The new normal seems to be ongoing crises on every level of life, physical and emotional. How do we live, how to we breathe easily, in the midst of climate crisis, continual forest fires, pandemics, and all the craziness? Even previously stable democracies around the world are being tempted to degrade into dictatorships.
The good news is that our bodies evolved to deal with exactly this. How life on Earth started is a great mystery, but one thing we know is that every component of our bodies, from the individual cells, to the organs and tissues, nerves, senses, and our brains are the process of continual adaptation to total change.
Let’s Reinvent the Day
Consider a few small changes to your life, to the way you approach the day.
1. What if you just work 8 to 5, or 9 to 5:30, and never look at or answer emails or messages at any other time? What would happen?
2. What would it be like if you spend two hours a day just walking at an unhurried pace, looking at the world, smelling it, enjoying the contact of the breeze on your skin, the sunshine, the textures of it all?
3. What would it be like if you do not hurry at all, ever, except in the rare emergency?
4. What would the night’s sleep be like if you spend the hour before bed time being in your own sanctuary, with just the golden glow of a soft light, or candlelight, reading poetry or listening to beautiful music?
No matter the structure of your day, we all have things we can do, small changes that make a big difference.
I recommend reading this interview with Brunello Cucinelli, who started a company that makes cashmere clothes. He says, “I am a great supporter of memory. If I remember things, I do not need to go back and check and revise. In this company, you cannot send emails after 5:30 PM, when the company closes for the evening.” When they have meetings, he wants all the staff present to have memorized the relevant numbers, so they can be looking each other in the eye as they talk, and be more present. And no emails can be sent to more than two people, so that you don’t clutter everyone’s inboxes.
https://pi.co/tag/brunello-cucinelli/
The Call to Be All That You Can Be, and The Need to Know Your Limitations
A wonderful feature of modern times is that almost everyone is living a long time. Global life expectancy in 2016 was 72 years – 74 years for women and about 70 years for men. Over the past hundred years, women’s roles have expanded to include all the functions that used to be male specialities. Americans have women fighter pilots. Women are heads of corporations. Because people are living so long, it’s as if they live three or four lifetimes in sequence or simultaneously.
Along with this increase in freedom comes an increase in expectations. It is as if every woman is supposed to be Superwoman. A full-on mother and also entrepreneur and social activist and wife and friend and athlete. This is wonderful, and exhausting. Guilt over not actually being Superwoman is now part of the female experience.
Part of daily meditative experience for women is sensing the fatigue and burned nerves that come from doing it all. If you can feel it you can heal it.
In meditation we bathe in this set of conflicting opposites: the call to be all that you can be, and the need to know your limitations. This changes daily, for as we push up against our limitations, sometimes we get stronger and they change. It’s like working out. Other limitations are more fixed. There are only so many minutes in a day (1440 to be exact).
Whether you are male, female, or a nonspecified gender, you will at some point be confronted with the fact that you are not Superwhatever. And there is an odd form of shame and guilt that arises when you realize this. Accept this shame and plunge into it. There are many skills inside this that you will only learn by practice and paying attention. The process is similar to working out on a muscular level. There is a science to pushing yourself just enough that you can heal up overnight. People who push too much without rest can develop chronic injuries. It is an eternal struggle: the striving to do more and awareness of your limitations.
Four Fields of Desire
Yoga in its origins is delightfully life-supporting and embracing of every possible desire. The yoga approach to meditation is always intended to support you in thriving, whatever your mission is in life. The techniques are ways of joining with pranashakti, the life force, and being tuned up so you function better as an embodied being.
Desires flow endlessly and each one is a little packet of energy and information to energize you and help you have a sense of direction. In the yoga literature, there is a succinct statement of the desire flow of life, summed up in four categories:
Moksha - Freedom. Liberation.
Kama - Love. Affection. Sensual pleasure. Sexual love. Enjoyment. Longing. Desire.
Artha - Substance. Wealth. Property. Money. Fulfilling material needs.
Dharma - Virtue. Morality. Religion. Good works. Justice. Ethics. Each of these is a vibrating field of energy, a current of desire flowing through a body, and we have come here to live.
All together these are called Puruṣārtha - “the object of human pursuit.” This is just a simple way of pointing to the flow of natural desires. Your body is always flowing with dozens, hundreds, thousands, of little desires. A hum of life.
These may play in any order and mix and combine. In any given moment, one may be teaching you, active, calling for attention, for tending, and the others rush in to support it.
When you are practicing mediation in a way that is cooperating with the energy of your own life, then the four purusharthas will play with each other, one will come to the surface to be felt and tended to, then another, then another. They may even join forces and make teams to help each other.
The texts suggest you keep in mind these four aims, called purusharthas, and be in a learning feedback loop to adjust the practices so that they are in the service of life.
One of the skills of meditation to cultivate is to notice which of the purusharthas is calling to you in a given moment, and give in to it. In meditation, much of your time will spent with your body processing the interaction of your energies and the demands and opportunities of the outer world.
Many of the thoughts, sensations, emotions, daydreams, and currents of desire you feel during meditation will be side effects of the way your body is processing the momentum of desire, pleasure, freedom, affection, wealth, and morality.
You want your practice to support you in pursuit of all your life’s purposes. All your pleasures and needs.
Don’t leave any part of you behind. Don’t turn your back on yourself in any way.
GETTING INTO BREATH - BEGINNER'S MIND
A yoga teacher I know remarked that for the first 3 years she practiced yoga she had little interest in pranayama, the breath aspect, and that she felt uncomfortable with the techniques. Then one day when her back hurt and she couldn’t do her ordinary moves, she discovered that breathing meditations elped. Lying on her back, taking ibuprofen, and humiliated, she found a new world opening up to her. Each breath massaged her spine and rejuvenated her. She did not have to force anything; rather, she finally surrendered to her natural instinct to breathe and found herself letting go as never before in her adult life.
Prior to getting into yoga, this friend had gone through a difficult divorce and had called upon her willpower to help her forge a new life. Even after yoga had become a sacred refuge for her, she was unable to relax and truly let go. Striving, exercising her will, was what had saved her. Then that day, feeling how the breath was massaging her belly, her heart, the front of her spine, she relented. Now she teaches breath techniques enthusiastically, yet she knows from experience that it may take her students years to appreciate them fully.
Another time I was sitting with a wine merchant and I had him sniff the air, not so much for scent but just in appreciation—as the carrier for all the wonderful smells he had ever smelled. He instantly got what breath awareness is about and went into deep meditation, really enjoying himself.
One of the things students have taught me over the years is that there is no hierarchical organization to talent or intimacy with life. Beginners often know more than experts, and experts are often at their best when they come around to being beginners again.
If you want to meditate with breath, start with what you know. Everyone has something they do well, whether it is carpentry, keeping babies happy, or quickly sizing up a roomful of people. If you really know how to enjoy a freshly baked cookie, a glass of fine wine, or the scent of hay, then use that as a gateway into breath awareness. Life tends to specialize us. Our senses become shaped by what we do. But humans are not ants. We were not born to be specialized. We ache to explore and see life afresh. This possibility exists for you in every breath.
THE GIFT OF BREATH: Virtual Workshops With Lorin and Camille
Camille Maurine and Lorin Roche will be teaching two virtual workshops on breath in meditation on October 3rd and 4th (each class is 2 hours). Join us on either day - we would love to meditate with you. Early bird price (until Sep. 25th) is just $35 for each class.
Getting Through a Stuck Place in Meditation
To get through a stuck place in meditation, you may need a particular kind of nutrition and healing, of the kind that comes from inside our body when we face a crisis.
Nature knows how to heal. When we go as far as we know how to go and then take refuge in rest, the body heals and adapts. As we face each difficulty in meditation, each intolerable set of weird sensations, each strange combination of our own instincts, and then take refuge in rest and relaxation, the body brews up its own magic chemistry to support us on the jouney.
Yatra (yātrā) is journey, expedition, pilgrimage, and also “support of life.” Yatra includes the sense of provisions for the journey. Some of the provisions we need come from soma, the magical chemicals the body brews out of the wildness of our experience. There are body chemistry keys we need to get through some doors. The body produces these automatically in the interplay of the percevied urgency, then the access to rest deeper than sleep, then the activation of all your senses, and the welcoming of all our instincts. There are moments in which we give up. Then we rest. When we have done our part of facing our fears and then give it up and enter the state of ease provided by the mantra, the body knows what to do here. Our exhaustion is the most sincere form of prayer to the gods of adaptation. Having stretched ourselves, the genius of life repairs us and rebuilds us. Sometimes this happens in an eternal moment of meditation, one of those times when a minute is a long time of torture. Sometimes we need to go sleep. Sometimes we need to go wander in nature and Do Nothing. When come back, we find by surprise the way is open. The soma has done its work.
All this is why you want your meditation to be as luscious and juicy as possible. You need access to both the state of rest deeper than sleep and the nutrition you get from exposing your senses to beauty. This combination is what allows you to face the situations inside or outside that are crushing you. To use the metaphor of an engine, there is just a thin layer of lubricant allowing the piston to slide back and forth thousands of RPM, revolutions per minute. That thin layer is what allows motion. Inside ourselves, we need nerves and sensory information to flow together. We need the vision gifted by soma to enable us to see the path ahead of us.
The “I Don't Care” Technique
Your brain is maybe 86 billion neurons. That’s 86,000,000,000. During meditation, you don’t have to tell them what to do. Each of your billions of neurons has maybe 200 Facebook friends, I mean synaptic connections. They chat back and forth 200 times a second. The number of interconnections might be more than there are atoms in the universe. What are they doing in there? Managing the flow of life in your trillions of cells. Assimilating what you have been learning in life and organizing it so the learning is at your fingertips.
This is the hum of life. One of the sweet skills of meditation is learning to hear it as music, as a current like a river, flowing with song, with harmony, with essential goodness. You don’t have to tell it what to do any more than you have to tell the ocean how to make waves and tides, or tell the stars how to revolve in the galaxy.
Part of learning to meditate is unlearning any patterns of over-control you may have. Unlearn the habit, if you have it, that you are supposed to tell your brain to shut up. You may have 60,000 thoughts in a day that you can perceive, and just underneath that are trillions of tiny decisions your brain is making to adjust your metabolism, your heartbeat, your breathing, to adapt to life.
Here is a skill: With all the thoughts you can perceive, and those just outside your range of perception, practice the attitude, “I just don’t care. I don’t care if I have 60,000 thoughts. I don’t care if my mind is filled with thousands of thoughts the instant I sit down to meditate. Let it be.”
Care of the Self During Times of Pandemic - Video
Guru Viking interviewing Lorin Roche, PhD, on how to stay well during the pandemic.
Lorin Roche and Guru Viking talk about how to work with anxiety, fear, and panic? How to work with isolation? How to work with sickness and death? And how to help others having those experiences?
Fear, sickness, death are perennial human experiences, and so my hope is that these episodes will be of use not only to those who are being affected now in this situation, but also of use to others beyond it.
0:55 - Guidance for those who are afraid or panicked.
14:18 - Guidance for those who are sick
19:48 - Guidance for helping those who are sick or dying
21:21 - Guidance for those who are dying.
27:43 - Guidance for those in isolation.
33:13 - Concluding comments.
For more interviews, videos, and more visit: - www.guruviking.com
Music ‘Deva Dasi’ by Steve James
Audio: Meditation as Communion With The World
Meditation is a natural and instinctive human ability, part of the survival wisdom built in to our bodies.
Meditation is innate, and you can go in through many doors:
Listening to music
Gazing at nature
Dancing
Receiving a massage
Making love
Breathing attentively
Savoring food
And hundreds of other ways.
If you take a deep breath and breathe out slowly, you begin to activate your meditation response. This can happen in seconds. Do it now. That little sense of relief is the beginning.
Our bodies have the ability to get stressed – to activate the fight or flight response. Immediately, our emergency reserves are tapped as our bodies and nerves mobilize for combat. Meditation is the opposite response, in which we enter a state of restfulness that allows the body to repair, recharge, and refresh.
There are thousands of different styles of meditation, just like there are thousands of styles of music and cooking. When you discover the style that goes with your individual nature, meditation is a joyous relief, something you look forward to each day.
Everyone already has discovered meditation on their own, in one or more of the hundreds of ways of activating it. Learning to meditate is a matter of noticing which of the doorways you already feel familiar with, and building on that knowledge.
Instinctive Meditation is a way of listening to the instincts as a guide in meditation. The word, "instincts" refers to the body's internal guidance system, refined over hundreds of millions of years. Hunting, homing, trail-making, gathering, nesting, resting, socializing, all these are primordial impulses flowing through the body at all times. When we learn to cooperate with them inwardly, meditation feels natural.
Scientific research indicates that meditation is a built-in ability of the human body, part of our instinctive survival skills. We all can do it.
We each have our own favorite ways of entering meditative states – our own unique style. We thrive in meditation when the approach we take goes with our own inclinations and instincts. Don't let anyone tell you that meditation is the realm of experts or gurus.
Listen to The Chakras
Thoughts can come from anywhere in the body, from our heads, from our hearts, from the gut feelings, from our sexual areas. During meditation much of our time is spent listening to all manner of thoughts. All the after-action reviews, all the desires and emotions. These often correlate with sensations from areas of the body. These areas have names in Sanskrit. One naming system is referred to as the chakras. From cakra चक्र. “Wheel. Circle. A potter’s wheel. An astronomical circle.
In the safety and serenity of meditation, as we are listening to the quiet inner hum and pulsation of our mantra, there is a quality as if we are receiving a massage, an extremely subtle massage that is gently suggesting to the body that it can let go of tension. Our sore spots come to the surface to be felt and healed.
It’s often painful to listen to and feel these areas because this is where we hold tension. People who do not understand the purpose of meditation think of this as distraction. It’s not. The body-mind system is tuning the tension so that we have an appropriate level of “bounce” or responsiveness. We are relaxed and ready.
Over time as we listen to the tension and “suffer” through the process of releasing excess tension, we learn to inhabit these areas of our body, more and more. We are inhabiting ourselves. We feel through the blocks we have put up to protect ourselves from our own experience.
Most of the time in meditation, if we have a busy life, we will be listening to the tension the body is holding, often in the areas called chakras. And sometimes sweet moments emerge in which we are listening to the song of the chakra, its note.
There are many different systems for assigning notes to chakras, don’t believe them. Go in and explore and make your own map. Discover, don’t impose. There will be times when you are listening to skin sensations, so to speak, or everywhere in your body at once.
Image by Sharon Pattaway
Naturalness and Spontaneity of Meditation
Instinctive Meditation is an approach to learning and practicing meditation that focuses on your individuality, so that you thrive in daily life and do not become dependent on gurus and external authorities.
Why Use the Term "Instinctive?"
Instinctive is an apt term to describe the naturalness and spontaneity of meditation. Most people have meditated spontaneously for a few minutes when listening to music or gazing at a sunset. People have access to meditative states by following their own innate impulses. How do we learn to intentionally enter a state that sometimes happens naturally? That is the skill.
Instinctive is also a fresh contrast to the standard teachings, since meditation is often taught in a way that is blatantly anti-instinctive and unnatural – it is advertised as a way to conquer or kill off your instincts.
Innateness
Meditation is a built-in human instinct. We all can do it and get the benefits: clarity, focus, relaxation and energy. There are thousands of ways of meditating, and one is right for you. The challenge is to find that way, out of the many diverse paths. That is what Instinctive Meditation is for – to help you access your inner wisdom so that you can meditate in your way, your style, your essence.
Spontaneity
You have spontaneously entered meditative states many times in the past while in the midst of:
- listening to music and closing your eyes in rapture.
- gazing at the horizon
- watching a sunset
- taking a nap
- looking in the eyes of someone you love
- basking in the afterglow after making love
Learning to meditate is a process of learning to intentionally cultivate meditative awareness in a way that feels natural to you.
Multi-tonality
Gratitude, wonder and love are natural portals into meditation.
So is fatigue. If you have been busy loving people and working and playing, your body has become ripe to enter meditation.
Sometimes a busy person, who has been active with family, friends, chores, and the tasks at work, will come home and sit or lie down on the sofa for a few minutes. They will sigh and say, "whew." That whew is a tiny moment of meditative awareness. If you keep returning to it, you may find that the fatigue you feel turns into a pleasant buzz of fatigue permeating your body. The more you allow the exhaustion to flood your body, the more quickly you will be restored.
Grief is another door into meditation. If you have experienced intense loss, you know that it changes your entire map of the world. You feel that you are no longer the same person, and the world is empty. This is often the way people feel when they have loved deeply, and lost. When this happens, we are plunged involuntarily into a process of witness the death of the part of us who loved, and we don't know for sure if we will ever come out. This grieving process takes us into many meditative moments, when we are awake in the middle of the night, alone in a crowd, sitting somewhere and feeling stunned, and just generally sinking into darkness. We hardly know ourselves. And yet, over time, as we attend to this inner process, we re-emerge. The sun starts shining again. We are utterly altered and rearranged, and we can start living again.
Individuality
There are types of meditation that go with each stage of the life cycle – adolescence, studying, entering the work force, courtship, marriage, birth, raising children and suffering the pangs as they become independent and leave home, and so on.
There are meditations that go with each type of person, and there are tens of thousands of important distinctions. And beyond that, no one is a "generic person." Each of us has unique qualities, ways we don't fit the mold, and these need to be converted from what feels like a curse, to a gift.
The meditation traditions of the world have preserved many thousands of different techniques. The knowledge that is lacking is which technique goes with which type of person.
When you find the technique that suits you, you'll feel that it supports your life as it is now and it nourishes the person you are wanting to become. The meditation will be an affirmation of your being.
Doing someone else's meditation is like trying to live someone else's life.
It might be entertaining for awhile, even educational at the same time that it is weakening you. Some day you will want to get back to rediscovering who you are. If you feel that a meditation practice is in any way undermining of who you are, make careful note, for the effect may be like taking a medicine you don't need.
Meditation in the past has been used to obliterate individuality. This is because sometimes a person has to do whatever it takes to fit into the ashram, monastery, lamasery to which they have been assigned. What is it to be a monk? You give up your name, your identity, your family, your clothes, your money, your desires, and your individuality.
The point of meditation in the past was to help you to merge with the herd, and become a happily submissive unit, blissfully bowing down to kiss the feet of the Dominant One, the Fearless Leader.
Learn to Trust Your Instincts
Anything that can strengthen you can also weaken you, if overdone.
For example, exercise strengthens you, but if you do not have enough rest between exercise sessions, your body will break down. Walking for hours may be enjoyable and vitalizing, but walking nonstop for 24 hours without enough water may damage your joints and organs.
Armies the world over use forced exercise to break the independent spirit of recruits and condition them to follow orders without question. Monasteries the world over use certain types of meditation to break the egos of recruits and make them compliant, submissive members of the religious order. Armies and monasteries seek to break and redirect the instincts of an individual. But if you are not in a monastery and you do monastic-type meditation, you may just become weak-willed, submissive and easily manipulated.
When you approach meditation, do only that which strengthens you – this is not mystical, you can sense it in your daily life.
Unity out of Diversity - Inner and Outer Yoga
News Flash: Ireland has a new government. From Euronews:
"Fianna Fáil leader Mícheál Martin has been elected Ireland's Taoiseach or prime minister after rival parties in Ireland voted to endorse a coalition government. Memberships of three parties in Ireland agreed to work together putting centre right party Fianna Fáil, centre party Fine Gael and the Green party in coalition with each other."
This is huge, these very different parties agreeing to work together, to join together to get things done and also live and let live.
What countries go through in attempting to build coalitions that unite many different subcultures, we also go through as individuals. This process is called yoga. Union. The aim of yoga is to make a fertile communion of all your divergent parts. The word anga, used in yoga, refers to the limbs of the body and also the limbs, or departments, of your inner life, all the "characters" in your internal play. Within yourself, you may have an area that is an Agnostic, and does not go to Church. You may have a Pagan, who worships nature. And you may have a part that identifies with one of the great religions such as Tibetan Buddhism (that denies being a religion).
Within ourselves, everyday, we have to work out a team of our inner people - the Worker, the Farmer, the Warrior, the Lover, the Healer, the Hunter, the Mother, Father, Sister, Brother, Magician, Trickster, Artist, the Student, Gambler, Clown, Priestess, Shaman, Comedian.
I don't think this work is ever done. In each moment, the energy of any archetype may rise up in us, as needed. These energies are just tonalities of the overall current of pranashakti.
Here are two practices. One for the beginning of meditation, and one for the end.
At the beginning of your meditation time, wonder within yourself, "Which of my inner energies have been pushed to the background and would like to come into center stage to be included, and give their gift of energy, instinct and insight?" Then just notice what happens in the silence and with your breathing and bodily sensations. Your energies may speak to you in sensations, as words, as images, as a current of feeling, or as a space between. A curious silence.
At the end of meditation, sit there for a few minutes just attuning to the needs of your outer life. What are the demands on your time and attention? What are your priorities? And if this is so, then what configuration of your internal team is best for this job?
You may find each day is different, or different times of day are different. If you have a teenage boy in the house, you may have to have the Father energy at hand, in alliance with the Mischief Maker so you can keep track of all his adolescent rebellion and not suppress it too much, just give the right amount of steadiness and rule structure.
If you are dating, you may be in the Lover for awhile and then switch to more of a Warrior energy to set boundaries, and then in your own sweet time reveal the Magician in you, who is a wizard at lovemaking. Every day is different, each moment is different, and we change over time as we age. This is what makes the Path of Intimacy so challenging and interesting.
As you wrestle with your inner work, have sympathy for what countries are going through as they attempt to make a union out of many millions of people. The principle is the same, whether it is the inner configuration of your archetypal energy to meet your daily life, or the governments that make some kind of a compromise that hundreds of millions of individuals can live with.
Countries
Hundreds of languages are spoken in India. It is said that 23 of these are mentioned in the Constitution of India (I haven't read the Constitution). Some are classified as Indo-European, some are Dravidian, and some belong to the Tibeto-Burman branch of the Sino-Tibetan language tree. There are others.
Geneticists think that humans have been living in the area we now call India for more than 55,000 years. Over time this area has been divided up into many different countries and then some of them been unified, and then divided again. Please do your own research and don't quote me here, this is not my field. The point I would like to suggest here is that India is now a unified country of one billion, two hundred million people. They speak to each other in about thirty individual languages, if you only count those that have more than a million native speakers. If you count the smaller language groups, the individual languages are in the hundreds.
According to the 2001 Census of India, they have 122 major languages and 1599 other languages. The reason for the different numbers is differences in the definition of what is a "language" and what is a "dialect."
How do you unify a country that is made up of so many individual states (each a sort of country unto itself, with an ancient and noble history) and so many language groups?
This calls for the kind of intelligence that invented yoga in the first place.
To create and govern an integrated India, the politicians and managers have to work the magic of compromise.
I only know about this from incidental reading, but I heard that Sanskrit was not selected as the national language of India because this would be oppressive to the language groups that were not derived from Sanskrit, such as Tamil. On a theoretical level, Sanskrit would have been great, but in practical reality, it was thought, it would be a disaster. Less than 1% of the population spoke Sanskrit.
So English is used as a national language.
As an article in the Indian Express explains,
"One of the reasons for Sanskrit being limited to a small circle of people was the narrow outlook of pandits. They never allowed the language to reach the common people. So, India today does not have Sanskrit as its first language, like French in Francophone countries and Arabic in West Asia. When a language is not used by common people, it dies a natural death. If Sanskrit is not made popular among Indians, it is likely to become an endangered language in its country of birth."
From a BBC article:
"But Sanskrit is now spoken by less than 1% of Indians and is mostly used by Hindu priests during religious ceremonies.
It's one of the official languages in only one Indian state, Uttarakhand in the north, which is dotted with historical Hindu temple towns."
"According to the last census, 14,000 people described Sanskrit as their primary language, with almost no speakers in the country's north-east, Orissa, Jammu and Kashmir, Tamil Nadu, Kerala and even Gujarat."
https://indianexpress.com/article/opinion/columns/sanskrit-language-india-persian-6294457/
also
https://www.firstpost.com/india/why-hindi-isnt-the-national-language-6733241.html
Recovery Protocols - Returning to Your Own Body
It is as if everyone is practicing a very advanced yoga, that of extending your body sense into what others are experiencing as bodies - "if you beat up on him, you are beating up on me."
This is the very definition of compassion - "feeling of sorrow excited by the suffering or misfortunes of another." From com, "with, together," + pati, "to suffer."
You may or may not be religious, but this is the essence of the Christian mystery. "Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me."
It feels as if the world has changed because of the protests. There is an awakening which could be permanent, a message has gone forth, asserting the right to breathe, everyone has a right to breathe freely, and to live in dignity.
But we can't live in a state of emergency functioning forever. We have to create time to recover and recharge. Like breathing out and breathing in again, to recover from the exhaustion of the protests and marches, you may want to give some time to returning to your own body, inhabiting yourself, and letting your body and nerves heal and recharge.
Healing hurts. As our bodies repair the wear and tear, we relive the joy and the pain of how we got so tired. Expect this hurt and welcome it. Let the tears and laughter flow.
Some ways to approach giving yourself healing, if you have been traumatized by the events of the past few weeks or months.
- Team up with someone, either in person or on the phone. It is very helpful to have someone "spot" for you.
- Give yourself 4 hours of uninterrupted time, that you are giving over to encouraging the bodily process of recovery.
Here are some options:
- Sit in a darkened room, with phones off, and just tell stories and listen to the other person, for 4 hours. If you are the one talking, give yourself permission to pause and feel into your heart sensations and your fear sensations and your skin sensations, and speak from there. If you are listening, just attend. Let that other person be your movie, your Netflix. You have the privilege of seeing the world as they see it, for this time.
- Go to somewhere soothing, a park or grove of trees or river or ocean, and wander in an unhurried way, talking story.
- alternatively, do some vigorous activity such as running, swimming, playing a game, and then afterwards, in the joy of simple physical exhaustion, talk.
- arrange a playlist of the most heartbreakingly beautiful music you can find, and play it on the best sound system or headphones you can arrange, and lie on the floor and let the music carry you away. If possible, with a friend.
- if you are alone, bathe in pleasure for hours. Take a shower or bath, rub lotion all over your body, wrap yourself up in a bedsheet, and lie down and simply feel your whole body, everywhere, and track your emotions and sensations.
The rhythm of healing is that we first of all give ourselves a sense of safety, even a little, and an atmosphere of relaxation. It helps to have someone with you, but you may have to do this alone. Then in the atmosphere of safety, that which is painful, that which is burdening your heart, all your worries, come up to be felt and released.
What we call "meditation" is just a set of ways to allow this process. There are tens of thousands of ways. You have all that you need inside you now. In a conscious healing practice such as this, you are actively welcoming the same kind of healing that your brain and body will do tonight when you sleep, and have done in every moment of sleep since you were first conceived.
The fetus in the womb alternates between deep sleep and REM or dreaming sleep. This alternation is how brains, nervous systems, and bodies learn and heal. To meditate deeply and allow healing to proceed, you want to allow this cycling of different brain states.
Your mind is not "wandering," it is processing in the ways that dreams are processing. Meditation, when approached in a natural and effortless way, allows the body to enter a state of rest deeper than sleep, in about 5 minutes. This feels totally natural. It just feels like normal relaxation. But in the lab, and this was studied and replicated for decades, restful meditation is physiologically quite remarkable.
Meditation, in a sense, takes a load off of our sleep time, so that the brain does not have so much of our unfinished business to deal with. This will allow sleep to be deeper as well. Wandering in nature, listening to music, or talking story for hours and hours, give yourself a chance to return to your own body and let your energies recharge. Wherever you are, however you are, you have the tools to do this. And you can accomplish this one breath at a time, one heartbeat at a time.
The Brilliance of the Monkey Mind
The brilliance of the monkey mind…
- and also the brains of pigeons, rats, and crows.
Brains make lists. This is because brains have to prioritize actions and elements for survival. They have to line up action sequences - that's what a daily life is. The only people who don't need to do this are those who just follow orders, who have no life, and just do what they are told.
If you have responsibilities - a job, a home, friends, family, pets, people who rely on you - in meditation, you will notice, your brain spends time prioritizing your lists and refining your action sequences. This takes place because you are at ease, on a sort of vacation, and meditation is a good time to practice being your best self.
This is one of the reasons why the term "monkey mind" in the meditation traditions is actually a toxic mental parasite designed to weaken you.
When you are daydreaming and thinking about your shopping list, you are actually practicing the yoga of sequencing actions. You are running through a choreography, with more of your instincts backing you up, more senses employed, more of your chakras supporting you, more relaxation. More in your body.
The Software Lobotomy
Monks just do what they are told. They have taken vows. So they want to lobotomize the parts of their brains that have desires and make decisions. In the place of that, they install the power structure of the ashram they are in. This aspect of meditation technology is a kind of amputation. A blessing for that small percentage, probably less than 1% of a population, that are natural renouncers. Their path truly is to renounce everything, including their individuality, desires, personal life, ego, any capacity for intimacy, any desire to be touched or to have sex, PERMANENTLY. In exchange for sacrificing their individual life, a monk or nun gets to be supported to pray all day. In the meditation traditions, this concept of "the monkey mind" as a something negative is a teaching that is only for those on the path of Renunciation. If you are not a nun or monk, it will harm you, like injecting chemotherapy poison into your bloodstream if you are healthy.
From psychologist Greg Jensen of Columbia University and colleagues:
"Monkeys can keep strings of information in order by using a simple kind of logical thought.
Rhesus macaque monkeys learned the order of items in a list with repeated exposure to pairs of items plucked from the list, say psychologist Greg Jensen of Columbia University and colleagues. The animals drew basic logical conclusions about pairs of listed items, akin to assuming that if A comes before B and B comes before C, then A comes before C, the scientists conclude July 30 in Science Advances.
Importantly, rewards given to monkeys didn’t provide reliable guidance to the animals about whether they had correctly ordered pairs of items. Monkeys instead worked out the approximate order of images in the list, and used that knowledge to make choices in experiments about which of two images from the list followed the other, Jensen’s group says.
Previous studies have suggested that a variety of animals, including monkeys, apes, pigeons, rats and crows, can discern the order of a list of items (SN: 7/5/08, p. 13). But debate persists about whether nonhuman creatures do so only with the prodding of rewards for correct responses or, at least sometimes, by consulting internal knowledge acquired about particular lists.
Jensen’s study adds to evidence suggesting that, like humans, monkeys can mentally link together pairs of items into lists that guide later choices, says psychologist Regina Paxton Gazes of Bucknell University in Lewisburg, Pa.
That’s probably a valuable ability in the wild, she says, because many animals need to monitor where group mates stand in the social pecking order. “An ability to construct, retain, manipulate and reference ordered information may be an evolutionarily ancient, efficient [mental] mechanism for keeping track of relationships between individuals,” she says."
Accessing Our Inner Resources in Meditation
Our bodies have evolved over a billion years to deal with all kinds of environment changes and challenges. There is genius in here at every level. One aspect of the magic of adaption is that our bodies grow stronger when subjected to challenge, as long as we have time to recover, and some nutrition so we can rebuild.
Think of working out. Going for a long hike, or carrying a load, or dancing for hours, challenges the muscles. We are sore the next day or two days later as we feel the microscopic damage to the tissues. Then the body rebuilds itself stronger. This is what "conditioning" is, strength conditioning. This leads to "being in shape."
When you first take up guitar, or ukelele, or any stringed instrument, your fingertips get very sore. Over time, your fingers build up callouses. This is another form of adaptation.
When our bodies are exposed to a virus, if it is novel to our immune system, at first we don't know we are being invaded. The virus just replicates itself, using our cellular machinery for its own purposes. After awhile, the body realizes, "Hey, that's not ME! That is something else, using my cellular machinery for ITS purposes! And the body generates an immune response. Very often, we are forever after immune to that virus. This is why we never get the same cold twice. There are about 200 cold viruses circulating in the world, and over a lifetime we may get a bunch of them, but is is actually a different virus each time.
Part of taking care of yourself, a fundamental life skill, is making sure you are exposed to enough of life's challenges to keep your emotional immune system challenged, your physical immune system activated, and your mental and spiritual immune systems active and in play. This means you have times of challenge or exposure, and times of rest and recovery.
Meditation is a tool for recovery, because it allows for a rest deeper than sleep, according to decades of physiological research at Harvard Medical School and other centers.
During meditation, the body cycles through waking, dreaming, and deep sleep-like states, adjusting its biochemical balance for each and surveying the adaptive challenges that the organism is facing.
This is why meditation can be so disturbing, because the bodymind system is built to adapt to reality. If there is a life challenge that you are not facing, or are trying to hide from, your meditation instinct will bring it to your attention so you can develop an adaptive response to it, can have the proper immune response to the stress.
This is also why you want to make your meditation as pleasurable, indulgent, luscious, adorable, and inviting as possible. You need that bodily pleasure in order to invite the body into deep restorative, recovery, healing mode. Then when the awareness of stressors arises - all the things in your life that are toxic, or challenging, you can meet them in meditation with all your best resources at hand.
Meditation is inner play, where you are gaming out, like in a video game, the adventure of life with all its allies, enemies, challenges, and obstacles. You can explore this option and that option, and keep on accessing your deepest strengths. In meditation, it is okay to fail again and again, because each time you notice you have failed, each time you think of something toxic or damaging and lose your sense of integrity, you can then go deeper into your inner resources and then come back to face the foe again.
It's desperation that makes us dive deep into the essence of life and get the inner medicine we need, forge the inner alliance. It is always a crisis, on some level, that makes us want to meditate.
Buddha was in a total crisis when he set forth on the path to become the Buddha we know, or have heard from. His first son had just been born and he was so scared that he fled the house in panic, ran away and never went home again. He was driven to go off and starve himself in the forest and try to invent a path through this world. Although he abandoned his family, he did his best to become a kind of good father to the whole human race. Someone who could utter wisdom to guide us. Someone to clear a path and show the way to walk through this world of wonder and terror.
We each have access to our inner Buddha. Your inner Buddha is inside you, inside your crises and challenges.
Meditation has thousands of gateways, thousands of variations. You will know the ones that work for you because after meditation you find that you are more resourceful -- you have the sense, "Oh, I've GOT THIS. I can handle it."
Healing From Betrayal (Meditation and Intuition - Part 6)
If you have been betrayed, you know how much noise it makes in your head. This is because to be betrayed, we have to have been sold out or attacked by someone we trusted and considered a friend. Betrayal feels completely different than when we are attacked by enemies or competitors.
When a friend betrays us, the damage goes deeper than attacks by enemies. There are two reasons: one is that they are closer to us, inside our guard; the second is that when a friend betrays us, we have to doubt the part of us that trusted them in the first place. We come to doubt our whole relationship to the world. We may recover from the external damage that the betrayal does to our life. But the lasting damage, more difficult to heal, is that we turn against the part of us that trusted them. In other words, being betrayed can damage our ability to form friendships and to trust anyone in the future. Then, because we have to form alliances with someone, we become more open to being betrayed again in the future because our whole signaling system is out of calibration.
For meditators, this is important because healing the damage from betrayals is as painful as having porcupine quills or cactus needles pulled out of your leg. It's a series of ouch, ouch, ouch moments. And there is no Novocain for it because the type of healing that is needed is conscious healing. The last thing you ever want to think about again is your friend who betrayed you. The very thought of them is like a virus that crashes your computer. But when you feel safe and relaxed during meditation, their image will come up, the mini-movie will start playing, and you will be inside a debriefing session as your inner intel staff and your inner Sun Tzu sit around and work on the problem of how did you get there, what damage did you take, how were you deceived, how does your intelligence gathering and assessment system need to be revised, and what exact steps to take today to move toward a solution. And how to prevent a scenario such as this from happening in the future.
As part of recovering from betrayal, you have to learn to distinguish between different kinds of pain - the pain of the needles in your body, the pain of the infection around the needles, the pain of pulling the needles out, the pain of cleaning the wound, the pain of the scar tissue as it forms, the pain of working the scar tissue so it becomes more supple.
If you are in the process of healing from a betrayal, don't give up on yourself. You can heal, and you can be better than before. But ouch, the healing process hurts!
Wash The Fear Out of Your Body (Meditation and Intuition - Part 5)
Sometimes just a little bit of meditation gives the nervous system enough juice, relaxation chemistry, that a significant amount of fear is released. This is possibly because some of our chronic fear is fear of relaxation itself. We are afraid to let go of the continual vigilance and shift over to really living. When we make the decision to meditate, then, that decision has a lot of personal power behind it. This means a lot to many of us, especially those who have not done such things before.
The basic mental focus of meditation is some aspect of life's rhythm: the continual flowing of the breath, or the flow of a yummy sound such as a mantra, or the flow of energy in the body. A sense of steadiness does emerge in this flowing rhythm, but you do not need to focus on it. The more you allow yourself to perceive rhythm, the more an underlying sense of stability will emerge.
As the senses become absorbed in perceiving rhythm and stability, the muscles of the body relax and let go of tension.
Now, let's go over that sentence again: "As the senses become absorbed in perceiving rhythm and stability, the muscles of the body relax and let go of tension." This is so obvious that it's easy to miss.
More on the Debriefing Process
What happens when the muscles let go of tension? Often, we become aware for a few seconds or minutes of what we were tense about. We see little mini-movies of what we were doing when we tensed up – an unfinished conversation, a disagreement, a negative emotion that came up between us and someone we love, a tense situation at work, a failure, a success, a deadline. This is your mind/body's natural debriefing mechanism at work.
In the military, whenever anyone comes back from a mission, they get debriefed on what happened, so that the intelligence agents obtain a more accurate assessment of the environment and the forces arrayed. Football teams also debrief about their games, and probably most professional sports use the technique.
If you have been meditating every day consistently, then most of your debriefing may be about current events, because you have caught up with yourself. If you have just started meditating, or have recently been through a lot of battles of some kind, then the debriefing that comes up during meditation may cover the whole time period. You will find your brain reviewing in excruciating detail crucial events of your life and how you responded to them.
How long does debriefing take? This is the weird part. Thoughts come in unpredictable bursts, just when you are most relaxed. This is because the body loves to do the debriefing while at ease, whatever level of repose is available at the moment. Unless you have some comfort in your nerves, you won't be able to filter away the excess tension.
Note here that the intelligence in your body does not care about you being relaxed. It only wants efficiency, and relaxation is usually the most efficient mode. The adaptive intelligence also wants you to have the most perfectly sensitive danger recognition and stress-response system. The keyword here is accuracy. The body wants totally accurate sensory information and totally appropriate response.
This is for most of us the hardest part of meditation, the toughest to take, this cycle of relaxation and tension release. While it may make sense logically to say, "Ok, when you relax, you let go of tension," in practice it is a bit of a bitch. You are sitting there all relaxed and at ease, and all of a sudden your brain is filled with images of when you were definitely NOT at ease, and your muscles are jumping with tension. What the f—- is going on here?
Again, what the f--- is going on is that your body/mind is taking advantage of the situation of meditation to wash the fear out of your system. You know this is happening during meditation because your awareness goes from being extremely relaxed, to replaying a movie of some time in the past when you were in a stressful situation, or some time in the future you think will be challenging. And what, really, is your body/mind doing? Practicing being relaxed while engaged in that situation, as relaxed as is optimal for your performance. Ask any martial artist, you are better off when you are relaxed. Ask a soldier who has been in combat. You are usually better off if you can keep your wits about you.
If you work from 8 to 5 each day, and meditate in the morning before going to work, most of your time during meditation will be spent thinking – your brain just going over the choreography of the day ahead, musing about your relationships, sorting, prioritizing, and mulling over anything that makes you tense. Only a few minutes will be spent in something like transcendence, where you are savoring the vastness of life, the delight of being alive, the incredible richness of the moment. These few minutes are precious, to be sure. But the unstressing aspect of meditation is just as important, because it allows you to live honestly in the sense of delight the experience of vastness gives you.
How to Feel Safe by Cultivating Relaxed Alertness (Meditation and Intuition - Part 4)
Reality seems to work by paired opposites.
The yin/yang symbol is an eternal symbol of this.
If you want to breathe in, you have to breathe out first. If you want to be wide awake for the day's work, you have to go completely unconscious, in the state called sleep, for hours beforehand. If you want to jump up, you first crouch down into gravity, then you spring upwards. We are all used to the ways these opposites work together. We know these opposites are complimentary. We use this all the time without having to think about it.
Here is one that may be less familiar: if you want to be safe in a situation that has some dangers, cultivate relaxation. If you go around the world with a thorough sense of relaxation permeating your body, then when you get an alarm signal, an inner ahhhooooggaa or danger signal, you will know this is coming from outside. There is something to attend to. Your nervous system will configure itself appropriately to face whatever danger is there.
If you go around the world with danger signals blasting away in your head all the time, false feelings of emergency, then you will be too tired, stressed, and off-balance to respond appropriately if and when a real physical danger does arise. Your alarm system gives so many false alarms that you and everyone around you will weary of the noise you generate. So paradoxically, a way to cultivate a state of alertness, in which you go around in a state of responsiveness, is to cultivate a wide-open relaxation, senses wide open, body at play, instincts supple, at home and ready for anything.
For years, I have recommended that everyone who experiences fear on a daily basis read the books of Gavin de Becker. Now Gavin has a new book out, Fear Less: Real Truth About Risk, Safety, and Security in a Time of Terrorism.
All this points to the idea, don't walk out the door without meditating. Meditation, practiced the way I describe it in my books, is a great tool for tuning your intuition and living a relaxed life. One in which your survival signals only go off when needed, so you listen to them.
The Interplay of Relaxation and Debriefing (Meditation and Intuition - Part 3)
During meditation, within a few minutes, you will find yourself relaxing deeply, as if you were several days into a vacation. Then suddenly, aaaoooah, you will find your brain reviewing something that feels like your personal car alarm. This happens because life is ruthless in its own way. You may want meditation to be a blessed respite from your life, and it will be, for a few minutes. Then your brain and entire body start to engage in a deep process of reviewing every time your alarm system went off, and assessing: was this really a danger? Does that alarm system need to be adjusted? In the military, this kind of after-action reporting is called a debriefing. Sports teams also debrief, often with video replays of crucial action.
You want meditation to feel like soaking in a hot tub, but suddenly you are in a room with Sun Tzu, and maybe a logistics guy, an intel guy, and a cartographer, and they are all interrogating you on why you pushed the panic button or called in an air strike on your own position. They are sitting there with clipboards looking at you and asking, "You called in Broken Arrow. What was your justification for that? What were you seeing, hearing and feeling?"
This aspect of meditation feels extremely uncomfortable, like watching a frame-by-frame replay of how you miscalculated something.
It is ruthless because your body-mind system wants to review exactly what your senses - your spies - were telling you, and exactly how you interpreted this data and said, "It's a threat," and then exactly what alarm or stress response you invoked. This will go on for a grueling 30 seconds or couple of minutes, then you will be in the hot tub again, relaxed more deeply than before, for a couple of minutes, then back to the room with Sun Tzu. (For an interesting story of when Broken Arrow was called, see We Were Soldiers with Mel Gibson).
Why does this happen? In essence, because it's natural. Your body, your brain, are part of life on earth, the hundreds of millions of years that nerves and senses have been evolving. This deep instinctive intelligence in you is a master of survival. Meditating is somewhat of an unusual situation because what you are doing is paying close attention to this intelligence functioning. Mostly you have to just let it work and learn from it and give it permission. Your body wants total elegance and grace, to move through the world with animal alertness, and an almost molecular precision in how much energy you expend on recognizing and adapting to dangers.
Your brain is not imitating the way the military debriefing or sports coaching works. It's the other way around. The military and sports coaches are utilizing the way the brain works. They conduct debriefings because this is the way the human brain works at its best, and they want to do what works. Military action and sports are always about success through exact application of force or energy, also speed, timing and synchronization. And they are always about learning from mistakes.
The debriefing process is painful and wonderful and educational, and when it is over, you can safely feel great, because you have learned from your mistakes on a deep level.
Keep in mind, when you meditate instinctively, your body goes into a state of rest deeper than deep sleep. This is healing, and your body-mind system conducts some of the brain rejuvenation that is usually does only during sleep. In meditation, we are simultaneously resting more deeply than sleep, and awake and alert. So we have to learn to put up with processes having to do with life maintenance that the body & mind do whenever we rest deeply. The brain and body do this same review when we are sleeping and dreaming, and the threats show up symbolically in the characters and plot structure of our dreams. When we are meditating, the review shows up as "feelies" – short video clips with sound tracks, emotions, and intense physical sensations. And we feel everything intensely because we are not only awake but more aware than usual.
The reason your body-mind system will zero in on the times during the day you felt afraid or invoked the stress response is because the response is so expensive energetically. The body stops everything else it is doing – resting, healing, digesting, learning, enjoying - and just focuses on the threat. This is absolutely great if you are in immediate physical danger of the kind that requires you to suddenly run a few hundred feet or instantly leap into combat. If the danger is not immediate, within a few seconds, you are like a car sitting in the driveway revving the engine up to 5000 rpm. A waste of good energy. Most human illness has a stress component, because the stress response wears out the body in various ways. Doctors have known for decades that 80% of all office visits are caused by the wear and tear of stress, and recently the percentage has been revised upwards.
I know this is a challenging point, but if you can stay with me here and really get this, it will change your life and meditation will forever be much easier.
Re-Calibrating Your Danger Signaling System (Meditation and Intuition - Part 2)
A dog that barks at every person and every leaf that moves is worthless as a watchdog. A car alarm that goes off because the wind blows, or someone walks by, is worse than useless – your neighbors will be glad someone steals your damn car, just to get that horrible noise out of their lives for a few days. And if we are tense and suspicious all the time, this is not good armor and not good radar. No military can be on high alert all the time – things break down.
Meditation is adaptive – this means that the power driving meditation and making it work is your body's innate intelligence, which is only interested in helping you to survive and thrive. This is the natural tendency of meditation, by the way – you can observe this in yourself, and you can find it out through interviewing others. Instinctive Meditation is just a name I give to a system for recognizing and utilizing what happens naturally during successful and healthy meditation. I developed it by listening to people who were thriving in meditation and in life, and I learned in a different way by listening to people who were taking damage.
As part of this adaptive process, one of the dynamics that goes on during meditation is that your body and mind will re-calibrate your danger signaling system, to make it more accurate. You'll find yourself going deeply into relaxation, and then your nerves will jump a bit as they replay the memory of a threat that you perceived. Then your nervous system will study the relationship of that perceived threat with your current sensory intelligence about your world, and evaluate the best course of action. This is an almost involuntary process. It has great survival but everyone almost without exception hates it because they think it shouldn't be part of meditation. It feels like you are at home having dinner, or resting, and a technician from the alarm company comes over unannounced and starts testing the alarm system, opening and closing doors and windows and checking the perimeter. If you allow this process, you will find that after meditation, your danger signaling system is more accurate with fewer false alarms, and you can go through life more relaxed because you trust your sensors.
How to Have Good Personal Radar (Meditation and Intuition - Part 1)
One reason to meditate is so that you don't miss out on the beauty of your own life as you move through the day. It is so easy to lose the joy of life in the living of it, to get caught up in hurrying and mental chatter about how late you are, how many things you have to do. When we find the style of meditation that works for us, we often find that our senses open up, and our intuition becomes more accurate. And at the same time, we engage in the actions of our everyday life with more relaxation and ease.
Because of this, many people think that meditation is about being open and relaxed, but this is not actually true: meditation gives your nerves a chance to be in deeper contact with reality, and as a result you will be more open and relaxed much of the time, because there is not an immediate threat. And because your senses are more open, you can perceive both safety and danger more accurately. And ask any warrior: relaxation is a great place to come from when preparing for combat, if that is what's called for.
Another reason to not leave home without meditating is that if you are relaxed as your baseline experience, then when you get tense, it is a signal, a clear blip on your personal radar. Relaxation is like having a well-calibrated radar system, that gives few false signals.
Unless you are relaxed and at ease, you will have a lot of noise in your nervous system. If you are afraid all the time, and suspicious of everyone, you won't know when you actually are in danger, because your danger signaling system is blaring all the time. If your radar is showing threats that are not there, you will have to learn to ignore it to get any work done, and then real threats will go ignored.
This is why meditation is part of the training in many martial arts, and why meditation and martial arts training are complementary opposites, enriching each other.
As an aside, though, I have to mention that sitting on your ankles, or sitting cross-legged, can be very bad for the knees. Sitting in a chair with your feet on the ground is a great pose, plus it has that extra sense of groundedness.
In the following several sections, we cycle through the interplay between safety and danger, because this is the most basic of instincts. We will look at the way rhythm occurs in meditation experience, and we will approach the same point again and again, spiraling in at it from slightly different angles, because it is such a challenging issue for meditators. Most people never get it, and the lack of this understanding is a major reason people quit meditating. So forgive the repetition.
