Being Authentic in Meditation

   I noticed tonight that at some point in the meditation, there was this sense of everything being in the place it needs to be; everything falling together, with nothing in particular standing out. It's something like what I have sometimes experienced when looking at landscape paintings from ancient China, for example: the figures are usually occupying one part in an overall configuration that does not 'overvalue' one being over the other. This mindset sometimes just washes over me during meditation, though it doesn't happen all that often, and it usually gets eclipsed by some mundane issue like back pain or the like. I rarely get a chance to experience this sense that all is well, yet all is not so prominent. Nothing has 'taken over' into the foreground, in other words.
  Lately, I have been noticing in myself an overall shift in attitude towards meditative practices in general. I no longer seem under the impression that I have to monitor myself or be a certain 'meditative' way in order to practice my method. What I mean by this is that whenever I am facilitating group practice, I have a tendency to feel as though I have to project an image of myself and aid others in their practice through certain kinds of emotions I 'create'. But lately, I have been thinking that this approach is a little bit like holding back a huge wave of water. It's destructive, in fact, because it suggests that one 'has' to be a certain way, almost like trying to hold a smile in one place the entire day without moving an inch! You can only imagine how uncomfortable that would be, and yet somehow spiritual practices can often influence people to try to adopt inauthentic postures, as though they were trying to be something that they themselves have not yet attained.
  I have found that, quite to the contrary, when I just admit where I am in the moment and see the difficulties as difficulties rather than trying to sugar-coat them, the meditation goes much smoother. I think it's because I am no longer subconsciously trying to build a wall around certain states of mind which I find either socially undesirable or 'not spiritual enough': rather, I come into this space with my garbage, and I leave the space accepting the garbage, even though I am not indulging it anymore. It's only when I can put down my struggles to be something else that I can go beyond the difficulty and envelop those difficulties without giving into them. This is hard to express, but I believe that it's the idea that when the room is completely lit around you, there is no more guessing about what is hiding in the corners. Subsequently, there is much more room in the mind to make choices about what is there rather than putting effort into hiding or glossing over what one dislikes about themselves.