Meditation Made Easy Page 5

  In Thy Presence, O Lord, filled with Thy Grace,

  I am starting yoga asanas.

  Grant me good health, energy, and efficiency in life.

  I feel Thy Grace, Thy Divine Presence.

  This little prayer, taking twenty seconds to say or think, became my favorite part of the cycle. It was the first time I had ever prayed. The sensation of doing the prayer became electric, and I would linger in the “good health, energy” part for a few extra seconds and really feel it. Even now, thinking it, I am delighted. It's as simple as a dog looking at you and wagging its tail.

  If ritual is not delightful to you, then why do it? The feeling underneath all prayer is longing and desiring, and that is your real prayer. Being with your sense of need, longing, wonder, awe at the universe, or gratitude to be alive is your prayer. If you like to think in terms of biology, you can regard your longing for meditation as a tropism. You are turning toward meditation to satisfy a need as naturally as plants turn toward the sun.

  You can keep an open and fresh attitude toward opening rituals. Meditation is ultimately the love relationship between your body and the solar system. Every breath you breathe is a cooperative action between the sun, the algae in the ocean, the forests of the world, your lungs and heart, and the muscles around your ribs. That's just a scientific fact. So whether you know it or not, every breath is an unconscious prayer. The purpose of ritually recognizing this is to free yourself from a sense of isolation. Meditation is simply paying attention to the pulse of this dance moment by moment.

  Variations

  NOTE

  Three Ways to Begin

  The following pages contain three very different exercises. Before going farther, ask yourself what you want to do right now. Say you have fifteen minutes. Do you want to find out more about yourself by exploring your tastes and preferences? Do you want to explore your senses? Or do you want to rest and do nothing?

  If you want to do nothing, do the Do Nothing technique.

  If you want to get into your body, do the Salute to the Senses. Saluting one sense a day is plenty.

  If you want to explore your individual taste, do a Feeling at Home exercise.

  Just pick whichever one strikes you right now. They are all easy, and at some point you will want to do all of them.

  Meditation is not just a set of techniques. It is your relationship with yourself, and the techniques emerge from that relationship. If you pay attention to your relationship with breath, or with sound, or with sensation or light, you yourself can invent any number of meditation practices.

  Remember, there is no “end goal” of meditation. It is a tool to help you enhance your appreciation for the gift of life.

  The methods in this book are presented as a way for you to get your feet wet. Once you are exploring, though, you will receive feedback from your inner and outer life. I encourage you to change the techniques and make them your own as you learn them. Your instinctive wisdom will guide you. People can be harmed by relying too much on external authority. Develop the habit of checking in with yourself about each technique, about what you want to do and how long you want to do it. This will activate your instinctive self-knowing. The habits you start with will tend to persist.

  Do not expect anything in particular to happen at any given moment when you are meditating. It is enough just to sit and be relatively restful.

  Tip

  Beginners often say:

  It's a relief just to sit still.

  The air has a silky texture in my throat.

  The movement of the breath is soothing.

  I like the rhythm.

  Is this really meditation? I feel like I am just sitting here being myself.

  I like the feeling of drawing the breath in really deep.

  I like the little pause at the end, before you exhale.

  As I am sitting here, I feel perfectly at home in myself.

  I can feel myself letting go of fatigue and getting charged up.

  I have the feeling I'm going to have a good day after this meditation.

  Walking around the block after meditating, I feel so relaxed in my body, every movement is a pleasure. I am glad just to be alive.

  I never appreciated how beautiful silence is before; it's almost musical.

  1. THE DO NOTHING TECHNIQUE

  TIME: 3 minutes to 5 minutes.

  POSTURE: Lying down or sitting.

  WHEN: Anytime.

  Sit or lie down and just allow your mind to do its thing. Your aim is to tolerate being there without trying to control anything. If you can do this, congratulate yourself. Take yourself to lunch. Your path in meditation is going to be pretty simple.

  Let your attention go anywhere it wants. You can think about sex, your to-do lists, movies, nothing, everything.

  Notice where your mind goes. The only thing that makes this seem even vaguely like a meditation is that you have given yourself a time frame of three to five minutes.

  This exercise helps you overcome technique-itis, which is the notion that there is something to be afraid of or that the human mind somehow has to be controlled even when you are resting. Technique-itis, left untreated, is mildly contagious and tends to last for ten to fifteen years, or until you give up on meditation forever.

  To develop an immunity to technique-itis, simply Do Nothing and tolerate whatever your body and mind do. You want to be in the same state you're in when you are about to fall asleep. The mind is just drifting. You need to find out if you can take whatever happens when you release control.

  You will learn to experience your natural state, without doing anything to it. Many people are slightly ashamed of their unvarnished selves and look for “techniques” to “improve” themselves. Years later, they are still doing gadgetry to themselves, and often nothing has changed.

  Variation No. 1

  Variation No. 2

  Tip

  Problem: If you have a sleep debt, doing nothing will probably put you to sleep.

  Solution: Most people have at least a few hours of sleep debt. Just take naps instead of meditating, and maybe go to bed half an hour earlier for a few weeks. If you take care of it, you will feel much better, and you won't fall asleep when you are meditating. As a bonus, you might not get that cold that's going around, because you won't be so run-down. You can't learn to meditate if you are fighting sleep.

  2. SALUTE TO THE SENSES

  TIME: 3 minutes to 5 minutes for each sense.

  POSTURE: Standing, walking, lying down, or sitting.

  WHEN: Anytime except when operating heavy machinery.

  Let's take a tour of some of the commonly known human senses. All of them are employed in the various meditation techniques of the world, by themselves and in combination.

  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.

  The meditations in this section touch on all the senses, not just seeing and hearing and taste and touch and smell, but also balance and movement. Take the time to explore these brief sensory salutations, at your own pace. You could take a year or you could take a month to go through them. If you are on vacation, you could do them in a couple of days. But the real effects will show up over the long run, over the months and years.

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

  Tip

  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.

  The brain rewires itself daily to be better at
what we are paying attention to. When you exercise a sense, the brain makes more neural connections for that sensory pathway. When you connect that sense with other senses, the brain makes connective pathways to coordinate perceptions. This is one of the things that makes meditation so much fun: you progressively have richer experiences of your body and your world as you move through your daily life.

  As you read through the following paragraphs, linger a bit and evoke your senses by calling up your favorite ways of experiencing. Take an attitude of playful idleness when exploring the senses, at least the first couple of times you explore each sense. Play and childlike curiosity engage your instincts in a healthy way and help you establish an easy familiarity with your senses. In an informal approach to meditation, this is the way to go.

  Doing the Salute to the Senses is very simple. After all, these are the senses you use all the time to know where you are in the world and how you are doing. The exercises below are ways of celebrating everyday sensuous perceptions. You will be choosing a sense—hearing, or touch, or vision—and paying close attention to it. Not much is required 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. And that is the whole point.

  Smell

  How it works: Smell is a chemical sense that allows us to detect the electric charge on molecules as they flow across receptors in the nose.

  Explore: What are some of your favorite smells? Choose one that is available to you right now and let it become the center of your attention. It could be a stick of cinnamon, a piece of chewing gum, a leaf, a cigar, a rose, brandy in a snifter, the smell of the leather on your pocket organizer, the perfume or cologne on your wrist. You could just go sit in a garden and breathe. Right now I thought of a peach, and one was available so I held it up to my nose, breathing in and out for several minutes, studying the smell.

  Salute to Smell

  Taste

  How it works: Taste is a chemical sense that detects the ions and molecules touching your tongue.

  There is much more to it, of course. Taste is inextricably linked with many other senses on and in the tongue: the sense of temperature and texture, the movement sensors in the tongue, and the muscularity of chewing. When we eat something and savor the taste of it, even the way it looked before we put it in our mouth is part of the experience. The sound of the crunch as we chew is part of the whole delight. Let all these other impressions come and go as you taste, but let taste be the center of your focus.

  Explore: What are some of your favorite tastes? I just ate some sushi, and the taste of the ginger and horseradish is lingering in my mouth. Is there anything around that you would like to taste? Take a little bite of it.

  Salute to Taste

  Sight

  How it works: Special cells in your retina contain molecules that respond to light waves pulsing in the range of about four hundred trillion to eight hundred trillion times a second. Your brain translates this information into the experience of color, texture, depth, shape, and motion. A great deal of the brain is devoted to visual processing.

  Explore: Let your gaze wander around the room or area you are in right now. Notice how effortlessly the eyes move. Release the eyes from any control and just let them move wherever they want.

  Salute to Sight

  Hearing

  How it works: Inside each ear is a resonant chamber with tens of thousands of tiny hairs of different lengths. Each hair vibrates to a different frequency of sound waves, setting off nerve cells. Your brain takes the impulses coming from these cells and sends the data swirling around intricate neural circuitry. This gives you the experience of tone, resonance, amplitude, direction, and many other wonderful qualities. The filtering mechanism lets you pick one conversation out of many at a party.

  Explore: Is there a simple sound that you would like to hear? Or would you prefer silence? Give yourself a moment to wonder what quality or intensity of sound or silence you would like to experience.

  Salute to Hearing

  Touch

  How it works: In the skin are many sensors for detecting touch, pressure, heat, and pain, and each of these has its own specialized nerve terminals. Just within touch itself, there are nerves for sensing the light contact that moves the hairs, a touch on the skin surface itself, and a strong touch. The skin has sensors both near the surface and deeper in the tissue.

  Explore: Check in with your body right now and ask yourself, what touch do I want? Touch anything with eyes closed and experience the sensations in your fingertips and palms, as if touching for the first time. Touch your skull very lightly and lovingly; let your hands and the skin of your scalp be awake to each other.

  Salute to Touch

  Variation

  Kinesthesia

  How it works: There are nerves in the muscles to detect stretch and tension, and there are nerves in the joints to detect position. You can notice these whenever you are sitting or lying down and breathing, or when you are walking, running, swimming, dancing, making love, or doing yoga.

  Explore: Consider the many movements you do every day, from the time you get out of bed in the morning to the time you go to sleep at night. Which movements do you love in particular? Which ones do you pay attention to? Which ones would you miss terribly if you were no longer able to do them?

  Salute to Movement Sensing

  Balance

  How it works: Near the inner ears are semicircular canals (vestibules) filled with fluid. Whenever the fluid moves, it causes movement in tiny hairs lining the canal, and sensors detect this. The brain interprets this information as the relationship with gravity, the mysterious attraction that matter has for matter. Balance, also called the vestibular sense, alerts your brain continually to the relationship of the body to the center of the Earth.

  Explore: Whenever you are moving, accelerating, standing, sitting, or lying down, you are enjoying the sense of balance. But the vestibular sense works so seamlessly and cooperates so beautifully with vision and kinesthesia that we rarely experience it in itself. Anytime you lean over, you can feel gravity attracting you.

  Salute to Balance

  Your Relationship with the Senses

  All the senses are used in meditation. Stay with any of these sensuous modalities for a minute or so to let yourself be reminded of what's real. Each sense is both external—as in hearing a sound—and internal, as in hearing the thought of the sound or hearing yourself think. Anyone with the sense of hearing can call up at will a remembered sound, and similarly people can call up an image or a feeling. Each sense reaches into the outer world and into the inner world.

  The senses constantly blend and interact with one another, and a single sense rarely operates in isolation. When you are eating, you see the food, smell it, taste it, feel the motion as you bite into it, and feel it move around in your mouth before swallowing it. Then you feel satisfied, which is yet another sensation. When you are walking, you look around, smell the air, hear cars and people on all sides of you, feel the motion in your legs, and feel hot or cold. When you are in a passionate embrace, there is something for every sense to enjoy. When you are listening to music, you will find that you are processing not only auditory signals but also kinesthetic information from all over your body. And no matter what you are doing, sitting still or moving, your sense of balance is always there informing you.

  In meditation you use the same senses that you use when you are enjoying yourself. So the more intimate you become with the senses, the better. As you salute each of the senses, you give it permission to interact with the others in new ways.

  Take the time to make a sensuous inventory. What are your dominant senses? Which ones are the le
ast developed? Be willing to refresh your relationship with each of the sensory pathways. Each connects you to the outer world and the inner world in a different way, and the variations and combinations are infinite.

  Although it may seem extremely simple, saluting the senses is a profound exercise. Even a few minutes a day of doing this will, over time, change your experience of life in interesting and useful ways.

  If you are a beginner at meditation, then you have a great advantage. You have not learned to split “the spiritual” from common, everyday sensuous perception. And if you do not ever split yourself in this way, then you will not have to quit meditating someday in order to recover from the split and reunify yourself.

  The more alert you are to all the senses, the richer your meditations will be, the more textured your sense of your inner world. Even thinking is a sensory experience; when we are thinking, we see inner pictures, we move them around and look at them from different angles, we listen to our internal dialogues, and we feel different body sensations with each of the scenarios we create.