Meditation Made Easy Page 6
Meditators often get into a rut with their senses, using the same ones in the same way every day. When asked to “Scan your body” or “Pay attention to breath,” people will use whatever senses they are accustomed to working with. But even in a simple experience of breath, there is sound, movement, touch, balance, and perhaps smell. The more senses you enjoy in meditation, the richer your experience will be. It only takes a minute to orbit through all the senses and give them permission to play. When you get intimate with a sense, you are saying to it, “Talk to me, tell me your story. What do you want?” The senses always answer, each in its unique way.
After meditation, go and use your senses.
NOTE
All Senses Meditation
TIME: 5 minutes to 10 minutes.
POSTURE: Sitting is preferable. You can also experiment with lying down or standing.
WHEN: Anytime.
All Senses Meditation
NOTE
NOTE
3. FEELING AT HOME EXERCISE
TIME: 5 minutes to 10 minutes.
POSTURE: Sitting or lying down.
WHEN: Anytime you feel like it.
To begin the Feeling at Home exercise for meditation, ask yourself, when have I felt really at home? Really at home in myself? Call up an experience and breathe with it for a few minutes. That's all. The following paragraphs are a meditation induction, meant to be read slowly. They're repetitive because the process is one of calling forth an experience, breathing with it, then letting it go and shifting to a different aspect of the experience and breathing with that.
Set your mind free to wander over your life experience and recall instances when you have felt very, very comfortable. They could have occurred anywhere, anytime, under any conditions.
If you like, get some paper and jot down all the times you can think of when you felt at home, in yourself, in your body, in the world, or in your heart. Each note can be a brief reminder, a couple of words. Then select one at a time and go into it deeply and let it teach you. Soak in it with all your senses.
As each impression and each aspect of the experience comes to mind, let it also come to your senses and your body. Let yourself see with your mind's eye what you saw, feel what you felt, hear what you heard, smell what you smelled, taste what you tasted.
If one of your memories of being at home is standing on the shore, there is the smell of the salt air, the sound of the surf, wind, and seagulls, the wetness of the spray on your face, the brilliance of the sun or the gray of the clouds, and the blue rolling motion of the ocean. Immerse yourself in each of these; let yourself rejoice in each sense.
Perhaps you recall a time when you walked for hours in the mountains and then rested under a tree overlooking a meadow. Let yourself recall that moment in rich sensory detail. You may have been aware of the buzz of fatigue in your muscles, a feeling of expansion in your heart as you looked out at the meadow nestled in the mountains, the ease with which your eyes took it all in, the beauty of sunlight shimmering on a stream, the quiet sound of brush rustling in the breeze.
As the images and memories come, breathe with them. Enter the image, see the scene, breathe with the feeling you had in your body. When you do this, the feelings come into the present. You are, in the present moment, meditating on the feeling of “being at home.”
When you are feeling at home, how do your eyes work?
When you are at home, how do you experience sound?
How does your skin feel?
Allow the memory to infuse you, take you over, teach you, bless you. Bless the memory in turn, and give thanks to life for the gift of being at home.
In so doing, you are giving your body a chance to learn from the condition of being at home. You are learning from your own spontaneous experiences. You are learning how your senses operate when you are at ease, at home in yourself.
Recalling an experience brings up the way your brain and sensory nervous system and breath function when you are in that experience. When you associate that with your breathing now, today, it alerts your brain to let meditation be just as friendly and inviting.
Keep returning to this exercise over and over when you have quiet time. If you like to write, you could keep a journal about your experiences. The primary task is to let your senses, all of them, be refreshed by the process of recollection. You will find that the process gets faster. Soon, the positive qualities you love about life will be at your fingertips to call upon whenever you need to. You may find, too, that your memory improves.
Do this exercise for a few minutes, and if it is going really well, continue it for as long as you like. Let your experience be leisurely.
Each time you do the exercise you may recall different experiences: holding your baby, sailing, dancing all night, sleeping under the stars while camping, a long and wonderful conversation with a friend, a vacation cruise, the day you graduated from a school, riding a horse. It will teach you about the way your senses operate when you are having vivid, life-affirming experiences.
Surprisingly, many people who learn meditation never learn to be at home in the practice. They always feel they are doing a technique coming from outside the self, and the authority for how to do the technique resides in India or Tibet or Japan.
Your meditation practice for the first month could be simply remembering times that you've felt at home in the world, spending five minutes or so a day in this way. If you think that sounds too simple, try it!
Tip
Variations
Getting Out
Always give yourself leisure time at the end of a meditation session. Allow about three minutes. This “getting out” time is as important as the meditation itself; it is your segue into action. And the whole point of meditation is to carry the relaxed attentiveness into action.
You become aware that you are going to end the meditation soon. You could call it an intention—you are just aware for a split second that you are going to get up soon. The body will immediately shift from healing mode into a kind of neutral gear.
You do nothing, you just coast. Thoughts can come and go, sensations come and go, you are not intending anything. Several minutes of this may seem like a really long time, a whole world of experience. You need a watch at hand to make sure you stay there.
Toward the end of the getting-out time, make little movements. Sigh. Then wait a few seconds. Then make a movement again. You will feel your metabolism begin to speed up.
Open the eyes a little, then close them again and notice your inner feelings. You will probably sigh again. Again open the eyes, a little more. Perhaps look downward and in front of you for a few seconds, because that means the eyelids do not have to open all the way.
Open the eyes and simply sit there for half a minute, savoring your body sensations.
* * *
Pause Now and Take a Deep Breath
* * *
CLOSING RITUALS
I recommend that people make up their own closing rituals, using hand and arm gestures. For example, slowly open the arms wide, then bring them in so the hands are over the heart. Then again open the arms, and bring the hands in to rest on the belly. Learn to appreciate a very slow movement here, slower than you've ever made before. Move at the speed you can feel. This slow movement helps the body integrate inner and outer.
For a one-minute meditation, there is no need to do any rituals for getting out. But for a ten-or twenty-minute meditation, make it a rule to spend about a minute reorienting for every five minutes you were meditating. This is something you have to impose on yourself, because spending two minutes at the end of a ten-minute meditation seems like forever. You may find yourself sitting there going vroom, vroom, revving your engines, eager to leap into action. If you have deadlines or are anxious about your performance at something, this vroom time is actually more important than the other parts of meditation. Your body is practicing staying as relaxed as possible while feeling the urgency to act and perhaps rehearsing specific actions.
If you have a limited amount of time for your whole meditation—say you have twenty minutes in all—then you work backward to see how much time you can spend with your eyes closed. Subtracting a minute or two at the beginning, and three at the end, plus a couple of minutes thrown in as a buffer, leaves you about fourteen minutes for eyes-closed meditation. It is much better to have these interlude moments for the transitions.
I once had a student who was an ER doctor, an emergency room specialist. He worked long shifts, and often nothing was happening, so he could rest in a room near the ER. On occasion, however, he would have to get up from meditation at a dead run and deal with a patient. He said that after doing this once, and being a bit shocked, his body invented an “intermediate” meditation state for when he was at the hospital, in which it kept guard with one part and let him mostly rest. He said he felt like a dog “sleeping with one eye open,” except that he meditated with one eye open. When he was at home meditating, he would go much deeper because he knew he wouldn't be interrupted.
So know that you can get up out of meditation at a dead run if you should ever have to, but don't do it unless you have to.
Going Deeper
The Sensuous Texture of Daily Life
There is a sensuous texture to everyday living. Awakening in the morning, you feel a certain way when you first come to consciousness. Then there is the first stretch, and you open your eyes to see what time it is. Standing in the shower you may or may not savor the water flowing on your skin. Drinking your coffee or tea, you may celebrate the taste or just mechanically consume it. As you look around at the people you love, your heart may be filled with love, or you may be too busy in your mind to really see them.
At work, sometimes the day flows as if you have inner resources backing you up, and sometimes it drags. Going to lunch, you may be happy or anxious. Coming home, there is the way you feel when you walk in the door. You may be ecstatic to be home and glad to see everyone, or you may bring the stress of work right in with you. Going to bed, there is the way you feel getting under the covers and what you think about lying there. What were your last thoughts as you went to sleep last night? Each of these moments borders on meditation and is a good path to take inward. It is up to you to allow yourself to go with the moment and permit it to deepen. To do so means you have to assess how much time you have, how safe you are, what it is you are curious about. The senses are the way into meditation and also the means you use to verify whether meditation is working for you in your life.
You can tell that meditation is working by the tiny, barely noticeable changes in the sensory quality of your day, by how you feel doing your life. The mundane is where your teacher is. Make the everyday your teacher, your guide. By noticing the feedback from your everyday life, you will be able to tell how you are doing. Other people may be able to see the changes as well. They may say, “You seem in a better mood lately.”
Explore your way through the meditations in this section. There is no rule about which to do first, which not to do at all. Let your cravings and your needs guide you. Everyone has rituals for getting ready for the day; everyone has to rise and shine in some way. Paying a bit more attention while doing your everyday rituals of bathing and getting ready for the day is a good way to get into meditation. You can begin the process of building a daily meditations practice in this way, doing what you do anyway. Most of these meditations can be done in secret. No one will even know that you are doing anything special.
Life is a succession of little moments, inner and outer. We know of these moments through our many senses. The more alert we are in the senses, the more there is to notice of the texture of the world and the texture of our feelings, sensations, and thoughts. The point of meditation is to see the Earth with fresh eyes, to become a person upon whom nothing is lost. Your way will probably be different from anyone else's. Find your own way into little meditation moments such as are described on the following pages. Invent your own, using my suggestions as hints or templates.
To select any of these sensory meditations, just pick your favorites, the ones that immediately attract you. After a week or two or a month, pick one that is unfamiliar. Treat them as recipes in a cook-book. Someday you may want to try each one. The main thing you are up to is training yourself to stay with a pleasurable sensation for longer than you ordinarily would, for thirty seconds, a minute, three minutes.
Mini-Meditations Throughout the Day
WAKE UP AND SMELL THE COFFEE
TIME: Give it 15 minutes. I dare you. But you can do it in 5 minutes.
WHEN: Morning, or soon after arising.
If you are doing this mini-meditation in the morning, shower first, then drink some water so you aren't thirsty.
Get a cup of your favorite warm drink—coffee, tea, herb tea—and sit somewhere comfortable where you can hold the cup and rest. Hold it under your nose and breathe in and out. This is normal savoring activity, only you stay with it longer. Keep on paying attention right through your usual limit, whether it is one second or ten.
Hold the cup in both hands and at just the right distance from your nose. You can close the eyes and give over to smell. You are breathing in and out as you smell, so enjoy the flow. Notice the sensations you have in your belly as you inhale the smell of your coffee. Be alert for sensations anywhere in your body.
Breathe in the smell for a while, then take a taste. Notice what happens in the mouth and on the tongue as you sip. Notice what happens in the entire body.
Put the cup down on a table, or lower your hands and hold the cup in your lap, and enjoy yourself.
Then raise the cup again. Make this a ritual movement, slow and gracious.
Continue this rhythm of breathing in the smell and resting for a few minutes.
Many senses besides smell and taste are involved in enjoying a cup of coffee. Sight brings you information about colors and shapes; touch informs you of the warmth of the cup and the smoothness of its surface; your motion sensors feed you sensations as you lift the cup to your lips.
Tip
NOTE
ARRIVE EARLY FOR EVERYTHING
TIME: About 3 minutes.
WHEN: At every scheduled meeting.
If you are even a little early for the events of your day, you can take a moment to breathe, feel yourself, and enjoy. It's a little luxury that meditators often overlook. One minute here and there can change the whole rhythm of a day by allowing you to catch up with yourself. This simple step will alter your life significantly, unless you are already hip to it.
I get the feeling that in the military “on time” means you arrive five minutes early, then stand around preparing yourself to walk in the door at the exact second of the appointment. At least, that's how military types I have worked with come for their meditation sessions. It doesn't matter whether they are generals, captains, or sergeants. They always seem to arrive early, loaf around outside, then knock on the door right on time. I can set my watch by them. Since they are not out of breath, it's easier for them to get into breath awareness. And they are very easy to work with in meditation. When you say “At ease,” they go “Whew.”
By contrast, about half my civilian students arrive just barely on time and slightly out of breath, or even a few minutes late. They call me from their cell phones to say, “I'm stuck in traffic but I'll be right there.” By inquiring how they live, I have found that they do almost everything this way. Meditation may even make them worse, because they don't really plan for the extra half hour they take in the morning to stretch and meditate. I think it is better to spend less time meditating and be early for things, so you can travel mindfully—senses open, unhurried, enjoying the ride.
At first this may sound severe, but it is really the simplest imaginable way of doing things: whatever time you say the appointment is, that is the time. Not a few minutes later or a half hour later. And because that is a simpler way of operating, it's more fun. You can even make a game out of finding out when
a person is really going to arrive: you can ask, “Do you mean three, threeish, or three-thirty?” When I make appointments with people, I usually ask, “When can you realistically get there, without rushing?”
If you are early for your appointments, you can use the extra couple of minutes to collect yourself, review notes, make notes, rest, drink water, chat, take a few conscious breaths, or feel smug. More important, if you are not cutting it close, and are not late, then you will not get an adrenaline rush.
In the evening meditation, one of the things you will spend time doing is reviewing every adrenaline jolt of the day. Your body will systematically go through each nerve, soothing it and restoring it. This happens spontaneously when you relax or rest—you don't have to make it happen, and it is hard to stop it from happening, since it is a natural healing process. But it takes time in your meditation. So the fewer false alarms you have from trivial things like being late, the more time you'll have available in meditation to be with other perceptions.
If you are early for an appointment, you can cruise. You can let other people get in the elevator first; you can wave other cars ahead. You can look at people, see things, enjoy your breathing as you walk. If you feel late, the stress hormones kick in. If you have any control at all over your life, arrange to be early for everything for a month and notice how many little moments open up.
I am emphasizing this point because lots of “advanced” meditators I know have a tendency to be a little late, to chronically rush around slightly out-of-breath. It's okay to do this once in a while, or in an emergency, but it's stupid to do it habitually. Why bother to meditate, then jerk your nerves around pointlessly? Yet a huge number of meditators do this. They meditate a bit longer than they have time for, then rush out of the house and zoom to work.