Meditation Made Easy Page 8

  Experiment with tensing and relaxing while sitting up, lying down, and stretched out on the floor in various postures.

  Tense your entire body, all the muscles simultaneously, then release.

  Do Tense to Relax every day for several minutes, and give yourself a month to get really familiar with it.

  NOTE

  LET YOUR BRAIN GO LIMP

  TIME: 1 minute.

  Sitting comfortably, put your palm on the back of your head, at the base of the skull. Let your head rest back into your hand and stay that way for a few breaths.

  As the breath flows in and out, the wave motion creates an undulation up the spine into the skull. Enjoy this sensation for a few more breaths.

  Then take away your hand and let it go limp in your lap. Now imagine your brain going limp, as though it doesn't have to work at all for the next minute.

  If you have a sinking sensation, go with it—let your attention drop into your body. This is just like the Slump exercise, except that there is no outward physical movement.

  Savor the feeling of relief.

  FIND STILLNESS IN MOTION

  TIME: 5 minutes.

  WHEN: Anytime you are rested and unhurried.

  Find a chair that gives you a sense of being firmly planted. Your pelvis is supported but you are free to move your torso, and your feet are on the ground. An office chair is good for this.

  Let yourself rock a little in any manner, back and forth or side to side. This is the same movement people make when they are restless or can't make up their minds. The movement comes from that same instinctive place.

  Let this movement segue into a circle. Your tailbone is on the seat, but upward from there your torso is orbiting around.

  Stay with the circle and allow your senses of balance and motion to engage with the movement you are in. This may take anywhere from a few seconds to a minute. When it feels natural, close your eyes and continue.

  NOTE

  As you are moving, you will find your kinesthetic senses tracking the movement. Have a sense of curiosity about what you will experience, and continue.

  Over a period of time, you will probably find yourself wanting to slow the movement. What you can do is let the movement coast to a stop.

  Continue to track the movement and notice what happens. If your nervous system is organized enough in the moment to process the experience, the sense of motion may actually become more intense as the physical motion lessens.

  As the movement coasts toward stillness, it may transform into a curiously blended sense of stillness and motion—“still motion.” You will know it when you discover it, because the sensation is liquid and exquisite.

  Variation

  NOTE

  EXPLORE YOUR MAGNETIC HANDS

  TIME: From 30 seconds to 5 minutes.

  WHERE: Anywhere.

  Sometime when you are at ease, either standing or sitting, let your hands “become aware of each other.” In other words, be alert in your hands. Notice what happens over the span of a few breaths as you pay attention to your hands.

  Now let the hands drift up so they are facing each other. The palms can be about a foot and a half apart and in front of the belly. Explore until you find a position that feels better than others.

  Let your attention drop a bit and rest in your breath, then pay attention to the sensations in your hands or between your hands with a mild curiosity.

  After you get used to being in this posture for a minute, notice what qualities of sensation you feel. What does the empty space between your hands feel like? What subtle tinglings do the palms detect?

  Move your hands in an exploratory fashion, compressing the air, fluffing it. Move very slowly and notice what you sense.

  Warmth?

  Pressure?

  A cottony sensation, as if there is something there?

  Magnetism?

  Tingling?

  Give the exploration a couple of minutes anytime you are curious. Do not concentrate or try at all; simply be curious. If you do feel a sense of magnetism between your hands, play with it a little, then return to it tomorrow or another time.

  If you don't feel anything, experiment sometime at the end of a meditation or when you feel energized.

  Variation

  Variation

  BEFORE-SLEEP MEDITATIONS

  TIME: 5 minutes.

  WHERE: Sitting or lying in bed.

  Using your senses of motion and touch, enjoy the flow of breathing for a few minutes as you are getting ready for sleep. You can sit up in bed, then slide down under the covers; or you can do the whole thing lying down. Go with whatever your preference is.

  Invite the feeling of drifting, since you are intending to drift off into sleep. If your nerves are jangled, you can meditate on the quality of “soothing” or “peace.”

  Sometimes the simplest things are the most neglected. Before-bed meditations cost no money and probably won't take any time out of your evening except away from the television or a book. The basic idea is to treat yourself as you would at a health spa. You'd turn in early, maybe as early as 9:00 P.M., and have no television. Maybe just a peaceful book to read and a candle.

  The next morning, notice how you feel. Are you more rested? More relaxed and ready for the day? Give this three days as an experiment sometime soon. Then, if you like it, continue.

  An hour or so before bed, you might want to bathe or shower and, even if you are a man, massage your whole body with a light moisturizer or lotion. This will help the body shift gears into rest mode.

  If you usually drink alcohol at night, drink herbal tea or water instead. If you never drink at night, try half a glass of wine sometime.

  Do a little stretching—very light, just enough to evoke a languorous feeling. Then go to bed early and welcome the process of letting your mind drift. You might review the day, or you might find yourself planning a vacation or remodeling the kitchen. It doesn't matter. What does matter is that you set your mind free.

  When people go camping, one of the healing elements is absence of electric light and an early bedtime. Under those conditions it's not unusual to wake up during the night and gaze at the stars for a while before drifting off again. During the night, campers often spend a lot of time sleepily meditating under the canopy of stars. This is a very renewing and balancing process. When you are at home, you can turn off the bright lights, have just a dim light, and begin to shift into rest mode more gradually than you usually do. You might find you love the gradualness.

  You can also spruce up your sleeping space. Look around it in the evening and notice what you want to do to make it a more inviting place. Do what you can, and over time keep paying attention to the space in and around your bed.

  Bed can be a sanctuary. Lots of spiritual people neglect the bed as sanctuary, as if it is more sacred somehow to sit on a wooden floor in the next room. Well, more power to them. But we all spend about a third of our lives in bed, or else suffer from lack of rest. So it is a very worthwhile sanctuary to cultivate.

  Over time, you will pay off your sleep debt, both through getting more sleep and through having a deeper sleep. Then you will be more able to enjoy the transitions—from waking to sleeping and from sleeping to waking. Transitions are exquisite, magical times. You can learn a lot about meditation by witnessing transitions between states of consciousness.

  Moreover, as you pay off your sleep debt, you will begin awakening naturally in the morning, without an alarm and feeling fresher. You may even find that you have time to meditate as soon as you start to flicker into wakefulness, and this is a delightful thing to do, to just lie there savoring existence before even opening your eyes.

  Take as long as you like to develop your preferences and habits in approaching sleep. All you need to remember is to treat yourself well and have a gradual phasing in to sleep. I have been doing various before-sleep meditations for more than twenty years, and I am still discovering new things.

  Last year, I start
ed visualizing the Earth from space while falling asleep. I wanted to have a sense of falling into the universe as I fell asleep. It took a few weeks for the visualization to be completely automatic and effortless, and then I found I had my favorite viewpoint—right over the Pacific, looking into that deep blue.

  There are many fantastic photographs of the Earth from space and space from the Hubble telescope. I recommend finding some you are particularly taken with and looking at them before you fall asleep.

  Give before-sleep meditations two weeks, and notice how they affect your sleep and your waking hours. Sleep is a time to let your soul fly free. Consider exposing your attention to the vastness and beauty of the universe as you get ready for sleep.

  Make friends with the dark. Often there is some sort of light in the bedroom—a VCR with its glowing clock, light streaming through a window. Consider making the bedroom completely dark by devising some sort of blackout covers for the windows. Then welcome the experience of darkness; it is very restful and will tend to make you appreciate the light that much more when it comes time to awaken.

  * * *

  Make Yourself Comfortable

  * * *

  REVIEW OF THE DAY

  TIME: 10 minutes.

  WHEN: Toward the end of the day.

  Few of us are able to move through a day and finish every conversation, give full attention and expression to every emotion, check off every item on our list, and adequately appreciate all the people around us. There is always something unfinished, more to feel, more to realize.

  By consciously and intentionally giving yourself a time to review the day before going to sleep, you help to unburden your sleep time from having to deal with this unfinished business.

  How to do it: Spend a minute or two settling in, then review your day either from the beginning to the end or by working backward from where you are now to the time you awoke this morning. Touch upon all areas of concern, anything that worried you or felt incomplete. Also remember the moments of pleasure, and give yourself time to feel gratitude for what you have.

  If you have had a challenging day, you may want to extend your settling-in time, to relax more before beginning the review.

  This simple, almost invisible practice of reviewing the day can dramatically improve the quality of your life. Many people do it naturally, and don't even think of it as meditation, yet it blesses their lives. Many other people I meet used to do something like this until a new job, a new relationship, a new baby, or some other life event made their quiet time disappear. Years later, they notice a feeling of missing something and finally realize that they are no longer giving themselves time to sit with themselves and be grateful, not even ten minutes a day.

  It is easy to get swept up in being so busy that we forget to take time for quiet moments to reflect on what the day has brought.

  HEART-CENTERED MEDITATIONS

  TIME: 1 minute to 10 minutes.

  WHEN: Anytime you have heartache or joy that needs attending to.

  Sometime when you are relatively quiet inside, let attention rest in the area around the physical heart and lungs. The lungs are spacious and the heart is muscular. Corresponding to those physical organs is an area of pure feeling. This feeling center is what people informally refer to when they say that their heart aches or their heart is glad.

  To get into that feeling center, recall some great experience that made your heart glad, that made you glad to be alive. Just thinking of it will cause a sensation to arise in your heart—it could be a sense of light or swelling, an upward-moving current of electricity, or a vibration. Use that sensation as a homing signal and let attention be called into that place called “the heart.” Be alert, because the sensations may last for only a flash, a few seconds.

  As attention rests there, become aware also of the gentle pulsing of breath.

  If you are experiencing sorrow or grief, you may already have sensations in the heart. If so, simply be with them. The sensations are calling you.

  You may also have a sense of joy and gratitude about events in your life, and may have wonderful sensations in your heart center. We can neglect to pay attention to our joy, just as we can neglect adequately to be with our pain.

  If you do not have sensations or feelings of ache or joy in the heart, don't worry. Someday you will. Come back then to this exercise and check it out.

  If at some point while meditating, you find strong emotions going through you, explore this simple practice of resting attention in the heart.

  As you breathe in and out, be alert to the qualities of emotion you are feeling. If you are feeling an emotion, be aware that it may change every couple of minutes into something else. Sometimes the emotions change every few seconds. They may include:

  Comfort

  Relief

  Sorrow

  Peacefulness

  Happiness

  Anger

  Hurt

  Excitement

  Go back from the sternum, inward. Feel all the way back to the spine. That is the heart area.

  Simply being with these sensations will help tremendously, for the heart knows how to heal itself and become available to love again. You have only to willingly tolerate the aching.

  When you “speak from the heart” you are speaking from inside those sensations. Courage is “to have heart.” To stay in the heart when you are afraid or the sensations are too much to bear, but you bear them anyway—that is the definition of courage. As you breathe in, the world is touching you, renewing you, encouraging (en-courage-ing) you to live again, adventure forth, and experience.

  Variations

  Getting into Breath

  Breath has sound and texture and motion. As your body moves with the inflowing and outflowing breath, your body balances automatically. Breath even has an impact on the visual field, producing subtle differences that you can notice.

  Breathing with awareness is one of the essential meditation techniques cherished the world over. Simply pay attention to the flow of air with appreciation for the gift of each breath. Doing this even a few minutes a day will bless your life. Human beings develop senses for whatever they pay attention to. If you pay a lot of attention to wine, you will learn to identify what type it is just by a sniff of the bouquet. If you watch a lot of baseball, you will learn to see what type of pitch is coming earlier and earlier in the wind-up or release. Mothers can tell the state of their babies at a glance. If you pay attention to breath, your body will over time evolve the senses to really, really enjoy it as one of the Fine Things of Life.

  Breath has to be mostly automatic and out-of-awareness by default, because our life depends on it every minute. We breathe many times a minute, whether we are awake or asleep. In a day we breathe more than twenty thousand times. Each of these breaths connects us to the entire planet. Appreciating this connection is joyous but optional—it is what we do after survival is assured.

  The movement of attention to cherish breath is instinctive, for all living things have a natural attraction toward that which gives them life. Meditation is an instinctive urge, a calling as deep as any of the ancient yearnings that move human beings. All the hundreds of techniques are just ways of cooperating with that urge. For meditation to feel innate, it helps to learn it at your own speed in your own way. Start now. Take a breath, have fun.

  TAKE A BREATHER

  If you feel like it, take a minute right now to explore what you enjoy about breath. Instead of “concentrating” on the breath, take a wondering and exploring attitude toward your relationship with breath. Breath will teach you how to pay attention to it.

  For example, think of some of the times in your life when you have found yourself appreciating the action of breathing.

  Walking outside on a snowy morning and seeing the air you exhale turn into a mist.

  When in nature, coming to a vista and taking a deep breath to breathe in the beauty.

  Saying “Whew” at a moment of relief.

  Yawning
and stretching with a deep inhalation.

  Saying “Ah…” as you exhale and settle down into yourself.

  Playing sports.

  Panting during sex.

  Inhaling a delicious smell and saying “Mmmmmm…”

  Finishing a task, leaning back, and sighing with relief.

  Take a few moments to recall three or four times you have said “Ah” or “Whew” or “Mmmmmm.” Then for a minute or two, simply notice the pleasure of breathing. You can have your eyes open or closed or go back and forth.

  If you are having a good time, you can continue for another minute or two. Simply notice what happens in your body as you pay attention to the flow of air in and out.

  As you pay attention to breathing, a whole world of sensory experience will gradually unfold.

  The beginning impulse to inhale.

  The air flowing in through the nose.

  The air flowing up the nose into the sinuses.

  The silky sensation of air flowing down the throat.

  The air filling the lungs, deep in the body.

  The brief pause at the end of the inhalation as the breath turns to flow out.

  The relief of breath flowing out.

  The pause at the end of the exhalation as breath turns to flow in.

  Other qualities of experience that emerge are:

  The rhythm of the breath.

  The smell of the air. Maybe there is a flower nearby, or someone is cooking.

  The motion and undulation of the body as the ribs expand into the inbreath and contract with the outbreath.