Meditation Made Easy Read online

  Meditation

  Made Easy

  LORIN ROCHE, Ph.D.

  To Those Who Make the Path by Walking It

  To All Who Have Ever Walked Point

  To the Search & Rescue Teams of All Time

  CONTENTS

  Introduction

  Have You Ever...

  Welcome

  My Story

  How to Use This Book

  Questions and Answers

  What Is Meditation?

  Where Did Meditation Come From?

  Why Do People Meditate?

  Why Should I Meditate?

  I Don't Have Time for This, What Do I Do?

  Can I Meditate Just Out of Curiosity?

  Will I Need to Make Lifestyle Changes?

  Do I Have to Sit Cross-Legged?

  Don't Have to Have a Guru?

  Do I Have to Sit Still?

  When Should I Meditate?

  How Long Should My Meditation Sessions Last?

  Where Should I Meditate?

  What Can I Do Wrong?

  What Do I Need to Get Started?

  How Can I Accessorize for Meditation?

  What Will Happen When I Meditate?

  Do I Have to Make My Mind Blank?

  Do I Have to Concentrate?

  Do I Have to Slow Down?

  How Could Meditation Be “Easy”?

  Is There Anything Difficult About Meditation?

  What's a Meditation Technique?

  How Do I Know Which Technique to Do?

  What's Mantra and Do I Need One?

  How Will I Know I'm Doing It Right?

  Getting Started

  Getting In

  Three Ways to Begin

  Getting Out

  Going Deeper

  The Sensuous Texture of Daily Life

  Mini-Meditations Throughout the Day

  Getting into Breath

  Getting into Sound

  Getting into Attention

  Obstacles

  Welcoming Your Individuality

  Meditation in Your Daily Life

  From Meditation into Life

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  CREDITS

  COPYRIGHT

  ABOUT THE PUBLISHER

  Introduction

  Have You Ever…

  Drifted slowly awake and lain there in a delicious restfulness for a few moments before opening your eyes?

  Looked at the night sky and felt utter wonder at the vastness?

  Merged so deeply with the melody and rhythm of music you love that your sense of self disappeared in the ocean of sound?

  Felt electricity coursing through your body when you made love? At the moment of orgasm, been filled with brilliance or fireworks? Or in the afterglow, felt your body shimmering and pulsing with a vibrant peace?

  Inhaled a smell so delicious, perhaps your favorite dish when you were really hungry, that you almost swooned?

  Sat by a river, conscious of its steady flow, and entered into a sense of stillness?

  Been so in love that your heart seemed to turn to light?

  …Then you have already experienced meditative awareness. These are all spontaneous experiences, typically lasting from a few seconds to a few minutes. Attention expands beyond its confines and touches something greater, something of the essence of life. Human beings have been experiencing these sorts of things since before there was the language to speak of them.

  Meditative experience is no different from these naturally occurring moments. It is just intentional. What I am calling a “meditation technique” is paying attention to the rhythm of such an experience, tracking it through all its phases, and returning again and again to be educated by it. Most of what is meant by “practicing meditation” is just spending time being in the presence of such a quality of attention, then enjoying the effect on your daily life. Meditation is the practice of developing your capacity for rich experience.

  Each of us is a yogi for half a second when we stop to smell the roses. It's all there in that moment of conscious, grateful breathing. When we cultivate our gratitude for breath, something good happens at a deep level. We make friends with life.

  Welcome

  Something has led you to be interested in meditation—your curiosity, your desire to explore, a longing for a little rest and relaxation, or the recommendation of a friend or doctor. Well, come on in.

  Meditation is a great gift to give yourself. It is a way to experience a higher quality of life just by going inside yourself and touching your center for a moment. It is a brief retreat from the world that lets you reenter the world with a more vivid presence.

  If you have never meditated before, this book will be your guide to some of the simplest and most widely practiced meditations in the Western world. They are all simple techniques you can do on your own; they involve things like paying attention to your breathing, listening to quiet sounds, and tracking the movement of your thoughts. You can start by doing the exercises for one or two minutes at a time, and as you grow more skillful you can meditate longer.

  If you have meditated before, you probably started and stopped a number of times, looking for ways of practicing that suited your individual nature and lifestyle. You may have learned a technique from a friend, a teacher, or a class that did not suit you. Perhaps it was like a shoe that doesn't quite fit—okay to try on in the store but uncomfortable to walk in. My approach is about taking what usually seem like obstacles to meditation—your busy mind, your long days, your desires—and making them into your allies.

  You will find the exercises in this book useful for getting started again and for learning how to customize your meditation to your needs. You also may find that the exercises help your meditation become easier, more restful, and more interesting.

  This is come-as-you-are meditation. You do not have to be other than you are to begin. There are no impossible-to-do techniques, no uncomfortable postures, no onerous rules to follow.

  If you invest the time in exploring how your individual nature interacts with these techniques, you will likely develop some powerful tools to enhance your life. The work for you is to engage your curiosity and sense of adventure. The rewards are a greater ability to pay attention to life and to love.

  Almost everything we think of as meditation is flavored slightly with the view from behind the monastery walls. The ideas that in meditation you are supposed to sit still and make your mind empty, aspire to high spiritual ideals, override or kill the ego, and cultivate detachment from things—all these come from the spiritual tradition for recluses. They may be wisdom if you are a monastic, but they are poison if you live in the world. These are not general truths any more than the rules for Ping-Pong are universal, applying to tennis, golf, volleyball, baseball, and every other sport.

  Meditation is about being intimate with your deepest self. Any sense of formality, any sense that you are doing a technique that comes from outside yourself interferes with this necessary closeness.

  Meditation can and should be something that you reach for as informally as you reach for a cup of tea, or an apple, or the phone to talk to a friend—in other words, as a direct response to sensing some need in your body or heart. Meditation can be something you look forward to after you roll out of bed in the morning, to help you wake up and get ready for the day. It is something you may find yourself wanting to do when you walk in the door after work, to unwind and revitalize yourself. It is not really that meditation is “better” than sitting on the sofa and having a glass of wine while listening to music on the stereo. Meditation is just as much fun, but it provides more relief, works better, and is cheaper. Taking this informal approach to being with yourself will help you keep medit
ation simple, a simple pleasure and a relief.

  Approaching meditation as a pleasurable indulgence will help you develop good instincts for your path, because instinctive guidance comes from the same place as your cravings and desires. You will need to be in touch with your instincts because you are your own guide in meditation, with your own daily life as your feedback mechanism.

  Your instincts do not necessarily feel “spiritual.” Far from it—they feel down-home, selfish, and spontaneous. The instincts are seat-of-the-pants and gut feelings. And they are often the first thing that gets thrown overboard when people try to be spiritual. But they are the essence of spirituality. They represent deep wisdom. The instincts move us to explore the world, survive, thrive, communicate, bond, reproduce, and rejoice. The urge to explore meditation is just as instinctive as the urges to talk to other people, work to assure your survival, explore your sexuality, and party. Spirituality is a spontaneous alchemy that occurs when all the instincts are working together. This happens only when all of human nature is embraced.

  Meditation is not one monotone mood of reverence, nor is it only irreverence. It is a wide-open embrace of every possible mood, emotion, and current of your being: that is its simplicity and its challenge. Therefore I advocate a radical informality with the self as the essence of the approach to meditation. In an informal approach, the rebel in you is just as important as the sincere seeker. The impulse that says Uh, I don't want to meditate today is just as useful and informative as the impulse that says I really want and need to meditate. I have an important day.

  For those of us who work hard and barely have enough real time for ourselves and our families, meditation can be incredibly useful: creating stronger, more resilient health and more consistent energy; helping us to be more at ease and perceptive in our relationships; and opening entire new worlds of gratitude, wonder, and well-being. Meditation should fit into our lifestyle naturally. In this book you will learn how to adapt your practice to the changing conditions of your life.

  If you live in the world and work long days, you already crave stillness and rest; this is not something that has to be imposed from On High. This craving is called “wanting a vacation”—and you achieve it by giving in to the craving. Meditation is the practice of giving in to such cravings and letting them carry us into our interior worlds. This feels like an indulgence; indeed, the sense of luxury is one of the ways of knowing you are doing it right. Meditation is powered by our deepest cravings, not by discipline.

  No one with a busy life can or should try to empty the mind, whatever that means. It is not that in meditation you won't find yourself sitting very still and going to a place beyond ordinary thought; it's just that any attempt to impose this on yourself will backfire. Imposition just makes a person more restless. Meditation for people who live in the world should strengthen the ego and enliven the connection to the fires of passion. The more you embrace your passion, the more readily you will go beyond it to places of total repose inside yourself.

  Meditation is quietly sexy, in the way that getting a massage or listening to great music is. The subtle currents of electricity that flow sweetly through the body, touching you everywhere, are to be cherished. Meditation allows the body to tune itself up to be ready for work, play, sleep, and all the exquisite pleasures of life. Let's say you walk in the door from work and you have half an hour to prepare yourself to be intimate with the one you love. What do you do? If you know how to meditate you would certainly spend some time that way, for one of the greatest gifts of meditation is that of enabling you to be completely present with sensuous experience, open to life with your senses shimmering, with a quality of surprise and novelty.

  Food is best appreciated by those who have had an active day and built up a good appetite. Water is loved the most by people who have been out in the sun working up a sweat and come in to drink a refreshing glass. Meditation is best known by the people who need it most, who are out there in life putting their plans, desires, and ambitions into action. It should have a sense of luxury and deliciousness. It should be a place for you to entertain all your desires and longings and prepare to fulfill them as much as is possible and ethical in your life. If you lose track of your deepest desires and longings, then what will be your anchor? The idea that you should give up or distance yourself from your desires and your ego in meditation is nonsense. When people succeed in relinquishing desire, they tend to lose vitality.

  You want meditation to be in the service of a better relationship with yourself and the world. This means having a more lively channel between your inner resources of love, passion, generosity, and curiosity and your outer life and relationships, where all those qualities are needed. The meditations presented in this book are all simple sensory-alertness exercises that will help you to have a more appreciative grasp of your everyday life.

  Longing is your best clue to what is good for you. You will have to work at investigating your longings. Go into them deeply and find out what you really want most passionately. Engaging with your hankerings, lusts, desires, and longings will take you straight into your heart, not hell. If you love music of any kind, you already know much about your longings—just notice what is awakened in your body when you listen to what you love with complete abandon. Notice what kinds of music you crave and when. The same instinct you use to choose what music to play will guide you in selecting what meditations to do.

  Be safe on your journey. Safety comes from being alert and relaxed as you move through your life. Let your best instincts guide you. Be awake to beauty. Be merciful to yourself and others. Cultivate your desires and enthusiasm for life. Meditation is enthusiasm for the simple: the simplicity of breath flowing in and out of us, day and night, for as long as we live.

  * * *

  Make Meditation a Mini-Vacation

  * * *

  My Story

  I was five years old the first time I saw someone meditate. One morning I went into the living room to watch cartoons on television. As I entered the room, there in one of the big comfortable chairs was my uncle Bud, absorbed in reading a book.

  After the cartoons were over, I turned off the television and saw Bud sitting there with his eyes closed, glowing with peacefulness. I had never seen an adult sit so still and be so at home in himself. He was as comfortable as a baby sleeping, and as powerful as a father. In my young life, I had never encountered those two things occurring in the same body.

  I immediately went over to him and asked, “What are you doing?”

  “Well, I was meditating,” Bud said, opening his eyes.

  “What's that?” I asked.

  To his eternal credit, Bud did not look at me with irritation. He had a twinkle in his eyes as he said, “I am reading this book here.” He pointed to a thick blue book on the table next to him. “And one of the things it says to do is to meditate.” My mind went silent at that moment. I looked at him, then ran off to play with my favorite toy truck.

  That is all I ever heard about meditation until thirteen years later. It was 1968 and I was a freshman at the University of California's new campus at Irvine. Because it was a new campus, the researchers were desperate for human subjects. They made it a rule that all social science majors had to participate in many hours of experiments as part of our course requirements. I signed up for three weeks of afternoons in a lab that was doing research on brain waves.

  When I showed up, I learned that my role in the research was to sit in an overstuffed chair in a soundproof room in total darkness, doing nothing for two and a half hours. By the flip of a coin, I had been selected as a “control” subject, which meant that I received no instructions on what to do in there.

  At first I was disappointed, because the other subjects were getting brain-wave biofeedback, and that sounded interesting. I knew absolutely nothing about meditation or any other mental technique, so I just sat in the dark. To my great surprise, I found myself becoming extremely relaxed. All my senses opened up wide to the darkn
ess and silence. It was incredibly luxurious.

  When I came out of the lab, colors were very bright and everything seemed vivid and beautiful. I found I could do my calculus homework in less time than usual, and writing essays for literature class was much easier. My mind worked like a finely tuned machine and my body felt fantastic from the intense relaxation. Whatever I wanted to pay attention to, my mind would stay in tremendous alertness. Rather than taking hours out of my day, the afternoons in the lab seemed to give me extra time for life.

  After the experiment ended, I missed having the quiet time. So I started sitting in a darkened room with my eyes closed and my ears plugged. One day a few weeks later a woman on the research team showed me a little paperback book she was reading. It was Zen Flesh, Zen Bones, by Paul Reps (it is still in print and currently published by Shambhala). I opened it to the back, to a chapter named “Centering,” and saw a list of a hundred or so classical meditation techniques. This chapter was a translation of a four-thousand-year-old Sanskrit text called the Bhairava Tantra. Reading through the list of techniques, I felt my whole body tingle because I had experienced many of them spontaneously sitting in the lab. The Bhairava Tantra became my guide and I kept the book with me for years. Somehow I still have that original copy, although its pages have come loose. It is my Velveteen Rabbit. It is worn out from being loved.