You May Need Better Armor

Meditation activates our senses and gives the heart time to feel. This can result in a brand-new and fresh feeling. Then contact with the regular world, of people who do not meditate, can feel like pollution. It’s like wearing white clothes, they pick up every bit of lint and dirt and show it.

There are a couple of ways of activating your armor.

1. Spend 5 minutes exiting from meditation. This allows your senses to recalibrate to the world of action. Toward the end of this 5 minutes you can run through you to-do list. Your body will automatically train itself to be properly configured for your day. Sometimes this is all that is needed.

2. Get excited about everywhere you are going to go and everyone you are going to see. This activates your own powers and the fire of your excitement is all the protection you need.

3. Develop a Prayer of Protection for yourself. Use any language that appeals to you.

“I am surrounded and protected by the Light of Christ. May Christ and all the Angels shower everyone I am going to meet today with love and healing energy. I am garbed, as if in silk, with The Armor of Christ, the Lord of Love.”

“I am immersed in the Flame of Love and surrounded by its gentle, purifying, protective flow.”

In Sanskrit the term for armor is kavacha. कवच. Each goddess has her kavacha that you can summon, each god has a different kind of armor.

You can feel the armor sometimes as if you are wearing an invisible coat of chain mail, like a knight in Arthurian times. This is a very tactile and a very real activation of the subtle body. It may feel like “an energy fur” or the sensation of being clothed in light. You may find you can activate your armor in an instant, with a thought.

When I was first beginning armor explorations in 1968, it seemed to take about 20 minutes before I felt the protection was happening. I went to the beach almost every day at dawn and would do Tai Chi-like motions, honoring the Sun and Wind and Ocean and Sand, then gather in all those energy-substances and pack them into the field around my body. It was quietly ecstatic and playful. I was just playing and dancing with the elements. Then I would notice that the feeling of being protected by elemental powers would last until late in the afternoon, when I would refresh it by another meditation session.

When you walk around the world with this kind of armor on, it also serves as advanced warning, a spider sense, a catlike whisker vibration sense that tells you about dangers and creepy people.

At the time in 1968, the Vietnam War was raging. If you blinked, you could get drafted into its death maw. The students around me were rioting and raging against the war and they were right. At the same time, the idealism of the students was being exploited by cunning political operatives who were cynically using people for their own strange agendas.

Everyone was smoking pot and you could not walk from one class to the other without being offered a joint or maybe you want to purchase a baggie of marijuana, magic mushrooms, speed, or some LSD? Sometimes the people offering were working with narcs, setting up campus activists to be arrested later. And the substances themselves, even something as benevolent as marijuana, were smuggled into the country by murdering whole families sailing off the coast of Mexico, and then sailing their boat into its dock in nearby Dana Point or Newport Beach. Weeks after the family was reported missing, the police would find an empty boat there at its spot, with blood splatters and traces of drugs all over the cabin.

With my armor on, I could effortlessly walk through all of this, gliding along in enjoyment, listening to my instincts, and learning about what intuition is, because all this was brand new to me. Because I was able to avoid all those traps, I was able to start my own learning center at the University and invite teachers from Esalen to come give workshops every other weekend. Armor helps us to stay clear of the toxic and frees up energy to do what we are really here on Earth to do.

To activate your armor, you may find Tai Chi is helpful, or just borrow some moves. You may find certain chants activate your force field. You may find that SPEED of intuition is all the armor you need – that if you listen to your gut feelings and respond within a moment, that you are protected.

You may find that pausing for a couple of seconds here and there gives you time to “gather your forces” and this is all the protection you need.

You may find that actively inquiring about everything is the protection you need, for example looking at someone and saying “What the HELL are you talking about?” An active dynamic mode keeps your life energy flowing outward to interact with the world, rather than passively accepting it all.

In all these ways, meditation and life are continually challenging us to continually up our game of survival, to learn to be savvy and discerning.

Click here to listen to the recording of our free meditation telegathering on power&peace (recorded on 21 Monday, 2020).

The Joy of Breath

There are moments when we stop taking life for granted and inhale deeply of the beauty that is around us. A cleansing breath drawn at glorious dawn; savoring the bouquet of a glass of fine wine before dinner; or, nestled in a lover's arms, surrendering to his or her smell-at such moments, you take life deeply into yourself and are intimate with something great. In the time it takes to breathe in and breathe out, you touch life and are touched by life intensely.

Miracles happen if you continue this appreciative awareness beyond the 3 or 4 seconds that such a moment usually lasts. To spend even 15 seconds in the same state, or 60 seconds, seems like a lifetime. And it can transform you.

Breath is a gift from God, a gift from the oceans and forests, from the universe. Breathing is, in fact, a relationship you are having with the natural world-a physical exchange with the sea of air surrounding the Earth. When you cultivate this relationship by attuning yourself to it, you are developing a gift that can bring you a lifetime of joy.

We can be interested in breath taking, fascinated by it, in the same way we are charmed by food, enchanted by sex, amazed by music. Most of the skill of aware breathing is in finding your pleasure circuits, those sensory pathways that light up when you breathe. Work at this; make a conscious effort to engage in your favorite activities with extra gusto and attentiveness. The more you link your adventures in breath to what you love--whether it is food, sleep, kids, horses, dancing, sex, or music--the better.

In my life, I am greatly inspired by yoga in all its forms. I draw on it deeply. But I don’t always use yoga terminology, nor imitate its methods to teach about breath. Rather, I present explorations you can do on your own, in the midst of your everyday life, so that you can develop your own yoga-- what works for you to develop harmony between body, mind, and spirit.

Yoga is a Sanskrit word meaning "union," or joining together. The discipline of yoga is concerned with joining together all the elements of human life into one seamless, harmonious whole. The word is derived from an ancient Indo-European root, yeug, which occurs in English in the form of yoke, jugular, conjugate, subjugate, conjugal, enjoin, injunction, juxtapose, and syzygy.

The yoga tradition of India is astounding in that followers for several thousands of years have made a dedicated effort to notice and record every possible breathing technique and have accumulated a vast repertory of methods. They have cherished each insight into breath they have come across and formulated it into a short pithy statement, or sutra, so that it can be memorized and passed on from generation to generation.

Yoga techniques have been developed for every human activity. There is the yoga of work, the yoga of war, the yoga of eating, the yoga of meditation, the yoga of sex, the yoga of devotion to God, and thousands more. There is more to yoga than can be explored in one human lifetime, or even a hundred, and there is more variety than any one human being can comprehend.

There is, however, one overall impression of yoga that predominates in the popular mind: that of the reclusive yogi, celibate, poor, living apart from society in a cave or ashram on a mountainside. There is a lot of truth to this archetype, and indeed yogi monks have done much great exploration. Their work has been so powerful that their approach--denying life, denying sexuality, and in general doing the things that monks are supposed to do-- permeates all of yoga. In other words, subjugation has been emphasized over conjugation.

As a meditation instructor, the approach I favor is to help people focus on becoming intimate with their own breath. When people tune in to their unique ebb and flow, they either invent the techniques they need to stay focused, or they are instinctively drawn to those that already exist and that naturally speak to them. This method of learning about breath may or may not be slower, but it's definitely more gentle than attempting to forcefully discipline your respiration.

The best things in life really are free. And if you are breathing easily while doing them, then they are even better. As we move through this mystery we call life, we are smitten often with different cravings: we want relief, stimulation, good food, companionship, a real vacation, and much more. It seems as if we would have to spend a lot of time or a lot of money to get these things. Maybe so. But first you should explore what is right here, free for the taking, ready to enhance your health and your life right now.

For millennia, people all over the world have found breathing to be invaluable for inspiring and healing. This is the message from all the ancient traditions, from Buddhism and the Sufis to Zen and the Vipassana monks with their beautiful walking meditations. Even today, singers and athletes testify that they can do what they do because they are centered in breath.

Breath is everyone's birthright. Its secrets are out in the open, under your nose, and inside you. I am convinced that the more people who know the secrets of conscious breath taking, the better. So take a deep breath--and let's begin.

From Breath Taking by Lorin Roche, PhD

We will offer a special workshop on breathing on October 3-4, 2020.

Click here for more details.

Getting Enough Touch Meditation

We are all touch deprived.

The sensation of touch hunger is so unbearable that we block it out. The reason for our deprivation not just the pandemic, with this newly installed fear of contact.

Our technologies are so beautiful and alluring that we don't realize that they present the simulation of touch. We think we are in touch with our friends when we text them. The touch interface of our phones was designed by modeling natural human touch gestures, sorcery and shamanism. Mudra or magical gestures are used all over the world in every culture.

I love Zoom and Facetime and Skype but after awhile it is like drinking those totally artificial sports drinks. It will keep you alive but is nothing like real fruit juice. We are designed by nature to get up in the morning, rub shoulders, make a plan, then go off gathering. Come back and sit around the fire in the evening, side by side, telling stories, and fall asleep in a huddle by the fire.

Here are a couple of things I find useful. First, meditate in any way you like, even for 5 minutes.

At the end of meditation, linger in the subtle world of touch. The touch of the air as you breathe in and out. The touch of your clothes on your skin. As you linger there, practice luxuriating.

Create your own mantra such as, "I am awake to the world of touch." Or you might prefer, "Now I am awake to the world of touch." "-ing" words are also fun, so simply "touching" is a beautiful mantra.

“Now" is a fun little mantra. It is handy to make up a chant or word or phrase you like, and connect this with sensory activation. When you walk outside, develop a habit of pausing somewhere safe and beautiful and just feel the touch of sunlight and air on your skin.

"I am awake to the world of touch." Do this every day for a week or so, even for a couple of minutes.

When we form an intention of something we long for and hang out with it for even 60 seconds after meditation, it's powerful.

On a sensory level, you are inviting your brain to rewire itself so that your touch sensors are dialed up a bit. You can enjoy more, whatever amount of touch you are getting. Meditation is essentially a process of taking more and more delight in less and less, so that you are delighted to simply exist and be breathing.

If you want to make up a Sanskrit mantra for yourself:

avamarśa - touch, contact parimilana - touch, contact

pratyavamṛś - to touch. To reflect, meditate.

sāndrasparśa - soft to the touch. susparśa - pleasant to the touch, very soft or tender.

sparśendriya - the sense of touch. sparśana - touching, handling. Air, wind. The act of touching, touch, contact. Sensation, sense of touch, organ of sensation or feeling, sensitive nerve.

Monier-Williams Sanskrit-English Dictionary, 1899

We discuss these and some other issues in our virtual meditation intensive Wild Serenity. You still can register and join us!

A Vow Not to Act on Thoughts in Meditation

In meditation, one of the skills is learning to not edit. Welcome and transmute instead of suppressing. For example, if you were angry at someone during the day but had to holdback and not say anything, that anger will come up and fill your body when you meditate. There is a set of skills you can learn to turn that anger into good clean fire energy you can use for your own life. This can become almost instantaneous, with practice.

In meditation it is okay for any thought to come because you aren’t going to act on it. That is basically all you need to decide and it is kind of a vow: “I am not going to act onany thought that comes during meditation.” The second part of this is, “After meditation,in my regular waking state, I will decide how to act, in accord with my highest integrity.”

When you decide this, you are giving freedom to your heart and mind to get busy sorting and processing all those impulses and emotions. Thoughts don’t come from outside you. When you notice a thought it is just some aspect of the world your brain is tracking and wanting to make sense of.

If you want to learn how meditation can be nourishing, effortless, and fun, join us for a 5-week online meditation retreat called Wild Serenity, which begins tomorrow, August 16th.

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.”

Freedom to Move

At any moment when you are meditating, be free to move. You can stretch, yawn, jump up and go for a run or walk, do asana, take a shower,

You can lie down and take a nap.

This is a higher form of discipline because you are taking care of your needs and not creating meditation to be yet another place where you have to practice denial.

Your wiggly impulses are a spontaneous form of kundalini yoga. You are marrying the restful part of the cycle with the move it. Notice in particular any impulses in the muscles around your spine. From time to time, engage the muscles along your entire spine, from the base to the top of your head. Get into undulation, subtle or major, tiny motions or large.

When you are free to move and wiggle, at the same time your body is free to dive into deep relaxation. If you are meditating and get restless and want to go for a walk, this is a success of meditation, not a failure. Go walk and come back tomorrow.

Over time you will develop a sensibility about how to take care of your body, how to move with joy, which then sets you up to have a deeper rest cycle in meditation.

This serves meditation, because as you relax and go deep, your whole body becomes an instrument your soul is playing.

This is the skill: Give yourself freedom to move in any way that occurs to you. Lift up and down, expand and contract, be heavy and light, moving wildly or serenely. Continually give yourself this freedom. Break out of the mindset that meditation is sitting upright and sitting still.

Photo for the banner Javier Allegue Barros on Unsplash

Come As You Are

Come yearning. Come sad. Come exhausted. Come wounded, come broken. Meditation is here to refresh you. You don’t have to be other than as you are to come. Come natural, come informal.

When you find a meditation you love, it’s like accessing your own inner vacation spot, a spa, where you can rest, be healed, rejuvenated.

This is a Shakti-powered approach to meditation, in which you learn the skills of allowing the immense power of your innate healing capacity to refresh you. No pushing required. You don’t make an effort. Any straining will only backfire. If you love a certain meditation technique, you will be naturally attracted to it and want to explore it, play with it, luxuriate in it, melt into its embrace, just as you do with music you love.

The power, the Shakti, is life’s urge to be at one with itself. This is one of the most powerful urges in a human being, your innate love of the life force. The skills of meditation have to do with letting the power of your love carry you. Let the power of your own soul’s love for its human embodiment permeate you.

Effort is only for when you decide to do something unnatural to yourself. In the outer world, this can be okay – you might have to force yourself to get up and take a walk. In the inner world of meditation, the doorways open because your attention wants to go there anyway. You don’t have to “improve” yourself in order to approach your own inner world. Each mood you happen to be in will teach you something about the forms life energy can take.

You Ego Is Not The Problem - Video

A weekly series of short chats between Dr. Lorin Roche and Tania Kazi about the wisdom of meditation and how it can lead to greater insights into our lives.

Women and Meditation - Video

Weekly wisdom chats with Dr. Lorin Roche and Tania Kazi on Meditation & More.

Delight in Sensing the World - Audio

Attention and mindfulness happen through the senses. When you are aware of thinking, it is through internal sensing: you see a mental image in “your mind’s eye,” you hear a thought or you feel one. You can even call up thought-smells.

Take your time to check in with your senses, at your own pace. Explore smell, taste, sight, hearing, balance and let them take you into meditation.

The first few times you meditate with the senses, it may take many minutes to engage fully with one of the senses and experience its range. Over time, by simply thinking of one sense for a moment, it will awaken. Tuning into each of your senses every day will enrich your life in subtle and wonderful ways.

The more you let your senses open up and rejoice in meditation, the better. When you pay attention to a sense, it comes alive. If you do so consistently, the brain literally creates more neural pathways to appreciate that sense.

It does not take much to awaken the senses; even the lightest touch suffices to start the process. The payoff is usually immediate — we find ourselves just a little bit more alert to the beauty of the world around us. Go for those tiny changes.

Grab some mini-meditations here and there throughout your day. Two minutes here, thirty seconds there. These will teach you how to develop a meditation practice that you want to do each day.

Five-minute guided audio meditation

Meditation Tips for Today - July 4th

Sometimes it works to just come as you are. No preparation. Just pause somewhere and tune in. Don't change clothes, just wear your pajamas or old jeans.

Sometimes the doors just open. They call to us. Also be alert to what preparation you might like to do before meditating. Sometimes vacuuming, dusting, puttering, cleaning, is a good ritual before meditating. Water the plants.

Other preparatory activities you might explore

- take a cold shower

- read a poem

- ask your mind to give you a beautiful thought and write it down. Just write one beautiful sentence.

- put on music and dance freely for half an hour, then lie down for 5 minutes, then sit and be in love with life for 5 minutes.

Other approaches:

- call a friend and share with each other what emotions are moving in your body, fear, worry, anger, love, tenderness, exhaustion, whatever is there. Just share emotions, nothing else, to honor each feeling. Don't try to get rid of the emotions, just honor them. Then explore meditating, giving thanks for each breath.

- meditate for one minute and then create something. Paint. Draw. Dance. Write. Play music.

- tell everyone you are going to Be In Silence for an hour or two, and turn off your phone. Take a physical book into your hand, whatever actual book you have. Make yourself very comfortable and look at the cover while enjoying the flow of your breathing. Breathe with the book. Open to the first page and slowly notice each page, the physical property of the paper and ink and then let yourself fall into the meaning and feeling of the book. Notice how different it is to the body to read paper than a screen.

This weekend is simultaneously Independence Day, Guru Purnima, Dharma Day, The Full Moon, and a partial eclipse.

Today is a good day to touch the Earth, celebrate the Sun and Moon dancing around each other, and live in gratitude for the air you are breathing. It's a good day to renew your contact with everything in life that inspires you.

- read the Declaration of Independence and take one thought from it, whatever you like, and appreciate how much human longing is behind those words, and how we are all, in our own way, continually striving for freedom, to inhabit our independence.

Breath Meditation - Audio

Breath has sound, it has texture, it has motion. As your body moves with the inflowing and outflowing breath your body balances automatically. Breath even has an impact on the visual field; there are subtle differences to notice.

Breathing with awareness is one of the essential meditation techniques cherished the world over. Simply pay attention to the flow of air with appreciation for the gift of each breath. Doing this even a few minutes a day will bless your life. A human being develops senses for whatever she pays attention to. If you pay a lot of attention to wine, you will learn to identify what type it is just by a sniff of the bouquet. If you watch a lot of baseball, you will learn to see what type of pitch is coming at the hitter earlier and earlier in the wind-up or release. Mothers can tell the state of their babies at a glance. If you pay attention to breath, your body will over time evolve the senses to really, really enjoy it as one of the Fine Things of Life.

Breath has to be mostly automatic and out-of-awareness by default, because our life depends on it every minute. We each breathe many times a minute, whether we are awake or asleep. In a day we breathe more than twenty thousand times. Each of these breaths connects us to the entire planet. Appreciating this connection is joyous but optional — it is what you do after survival is assured.

The movement of attention to cherish breath is instinctive, for all living things have a natural attraction toward that which gives them life. Meditation is an instinctive urge, a calling, as deep as any of the ancient yearnings that move human beings. All the hundreds of techniques are just ways of cooperating with that urge. In order for meditation to feel that innate, it helps to learn it at your own speed in your own way. Start now.

Take a breath, have fun.

The Desire Scan

In addition to any Body Scan practice you do, or as a modification, you might explore what could be called The Desire Scan.

Almost all of the meditation traditions have come to us from monastic enterprises, where the overall intent is quietude and the abandonment of personal desires. For monks and nuns, this can be beautiful. It is their path. This is also the path sometimes when you are 70 or 80 or 90 or earlier, if you have a disease and are close to death. You go through a process of abandoning desires.

But if you are in the beginning of your life or midway, meditation will harm you if you practice in a way that stifles the flow of desire. And just everyday living is so hard that we don't even have to practice repression, just the daily grind makes for enough suppression.

As a counter action to all that, and to make sure that your body with all its nerves and senses is continually nourished by your own life essence, you may want to incorporate a Desire Scan into your day. At first this may take a few minutes, and over time you will internalize it so it takes a few seconds.

To begin, notice how universal desires are. We all want the same kinds of things, even though we have our particular mix, our own preferred menu and sequence.

Here is the practice.

1. Think of the whole spectrum of desires.

2. Breathe with each desire, in turn.

3. Notice where in your body you feel the sensations and energies that go with each desire. Enjoy the motions your body makes when you are in the midst of fulfilling that desire. 4. Savor it all.

5. Inquire into the desires you know so well, and spend a little time with the ones that you have not been able to explore lately, or ever.

6. Finish by attending in a loving way to the overall feeling and sensation of your body.

7. Sit there for 3 minutes with your eyes open, just integrating, before jumping up to go do stuff.

Learn to tolerate the weird sensations that go with entertaining a desire that you feel is forbidden. If, for example, you have a secure home and steady relationship, but are attracted to danger, are secretly in love with someone at work, give yourself a chance to feel those forbidden feelings. You are safe in meditation to do so. This will let your body be nourished by the erotic flow and you will in fact be way less likely to wind up in bed with some stranger. Meditation is a private internal space, a temple. A party. An internal Mardi Gras. What happens in meditation, stays in meditation.

If you have not been able to Speak Up and Hold Your Ground in a close relationship, then you will find this repressed strength coming to you while you are meditating, if you allow it. The sensations may be terrifying. OMG If I ever spoke my mind!

If you are a person that says YES a lot, it can feel taboo and death-defying to say NO to people. The reverse is true. If you like to say NO, then surrendering to a YES can feel like a fate worse than death. "Once I let down my guard, a catastrophe will happen."

Meditation is the place to let your body-heart-mind-senses have free play, so they can all practice the motions of life in a safe circumstance. All your chakras, so to speak, can practice flowing together, supporting each other, combining in combinations to enrich your outer world of action

The Basic Desires

- Food. Delicious to us. Nutritious. At the right time.

- Clothing that fits, serves our purposes. Looks good. Keeps us warm.

- Restfulness. Sleep.

- Activity and exercise. To use our muscles.

- To speak up, say our piece.

- Power and some control over our life.

- A home or nest or spot to call our own.

- Desire for a sense of safety and to feel protected and peaceful.

- Exploration, novelty, satisfy our curiosity, learn new things.

- Communication with other people, the desire to exhange information.

- Teamwork, the desire to join up with others, form relationships.

- Justice, to protect the righteous and punish wrongdoers and thus keep people safe.

- Close, long-lasting relationships that feel like tribe or family.

- Pair coupling or mating or sexually charged relationships that might lead to children.

- Accumulation, the desire to horde some food or money or supplies so you have some stuff saved up.

- Organization, the desire for your stuff to be where you can find it. Each thing in its place.

- The desire to share what you have with others.

- The desire to be seen as valuable by your tribe or team.

- The desire for freedom and autonomy.

- The desire to feel ethical, that you are honoring a code of conduct.

These desires all emerge from the instinctive matrix of the body-mind system that has been keeping us alive.

The instincts appear to us as impulses that we call desires.

Inside each desire is an impulse of life seeking to renew itself, keep the game going, repair itself, learn the lessons of today and get ready for tomorrow.

The flow of desire wants you to be ready for anything, ready to dance into the next phase of your life.

When we have a desire to meditate, or to learn a new way of meditation, this is life in you seeking to evolve itself.

In essence, we go inside to contact our inner riches so that we can go out into activity and give more of ourselves to the world. Then we are open to receiving more from others in return.

In the yoga texts, the purpose of life is stated succinctly as

Kama - sensual pleasure

Artha - wealth

Moksha - freedom

Dharma - duty, obligations

These are the purusharthas.

पुरुषार्थ

puruṣārtha

the four objects or aims of existence

Yoga and meditation exist to help us fulfill these aims of existence.

It is interesting to consider meditation as a way of fulfilling desires.

If you are going to practice meditation and you want it to enrich your daily life, then you need to continually be fine-tuning your attention so that it allows the energetic richness of every desire to flow in your nerves. This is what creates the sense of "readiness to live" that is such a delightful gift of meditation.

This approach is actually fundamental to the whole sensibility of the classical yoga world. It is not exclusive to what we think of as Tantra. It's right here in the Sanskrit language.

Moment-by-moment in meditation and in our day, we have to improvise with kama, moksha, artha and dharma, to find ways for them to support each other. This is a great game and a fresh discovery every day.

Make your own list of say, your favorite 8 desires, and add a couple that you are scared of or have an aching yearning for. Just have a page in your journal. Over time, make sure that your meditation practice is welcoming to YOUR flow of desire, so that inwardly you can be practicing the Yoga of Desire, the integration your inner life with your outer life of action.

Pro tip:

Find a way to dance, even alone by yourself. Just dance freely. Also learn some Tai Chi or QiGong moves. These Taoist arts embody an appreciation of all the instinctive energies of life and have developed ways to honor them and set them free to circulate in a healthy way.

Scrolling Through the Chakras

When we are cruising through social media, surfing the web, scrolling through Facebook, the ‘Gram, Twitter, we are moved by the instinct to explore. What’s happening, what’s the buzz, how are all my people doing, what is everyone’s relationship with everyone?

When we scroll through our chakras it’s the same basic instinct. What’s happening? What do all the chakras have to say to me and to each other?

Are any of your chakras feeling FOMO or even, IKIBLO - “I just KNOW I am being left out!”

Meditation is the practice of lovingly tending to the energetic dynamics of life, it’s very life that you’re living now.

Enjoy Your Busy Brain (Part 3): Pull Out the Thorns and Tune Up

In meditation, give yourself a LOT of time to get used to the tension-relaxation-tension-relaxation cycle.

It often feels like pulling out the thorns, so go easy on yourself. Resist the temptation to say things like, “This isn’t helping; it’s making me worse!” (Although it’s easy to feel that way at first.)

I once had a whole series of vaccinations before traveling in equatorial Africa, and some of them made me feverish for days. But it’s a hell of a lot better than getting the full-blown disease.

In meditation and in life, it’s better to pull out the thorns than leave them to fester!

And it’s better to give your body a chance to explore more elegant ways of dealing with stress, rather than staying in Alarm Mode for long periods of time.

As you can see, meditation is NOT one single state, but rather a continually changing inner-theater of quiet/explosive/erotic/placid/turbulent intensity, in which each breath brings drama, catharsis, rebirth—and yes, even healing.

Take time to tune up.

Meditation feels different each time you do it.

Each breath, each moment of meditation is different from the next as your body rests up, revitalizes itself, and tunes up for action.

The more you cooperate with this process, the more the vaccination quality we discussed above will work for you.

You will become more skilled at handling the stresses you are facing; be they long hours, aches and pains, too many tasks to juggle, or a medical condition.

Should you find a moment to meditate each day, you will soon realize that here -- at last -- is the deepest quality of rest you have ever experienced. And as your body gets used to it, you will feel yourself healing very gently and gradually, on a deep level.

Enjoy Your Busy Brain (Part 2): Don’t Try to Make Your Mind Blank!

If there’s one golden piece of advice in meditation it’s this: Meditation is definitely not one monotonous state of inner blankness!

Even though everyone wants the brain to shut up during meditation, it almost never happens. Rather, meditation is a dynamic condition of relaxation and tension, inner peacefulness and excited musings about work and love.

When I ask people why they have quit meditating, the most common response I get is, “I just couldn’t get into it. I couldn’t make my mind blank.” They admit that yes, they felt relaxation, and yes, they felt better afterward, but all that inner noise -- that can’t be right, can it?

Learn new, more powerful responses to stress.

This play of opposites that occurs in meditation reminds me of the way vaccinations work.

When you get a vaccination, you take into your body a weakened form of a virus or bacteria -- and your immune system learns to fight it.

In meditation, the mind-body system instinctively enters a deep state of safety and relaxation, and then replays portions of what is stressing you -- so that you can learn new, more elegant, more adaptive, more powerful responses.

For example, in meditation you might find yourself replaying an argument you had with a loved one. You may experience snatches of conversation, the memory of muscular tension, and all the other aspects of what you feel emotionally and physically when stressed.

And then -- and here is the beauty of meditation -- you may spontaneously explore new and better ways of handling similar situations. You will actually get better at coping with stress!

This happens whether you want it to or not, for it’s an aspect of the body’s adaptation and spontaneous self-healing.

If you have a rich and full life, your brain is going to be very busy in meditation. This is good!

Enjoy Your Busy Brain (Part 1): Why Do I Have so Many Thoughts in Meditation?

During meditation, the brain is very busy!

At the same time, however, you may experience a great deal of relaxation and repose. The paradox is: you can’t relax without letting go of tension ... and in letting go of tension you remember all the things you were tense about.

Relaxation, tension, relaxation, tension.

Whatever thoughts, sensations, or emotions you have been holding back by staying tense are suddenly free to flood your awareness -- and be dealt with. Meditation is a highly alert state, and so you often find yourself shifting every few seconds between delicious rest and anxiety, until your system works out just the right balance between ease, excitement, and alarm.

This is what makes meditation ideal for managing the challenges in your life, including your relationships and your health.

The Elixir of Each Breath

One reason why it is important to be centered in your ego, in your natural self, and in your body when you meditate is so that your needs can be met. So that meditation can be a healing place, that tunes you up for life.

If you are on the path of intimacy (as opposed to being a monk or nun), then sexuality is a major part of your life and your dharma, your way through the world. Even if you are not having sex on a regular basis, welcoming the tingle of electricity through your body is important for your physical and emotional health.

Anger is also important, to notice and care for any feelings of anger anywhere in your body.

Hurt is important, to notice, tend to, soothe, any areas that are feeling hurt.

Exhaustion is important to notice, feel your way into any nerves, muscles, areas of the body that are feeling the strain, feeling tired out, in need of soothing and replenishing.

Boundary invasions, that weird rage feeling when someone crosses your boundaries, invades your space, is an important area of life to attend to, study, learn from, develop responses to.

Basically you want to feel every area of your body and its needs for healing and for expression.

This is where the magic happens.

Let's say you are using breath as your gateway into meditative awareness.

If you can simultaneously delight in the gorgeous generosity of the air, this magic substance that day and night gives us life, while at the same time feeling your desperate need for love, attention, healing, friendship, and safety, then your body will manufacture its own healing chemistry as you breathe.

This is, by the way, what life does. It generates a creative response to every challenge, every need.

Air is magic. This is not scientifically proven yet, but I also think that when we breathe aware of our needs, that we magnetically attract from the prana in air the exact kind of healing magnetism we need. There are some kind of charged particles of life in the air that respond to our need. All the meditation traditions consider this ocean of air we are living in to be generous beyond comprehension.

Most of us are borderline exhausted, like marathon runners, just doing our best ever day to get everything done.

Therefore when you approach meditation, come as your needy, exhausted, joyous, horny, lonely, irritated, angry, hurting self. That way you allow the generosity of life to treat you, heal you, soothe and refresh you.

* Ego is simply the sense of "I." The sense of who you are. What you capabilities and limitations are. What your desires are and the nature of your Path.

** When people try to be perfect in meditation and do not cherish their imperfection, and do not stay in their ego needs, then meditation can be dessicating. They might benefit for 6 months to a year, but then the denial of needs becomes a permanent part of the way energy flows in the body. There are many skilled observers in the world, and among them meditators are famous for becoming robotic and dissociated.

How Meditation Can Make You Stronger

When you challenge your body to work, you get fatigued, and then the body rebuilds itself and you come back stronger. Athletes and bodybuilders work this action/rest cycle constantly: it’s called training, and it’s how muscles grow. When you challenge your muscles, the body rebuilds them stronger than before. That is what “working out” is. Lifting weights, exercising, working the body, breaks the tissue down. There are micro-tears. At night, and on your rest days, the body rebuilds the muscles. It can take two days to recover from an intense workout. You may feel sore the next day, and really sore two days later.

I remember being surprised when I learned it is rest that makes you stronger. I’d always assumed it was the workouts that built you up. The trainers say it’s actually rest plus having sufficient nutrition circulating in the body to provide the raw materials for the repairs. The play of opposites is that you want to challenge the body and break it down, just the right amount, and then rest those body parts through sleep and normal use for a couple of days. That’s what makes you stronger.

Working out week after week without sufficient rest time can result in overtraining injuries, which means the body does not have enough time to repair the injuries before you stress it again. This is a known phenomenon in all form of athletic training, and coaches and exercise physiologists have done brilliant work in revealing these rhythms. Athletes who follow their training rhythms get better results with fewer disabling injuries.

In daily life, we do many kinds of workouts, on emotional, social, and informational levels. We challenge ourselves to cope with environments at home and at work, and we can get worn out on many levels. Our rest time is when we heal up and become stronger. I think we can suffer from a kind of “overtraining” fatigue on these other levels, such as emotions and information. Sometimes, we ache with fatigue, tension, or just plain pain that is not just physical. Mostly the pain goes away by itself. There are some forms of pain that stay, and we wonder what that is. This is more than just the usual pain, we find ourselves thinking.

This is where meditation comes in. Among other things, meditation can be a rest much deeper than deep sleep, which we can access in the midst of our day whenever we want. When you rest more deeply than sleep, you can heal more deeply also.

Meditation feels like time out, time off, a brief vacation in which you don’t have to do anything.

You pay attention almost idly, in the gentlest way possible, to some aspect of the body’s self-renewal process, such as breathing , the heart beating, or the relationship of your body to infinity, or any of a million other things. In meditation we enjoy whatever the focus is and rest in it. We do so little that the entire doing structure of the body can reset its circuits.

You place your attention in some aspect of how life renews life, and you rest there. Feed on it, bathe in it, explore it, delight in it, play with it. Nest there. Bond with it. That’s about it. The technique is extremely simple, but what can be elusive is finding the approach you love so much you want to do it, or that is so natural to you that you can do it under almost any circumstance.

Is Your Meditation Practice Working?

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.

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. 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.

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.