rest, and simply be, without the constant demands to do and to achieve. Our restless, always-switched-on society does not encourage the development of time spent strengthening our capacity to be with ourselves. As a result we see the sad effects isolation and alienation, as well as the difficulties that occur in a world that tends to define people in relation to they appear to others. When we practice meditation we are showing a profound act of gentleness towards ourselves, because we allow ourselves to simply be, without any need to achieve or do, or any link to appearing special. It can be one means of transforming our deep aloneness into a kind solitude rather than into the fearful, judgemental, loneliness which many feel:
