Meditation Made Easy Read online

  Sit in uncomfortable postures.

  Meditate longer than you want to or need to.

  Resist thoughts. Demand a blank mind.

  Resist falling asleep.

  Sit in a stuffy room.

  Choose a tradition or meditation that reminds you of the worst aspects of your childhood.

  Don't listen to your inner voices.

  Worry about whether you are being a good meditator.

  Try to achieve enlightenment.

  Suppress your emotions.

  Use a mantra that grates on your nerves.

  Worry about whether your chakras are balanced.

  Resent all noises.

  Wear new, uncomfortable contact lenses while meditating.

  Ban specific types of thoughts, such as sexual thoughts or angry thoughts.

  If you are sitting in a group of ten people for a meditation class and the instructor says, “Okay, let's all close our eyes and find something about our breathing to enjoy,” maybe five to seven people will do something like that. They will find something to enjoy. One person will sit there sort of perplexed, not knowing where to begin. A couple of people will be sitting there scowling. If you ask one of them what he is doing, he might say, “I was trying to block out noise.” Inquiring further, you would find that he was starting to become aware of his breath, then he heard a sound somewhere, then he briefly wondered what the sound was, then he invented an Odious Rule on the spot that he should not hear the sound, then he got angry (or else he recalled an internalized, angry parental voice), then, disgusted, he returned to his breath. This all took place in ten seconds.

  This guy is not going to have a happy time in meditation. His critical inner voice will win every time. Not only that, it will get to score a hit on him by proving that he failed at meditation.

  You, on the other hand, are not getting expensive coaching on your meditation technique. Think of all the money you are saving! But that means you will have to pay a little attention to these things and go a little more slowly. Be alert to when you are about to make up an Odious Rule, and start making fun of it.

  The rules can vary from person to person. For one person it might be “You have to make your mind blank,” and for another it might be “You have to believe in the teacher” or “You're not allowed to feel too happy” or “Mood swings must be controlled.” Sometimes it is just the voice of the Inner Rebel that must be banned and obliterated with the drone of a mantra.

  One way of finding out if you are being run by an Odious Rule is to notice whatever you call “difficult.” If you have any feeling of difficulty at any time during meditation, check in with what rules you have made up. When people say meditation is “difficult,” often one or more of the following things is going on:

  Many thoughts are coming, and everyone knows you aren't supposed to think during meditation.

  Some thoughts flash through very rapidly, and everyone knows thoughts should obey the thought speed limit, moving slowly, gracefully, with immense decorum, like a funeral procession.

  Sensations in the body are calling for attention, and everyone knows that the body is supposed to be numb during meditation.

  Tension is being released—the body is going into relaxation and by contrast the tense areas show up—and everyone knows that tension is supposed to disappear instantly, like kitchen stains do in TV commercials.

  Emotions are welling up and you don't want to feel them. Everyone knows you're not allowed to cry during meditation. Or else “unauthorized” emotions are coming up. This is different for everyone.

  What you may be encountering here is your internal manual of meditation. It already knows everything there is to know about everything. Its title is “How to Make Yourself Miserable” or “Meditation Made Difficult.” As you pay attention in an easy way, you contradict the inner programming about making things difficult.

  This tendency to make things difficult is just in our culture. Not everyone has to deal with it right away, but all meditators have to deal with it eventually. If the Made Difficult instruction set comes up and wants to take over your meditation, just make fun of it. Don't get into a struggle with the tendency to make things difficult. It's a tar baby.

  When you approach the activity of meditating in a healthy way, you violate all the dysfunctional rules you may have learned along the way: don't feel, don't think, don't wiggle, don't ask questions, don't be angry, don't be sexual, don't doubt, don't be a rebel, don't do it your own way, do it the official way.

  What Do I Do About…

  THOUGHTS

  The situation: Much of the time when thoughts come during meditation, you will be completely carried away by them. You will forget you are meditating and be busily planning something or reviewing something you did earlier in the day. This is healthy; it is part of the brain's natural functioning. The brain and nerves do this kind of processing whenever you rest. This goes on all the time when you sleep, particularly when you dream, and it would be unhealthy to try to resist it during meditation.

  So try this attitude on: when thoughts come, they come. Take a welcoming attitude, as if birds have just landed on your lawn. Let them peck around. When you become aware that you are thinking, then you have a choice: you can finish the thought or you can return to the breath or whatever your focus is. When you become aware that you are thinking, do not hurry back to the breath and do not feel you were wrong to be thinking.

  You are not responsible for the content of your thoughts in meditation. Nor are you responsible for the speed, frequency, color, or tone of voice. You are responsible for thoughts when you act on them, and in meditation you are not acting on thoughts.

  Your mind may feel, sound, and look tremendously noisy to you when you are meditating. This is because the brain and nerves are sorting and filtering. The body has to check every “panic button” you pushed during the day, or since the last time you meditated, and see if you really, truly want a state of total bodily emergency declared because your red dress did not come back from the cleaners on time. Part of what we learn from meditation is perspective—to have the kind of balanced view about today's events that we might get with time, with days or weeks, months or years. There is no way to do this other than by sorting through your everyday experience.

  Thoughts do not “appear” out of “somewhere” and take over your brain. Thoughts are already there, and you are quiet enough to hear them or see them. As they emerge from the background noise, attention selects them and begins to sort them out, to extract the lessons from that arena of experience.

  Your task is to witness them. There are restless thoughts, planning thoughts, memories of the day, reviews of conversations you want to have, painful memories, good memories, joyous memories.

  There are various conditions of relationship with thoughts: being lost in thoughts, becoming aware that you are lost in thoughts, being aware that thoughts are there in the background but still being aware of your breath, a “light cloud” of thoughts, a storm of thoughts.

  There are thoughts about thoughts:

  I really shouldn't be thinking this…

  I really shouldn't be thinking so much…

  Okay. You thoughts, that's enough! Shut up.

  Grrrrrrrr…. If it wasn't for these thoughts, I would be peaceful.

  Hey, that's a pretty interesting thought. I think I'll sneak off and play with it a bit.

  There are visual thoughts and auditory thoughts. The visual thoughts can be brief images, still photos, or video clips, and they can appear anywhere in your mind's vision field. Auditory thoughts can be stereo or mono, and they can be simulations of various people's voices. There are many different bodily feelings that co-occur with thinking, “gut feelings” that people sometimes call instinct or intuition.

  This is only a sampling. There is very little, if anything, in human experience that a meditator does not sift through over the course of months and years of meditation.

  So don't worry about controlling o
r editing your thoughts during meditation.

  EMOTIONS

  Emotions include joy, sorrow, reverence, hate, and love, to name a few. Over time, you will experience and reexperience almost every human emotion while you are meditating. This is part of the brain's balancing and integrating activity. Your task is to allow the emotions to flow and to breathe with them.

  During meditation, every part of your being talks to every other part. One level of this communication is experienced as image and sound, or “thinking.” Another level plays through us in the sensations of flow we call “emotion.” The word emotion is very cleverly constructed: e-motion, just so we don't forget that emotions move.

  In meditation, the central attitude should be to welcome the flow and the motion of emotions, and to pay attention whenever and wherever your attention is called. Always give priority to paying tender attention to emotion, and never try to override an emotion using the meditation focus.

  You may find yourself feeling things, and finishing feelings, from many years ago. You may find yourself immersed intensely in emotions having to do with today, or yesterday, or tomorrow. Some will have been in suspended animation since a loss or trauma years ago, and now they feel safe enough to emerge.

  The nervous system is concerned with building connections, with making your emotional life one seamless tapestry rather than a jumble of fragmented or disjointed experiences. The body wants to have any and all emotions available at a moment's notice, as appropriate, and to be able to express each.

  Emotions come up during meditation because you have created a refuge for yourself, a place where you feel safe. You are at home in yourself, so you can cry or get really angry or feel like dying or become blissfully happy. As your body gets used to the refuge, you may find yourself shifting rapidly between very different emotions. You are not going crazy; your brain is just busily getting up-to-date. You may be tempted to try to bring it under control and impose some sort of false equanimity, but don't. Welcome the emotions and simply pay attention.

  Many women cry during meditation for the first few months, then feel much lighter and freer. Other people laugh a lot during and after meditation for months after beginning. Usually, day in and day out, the emotional content of your meditation will be whatever you were feeling all day but did not have the time or attention to attend to.

  As difficult as this emotional processing seems at times, give yourself the attention. You will feel much freer after meditation. If you have a hard time being tender toward yourself, seek out people who are good at doing what friends do. You can learn from any healthy person how to pay attention to human feeling without blocking it. Cultivate people in your life who are good at emotional expression, and learn to celebrate emotions with the attitude of “the more the merrier.” All the explosions of life—anger, tears, laughter—are natural ways for the body to reset its fuses. Whatever feelings you deal with through conversation, dance, sports, music, or art will not be stuck in your body for you to feel while meditating.

  If you are stuck, get help: there are psychotherapists, dance therapists, art therapists, and relationship teachers who can help you learn to let emotions flow.

  BODILY SENSATIONS

  During meditation you will feel a huge variety of sensations in your body, all having to do with the relative level of tension and relaxation you are in at the moment. These sensations change from second to second, and sometimes, paying attention to them is the best thing to do. Usually your attention will be called by a set of sensations. You can trust this calling, for it is the body's way of saying it needs a little help. When you place your attention in any area of the body, the circulation immediately increases there. There is more to this than just increased blood flow, however; attention itself is healing.

  In your evening meditations, you may sometimes find your body doing a sort of fast-forward rapid replay of the day's sensations. This roller-coaster adventure can be confusing to beginners, but it is just a side effect of relaxation. Your body is freeing itself up by stripping away the anxiety correlated with performance.

  There is often a layer of sensation underneath emotional experience. After the most intense part of the feeling has passed, you can shift to paying attention to the bodily sensations beneath the emotions. You may find sensations in your belly, pelvis, chest area (the “heart”), and throat. These sensations may be electric, clammy, creepy, disgusting, joyous, cold, warm, or fearful. You can also shift your attention to the bodily sensations if you find yourself in a recurrent series of images or voices.

  These sensations are what people often refer to as “gut feelings,” and they can be very intricate and sophisticated. Anytime you are deeply relaxed, your body, nervous system, and brain, acting in concert, go into a mode of “sorting gut feelings.” The body is attempting to learn from past experience and come to an accurate assessment of the present. Having clear and accurate gut feelings is one of the great joys of life, and one of the greatest gifts of meditation.

  One reason for meditating in brief sessions, such as five to ten minutes, is so you can get used to the sensations that go with relaxation. There is a lot to learn about moving through your world with your sensors open. The more gradually you engage in this, the better.

  If you meditate more than about twenty minutes, too much relaxation can carry over into your daily activity, and your are probably not used to having such a rich experience of your body. Your skin may feel too sensitive to be out among crowds, for example. If you build up very gradually, you will be able to tell what amount of meditation is just right for you.

  What About Painful Sensations?

  As you begin to rest and relax in meditation, you may become aware of underlying pain or discomfort, such as:

  Sore muscles from physical labor or exercise.

  Lower-back or neck pain from postural problems.

  Tension in various parts of the body: the jaw, shoulders, eyes, belly.

  Pain in the nerves from work or long hours.

  Stiffness from not moving around enough.

  Fatigue from post-flu syndrome.

  Pins-and-needles sensations from restoring blood flow to tensed muscles.

  Don't dismay. The paradox is, as you settle into meditation, places in your body that have been habitually tight will start to soften and let go and will feel uncomfortable. When an area has been tensed and then relaxes, there is a period of discomfort as balance is restored.

  This is why it is important to make yourself as comfortable as possible when you meditate, so you can tolerate the discomfort that can accompany getting into body awareness. Therefore, let yourself shift around or stretch in any way when you are in meditation. Let the Stillness in Motion, Slump, and Tense to Relax exercises help you here.

  If you work long hours and then meditate in the evening, it could well be that most of your sensations are painful. Usually these are tiny pains: crinkly sensations in the skin, on the face, around the eyes, or all over the body; prickly feelings in the heart and belly. They can go on and on, for ten minutes or twenty minutes, the entire meditation. These sensations are often accompanied by images and recalled conversations, and they come with emotional content. You will become well acquainted with this process if you work hard and then meditate.

  It is a brave decision to meditate after work when you are tired and stressed! It takes courage to face the pain of fatigue so directly. The reward can be that in half an hour you emerge from meditation feeling renewed, and when you eat dinner even the simplest food tastes delicious. Many people report feeling better all evening after meditating, and then they sleep better because they are already relaxed.

  If you are willing to pay attention, and if you stay right there breathing with the painful sensations, they will change gradually, with seemingly infinite slowness. But they will change. The wonder of meditation, and the wonder of the human body, is that you can feel peaceful while you are sitting there feeling your nerves heal, even if they are really irritated.
As you learn to trust this process, you will get better at letting the pain pass through you. But this phenomenon is one of the main reasons people quit meditating: they just don't want to sit through the agitation and uncomfortable sensations.

  Some people live with pain that is always there, either from injury or disease or because they do not like being in a human body. Although it is natural to want to flee from such pain, people in these situations have reported great benefit from learning to enter the pain and stay there with it.

  If you ever find yourself in continual pain, consider attending to it for five minutes every hour. When you do this, you may find your body relaxing into the pain, letting go of the muscular tensions it was using to try to block the pain. This muscular tension is often more uncomfortable than the actual pain.

  A surgery patient told me recently of lying in the hospital recovering from an appendicitis operation. The pain was so intense, she said, that her entire body recoiled from it at every movement she made. Yet she hated the way the drugs made her feel. So, with no other good choices, she decided to put her attention right into the pain and feel it. After a while she was able to merge with it and take it. The pain was still there, but she was not doing anything to try to protect herself from it. As she accomplished this, she found her entire body relaxing, letting go of the constrictions it had been doing to try to defend itself against the pain. To her surprise, she felt that the pain of the surgery and of the infection that necessitated the surgery was not as intense as the pain of her own aversion response. Then she discovered that because she was relaxed, she could get up and move slowly about.

  You'll have to explore to see what meditation focus is a good support for you to stay there and tolerate whatever sensations of pain you are experiencing. It may be a breath technique, a mantra, or a kinesthetic awareness practice. The pain itself is the main focus, and simple attention the main healer. But sometimes a supporting rhythm, whether of the breath or a sound, is wonderful.