Meditation Made Easy

by Lorin Roche

  HOW MANY THOUGHTS DO YOU THINK IN AN HOUR?

  Take a minute and notice how many thoughts you think. Then do the math and figure out how many per hour. Then calculate how many thoughts you think in the waking part of a day. What is it? Fifteen thousand? Twenty thousand? There is a tendency for thoughts to slow down or condense when you pay attention.

  Depending on how busy you are, you may think a thousand or more thoughts an hour. If you like, you can count them, just as you do your pulse. It does not matter, though, whether the total is two hundred or fifteen hundred thoughts. The issue is, are you going to set your mind against the flow of thought or are you going to accept thought as part of meditation? Are you going to take the attitude that thoughts are not supposed to be there, or are you going to accept the flow of your thinking as part of the meditation?

  If you do not accept thoughts wholeheartedly, then some part of you will have to set itself up as the Thought Police. Say you think extremely slowly—only a hundred thoughts an hour. But what if your Thought Police decides that is too many?

  Say that after meditating for a few months, you think 20 percent fewer thoughts. Your mind is thinking more relevant, organized thoughts and has fewer random thoughts. This is likely, but the Thought Police will never be satisfied.

  The brain is designed to think. If you find that you crave mental peace, embrace this craving and see where it leads. It leads to the ability to experience the quiet underneath thoughts. This occurs without repressing thought in any way. Essentially, what the meditator does is follow the flow of thoughts back to its source. Although thoughts do not stop, the experience of peace is very strong. It is as though a river of thought impulses is flowing through you, yet you can sit by the banks of this river and enjoy watching it flow.

  Don't tell your brain to shut up. Instead, welcome all thoughts. This means welcoming even the thoughts you don't want, and the thought Those other thoughts should not be there, and the thought Those thoughts should be controlled.

  You are not the Thought Police: “Attention all units. Racy thoughts entering limbic expressway at high speed.” Meditation is not one set speed, such as slow. It is not slowing down. Your brain may speed up during meditation, or it may change speeds constantly. Your task as you go into meditation is to match your own natural motion and not get stuck in the role of traffic cop. You are not the police, telling everyone to slow down and striking fear in the hearts of speedsters and drivers of red sports cars. You are a musician in a jam session, a member of a band or symphony. Your task is to match rhythms, let them teach you their flow, join in, witness, learn how to pay attention to a vast and fast-moving enterprise.

  For People Who Must Have Rules:

  The Ten Commandments of Meditation

  Welcoming Your Individuality

  The Sense of Wonder

  Wonder is very close to the essential spirit of meditation. If you simply think Hmmm…I wonder what my approach to meditation is, you will begin to get answers. I recommend spending one minute a day in wonder, perhaps before, during, or after reading a few pages of this book. Life and your own being will answer you over time. Give the question a couple of weeks, then let go of it and be alert to what your daily life shows you.

  Whenever you ask a question of life, your whole nervous system seems to become oriented and alert for an answer. You can think of it as friendly angels guiding you, or you can think of it as your own hunting instincts being activated by your quest. The challenge of wonder is to tolerate uncertainty. If you do not relax into uncertainty, wonder may start to seem like insecurity.

  I used to teach meditation techniques in a structured, step-by-step fashion, and I taught the same techniques to everyone, with only the tiniest modifications to accommodate people's individuality. One day in 1976 I changed the way I approached a session. Until then, I had been giving an instruction, waiting for the student to practice it a bit, then asking for a description of the experience. Based on that, I would give another instruction. But that day I started with a couple of questions instead of instructions. I said to a student, “In a while I'll give you some meditation instructions. But for now, let's just see what you normally, naturally experience when you pay attention to breathing.” We sat there in the silence, breathing. A couple of minutes later I asked, “What interests you about breathing?” Then we sat for a few minutes with a sense of wonder and inquiry about breath.

  After a while she took a deep breath and said, “Mmm…the flowingness of breath is such a pleasure. I can feel the air gliding in through my nose all the way to the depths of my belly, and then it turns and flows back out into the world.” She was almost embarrassed at the intimacy she was experiencing with breath, but she continued. One of the things she said was, “I feel that all of me is here, relaxed, poised, and ready for life. It is somehow an intense pleasure just to exist. I am at home in myself and at home in the world.”

  Over the next couple of minutes this young woman, who had no previous meditative experience, became completely absorbed in feeling the flow of breath. Perhaps because I waited patiently with no sense of hurry, she found the words to describe even the subtlest aspects of breath. With very little input from me, she became confident in her ability to meditate and developed an intuitive grasp of the whole process and its rhythms. I never had to give her any direct instructions. I just kept asking questions and giving her a chance to experience for herself. Asking questions evoked her own ability to pay attention and devise her own techniques of meditation.

  Mulling this over a few days later, I started laughing and the thought came to me, If people want to learn to meditate, who am I to get in their way?

  Essentially, what I learned that day is that the body can teach us how to meditate if we give it a chance. Over the weeks and years that followed, I found out that most people can learn meditation in the same self-guided way. Everyone seems to have a way into meditation that is natural to him or her. Everywhere in the world I go, I meet self-taught meditators who have never studied with a teacher and who seem to be doing very well indeed.

  As for the people who study with me on a regular basis, it seems that the essence of my work is to support them in being in wonder about their next step in life and in meditation. I encourage people to make up their program as they go along and check in with me as a reference, if they like. I have found, in thousands of interviews, that people have very good instincts for knowing what they need in meditation and how to get there. These self-guiding instincts come forward only when you are willing to engage your sense of wonder.

  The Yoga of Needs

  In learning to meditate from a book, you will look to your daily life as your arena. It is your individual needs, passions, and desires that have led you to want to meditate. And those same impulses will guide you. Ask yourself questions—what do I really want out of meditation? when in my day would I like to make time for it?—and take your time exploring the answers. What works for you may differ from what works for anyone else.

  In the session described above, all I did was wonder about the unique way this person would go into meditation. That helped her feel safe to explore and to learn from her own experience of breath and silence. Even more important, I did not get in her way. She knew that I had answers if she really needed to ask about something, but because I did not fill the space with my knowledge, she activated her own self-guiding instincts. For me, doing sessions after that became an exercise in watching the human instinct for exploration. Over time I realized that many instincts come into play during meditation and while learning meditation: the homing instinct, self-preservation, healing instincts, and many more. Those instincts in you know your individual needs and how to satisfy them.

  Your meditation technique will emerge from paying attention to your needs. You do this every time you allow your background sensations to come forward as you are getting into meditation. Your needs may present themselves as sensations of any kind anywhere in your body, as hankerings, lusts, image
s, desires, cravings, emotions, passions, and moods. Your practice is to feed each with attention, let it breathe, allow it to move through you.

  A meditation technique is a relationship you establish between attentiveness and your needs. It is the link among all the elements of your life that want to come together so you can fulfill that need. This is yoga—yoga means linking together, and meditation is a type of “linking it all together” in the service of life.

  In the years following 1976, I somehow accumulated a shelf of books on meditation that was more than forty feet long. It was just one long shelf running the length of the room, and it was jammed. There were books on meditation and spiritual practices from many traditions: Sufi, Yoga, Tibetan Buddhism, Chinese Taoism, Native American traditions, Zen, many different types of Western Occultism, Christian meditation, Jewish meditation, Egyptian mysteries, several schools of Sikh, the Hermetic tradition.

  Listening to people tell me what they normally and naturally experience when they pay attention to breathing, I realized that people not only fall into meditation naturally, they spontaneously reinvent the classical meditation techniques in the books—even the most obscure ones. As people settle into their own style of meditation, just following their personal preferences, they find themselves paying attention in styles that were mapped out thousands of years ago—and there are many such styles. For one person, meditation may be like listening to a distant waterfall; for another, it may be like being outside under the stars, aware of the vastness and yet comforted by it. For others, the breath feels like lovemaking, massage, or feeding. Some people experience meditation as an awakening, as if all the unused parts of the self come alive and are then available to enjoy life. Many people, when they listen to the silence, hear singing sounds that shape themselves into mantras—the same mantras I would give those people if I had thought about it.

  A problem for meditators is that when they are doing their native, most natural meditation, it doesn't feel like they are doing anything. Hundreds of times people have said to me, “That can't be my meditation technique! I feel like I am just sitting here being myself!” And yet one minute earlier that person was saying, “I feel perfectly at home in myself—rooted here on this spot and yet somehow aware of the universe. I can feel the sky above me. The universe seems friendly, somehow. I feel transparent, as if I am a galaxy—billions of tiny lights in a velvet emptiness.”

  When I had my library available, I would open one of the hundreds of books and find a technique that sounded just like what the person had said. It might be from a tradition he had never heard of, a Brahma sutra or a Sikh listening meditation. There is a different feeling tone to each tradition, as there is to different genres of music or different styles of cooking. Within that feeling tone are innumerable recipes. Your inner feeling tone for meditation may be something that has lived on Earth at some time and been recorded, or it may not have been recorded. It may not even have been felt before. The range is huge: hundreds of major ways.

  As you become familiar with meditation, engage more and more with your individual taste. Celebrate it. Seek out music, theater, novels, movies, poetry, and people that affirm your own experience of life and meditation.

  Surprise

  Being willing to be surprised is another essential meditation attitude. Willingness to be surprised is more than not having expectations. It is a willingness to be shocked, startled, delighted, appalled, amazed, grieved, and grateful at what you feel and see and hear inside yourself. It is a trust you extend to your inner life that leads you to release control. In meditation you are meeting the universe in a new way. You will get relaxation no matter what, and you will get a kind of serenity. You can take that for granted. But you may as well be willing to be electrified as well. It is always a challenge to accept your full electricity in meditation, because the tone of it changes in small ways from day to day, and in major ways over a period of months.

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  Be Willing to Be Surprised

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  Feeling the Movement of Your Life

  Meditation is about feeling the urges, impulses, and impetus of your life. It is about centering yourself in life's flow, living in the calm inner center, coming back to center again and again, endlessly. It is not just focusing; it is returning to the focus, then losing it and returning, again and again.

  Life is energy and substance in motion, an exquisite dance. Our daily life is part of the vast dance of Life on Earth and the Earth Orbiting the Sun. Meditation is about silently feeling your connection to all this. The silence and peace are not a lack of movement; they are balancing in the midst of movement. Faster vibrations can even feel more peaceful.

  All this is voluntary. It has to be. To stay in meditation is to invite life to flow through you more intensely. It is to invite life to change, remodel, update you.

  Tip

  Honoring the Inner Rebel

  You never know where the spiritual part of you is hidden. Because this is meditation, and not the army, your impulse to rebel against discipline is as important as your desire to change yourself for the better. You may have noticed in the past that when you try to get yourself to do a self-help program, you wind up tyrannizing yourself. Then you rebel against the tyranny. The rebel becomes a saboteur of your program because you left her out. The way through this is to embrace the rebel right from the start.

  Welcoming the rebel may mean listening to the feeling I don't want to meditate today and finding out what it wants. To honor such a feeling means to take it so seriously that you would be willing not to meditate but to watch TV instead, or watch the sunset. But you are also willing to enter the feeling, explore it, let it teach you. Welcome the rebellion, then listen to it. The rebel is there to make sure you do not become enslaved in an external system that takes away your inner authority, restricts your inner freedom, or oppresses you in any way.

  Meditating the rebel's way may seem strange. Once I was working with a schoolteacher, and she was getting restless just a few minutes into her first session. When I asked, “What are your impulses?” she said, “I just want to be outside.” We went outside, and since we were on a mountain in northern New Mexico, we could see vast horizons. She breathed a sigh of relief. It turned out that she prefers to be outside as much as possible, even in winter. She dresses warmly, sits in the snow, and has a great time meditating. The rebel in her is her spiritual part. Another woman's rebel might insist that she sit cozily in bed to meditate on certain days.

  The rebel in you is probably smarter, healthier, and more useful than your impulse to practice meditation. Many people, when they imagine meditating, conceive of it as some sort of inner prison. Your inner rebel will immediately alert you if you start making up Odious Rules such as “You can't think, you can't feel, you can't scratch if you itch.” The rebel will have none of this. The way in which you rebel is your individuality.

  So honor your inner rebel. As you do the meditations, be alert for the voice of skepticism in you, the voice that says, Hey, wait a minute, this is bull! The rebel looks out for your individuality. Invite it in, no matter how much trouble it seems.

  As you read about and explore meditation, notice anything you hate or don't want to do. Always take your own side. Be willing to hunt for your own particular way.

  Embracing All Parts of the Self

  The greatest danger for meditators is deleting parts of the self. The parts of yourself that you snub and do not invite to the party cannot give you their gifts. When you delete parts of the self, you limit your vitality and your range of expression. In the long run, this will mean that you either go through life as an overly peaceful meditator or quit meditating because you have made meditation a kind of prison.

  Think of meditation as a party you are giving for every aspect of your humanity, every aspect of the soul. Invite even the street people, the witchy bitch, the cranky skeptic, though they seem incongruous. Maybe they stink and don't know how to use the silverware, but feed them.
When any quality is integrated, when it gets to rub shoulders with all the other parts of the self, it changes and is socialized. Each has a gift to give you.

  What part of yourself have you lost? It could be a feeling tone from your schooldays—perhaps you were athletic or you sang in the shower a lot. It could be the movie lover in you or the letter writer. The purpose of life is to get survival taken care of so that we can get on with being as individualistic as possible. Many men lose the lover in them when they hunker down to work long hours. In the process of gearing up to be successful, people often find that they have lost the person inside who was capable of enjoying the success. If you continue meditating, you can be sure that the lost parts of you will come knocking at the door to be let in. They may appear as moods, images, memories, or sensations in your body. Welcome them, even though you most likely will not know what they are at first.

  In fairy tales, it is the unpleasant aunt, the one not invited to the wedding, who shifts into a malevolent witch and curses the marriage. When people go into meditation with a spiritual approach, you can almost hear the ripping sound as they split off parts of themselves to fit their picture of what a proper meditator is. It is a kind of Peter Pan syndrome, in which the Shadow is split off and then becomes Other.

  In meditation, you have a few months to get used to the range of your inner experience and train yourself to accept it all—or not. The habits you develop will tend to be permanent. This is what I see in my friends and in the people who come to me for coaching. The attitude with which they went into meditation has become cast in concrete. At some point, a necessary crisis was missed.