An acquaintance asked me what meditation is all about. I told her that one simply sits and allows the mind to quieten. She asked me to explain.

—In our head we have a voice that talks all the time. This voice we endeavor to quieten.
—But that's impossible. That voice is the mind. It only stops when I sleep.

And I realised then that one must already have had concrete experiences of non-self or no-mind to entertain its possibility. Such experiences usually occur in childhood during moments of extreme stress, stress that modern parenting shields the child from. And this is my point: by shielding our children (what I call over-mothering) we deny them formative experiences that later in life could become transformative. Over-mothering is an insidious form of control ensuring conformity.