by Lorin Roche
In everyday life, we have to edit our responses to match what is appropriate in the environment. This is healthy. Each of us has a set of emotions that we allow and a set that we disallow—this is called a personality. When you begin meditation you have a fresh start on life, on how you slice up the pie of your inner qualities. If you just carry over your outer-world adaptation to the inner world, you miss much of the opportunity meditation offers. You do the equivalent of taking your elementary school personality over into high school.
Anger, greed, sexuality, revenge, ambition, wild passionate adoration of anything, the desire to be drunk or Dionysian, fear, laziness—which of these do you have trouble with? Which of these do you think are not a proper part of meditation?
Whatever you leave out cannot be integrated. It sounds obvious when put that way. Remember, though, that in meditation all your thoughts and feelings are whizzing through your body and nerves at high speed, and it will take you quite a while to learn what they are. The acceptance of all parts of yourself has to translate to the level of reflex. This comes only from gradually developing trust—trust of the space of meditation, trust of your body, trust of what the nervous system is, trust of what your brain is, trust in life itself.
Your task is to take the embracing attitude from the level of theory to the level of your bodily responses. During meditation, things happen too fast for theory. You operate out of reflex. That is why I say meditation is more a physical sport than a mental game. Or you could say it is more like a relationship with all your parts. If a child playing in the backyard turns from her little world and comes running to you to share her excitement about a caterpillar she has been watching, you have less than a second to decide to accept her embrace even though she is muddy and you are wearing nice clothes. If you stop to think, Hmm…okay, this is my niece, and she is in an explosion of enthusiasm for life and discovery that I cannot ever hope to return to. Every moment of her three-year-old life is a major moment. Do I let her get my clothes dirty or do I try to hold her at arm's length? she will see your hesitation or disgust or preoccupation, and that is what she will get. You will miss the magic of the moment. Or you could embrace her with open arms, share in her joy, and she would run back to her play fulfilled. What moves you toward this kind of emotional suppleness with yourself and others? Is it music, theater, movies, friends, conversations? Find out and cultivate it. Go on in and make friends. Get muddy.
Sex, Drugs, and Rock ‘n’ Roll
All of us have at least one secret desire that we consider sinful according to some scheme of things. Something that feels like a vice. You may have had experiences being wild at concerts or drinking and dancing all night. You may recall times when you felt really good being bad.
Every vice has a secret to teach us. The secret is in the desire for a certain quality of experience: intensity, freedom, wildness, vivid colors, aliveness, total joy, free-flowing sexuality, innocence, a heightening of the senses, universal love, lack of inhibition. These are all good qualities. There is much to be said for each. As a matter of fact, they are much too important to be left to chance, or to imported illegal substances, or to complicated arrangements of people. Using substances to experience these qualities can physically destroy you. Face up to it, drugs are obsolete.
Meditation is for passions and cravings so deep they can't be fulfilled by ordinary experience. All of us have desires that can't be fulfilled—we want to live forever, be perfectly thin or muscular, have unlimited money, be on vacation eternally, have all the love in the world. In meditation you ride these cravings and they take you into some level of life where the joy of movement is itself enough delight; where it is better to be in movement, playing with life, at peace inside yourself, than it is to have arrived at any goal.
Even the ancient word meditarai, from which our word meditation is derived, speaks of this connection of mindfulness, rhythm, and the harmony that heals. All this means that meditation is an interior Sex, Drugs, and Rock ‘n’ Roll. The sex is the passionate current of desire. It's subtle, but sexy. Relaxation is very sexy, and most people get turned on when they are deeply relaxed. The drugs part is the body's own internal pharmacy as it heals itself. Dozens of scientific studies have shown dramatic drops in the stress chemicals and increases in the natural opiates during meditation. The rock ‘n’ roll is the inner music, the pulsation of the heartbeat and breath. The harmony can be a measure of music, a measured sound such as a mantra, or exactly the right song played at the right moment to satisfy the soul. The meditation traditions of the world have explored ways of paying attention to flow, pulsation, and inner songs so that you never tire of them but actually get more and more interested.
Meditation is taking the same circuits you use when you are having a good time and then underwhelming yourself. We should be bored, but we aren't. In this delicious underloading of the senses, something magical happens. When you do this, when you let yourself be shaped by these moments, your whole body and heart and mind realign with life. Believe it or not, this is what the sacred traditions have been saying for thousands of years.
The ecstatic longing to be transported is the same whether we are at a rock concert or an opera, watching our favorite television show or in a totally silent meditation room. The main difference is that in meditation you follow the impulses of pleasure beyond themselves into the silence, and you rest there. In meditation you learn to respond more and more to less and less, so that the quieter the music is, the more intensely you feel it. In meditation even the simple action of breathing or listening to the rhythm of the vowel sounds becomes intensely pleasurable.
Meditation is not taking something away or denying ourselves something. Meditation is adding something: the willingness to follow the music into the silence; to follow the beat into the space between beats; to follow the rhythm of breath into the great interior dance.
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Don't Judge Yourself
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Exercises for Uncovering Your Personal Style
THE RHYTHM OF EVERYDAY LIFE
Let's take a minute to recognize some elements of your personal style. Just take a conscious break in the midst of all this reading and ask yourself some pertinent questions. We've been talking about the importance of asking and the magic of the answers just percolating up. So now, consider the rhythm of your everyday life and the pace at which you like to move.
Do you like to move fast, have the feeling that lots of things are happening simultaneously?
Do you prefer a slow, orderly pace to life?
What rhythms turn you on? Slow and sultry? Dynamic and energetic? Lyrical and soulful?
Is your personal aesthetic minimalist, simple, spare? Extravagant, colorful, outrageous? Somewhere in between?
Once you ask, you'll know. Now the best advice I can ever give you is to learn to meditate without cramping your own style. It may seem odd to meditate for only half a minute and then stop to make sure you are not making a chore of it or putting pressure on yourself in some way. But by doing so, you will be developing ease, rhythm, and a sense of your individual style. Then you can do longer and longer meditations and feel comfortable. Any one meditation of ten or twenty minutes is composed of many minute to minute-and-a-half cycles. A lot happens in a minute.
To keep it simple, I suggest that you approach meditation with an appreciation of movement. Attention moves, whether you want it to or not, so by accepting this in advance you will not be at war with yourself.
If you like to move fast, the best way for you to approach meditation is by doing quickies: quick in and out; doing each meditation for a short time, so it seems like a brief but satisfying pit stop in the racecourse of your life.
If you like to have a leisurely pace whenever possible, set aside a chunk of time, and give lots of attention to the getting-in and getting-out phases.
If you know you love rhythm, if you love the way your body feels in the presence of drums or a band with a great beat, play music and
dance to it before you meditate. You don't have to do this every time, but when you do, you'll find that the delicious, erotic energy of the rhythm permeates your meditation and touches deep into your core.
If you crave simplicity or silence, give it to yourself. Seek out times and places of quiet, so your nerves can thrive on the sanctuary that silence gives.
If you find yourself craving rich colors and complex imagery, experiment with meditating in a Catholic church or an art museum.
YOUR RULING PASSIONS
You do not have to give up any passions to meditate; on the contrary, you celebrate them even more, following the trail they have made in your nerves and body. The peacefulness and tolerance of meditation are complemented by the richness of experience represented in wild vices.
What is this desire we all share, to move with abandonment, to numb out some pain, to be intensely stimulated? Whatever the vice, there is a legitimate calling behind it. Use meditation to explore that calling.
Consider the following questions. Ask them silently to yourself and then listen for your answers. Call up your memory. You may even be moved to speak them out loud. Come on—you won't be arrested.
What is my favorite vice?
What is a vice I loved but had to give up?
What is the best I have ever felt while doing some wild and sinful activity?
Now feel the excitement, the relaxation, the expanded awareness, the sexual intensity flowing through your nervous system. Allow yourself to have the fullness of that without getting into trouble, just sitting there on your sofa or in your meditation chair.
In case you've blanked out some possible vices, here's a quick list for easy reference!
Smoking cigarettes.
Smoking pot.
Drinking a lot at parties and dancing all night.
Doing cocaine or other drugs.
Overeating.
Having lots of sex or naughty sex.
These are Dionysian forms of worship, celebrations of the passions. When you go inside and cherish the experience of wildness, it becomes an Apollonian meditation—contained and outwardly respectable, because nobody can see what you're thinking. You don't have to stop feeling wild inside just because you aren't acting out anymore.
Meditation in Your Daily Life
How Do I Let Meditation Be Easy?
Ease is defined as “rest, quiet, and repose.” Ease is “freedom from work.” Ease is also informality and release from constraint. This is a pretty good description of meditation! Meditation is a time when you are not pressuring yourself to perform. You are resting very deeply and relaxing, yet you are paying attention in an easy manner.
Ease is actually a requirement for both learning and practicing meditation. That's because when you try to pay attention, only a tiny part of your being is involved in the “trying.” Meditation involves paying attention with your entire being.
If you catch yourself “working at it,” stop instantly. Take a breath, shake yourself out, stretch, open your eyes, do anything to interrupt the pattern. Working at meditation is the one big boo-boo.
Meditation is a built-in ability. All human beings have it innately. The techniques are ways of giving the body permission to enter meditation, which it wants to do anyway. When you find the times and ways that your body naturally wants to meditate, then meditation really does feel easy.
When you think about meditation, put it in the same category of things you do just because you feel like it, whether it is dancing, making love, fishing, talking on the phone to your friends, or going to a movie. Do you tend to put meditation above your head, as if it were spiritual? Spirituality is just one of the many tones of meditation, and it is not the most important one by any means.
When do you have the greatest sense of ease in life? What are you doing when you feel easy? Do you have special activities or times in the week for cultivating ease?
Another way to let meditation be easy is to choose techniques and senses you are interested in. There are hundreds of things to meditate on. Entire worlds of meditation techniques have been developed for fighting, making love, eating, hunting, painting, listening to music, healing painful memories, and exploring the subtle planes of existence. Any one person may not have time to explore fully all the meditation practices for each instinct, but you will have many of these interests going on in your life at any one time. And your meditation, no matter what technique you use, will have elements of fighting, sex, nourishment, hunting, and art. You will find that you pay attention quite easily to what you are interested in. As you explore meditation, your challenge will be to let your practice be shaped by your inner needs as they emerge.
Think of any good book or movie or play or opera you have ever loved. There is actually a meditation technique about that type of drama. The only difference is that in meditation the drama is approached from the inside. The yogis and meditation traditions have been interested in what parts of the body, what chakras or energies are employed by or represented by each character. How do the energy centers in the body work together or fight one another in the course of such a conflict?
Let's say you sit to meditate at the end of the day after work. Your first experience may be total relief: Ah, how blessed just to sit here. But after a few minutes of relaxation, you may find that your brain is generating thoughts about the power dynamics at work. Is my job threatened? Will I have to move to the new office building across town? As these thoughts flow through your awareness, your body is practicing staying relaxed, and sometimes failing to do so. Your body and brain will bring up worrisome situations again and again until you can stay relaxed all the way through. Relaxed here means that you are not running scared; you have the presence of mind to consider all your options, and you do not think that your life is threatened when it is only your status in this temporary tribe.
Tip
This process can be painful. Each time you think of your boss, you may feel your solar plexus jump. Dare I ask for a raise? In reality, however, this is your own personal movie you are watching. It is your favorite novel, the one in which you are the protagonist. Every drama you have ever seen or read is there to help you understand and act within the plot structure of your life. Meditation is the time when you, as hero or heroine of your own drama, in the midst of your daily life, take a moment to charge your batteries and emerge renewed. Your thought process, the whole struggle to face your challenges with your senses and heart open, is really the most interesting thing around. You will learn this from your own daily meditation practice. It really is quite interesting to sit there and breathe and watch the plot of your day unfold before your mind's eye. Then in twenty minutes or so you get up and you are a little freer, as if you have just come back from vacation.
Remember: One way to let meditation be easy and keep it simple is to make it about your needs, about helping you to fulfill your immediate needs, such as the need for rest, the need to be able to focus well at work, the need to be able to relax while under pressure, the need to communicate clearly. This keeps the whole enterprise of meditation honest, because you will be able to tell each day how you are doing, how well your meditation is working. No Hindu metaphysics or Tibetan mysteries are involved.
Another way to allow meditation to be easy is to not be artificial with yourself in any way. Ease is defined as informality, freedom from constraint, freedom from labor, naturalness. In sailing there is a term, ease off, that means to back off from running too close to the wind. If you want meditation to be restful, a solace for your soul, and a place of renewal, learn to be easy with yourself in meditation. Being easy with yourself and easing off is a kind of a physical skill that you can practice. You can do it with each breath. While meditating, you will probably catch yourself occasionally trying too hard and need to ease off.
GUIDELINES FOR YOUR PERSONAL MEDITATION
Refer to this list of guidelines if you feel lost, confused, overwhelmed, worried, obsessed, or simply need to get a grip.
Remember…
Follow your own rhythms.
Welcome all your thoughts and feelings, especially uncomfortable ones.
Greet your inner rebel, the part of you that may say, I don't want to meditate.
Honor your preferences. Let your meditation be like your natural self, your natural cravings, your own set of needs.
Never force anything in meditation. Learn what effortlessness is. There is plenty of room for effort in the outer world.
Whenever you begin a meditation, just sit there for a couple of minutes and let your nerves settle in.
Welcome all the experiences you will ever have and those you have never even dreamed of.
Honor your discomfort. Much of your meditation time will be spent massaging the sore areas of your life, reviewing mistakes, healing inner wounds, accessing relaxation, and then mentally rehearsing action.
Take refuge in meditation but do not use it to numb yourself.
Do not tell your mind to shut up. Inner noise is not noise. Thoughts come and go.
Increase your tolerance for creative tension, for all that is unsolved. Use meditation to give you the courage to face your unsolved issues.
Learn to tolerate the unstressing process—the painful process of your body letting go of tension.
Make meditation a generous space, one that includes all of who you might ever be. Cry, laugh, dissolve, let go, rage, worry, go insane, be wild, want to kill your enemies, want to die, want to be saved.
Meditation should feel like a luxurious indulgence, at least much of the time.