Meditation Made Easy Read online

  Pain is a calling. It is the body's way of telling you to pay attention. Nothing could be easier, on the level of effort, than to attend to painful sensations when you are meditating. It takes no effort to pay attention to the sensations; it takes willingness to suffer through the sensations so that your body can heal more quickly.

  NOTE

  The Ahhh…And the Ouch of Meditation

  NOISE

  Go placidly amid the noise of your mind and the noise in the street, and remember that your brain evolved to deal with it.

  Whenever you encounter an experience in meditation that you don't know how to handle, make up a way to handle it gracefully or give up on meditation for the moment. Just don't invent an Odious Rule. Let's take noise as an example. Perhaps you are meditating and you can't stop listening to an interesting conversation in the next room. Or you find yourself listening to sounds you can't identify, and you sit there wondering, trying to visualize what they are. Or a door slams down the hall and you are jarred from feeling peaceful. How do you deal with these situations?

  If you are being informal with yourself, then you will deal with the distraction just as you would when reading a novel or magazine. Your attention will flicker over to the outside sounds, assess whether they are life-threatening, then return to your breath or whatever your meditation focus is. Almost anyone can read a novel in an airport or a newspaper in a café with no problem. People do not furrow their brows while reading their favorite escape fiction. A more common challenge for them is remembering to check the time. People can even stand on a busy sidewalk and view a TV news broadcast in a store window. If you watch people concentrating in this way, you will see that they do not strain with concentration. They just watch. If you observe athletes during a game, you'll notice that they tend to have wide-open, almost blank faces. They are concentrating with an open focus. People do this naturally when they are just being themselves. If you are meditating and are this natural, people will think you are an expert. But it is really much easier and simpler not to tie yourself up in knots in the first place.

  Many times when traveling and staying at people's homes, I have walked out of a room after meditating and the other people have said, “Sorry about the noise while you were meditating,” and I have said, “What noise?” This is not a feat of expert meditation. A six-year-old with a comic book can do the same thing. Watching thoughts and perceptions condense out of the dancing chemicals in the brain is just as interesting as reading comic books.

  The Odious Rule way would be to resent the outside sounds. Then you can quit meditating and blame the outside world for not shutting up, or you can continue meditating but cultivate anger. This gives you a justification to storm out of the room and scream at people, “Will you hold it down to a dull roar! I'm trying to meditate!”

  Most people, left to their own devices, will start to resist hearing outside sounds. This is the problem with approaching meditation formally, instead of letting it be as natural as reading a novel. This is the way in which people “doing a technique” are separated from their natural, instinctive way of doing things. They may start to get irritated by the sound, then will try to concentrate. Right here, the meditation is corrupted and you may as well quit.

  Some people get irritated at Life or The City and think that other people being alive is an obstacle to meditation. Thus the desire develops to move to a quiet place. But then, nature is very noisy. I live near a bird refuge and the birds make a racket at dawn, singing and chirping away. The blue herons make a weird screeching sound when they glide overhead at dusk. A person could really resent all those noises!

  By following the principle of always doing the simplest thing, the well-trained meditator will just let attention stay on the outside noise until it is no longer interesting, then return to breath—because it is more interesting.

  During my training to be a meditation teacher, at one point I lived in a hotel on Majorca in winter. It was 1971 or so. The Transcendental Meditation movement liked to rent hotels out of season because we got such great deals. Because it was the off-season, though, construction was going on all over town—lots of jackhammers and dynamiting early in the morning right next to my hotel. I could have made this a problem. But I was having too good a time to do that. I was dynamiting the obstacles inside my psyche, so what was going on in the outer world was a perfect metaphor. A nervous system knows how to deal with noise; you just have to let it do its thing.

  All this is another example of how practicing a “technique” can make you stupid. Leave a person alone to read a newspaper in a nice coffee shop in the afternoon, and the person sits there gratefully enjoying the experience. No one sits in Starbucks on a busy street thinking, “If only there were no traffic, if only no one moved or made a sound, then I could enjoy my cup of coffee.”

  When meditators do not let meditation be simple, what they are practicing is not meditation but resentment—the Resentment technique. If you know any people like this, watch out! Sooner or later their resentment will want to find a two-legged target.

  SLEEPINESS

  Sleep is to be welcomed. It is wonderful if you fall asleep during meditation. Most busy people have a sleep debt of several dozen hours. When you pay it off, you will feel a lot better; you'll feel younger and lighter. When you are meditating, you sometimes get so relaxed that you will fall asleep sitting up in your chair.

  If you nod off, fine. When you wake up, do not try to return to the focus for a while. Just sit there for a minute and let your brain wake up. You will know when you are awake again. Then continue meditating.

  Have a blanket and pillow nearby so you can lie down and sleep.

  There will be times when taking a nap is by far the most profound meditation you can do.

  URGENCY

  Sometimes when you sit to meditate you will be inundated with a sense of urgency about doing this and that. Suddenly you'll think of all the things you have to do. This is not a problem—just witness the urgency. For the time being, that feeling itself is your focus. The urgency may be unpleasant, but hang in there; it is very worthwhile to permeate urgent feelings with attention.

  On the first level, the urgency is associated with specific tasks left undone or specific topics about which you are concerned. On the next level, the urgency is a feeling in your body, maybe an adrenaline rush in your belly. And farther on in, the urgency is a buzzing in your nerves.

  Learn to track these levels; it will be a good thing for you.

  Always remember, when this sense of urgency comes up, it's because you have a life and have things to do. The feeling of wanting to do things is to be cherished. What's going on is that your brain is combining relaxation and attentiveness with the electricity of urgency. If you stay with it, you'll emerge balanced. It's a good use of ten or twenty minutes to filter the anxiety out of your action plan.

  Everyone who is engaged with the world has feelings of urgency about things that need to be done now. There will be times during meditation when you'll find yourself shifting from being deeply relaxed to feeling urgency zap through your body like lightning. This is not a problem—just witness the urgency. Urgency is a sense of need, and you are available to your own feelings of need. Feeling your urgency in meditation is perfect, because the urgent feelings really need to be combined with inner resources, with calm inner strength, and this is what happens in meditation. If you do this, you will find that you emerge from meditation energized. Some or most of the urgency will have been transformed into excitement and real energy, and there will be less anxiety.

  The urgency is not your meditation technique; your technique is to pay tender attention to the urgency as a set of feelings in your body. The urgency probably has a set of pictures with it, pictures of tasks you need to do. The only thing to watch out for is not letting the urgency push your technique.

  Many people feel that they have failed to meditate properly when feelings of urgency come up, and acting on this misinformation, they tr
y to do something. They may try to do one of two things, either of which will immediately sabotage their meditation. They:

  Try to suppress the urgency in order to calm down.

  Urgently try to “get into” meditation. They may be tempted to rush into breath to escape from the tension.

  Either or both of these will corrupt the simplicity of attention and will make meditation seem like work. What you do is simply let the urgent feelings call your attention, and continue to pay attention as the highly charged thoughts roll through your mind. This usually feels like suffering. So stay with the urgent/anxious/excited feelings until you have matched rhythm with them and there is no suppression in your attitude. Then to your surprise you will find yourself slipping into meditation. This is easier done than said. I had to use all these words to describe something that in practice you can do in a few seconds.

  One day a man by the name of Norm came over for a meditation session. He mentioned at the beginning that he was always “aware of time.” He looked at his watch a lot and seemed to want to move fast. He had an attitude of “Let's hurry up and meditate.” He said he had tried to meditate many times but couldn't “slow his mind down” enough to succeed.

  I listened to Norm talk about his relationship with time for a while. Then, because he was a physicist, I asked him, “What…is…time?” He closed his eyes and didn't want to open them for almost half an hour. He was in a deep reverie, experiencing his own body as a wave in the spacetime continuum. Afterwards, he said he did not feel anxious about time, as he did before, but excited by being able to play in the fields of time. Norm had told me that his work involved using super-computers to make animated imagery of physics equations, so I figured he would have a lot of fantastic mental imagery, and he did.

  This was a breakthrough for Norm, and you will have your own at some point when you are meditating and the sense of urgency arises in you. Urgency is the pulse beat of your own life, and ultimately the dynamic impulse of life itself, which is always wanting to move on. This is not an obstacle to meditation; rather, it is a great ally.

  MOODS

  If you are moody, meditate anyway. Moods are a bit vaguer than emotions. By “moody” I mean:

  Irritable

  Bored

  Restless

  Lonely

  Ornery

  Horny

  Mischievous

  Cheerful

  Chipper

  Sassy

  Playful

  Amused

  Defiant

  Creative

  Rebellious

  Dreamy

  You usually can't quite put your finger on the discrete emotion, but you know something's going on. A mood may be associated with a vague feeling all over your body, and you may not even want to pay attention to the mood—you may want to jump out of your skin, or lose yourself in watching TV or some such thing.

  Whatever mood you are in, angry or tired or peaceful or excited, you can meditate. All this variety of emotional tones just makes meditation more interesting; it allows you to experience your body in different states. When you find yourself in each mood, that is your opportunity to be with it. Attention is magic. Your attention is called; simply be there while the sensations, emotions, voices, and images last.

  While meditating, you may notice very quick movement among your moods, from one to another. Or the movement may not seem quick enough. Breathe with each mood as it comes and as it goes, and let it have a home in your meditation.

  Sometimes an entire meditation will be spent processing a mood, soaking in it. Then when you emerge from meditation, to your total surprise, you find you have finished it and feel completely different, as if a weight has been lifted off you.

  Welcome your real self. That's what honesty means. Restfulness sometimes means you are resting in your own bad self—from the beginning. You do not have to be an impostor, taking on a false attitude of piety.

  Train yourself to welcome “negative experiences.” I'm lonely, bored, horny, angry, tired, irritable, worried about money, hungry, lost, depressed. I don't wanna meditate. Bring 'em on. You do not have to change any of these moods in order to meditate. These are the gateways into meditation. Your everyday, real life is your work sheet, your material. Your longings, the unfinished places in you, your needs for energy and attention and love, these are the motivators for meditation. You can meditate as a rebel, as a trickster, as a grump.

  RESTLESSNESS

  Welcome your impulses to move. If you feel restless before meditating, you may want to learn a stretch routine or walk for half an hour. Showers help.

  Once you start meditating, welcome the restlessness and find out what it wants. Never try to “suppress” restlessness in meditation. If you don't want to do anything beforehand to minimize it, then witness it and ride it; you will learn a lot.

  In meditation you do not make yourself sit still. You only sit relatively still, as you would when listening to music or reading a book. When you are reading, you don't have to tell yourself, “Sit still, sit still,” as if you were a dog. You don't even think about it. So let yourself stretch, sigh, or scratch. Even when you are in deep meditation, your breath is flowing and your heart is beating. So why get into a struggle with life about movement? If you welcome movement, you will experience more stillness in meditation.

  WILD, POLITICALLY INCORRECT IMPULSES

  Externally, meditation appears politically correct because no one can see what you are thinking.

  Internally, meditation is Wild Time—you cut loose, let your hair down, party, think any outrageous thought that crosses your mind without bothering to edit it. You don't have to go out of your way to think something outrageous, but you don't have to maintain a guard against thinking it either. That would be too much work. You don't need to edit during meditation because you aren't going to act on the thoughts. So why bother to edit? Meditation time is like when you dream at night.

  During the day, we are all constrained in many ways. We conform our behavior to whatever situation we find ourselves in. This is good. This is called civilization. It is good that you didn't murder the guy who carelessly dropped your vase.

  But meditation is internal behavior. Because you are not acting on your impulses in meditation, you don't need to edit them. On the contrary, you want to let every impulse move through you so that you can learn from each one and receive its gifts of energy and passion. This is by far the hardest thing for almost anyone to get. But don't worry, you have years to become accustomed to it.

  Let's go over that again: you are not acting out thoughts; you are savoring them, releasing the energy tied up in them, freeing that energy for your life. This gives you total freedom to experience any thought. There is little most people ever experience that is not outdone on the nightly news or in the movies.

  The relaxation and calmness of meditation are the foundation, and with that you want to welcome every taboo thought, every inappropriate impulse, so that you don't have to expend the energy to block it out. This is how you get defragmented.

  If you want meditation to be restful and renewing, then let it be a time when you don't edit yourself. Let whatever hasn't had a chance to express itself come to the foreground and be cherished. Let meditation be Open House for all parts of yourself, whether they are tame or wild. If you do not let your passions play through you, you will get bored and want to quit meditation.

  SELF-CRITICISM

  If you find that your thoughts are self-critical, the secret is this: do nothing. Witness the thoughts. Listen and look. Breathe. At first you will be involved in the criticism, really believing it. At some point, though, you will remember that you are meditating and then simply return to the home base of wherever your chosen focus is. Do not try to block the thoughts in any way. If anything, welcome them. Whatever comes into the expansive space of meditation is gradually transformed.

  Then, after meditation, go take good care of yourself. Love yourself up: take a walk or a bath, or
luxuriate in some way. Talk to a good friend. Over time, you will learn to let negative thoughts just flow through you with no resistance. You will learn from them, get the information and pointers they sometimes bring, and be grateful for their input.

  Tip

  This Is Your Brain at Work

  Your brain has maybe a trillion neurons, with seventy trillion synaptic connections among the neurons—there's an entire universe in there, like the stars in the sky. They all glow, hum, and commune with one another in the most delicate symphony conceivable.

  Neurons in all the different parts of the brain are continually talking to one another, swapping data, telling one another stories. When we are resting, our brains do deep work, sorting everything out, healing connections, forming networks connecting everywhere with everywhere, reevaluating all priorities, noticing what has been missed. This goes on during the restfulness of deep sleep and dreaming, and it goes on in a similar fashion during the restfulness of meditation. The difference is that you are conscious during meditation, so you notice, and you have to learn to flow with it.

  There is no need to try to get the neurons to stop communicating. Anyway, you couldn't do it; there is no mute button for the human brain. The hum of all that activity is the hum of life. Life is the symphony you are listening to.

  Remember this when you sit to meditate. During meditation, all the areas of the body and brain talk to one another even more than at other times, because you are resting and not doing anything else. Yet all this electricity, all this flowing of chemical messengers, is not an obstacle to meditation. This is your meditation. You can find the peace you crave amid this singing of neurons.