by Rolf Sovik
if you are making a spiritual effort now.
—Sri Yukteswar
“The mind is indeed the cause of bondage and liberation,” yoga scriptures say. And for this reason, they tell us that meditation is the most important of the many tools yoga has to offer. But the length of time to devote to meditation is left to each individual, and for most of us, meditation is an acquired taste that develops slowly. It is only as we progress in our practice that the act of quieting the mind becomes more and more satisfying.
If you already meditate, the prospect of lengthening your sitting time may seem attractive. Longer sitting times calm the nervous system and establish a more still and tranquil mind. You may have already had meditations that lasted considerably longer than usual. And perhaps you would like to make those longer times the rule rather than the exception.
The problem is in the execution. As meditations lengthen, old knee pains may return, or you may hear from the part of your mind that holds the rest of you hostage when it is threatened with anything but the status quo. (“What good will this do, anyway?” it thinks.) In such cases, longer meditations don’t prove to be better ones at all.
Ancient texts describe sages who meditated for enormously long periods of time with no apparent discomfort or loss of attention. Take the boy-saint Prahlada, for example. After the death of his demon father, he reflected: “O self, you are the fragrance in the flower known as the body. . . . Hail, hail to you, O self who has manifested as the limitless universe. Hail to the self which is supreme peace.” After thus contemplating, Prahlada entered into the state in which there is no mental modification at all—only supreme bliss, undisturbed by the movement of thought. He sat where he was like a statue. A thousand years went by. . . .
Now certainly a thousand years of sitting is not our goal. It is difficult for us to even know what sitting for a thousand years might mean. At the moment, anything past ten or fifteen minutes may seem challenging. Is there hope for the more modest aim of reaching a little deeper into stillness?
The answer is yes. Stretching your meditation time to half an hour or even longer is something you can aspire to. A meditation lasting that long will quiet your mind and bring a deeper level of self-awareness. But how can this goal be achieved? The answer is that it will require working with your self—a project very much worth the effort.
Find Motivation
First, you will need some solid reasons for sitting longer—motivation to support your practice. Keep these three themes in mind:• Cleansing
• Strengthening
• The Delight of Being
Cleansing. Remember how pleasant it feels to step from your shower and slip into clean clothes? A similar sense of feeling clean—but purely within the mind itself—comes from sitting longer. The mind is refreshed as it sheds its attachments. The mind’s worries are not gems to be treasured and displayed at every opportunity. Their odor, the burden they place on our emotional and cognitive energies, can be rinsed off daily, and a new mind put on. With longer sitting times, the cleansing process reaches deeper into the places of the mind that normally lie unexposed.
Recently I was talking with a friend who had had a run of mechanical problems with a car. You would not have criticized him for feeling angry. His relatively new vehicle had needed expensive repairs and caused considerable inconvenience. But in our conversation, he expressed himself with the kind of balance that I knew comes from meditating. As a result, he was able to tell his story without becoming angry or overwhelmed by it. And, even though he appreciated it, he did not need my empathy to make peace with his situation.
One of the great sourcebooks on yoga, the Yoga Sutra of Patanjali, describes this more systematically. It says that when the mind is unfocused, we identify with the cares and concerns passing through it. Then, the mind is stained by its own attachments. But following meditation, those attachments feel less burdensome, and inner life is less distressed by endless replays of worries.
Strengthening. In much the same way that a muscle is strengthened by repetitions of a certain movement against resistance, the mind is strengthened by focusing for longer periods. Resistance to meditating comes from the mind’s habit of restlessness. And it is precisely this restlessness that is calmed with longer sitting times.
When distracting thoughts arise, it is best to let them come and go without feeding them, and to maintain a focus or return to it if the mind wanders. But just like actually falling asleep, in meditation we often do fall asleep to our focus. Longer sitting times give us the opportunity to observe this process and improve on it.
The strength of our detachment is proportional to the strength of our ability to maintain a relaxed, inner focus. By strengthening this focus, we acquire greater ability to discriminate between distracting thoughts (or their subtle energies) and thoughts that support the meditative focus. This is not a project for a five-minute meditation. It takes time. Otherwise, it is the energies of our distractions that are likely to be strengthened rather than the mind itself.
The Delight of Being. Thankfully, despite these challenges, we have all had moments when meditation seems to come easily, when concentration settles quickly into a groove and a joyful sense of surrender takes over. In the stillness that follows, the delight of being arises.
That delight is the third motivation for sitting longer. Longer meditations allow us time to return to a quiet sense of being. This is not a static experience; it is an experience that arises out of the process taking place within the mind itself. Concentration, non-attachment, and mindfulness are the dynamic forces underlying it. Presence of mind is its fruit. You can have more of it simply by giving a little more time to it.
Your Knees. Yes, along the way you’ll have to figure out what to do about those knees—and probably your lower back as well. Patience helps. Many years ago, following surgery, I was not able to sit with knees folded at all. During the six months of healing time required to restore my normal cross-legged pose, I sat on a chair. Swami Rama had often explained that it was the position of the head, neck, and trunk that was important, not the position of the four limbs. I took his advice to heart.
But if your knees are agreeable, you can work with them in a variety of ways. Postures that help create more flexibility include poses that stretch the quadriceps and adductors or those that open the hips. Reclining leg cradles are especially useful, as is the butterfly pose practiced with your back against a wall. Resist the urge to select a meditation posture that “looks good” but is actually too challenging. You must sit in a comfortable pose rather than one that becomes painful long before you are ready to finish your meditation. Consider more cushioning if sitting cross-legged is tiresome. And don’t be shy about shifting your legs in the middle of a longer meditation to remove aches or pains.
To build tolerance in your posture, sit in it at other times—when you are watching television or eating. Do some of your paperwork on a desk or table that allows you to sit on the floor. Be sure to support the back of your pelvis with a cushion. Sitting flat on the floor in most cross-legged poses is too demanding on the lower back, particularly when the knees are elevated.
And speaking of the lower back, remember to practice poses like the seated staff pose, the downward-facing boat pose, and the chair pose (utkatasana) to build lower back strength. The energy of the spinal column will enlist the muscles it needs to sit erect, once you have strengthened them. Until you do, keep practicing.
Use a Mala
If you use a personal mantra for meditation, then a mala will be valuable. Using a mala shifts your attention away from physical and mental distractions. More important, it is a measure of your mental capacity. Experienced meditators know how many malas can be comfortably completed in one sitting and work with that amount. Most often they keep the number of malas unchanged while they refine their concentration skills, but occasionally they add to the number of completed malas as well. Thus the mala takes your mind off the clock and places it back o
n your practice.
Time and Place
Creating a pleasant environment for meditation will attract you to it. It will also reflect the enjoyment you derive from it. You can place your cushions in such a way that they are inviting and define a space reserved only for meditation practice. Some meditators even set a small room aside for meditation. Let your inner taste guide you in arranging your space.
It is virtually impossible to lengthen your sitting time without sitting regularly. Some people describe meditating for long periods of time (six or even ten hours in a day) as a kind of meditation retreat, but then do not sit at all on other days. And the long periods of time they describe are often not periods of focused practice but expeditions into odd places of the psyche that emerge when the mind is challenged by the absence of normal psychological supports. This is not helpful.
Simply sit each day. Choose a time before breakfast if you can. If not, select a time that allows you to be free for half an hour or more. Although some worry that meditation before bedtime will keep them awake, this does not really seem to be the case. You can even meditate both in the morning and evening.
Since what you do in your day determines what you will become, if you want to be a meditator, then daily meditation will make you one. If you keep a regular schedule, your meditation will naturally evolve and lengthen.
Learn More
Longer sitting times make sense when you are actively engaged in learning about the meditation process. Begin by reading the words of scriptures and teachers who you respect and who have written about their experience. Continue by seeking out sages and teachers in order to listen to their words and contemplate on them. And finally, meditate. Meditation is the lab work that translates theory into firsthand knowledge. It is in doing the inner work of meditation that abstract concepts of truth become realities.
Yogic texts remind us that “ignorance is not removed by half-knowledge, just as there is no relief from cold when one sits near a painting of a fire.” Seeking truth is not a matter of rational thinking. It is an inner experience. All the more reason, then, to make friends with your meditation seat and bring the fires of self-awareness to life by sitting near them a little longer.
The Study of the Self: Svadhyaya
The Study of the Self: Svadhyaya
Of all the flowing energies in the universe, consciousness
is the most dominant, the one from which all the others proceed
and into which they all merge.
—Swami Rama
In this book, we have examined each of the stages of meditation in some detail. That has meant learning to sit, to breathe, and to rest awareness in a quiet focus. We have also been able to touch upon portions of the theoretical framework that accompany meditative practice, although that has been of lesser importance overall. Before closing, however, it will help if we open the door to yoga philosophy a bit wider.
We can do that by briefly exploring one of the niyamas, the “observances” of yoga. The particular one of interest to us is svadhyaya , self-study—the fourth among them. With a little attention, it will point us toward the final goal of meditation and bring the journey contained in these chapters to an end.
Svadhyaya
Like many other Sanskrit words, the term svadhyaya has a richer history than can easily be captured in English translation. The hyphenated phrase “self-study” is, on the surface of things, quite precise. The first part of the word—sva—means “self.” The second part—dhyaya—is derived from the verb root dhyai, which means “to contemplate, to think on, to recollect, or to call to mind.” Thus, it works to translate dhyaya as “study”—to study one’s own self.
But we Westerners carry some baggage along with the concept of self-study. In the West, the study of one’s self is associated with the search for the origins of an individual’s personality. Such an analysis of our thoughts, feelings, associations, and fantasies, however, is not what svadhyaya is about. To get at its true meaning, we need to approach our subject from a different angle.
The Nature of the Self
The import of svadhyaya reveals itself in the traditional teaching image of the ocean and its waves. Each wave, traveling across the surface of the sea, can be likened to an individual being. Each is distinguished by its location in space, as well as by other qualities, such as its shape and color.
But the substance of every wave is the sea itself. Waves and the substance from which they arise are one and the same. And since individual waves are part of the sea, as they appear and disappear they neither increase nor decrease the immensity of water in which they have their being. A wave is never other than the ocean—though it has its individual identity so long as it is manifested on the ocean’s surface.
The premise of svadhyaya is similar. Like the waves of the sea, it is said that individual awareness is never separate from the infinite consciousness in which it has its being. Individual minds have distinctive qualities, preferences, and colorings, but they are not entirely autonomous. Each mind is a wave in a vast expanse of consciousness.
The aim of svadhyaya is to bring the experience of that immense Consciousness, the Self, to awareness (these words are capitalized here to set them apart from ordinary consciousness and self-identity). Just as we might theorize that one day a wave could discover its watery nature, so a human being can discover the deep Consciousness that is the substance of individual awareness. It is this process of Self-discovery that is the essence of svadhyaya.
But to say that Consciousness may be brought to awareness, or “known,” does not mean the Self is an object, like a book or a piece of fruit. We can never claim to have stumbled upon the Self as we would a piece of loose change in a parking lot. Just as a wave cannot be the possessor of the ocean, the Self cannot be possessed by individual awareness.
Instead, the Self must be experienced as the deep basis of individual awareness, and this is possible only when the mind can turn toward its own underlying nature, experiencing itself as the subject of consciousness, not the object. The sages tell us that we are the Self and that to “study” it is to gradually know it. Broadly speaking, then, we could say that all yoga leads to svadhyaya, but certain specific methods are more closely associated with it. These specific techniques for gaining experiential knowledge are collectively called svadhyaya.
Western Counterparts
The concept of svadhyaya is not limited to the East. In every age and place, East and West, poets, mystics, and philosophers have explored its ramifications. Shakespeare opens Sonnet 53 with these intriguing lines:What is your substance, whereof are you made,
That millions of strange shadows on you tend?
Since every one hath, every one, one shade,
And you, but one, can every shadow lend.
If we interpret the words shadow and shade to mean individual human souls, then Shakespeare is portraying us all as strange shadows—shades who only darkly reveal the light dwelling within us. To paraphrase Shakespeare, then, we might ask, what is the substance in which every individual soul has its existence? As we have seen, this is svadhyaya’s essential question.
Walt Whitman, in Leaves of Grass, also illumines the concept of svadhyaya, but with a different kind of imagery. Whitman speaks in the first person, yet in the voice of the infinite. Here are some lines from “Song of Myself ”: I celebrate myself, and sing myself,
And what I assume you shall assume,
For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you. . . .
Myself moving forward then and now and forever,
Gathering and showing more always and with velocity,
Infinite and omnigenous. . . .
I am not an earth nor an adjunct of an earth,
I am the mate and companion of people,
all just as immortal and fathomless as myself, (They do not know how immortal, but I know.)
In his characteristic style and with unguarded innocence, Whitman proclaims here that his is a soul whose compass
is universal. He speaks of himself as if he were both wave and sea—simultaneously embracing both. This is the vision of svadhyaya.
Inner Repetition
How can such a vision be part of our daily practice? An alternative translation of the word svadhyaya tells us that the word means “reciting, repeating, or rehearsing to one’s self.” Thus, svadhyaya consists of repeatedly impressing on the mind the idea of infinite Consciousness and returning again and again to an intuitive vision of it. This is accomplished through contemplative recitations (usually taken from sacred texts) and meditation on a mantra (mantra japa). It yields an increasingly transparent vision of the Self.
The manner in which we incorporate these practices into our daily discipline depends upon the nature of our mind. When the mind is relatively clear, when it is not distracted by competing thoughts or disturbed by likes and dislikes, it more readily reveals the Self. At such times it is sattvic—filled with sattva (the principle of clarity and even-mindedness). This state of mind takes naturally to svadhyaya practices, for it allows the experience of Self-awareness to permeate the mind easily.
But when the mind is distracted by desires and mundane involvements, it is dominated by rajas (the principle of activity). Rajasic elements of mind need to be gradually disciplined in order to acquire a taste for contemplation and japa. This means establishing a pattern of practice and, within reason, sticking to it, even when the mind squirms or resists.