Meditation Made Easy Read online

  The quiet sound of the air flowing and whispering through the same passages we use to sing and talk.

  If your eyes are open, you may also notice the way the eyes tend to rest on one spot when you are focused on breathing. You can then let the peripheral vision open up to take in a larger view.

  The more senses you allow to come into play during meditation, the more interesting and involving your experience will become.

  A wine taster can take a sniff of wine, then a sip, and say what kind of wine it is and perhaps where it was grown and when. You can learn to have that appreciative attitude and richness of experience with your own breath.

  With each breath, you import substance from the ocean of air that embraces the Earth, and you give back to the world the substance you have already used.

  Tip

  WELCOME A BREATH

  In this meditation you take the attitude of actively welcoming breath. You do not need to control it in any way.

  Standing or sitting, turn to face any direction you like and welcome the inflowing breath. Lean forward slightly, leaning into the breath. Greet the air as you would a beloved guest coming into your home. Allow your thoughts to come and go, but keep bringing your attention back to the encounter with breath.

  You can have any attitude you want, or you may find yourself moving from attitude to attitude as you pay attention:

  Restlessness

  Curiosity

  Wonder

  Gratitude

  Relief

  Sensual pleasure

  If you like, say to yourself, “This breath is the breath of my being.”

  The breath is a gift to you from the entire history of the world: all the oceans, all the forests, the sun. Each time you breathe in, the whole world and all of history is coming into your body to keep you alive for a few more moments. Each time you breathe, the mystery of the sun shining on the oceans and forests of the world comes into your lungs. The lungs are temples for receiving the spirit of the universe. A secret of meditation is that the universe is sensuously intimate in its vastness. This is a secret that every breath is eager to share with you.

  Be as natural with yourself as you are when you spontaneously sigh or yawn. Notice your relationship with breathing, and take pleasure in it.

  Place your attention on each of the following for a few seconds:

  Rest the attention on the flow of breath in your body.

  As you breathe in, notice the sensations of expansion.

  Attend to breath as a flow from the whole world into your body.

  Be aware that the ocean of air giving you life is something that it took a whole planet and the sun eons to produce. Be aware of all the oceans of the world as you breathe.

  Be aware of the sun shining continuously on the Earth as you follow the flow of breathing in your body.

  Now place your attention in the middle of the chest—not on the surface, but deep inside, in the space you breathe into. Welcome the breath from there. Celebrate the way the incoming air flows into those deep spaces inside you, refreshing you.

  YAWN TO WAKE UP

  TIME: Anywhere from 15 seconds to 5 minutes.

  WHEN: Anytime you find yourself wanting to yawn, get into it as much as you can. Prolong the stretches and deep inhalations.

  When we neglect yawning, we miss out on a great human activity. It is spontaneous—the body just does it. It takes less than a minute, and it's refreshing.

  If it is natural for you to do so right now, let yourself yawn or stretch or sigh. If not now, then the next time you have a chance, give over to a yawn completely and without hurry. Adults almost never really indulge yawning, and yet it is a personal and spontaneous form of yoga. It is where yoga came from.

  When you have some time—perhaps in the morning or in the evening after work when you want to meditate—really get into yawning. Spend five minutes stretching every way you want.

  Yawn for a while and learn about how your body likes to breathe. You will learn a lot.

  A yawn is a stretch in the jaw. It may lead to a full-body stretch. Get down on the floor and let yourself stretch. See if you can invent stretches for two minutes. Your body will teach you a great deal about yoga in those two minutes.

  You can do Yawn to Wake Up in combination with the tense-and-relax exercise. Yawning is the source of Tense to Relax—and of yoga in general.

  BREATHE FAST

  TIME: 10 seconds to 5 minutes.

  WHEN: At beginning or end of meditation.

  Fast breath during meditation has some of the exciting qualities of fast cars and fast horses. It can wake you up and clear your head.

  Here is a simple breath exercise. Have a watch at hand or a clock within sight.

  For ten seconds, breathe rapidly in and out through your nose, with the mouth closed.

  Notice how you feel. Scan your head and your senses.

  Then continue breathing rapidly for another twenty seconds.

  Notice how you feel.

  If you enjoy the sensation, do another minute of fast breathing.

  Obviously, do not do this if you are driving. But it is very safe to breathe rapidly. People breathe like this when they are exercising, dancing, making love, climbing stairs, running. It is very energizing. Don't worry about hyperventilating. The body is extremely good at balancing oxygen levels in the blood. If you have any concerns, though, do not do it.

  If you are on medication for high blood pressure or have a chronic illness, don't do this meditation. But if you can exercise, then you can breathe fast.

  Over a period of weeks, explore fast breathing before and after your meditation sessions, or as a thing in itself. Give your body a chance to become at home with it.

  EXHALE SLOWLY

  TIME: 1 minute.

  WHERE: Anywhere.

  Take a deep breath, feeling the expansion of your chest outward in all directions. Then exhale normally.

  Take another deep breath, but this time exhale very slowly, letting just the smallest stream of breath flow out. Feel the place in your throat that you can constrict if you want to whisper. Use that place to gently restrict the flow of breath. Get used to that constriction, and notice that your breath makes a slight sound, a soft hhhhh or ahhh.

  You can exhale either through the mouth or through the nose. Do whichever you prefer.

  As you exhale, feel the slow deflation of your chest. That's all. Continue for as long as you like.

  Get used to this very simple breath and explore it under many conditions. When you become comfortable with it, you may find that you can use it to change gears in the space of a few breaths. You can use it almost anywhere, under almost any conditions.

  It is very relaxing and comforting, and it helps to dissolve tension. It creates a feeling of melting and spreading.

  INHALE AND HOLD A BREATH

  TIME: 5 minutes.

  WHERE: It's good to do outside.

  Inhale slightly more than usual and hold the breath for a few seconds. Then exhale normally. Do this again and again, and pay attention to the top of your head.

  Then settle into a normal breathing pattern, neither deep nor shallow. At the end of each inhalation, hold for a brief moment. Continue to be alert to sensations in the top of the head.

  Over time, as you get used to this pause, you will develop the senses to notice when you are coming to the end of an inhalation. Then you can glide to the end. It is like taking your foot off the accelerator and coasting before braking and entering a turn. It's a natural movement you can fall into.

  Variation

  BREATHE POWER

  TIME: 10 seconds.

  WHEN: Anytime.

  As you move through your day, you can call on any quality you want by thinking its name as you take in a conscious breath. The trick is to allow yourself to feel your desire or your need for the quality. Then attention will naturally be on that quality as you breathe. Necessity is the mother of invention.

  The first few times yo
u do this, you may want to be relaxed and have a lot of time.

  Experiment now. Be awake in your body for some quality of feeling you crave or desire. Then simply be aware of that quality as you breathe in.

  Power

  Relief

  Love

  Peace

  Centeredness

  Alertness

  Calm

  Inspiration

  Energy

  Notice that the qualities can be opposites—energy and calmness, for example. Breath is opposites. You breathe in fresh air and energy and you breathe out old air and tension.

  If you want to get rid of feelings or thoughts (purification), pay attention to the breath flowing out.

  If you want energy and inspiration, pay attention to the breath flowing in.

  More effective than thinking the name of the quality is feeling it. Some people can refer to a feeling immediately without words. Other people find it easier with words, and still others use images or colors.

  Check out this exercise and see if it works for you. If it doesn't work right away, experiment with it next week, and the week after.

  One way in for this exercise is to get into it sometime when you are in a magical moment—watching a sunset or sunrise, communing with nature, enjoying a good walk. Once you are at home with the exercise, you can call on it as needed.

  This exercise is as good when done for a few seconds here and there during the day as it is when part of a longer meditation.

  BREATHE THE BREATH OF LIFE

  Love, communion, nourishment, vastness, terror, and ecstasy are there in every breath. To experience this right now, just breathe out and don't breathe in for a few seconds…. Go ahead, breathe out and then pause before breathing in and notice what happens.

  Stay with the pause as long as you want.

  When you finally breathe in, pay attention to the sensation or world of sensations. What is it? Let the sense of relief unfold into its various subqualities. Play around with pausing briefly at the end of both inhalation and exhalation. Which is your favorite, the pause at the end of exhalation or the pause at the end of inhalation? Or is it the middle part of the breath, the smoothly flowing caress of air? Take another moment to explore your sensuous experience of breath, no matter how tiny the sensations are.

  You have just experienced how totally dependent you are on Earth's ecosystem for each molecule of air that you breathe. You will die within minutes if you just stop breathing, and right there is terror enough, implicit if not explicit. Every breath that you or anyone else has ever breathed is an unconscious prayer to the totality of the world, a statement of your fundamental connectedness with every cell of algae in every ocean, every plant on all the continents, every wave-like particle of sunlight that touches the Earth. Air circulates so freely that each breath contains molecules that have passed through the lungs and heart of every creature that has ever lived—Buddha, Jesus, and the tyrannosaur whose bones stand in the museum.

  Meditation is this simple and immediate. In fact, the most important and basic of all meditation techniques is to notice what it is to breathe. There are many hundreds of meditative breath techniques, but the essence is to inquire, What is it to breathe? Then let your senses awaken and take you on an inner journey of discovery. Although many expert meditators have inquired in this way over the past four thousand or so years, many more just regular folks have gone the same route. I think it began many tens of thousands of years ago, whenever human beings had a few quiet moments in the cave or savanna and enough language to talk about it.

  Meditation is not an intellectual pursuit but rather the pursuit of rich experience and the full development of the experiencer. It is sensuous and vivid and relational. So the answer to the question of what is breath is not an answer that can come in words. The answer is what happens to you when you learn to cherish breath day in and day out over a period of months and years.

  The answer lies in the way the world opens up in wonderful ways. All the senses are enhanced, and a spontaneous reverence emerges for the world and the space around it. I constantly meet people who secretly practice this kind of attentiveness. They do not even think of it as meditation; it is just a mystery they are exploring, a secret love affair they are having with the life force. They are invariably surprised to learn that they already know how to do a basic form of meditation. True, there is always more to learn, but the essential approach that we call meditation is something most human beings are already adept at in some small way, in their best moments. The task is to take those best moments and extend them.

  There is little about meditation that one could not learn by being attentive to what it is to be in love—not just romantic love but everyday love, the kind of love that spans years and decades. A person who loves deeply and has learned to be true to the demands of relationship may know as much about meditation as someone who has spent years in a cave. Meditation is a surrender to love's forces, letting ourselves be molded by that which is the greatest in us. The recluse in the cave is surrendering to her wild and passionate love for the vastness of space and silence. That is not a more spiritual passion than some other kind of love; it is just a different context for surrendering.

  You may as well choose from among the meditations presented here the ones you can fall in love with. This is different for everyone, and even for the same person it changes over time, like musical taste. Every now and then, meditators have to go on hunting expeditions for their next passion in meditation. There is no point in doing breath meditations unless you are willing to be entertained by breath and even risk falling in love with the process.

  Getting into Sound

  Sound, like breath, is infinitely interesting. Think of how much music of all types, live and recorded, is being played and broadcast around the world at this moment. On every continent music is being played because human beings like to listen to melodic sounds. People are making sounds with every kind of instrument: stringed instruments, breath instruments such as the flute, percussion instruments, electronic instruments that can imitate anything, and the human voice.

  To use sound in meditation, start from where you are with sound, then learn to listen to progressively quieter sounds until you are listening to silence. At that moment you may experience a moment of mental silence as well. Although brief, those moments are immensely refreshing. The world does not have to become still for you to experience silence. There is a stillness underneath sound that is there for anyone to partake in.

  If you are in nature right now, there may be sounds you can use as a focus: a waterfall, a brook, the wind in the trees. If you are in your home or at work, there are probably numerous sounds in the background. The hum of refrigerators, computers, fans, and heaters or air conditioners may permeate the environment. What we think of as silence may in fact be quite noisy. People rarely complain about how noisy the ocean is, but waves produce a lot of sound. Leaves on trees make a tremendous sound as they rustle. And if you are in a sensory deprivation chamber, the sound of your heartbeat and your breathing can seem very loud. So noise is not an obstacle to meditation—it is something you make use of. There is never complete silence as long as you are alive to hear, because the rush of blood flowing through your body hums in your ears.

  Sound is a wonderful medium of expression and exploration in meditation. You may want to explore some of the sounds that have been used for thousands of years as tools of thought.

  Meditation sounds, or mantras, often resemble the sounds people make when they sigh or exclaim in surprise, wonder, awe, and pleasure: Ahh! Ooooh! Eeeeeee! Mmmmmm…. These sounds are often soothing and awakening at the same time.

  Make a list of all the yawning, sighing-with-relief, exclamation, and orgasm sounds you can think of. Hum them a bit and notice how they feel in your body. Do this now.

  Hoo. Whew. Aiee. Oy. Oooooh.

  What sounds do you associate with relief?

  What sounds do you associate with surprise?

&nbs
p; What sounds do you associate with wonder?

  What sounds do you associate with delight?

  What sounds do you associate with orgasm?

  What sounds do you associate with joy?

  What sounds do you associate with peacefulness?

  Make your own list of favorites right now, before going further with sound. Survey the sounds you sometimes make naturally. What are your favorite sounds? Become intimate with the sounds you love. This will be your foundation for the explorations with sound on the following pages.

  You could also set yourself the task of noticing the sounds other people make. As you go to work, watch TV, see movies, talk to friends, play with kids, what sounds do you hear? Comic books often have wonderfully descriptive action sounds—kerPOW!

  EXPLORE THE VOWELS OF YOUR MOTHER TONGUE

  TIME: 20 minutes.

  WHERE: You need uninterrupted conditions for this.

  On Sesame Street (an educational TV show for children), one of the puppets sometimes walks out waving a sign that says, “This portion of the show is brought to you by the Letter E.” Mantras are self-generated sounds that can be used in meditation, and all mantras are brought to you by the Letters of the Alphabet.

  One approach to exploring the use of sound in meditation is to relearn the alphabet. This time around you are concerned not with how to write and say the letters, but with recognizing how the sounds resonate in your body. You may have done this once upon a time, when you were learning to speak. Recently I visited a friend who has a two-year-old daughter, Sabrina. The little girl was trotting around the room singing vowel sounds: “Ah—Eeeee—Ah—Eeeee—Ohhhhh—Eeeee.” She was clearly delighted by the sounds themselves, and I was too. It was beautiful. She kept improvising and playing with the sound quality of words she was learning: “mmmmMmmmmmOmmmmeeeee” (Mommy).