Meditation Made Easy Read online

  You could be fly-fishing, playing piano, cuddling, making love, lounging in bed in the morning, driving fast, waterskiing, singing, watching a movie, anything. How do you see the world? How do you perceive colors and sounds? What do you smell? How long do you linger with that smell?

  Be in your body and notice how you breathe when you are engaged in that activity. Take a deep breath now, as if you are inside that experience. What does it feel like to breathe? Are you breathing freely? Are you so excited that you are breathing rapidly? Explore.

  Go ahead and give over to what the experience has to teach you. Be there inside your body in that activity, attending to your senses and to life.

  Sometimes, when you do this exercise you may recall an activity you do alone. At other times, you may recall experiences that have to do with shared attention.

  In shared attention you are attending to someone and he or she is paying attention to you in a special way. In doing the exercise you are internalizing that quality of attention you love, taking it inside yourself, memorizing the way of it. This could be another person or an animal. Animals can be amazingly attentive and give unconditional love.

  Other experiences may be solitary but may not feel so because you are being with yourself.

  As you enter the experience of that activity, notice how you are paying attention. What quality of alertness do you have? Are you vigilantly alert or languidly aware, or somewhere in between?

  Reentering your memories of your favorite times will teach you about the qualities of attention you love and crave.

  Reminder: Pause and take a few breaths as you read.

  Always be alert to the qualities of attention you love. Cultivate them in yourself and others.

  You can do this exercise a few minutes a day for years and never come to the end of it. Over time you will learn to enjoy the sense of inquiry also, the process of asking yourself questions and then receiving answers in whatever language the body speaks in the moment.

  When you recall an experience, it is real as far as your brain is concerned. When you call up an experience in the context of meditation, you give your nervous system permission to remap itself and make more connections. Your nervous system wants to have all learning, all its best resources available at every moment. The brain needs only the slightest permission to do this remapping. It knows how to defragment itself, how to weave all the disparate elements of your being together.

  Some people think of meditation as subtractive attention, that you get there by deleting everything interesting. This is an option—the hermit cave dweller's path—but there is no particular reason to seek it out if you live in the world. So let your colors fly.

  COMPASSION FOR YOURSELF

  One of your tasks with attention is to learn how to be good to yourself. Compassion starts at home. If you are not compassionate toward yourself, how can you be compassionate toward someone else? The word compassion is made up of com- (meaning “with”) plus passion. Be with your passion.

  If you do not make meditation a healthy place right from the start, it's likely that it never will be. Healthy means you do not repress yourself, brutalize yourself, edit yourself. You want to accept all impulses so that they can join the family, become integrated. Any part that is excluded becomes slightly insane. Good healthy anger that is blocked can then seem like feral rage. But when you accept it and work with it, it becomes the ability to stand up for yourself.

  If you do not intentionally cultivate your best attention in your native state, then you will tend to recapitulate the worst attention your kindergarten teacher or parent gave—disapproval, criticism, scrutiny.

  When you develop compassion for yourself, you will discover that even the most critical of your inner voices is trying to love you.

  GIVING AND RECEIVING LOVE

  Attention is a many-splendored thing. In love, in business, and in meditation, you find yourself engaged with many tones of attention. Each has its own value and purpose. Each is a different way of relating to the world. You move between these modes naturally, all the time, and you always have.

  When you meditate, you exercise the full range of attention. What I am calling the different tones of attention are the parts of that range, as individual colors are the parts of a rainbow.

  Let's say you are out on a romantic date with a new love. You may find yourself paying attention with: appreciation, admiration, curiosity, wariness, delight, longing, and amusement. Notice that the type of attention changes slightly from moment to moment. You may look across the table at someone and find yourself switching from curiosity to delight, or from wariness to amusement.

  During meditation, you may find the same kind of rapid changes going on as you pay attention to yourself.

  Returning to the story above, let's say that years later, you are still in love and meet at the same restaurant to celebrate your relationship. As you look at the other, you may feel yourself moving between adoration, tenderness, amusement, respect, compassion, passion, devotion, and trust.

  You may also feel yourself receiving these qualities from the other person, perhaps in a different order. Or you may feel a hankering for a type of attention you are not getting. Maybe you crave understanding and enthusiastic reassurance, and instead you are aware of receiving approval.

  Attention is the very texture of a relationship. Each of the tones is a wonderful world of perception and can be explored endlessly. Part of your individual signature, your personality, is the sequence of types of attention you give other people and the speed at which you switch back and forth between them. Other people, when they think of you, think of the type of attention you give and ask for.

  This is one of the ways you can learn how to pay attention to yourself in meditation. You can draw on the way you feel when you are being loved and listened to by an old friend, even one who has died or moved away. As you practice paying loving attention to all the material of the self presented to you in meditation, you are learning to love other people as well.

  If you want to give love a chance to survive, know intimately the kind of attention you are good at giving, know the attention you crave to receive, and know both how to give and how to receive. Then work to extend your range of both giving and receiving.

  This is where meditation comes into play. A simple way of describing meditation is: to take a bath in attention and absorb all its qualities. Even though each of us specializes in giving certain types of attention and feels a shortage of other types, somewhere in our soul we know all types. In meditation, the body frees itself of the restrictions imposed by our everyday activity and renews its contact with the fullness of life.

  * * *

  Pay Attention with Love

  * * *

  SETTING ATTENTION FREE

  As you explore meditation you will find that you have, not only a set of modes of attention, but also a speed at which you switch among them. In meditation, almost everyone has a tendency to violate his or her speed and tone. But doing so makes meditation difficult, or at least less interesting. Alert yourself not to do this.

  If you are watching a presentation at a business meeting, you may find yourself leaning forward with interest or leaning back with detachment. And your attention will tend to shift among various tones. The mix will probably vary depending on the situation, but you will move among tones of attention, as appropriate.

  Interest

  Suspicion

  Skepticism

  Pleasure

  Enthusiasm

  The situation is no different if you are paying attention to your breath during meditation. You might delight in breath one second, be soothed by it the next, fall asleep a few seconds later, and wake up horny half a minute later, wonder what time it is, then realize that you feel extremely well. All this shifting is how life refreshes itself.

  People bore themselves out of their skulls by trying to make meditation one monotonous tone. So do the opposite: set yourself completely free in meditation. Let yo
ur attention roam the universe with rapacious intent if it is so inclined, and return to your breath again and again as a base.

  Meditation is interesting when you are aware of your own needs, all of them, and let them emerge in the meditation to be attended to. There are many ways of experiencing your needs and many levels on which they reside.

  Let your needs come to the surface. They will anyway. You will be tempted to call what you hear mental noise, but it is your inner life coming to the fore to be attended to.

  SPEEDY MIND

  Meditation happens one breath at a time. That's a few seconds; in half a minute you may breathe in and out eight times. During that time you are likely to be conscious of many thoughts, images, and feelings. The human brain works very quickly.

  The people who make commercials know this. They have thirty seconds to convince you that you are unsafe, dirty, ugly, tired, or headachy and that you need their product, which is safe and clean and will make you look beautiful, smell alluring, and live forever. An entire world of beauty is evoked. A lot can happen in half a minute.

  Meditation experience comes at you just as rapidly. Fortunately, you have watched a lot of commercials in your life, so you can easily handle your meditative experience if you don't resist. Get used to the speed and intensity. In reality, you think and feel just as fast all the time. Not only is it not a problem, it is a profound adaptation to the necessities of life. The brain doesn't slow down during meditation, nor should it.

  When you close your eyes to meditate, you have to respond to or accept your experiences second by second. That is why I tend to refer to meditation as a sport rather than a mind skill. It is a mind skill, but what people think of as mind isn't mind. Mind is the entire body. Your whole body is your brain.

  As an exercise, consciously watch some commercials. Notice the speed at which the scenes change, how much information is being presented for you to process, and how easily your nerves ride the changes. In commercials, in life, and in meditation, thirty seconds is a long time.

  THE COCKTAIL PARTY EXERCISE

  EXERCISE: Go to a party and have a conversation.

  PURPOSE: Notice the easy flow of attention.

  The next time you are at a party and find yourself engrossed in a fascinating conversation with someone, notice how effortlessly you concentrate on the back-and-forth of the communication. You and everyone else there can be involved in a conversation, track new arrivals, scout around, get food and drink, and return to the conversation. All this is effortless fun because Nature has spent about two billion years figuring out how to make a nervous system that can survive.

  Another way to notice how easy it is to focus is to read a newspaper or a favorite book in a coffee shop or an airport.

  What does this mean for meditation? It means that in meditation you can pay attention to your breathing or other meditation focus with ease even though people may be conversing all around you. It is not at all an “advanced skill” of meditation to be able to focus when there is a lot of background noise, or when other people are whooping it up.

  If you are meditating and somewhere within earshot interesting things are going on, you will find your mind going there to check it out. No problem. If you do not resist the process, your attention will of its own accord return to your focus—your breath, or your own thoughts and sensations.

  During meditation a kind of internal party is going on at which all your parts—all the areas of your body and brain—are talking to one another. Sometimes you will be completely involved in hearing and seeing and feeling the communication going on, and sometimes you will be immersed in peacefulness, watching all this action as if from a distance.

  If ever you feel yourself trying to block out anything while you are meditating—a thought, an external noise, or the movement of your attention toward a conversation—stop, breathe, and even open your eyes. Don't continue.

  THE INNER MULTIMEDIA SHOW

  As you move through your daily life, you are immersed in a world of external sensory experience: there is an immense variety of sounds, voices, colors, shapes, smells, and tastes to notice. Although your attention is mostly on the outer world, your inner world is vibrating with aliveness, responding to everything that is important to you. Experience is always simultaneously inner and outer. Nothing really changes in this regard when you close your eyes to meditate.

  When you close your eyes to meditate, the only difference is that you are not paying as much attention to the outer world. You are paying more attention to the inner world. The inner world can seem like a conversation, a party, a committee, or a family. Much of what is going on there has to do with past and future action in the outer world. The main difference is that during the moments you are meditating, you are not driving a car or working at a job or hanging out with people.

  The outer world is there; your inner world is there.

  When you are meditating, you are still in a rich world of sensory experience, just as always. You are still seeing things, hearing things, feeling things.

  The Play of Inner and Outer Movies

  Let's say you and a friend are talking over what movie to see tonight. Neither of you has made up your mind yet—you are just batting the subject back and forth for a couple of minutes. Each of you wants to be happy with the choice, as well as to please the other person.

  As you consider your choices, your brain may show you:

  Brief video clips of previews you have seen.

  Still images of movie ads from the newspapers.

  Songs and snatches of dialogue from the previews.

  Phrases selected from reviews you have read, presented either as a voice or as text.

  Auditory replays of comments from people who have seen one of the movies already.

  Images of the actors in other films you have seen.

  Images of the various theaters, inside and out, of the possible lines, crowds, parking problems, and comfort of the seats.

  A remembered smell and taste of a particular theater's popcorn.

  Along with these images and sounds, your brain and body will be displaying to you various feelings of evaluation, good, bad, or indifferent, about each image or sound. These feelings may seem abstract to you. Or they may be localized in your gut or your heart; or they may be an overall bodily sensation that you interpret as excitement or aversion, “I really like that actor (or director), but I don't like film noir (or costume dramas).” Reading these bodily feelings may well be a familiar tactic to you as part of your personal intuition, or the process may go on without your noticing it.

  This is just part of what is called thinking, and it goes on all the time, whether you are walking down the street, talking, or deciding where to have lunch. It even goes on part of the time when you are asleep, in which case it's called dreaming.

  These elements of thinking—all the moving and still mental images, the remembered music and dialogue, the feelings and sensations evaluating the internal multimedia experience—can be combined in thousands of ways. Every human being has her or his own multimedia thinking “signature,” a distinctive set of styles for selecting and combining elements. Just as your voice is distinctive, so is your style of displaying mental images, sounds, and feelings.

  So when you are in the process of deciding which movie to see tonight, you are making mental movies about what movie to see, watching the mental movies, and then somehow deciding which of your choices to pursue. This is part of what thinking is, and we are all so good at it that we do it all the time without even paying much attention, just as we can walk down a street without having to pay attention to each step we take.

  This is also the reason we like movies. They fascinate us because they are like the thought process. Reality does not jump from scene to scene, but our memories and dreams and internal video imagery certainly do. This is thinking, and human beings do a lot of it all the time, including when they are meditating. Write this on your hand: Thoughts are not a problem. Welcome all thoug
hts.

  During meditation you are in the multimedia theater of your mind, Feel-O-Vision, with a great sound system. You can adjust the dials, turn the volume up or down, change seats, play different movies, even make movies. There are many meditation techniques—as many techniques as there are ways of doing things with photography, film, painting, sculpting, and sound. Meditation is the process of paying attention to the details of thought creation. It is also cleaning the lenses and all the equipment; sorting through the archives; tuning up the equipment; making sure all the connectors and plugs are properly connected; making sure the electricity that powers it all is secure.

  Meditation is vastly simpler than thinking. You are mostly witnessing thinking, checking in with your inner television screen and stereo, tuning up the equipment, sorting the memories, taking five, resting, enjoying yourself.

  Once you have decided how long to meditate and where, you don't have to decide anything else.

  Obstacles

  How to Handle Everything in Meditation—

  These Are the Rules

  The Law of Odious Rules

  The Law of Odious Rules says: Every meditator has to invent at least one rule that makes meditation difficult if not impossible. For example, because meditation is generally thought of as sitting still, some people make up a Wiggling Is Forbidden rule for themselves. If you can't think of any such rules right now, consult this handy list:

  How to Make Yourself Miserable in Meditation