Meditation Made Easy

by Lorin Roche

  The Meditation Top Forty

  Here are a few dozen meditation techniques from the Bhairava Tantra, the ancient Sanskrit meditation text I mentioned at the beginning of this book. Each of these techniques can be done for a few seconds at a time or for hours. Read a few now, or as many as you want, then return later. For many years I could not bear to read more than one or two at a sitting. Go at your own pace.

  Notice the ones you are drawn to and the ones that remind you of awakenings you have already had.

  Attend to life as flow. Nothing is fixed, everything flows.

  Breath is continuous pulsation. Be at home in the eternal rhythm.

  Breath moves through you, in and out, twenty-two thousand times a day. Set aside some time to consciously enjoy the beauty of that flowing. Give yourself a chance to fall in love with breath.

  Breathing is something we do in cooperation with the whole world. It is a flowing exchange of substance with the ocean of air that surrounds us. Be awake to the continually changing tones of that flow: breath as nourishment, as purification, as a tender embrace, as healing, as music, as the wind that feeds a fire, as love.

  Be awake to the blessing of the air flowing in. Accept each inbreath as the beginning of a new lifetime.

  Be awake to the blessing of the breath flowing out. Accept each outbreath as letting go of the old you—all those old thoughts and old feelings.

  There are pauses in the flow of breath. Attend to them. Follow the breath as it flows into the body. Find the place inside you that is luminous if you pause for a moment at the end of the inhalation. Learn to rest in that inner center.

  Follow the breath as it flows out of the body, and rest for a moment in yourself, aware of emptiness, before the breath turns to flow in.

  Just as you can be aware of the brief pause as breath turns, learn to pay attention to the space between thoughts.

  Consider all the places in your body that tingle and glow and feel electrified when you are in the sexual embrace. Consider those moments as a glimpse of a higher reality. Then consider that every cell of your body is always permeated with that loving electricity, which is the life force. Revel in the delicate lovemaking on microscopic levels that is continually re-creating your body. Then dwell in the vastness of eternity as the arena for this loving.

  Listen to the hum of your heart. It is as if a chord of music is vibrating, on and on.

  Listen to the individual notes of a chord of music, then go back and forth between hearing the sound in its entirety and hearing the individual notes. Thus know the nature of life.

  Listen to any sound—a waterfall, a vibrating bowl, crickets, the repetition of vowel sounds—in such a way that you merge with the sound. Or consider each of the vowels in turn. Chant the vowel out loud, then say it quietly, then listen to it inwardly, then listen to and feel the delicate resonance of it, then let go and listen to the silence. Notice the different quality each vowel has, the different feeling as it fades away into the resonance of space.

  Listen to the last notes of a musical performance as they fade into silence. Be aware of that silence as the charged essence of all music. When you get that, learn to listen to each beat in the rhythm as a moment of silence.

  Musical instruments tend to be hollow—think of a drum, a flute, or a stringed instrument such as a guitar. It is the empty space inside the instrument that is the resonant chamber. Consider your body to be a musical instrument: a delicate layer of skin with sacred emptiness inside. Be at home in the resonance of that emptiness. Picture every particle of creation as a tiny vibrating musical instrument, with a shape on the outside and empty space on the inside. Listen to the songs that all these instruments are playing.

  Contemplate emptiness stretching away in every direction: emptiness above, below, to all sides. Meditate on emptiness resting in emptiness, and be free.

  Savor how each of your senses informs you, in a different delightful way, of the play of shape and emptiness: Smell. Be outside in a vast space and stand downwind from some odor: a tree or an animal or a field of flowers. All that invisible air, all that space, and yet a few molecules of scent evoke an entire world of experience.

  Sight. Pay attention to light as shining through space: the space between your eye and your hand, the space between your eye and a distant mountain, the space between you and the sun. Space and light play with each other and cooperate to give the appearance of creation. Be at home in the playing of space and light. Or look at a pot and be aware of how the emptiness makes the pot.

  Touch. Touch yourself with a feather-light touch, then even lighter, and ever more lightly, until you cannot tell if you are touching yourself or not.

  Balance. Attend to your sense of balance by making tiny movements of the head. Allow the movement to become more and more invisible until you cannot tell whether you are moving. Thus be aware of the movement of stillness and the stillness in movement.

  Pay attention to all the tiny little balancing movements the body is making as you sit there or stand there. Enter that world of movements with wonder and appreciation. Then consider that everywhere in creation, all matter on every level is continually in a dance of making tiny or large balancing movements.

  Think of all the heat your body generates. Be amazed: day and night you burn at about a hundred degrees, no matter what the outside temperature is. Every cell of your body is a little flame, generating heat and invisible light. All this energy comes from the sun. So in a way your body is composed of billions of tiny suns, existing within the radiant embrace of the vast Sun in the sky. Thus be aware of your essence as flame and rest in that flame.

  Look at the night sky on a moonless night and see all the stars as discrete points of flame against a background of vast blackness and empty space. Get the feeling of how the universe is almost entirely emptiness; it is 99.99999 percent emptiness. Then love the tiny points of matter for how infinitely precious they are to shine forth in such vastness.

  Imagine the cells of your body as being like the stars, tiny points of light in a vast emptiness. Identify with the space itself as well as the points of light.

  Dwell for a few days in the awareness of life as flame. Track the continually changing energy tones of the flame: purifying, nourishing, energizing, refreshing, renewing, enlivening, luminous. Be free within this continuous flow of flame. Develop a tolerance for the intensity of life's flame.

  When in the midst of passionate lovemaking, pause and savor the magical flame in your heart and in your genitals, in your skin and throughout all your senses. Together, fall into a delicious nonmoving internal movement of this light, heat, and tingling electricity. Then go deeper into the hum of the electricity. Let yourself dissolve into that resonating electricity just as you do at the moment of orgasm. Emerge from that dissolved space and continue lovemaking, but without hurry.

  Ask your lover to tease you until you crave to be touched more and more at some spot on the body. Pause there in the unbearable and savor the craving itself; throw your awareness with total abandon into what it is to crave. Know this delicious torment as the essence of creation. Be the vastness and emptiness craving the play and interplay of matter.

  Reflect upon all the human passions: anger, desire, lust, greed, arrogance, envy, and any other passion that you can think of. Meditate on the different way that each is a form of flame. Let that flame take you into subtle inner flame and then into light and space, each in a different way—anger as fire and the desire to destroy something; desire as a fiery wanting to move toward something; lust as the fire of wanting to merge with something; arrogance as a way of holding the fire as if you are more luminous than some other part of creation. Be at home with the fire itself as it manifests differently in each passion. Thus learn to be illuminated, inspired, and enlightened by each type of flame.

  Standing, surrender to gravity and let it pull you to the ground. Give in slowly. Lying on the ground, continue to give in to gravity more and more and let it pull you into its embr
ace. Then let gravity attract your essence in toward the center of gravity and be aware of the center of the Earth. Rest awareness in that still center of attraction around which all else rotates: the axis of the world.

  Lie on your back in a wide open space on a day when there are no clouds. Pay attention to the vastness of the blue sky. In time, thoughts will forget to come, your body will vanish, and for a moment you will be your essential nature. Over a lifetime, come again and again to this perception.

  As you fall asleep each night, develop little meditations you do. Lying there in bed, be aware of the flow of breath attracting you in toward your heart, and fall into the center of your heart as you fall asleep. Or lying there in the darkness, be aware of darkness extending toward infinity in all directions. Fall into that infinity as you fall asleep, and be free to play in infinite space.

  Waking up, there is a moment of bliss when you are not awake or asleep, not in that other world or this one. Enter the quiet ecstasy of this transitional state. Cherish it for what it reveals of your true nature.

  Enjoy the flow of thoughts and desires through you as you would enjoy the flow of water in a river. Take delight in the flow itself. Then begin to notice the source of the river, the source of the thoughts and desires. Follow the current of desire back toward the one who is desiring.

  Sometime when you are totally upset, stop and explore inside to see who you are. Your usual mind has been dissolved, and glimpses of your essential nature will shine through. Leave the upset behind and follow the clues wherever they lead you.

  Become aware of what it is that you love unconditionally. It could be anyone or anything on Earth or in Heaven. Give over to that love with total abandon. Surrender to that love and breathe with the delight of it. Pay attention to every movement in your heart and your entire being as you love. Then be aware that for love to flow, three elements are needed: your attention, the other being, and the space between you. Love charges the space and makes it electric, full of delight. Pay attention to the way in which at one moment it is a delight to be touching the beloved and the next it is joyous to move away. Thus develop your appreciation for space itself as an element of relationship.

  In a devoted relationship there is one current of desire that would like the love to stay the same: let this moment last forever, this delightful stage of relationship. There is another current of desire that says let things change, let us evolve together, let us grow closer. Let's move on. This current is a willingness to be changed by love itself. Cultivate this dual awareness of nonchange and change, eternity and transience. Return again and again to appreciating the electric tension between these opposites of adoration and detachment. The electricity itself will teach you.

  Sometime when you are walking among other people, consider that the life in all bodies is the same Life appearing in different forms. Silently and invisibly greet that life as you walk by each person.

  Let go of the thought I am this body. Let go of the thought I live in this particular time and place. Let go even of the thought I am I.

  Dive deeply into the awareness of being everywhere in all of time.

  Feel every sensation, every touch of light, every smell, every taste, every sound as a gift to you from the divine beloved that is Life. Cultivate this awareness day by day and you will grow more intimate with life in tiny little ways. Invisible doorways in your being will open up. Attentiveness to what you are receiving is gratitude and is a gift back to life. Thus the relationship of your small being and the vastness changes, because there is a two-way flow.

  Abandon the attitude of wanting to prolong pleasure and avoid suffering. Let the heart just be itself and feel whatever is there as it comes and goes. Return again and again to attending to the heart and its pulsations, and over time you will realize the oneness of your heart and all hearts.

  The next time you catch yourself in a thought such as I want this or I feel that, grab hold of this “I” and perceive it by itself. Feel it through all its ranges and stages, feel into its source. You will thus experience attention beyond thoughts.

  Wonder Who am I? for a minute or two and then let go of the question and dwell in the silence. Eventually a current will arise in your heart or your being, and that current will carry you into realization of your true nature.

  For your essential Self, there is no knowledge to be gained, no enlightenment to be achieved. The Self already is knowledge and enlightenment. For the “I” that is wondering Who am I? there is only the ongoing adventure of discovery. There is no possibility of turning back, and there is no hurrying either. You are sailing your little boat on the vast seas of infinity and will go only as fast as the wind and currents take you. Realizing this, cherish every perception, no matter how tiny.

  A daily meditation practice can be made of several of the above techniques. You might practice one of them consistently for ten minutes or half an hour for several months or years, and then move on to another technique. In addition, at odd times throughout the day you might practice a different selection for a few seconds or minutes.

  As the Bhairava Tantra puts it: “Developing attention in any one or more of the ways described above, you can know, from the inside, the life that permeates us all. Knowing that life, you become friends with all. Being friends with all, your isolated ‘I’-self will gradually realize its identity with the Self of the universe.”

  Jargon Zone (Optional, Extra-Credit Reading)

  From Meditation into Life

  At Home with Yourself

  Human beings are instinctively social, and so we are oriented to the idea that wisdom comes from outside. This results in a tendency to pave over your innate knowing. But meditation is nothing if it is not trusting yourself, being at home in yourself. I have many friends who have practiced meditation for decades in an otherworldly spiritual tone, and they still are not at home in their personalities, their bodies, or this world. They have made a sort of lease agreement with a Hinduized or Buddhist inner world. They get to stay there as long as they observe all the proper rules and rituals. Meeting them, you would not say that they are shining examples of meditators. They seem to have given up important parts of themselves in the attempt to become spiritual.

  By the way, I am one of those people who is at home in my own garden-variety Hinduism. I love the Upanishads, became a vegetarian at age nineteen, and used to burn incense all the time. I still chant Sanskrit before dawn just for fun. But maybe 1 percent of Westerners thrive on such things. When I think of the last, say, two hundred people I have worked with, I'd have to say that reincarnation, celibacy, vegetarianism, or the Hindu or Buddhist or Tibetan pantheon would be near the bottom of any list of things they needed to know.

  We have good notes from Asia on meditation techniques for recluses. But we do not have such notes on what meditation is like for people who live in the modern world. The techniques are still being adapted, and Western meditation teachers are just beginning to find their voices. But that's fine, because meditation is instinctive anyway. If you do not give away all your authority, if you take a playful, exploratory attitude, you will discover what works for you.

  Meditation teachers like to impose techniques on you, techniques that prevent you from discovering your own way. They know the way: just follow them. They encourage you to override your innate preferences by advertising their teachings as “scripturally authentic” and therefore of the highest authority. This lets you bypass, temporarily, the hard work of exploring your individual nature.

  The problem is that meditation is ultimately about exploring your deepest cravings. The energy that propels meditation comes from your basic urges and inarticulate hankerings. When are you close to them? When some people are alone with a stereo, they put on music that reaches them deeply. Someone else might find a book, or go for a long walk and brood. How can you make yourself that comfortable right at the beginning of your exploration of meditation? The best thing you can do for your learning is to make yourself at home in meditat
ion. To do so, take some time to recall the activities you already know how to feel at home with.

  As you get a feel for what meditation is, the next step is to wrest authority away from externals and place it back in your heart. Your relationship with life is the teacher—cultivate friendships so that you have feedback mechanisms. The more you connect meditation with your passions, your deepest cravings, your unfulfilled longings, the better. Where else will you make a home for your desires? Then meditation will be simmering in your own creative fires. You won't have the Answers, but you will have energy, enthusiasm, and your own gut instincts for guidance.

  All creatures have a homing instinct. They follow impulses to return to their nest. Meditation is a human homing instinct, an impulse to return to the home within yourself, and then feel at home in the world. The key is to customize meditation, be very active in appropriating it for your own use and needs, and not imitate anyone else.

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  Remember What You Love

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  Opening Your Heart to Life

  Nature has designed us to thrive. Meditation is part of Nature's maintenance program for keeping us at our best. Meditation is for repair, healing, revival, inspiration, preparation for action, and love. The ability to meditate is built in, innate. It is woven into the very fabric of our bodies. It is built into the human body as part of our survival skills and is just waiting to be used.

  In the same way that we have the ability to perceive a threat and become alarmed and juiced with adrenaline, we have an equal and opposite ability to perceive our own competence, to perceive beauty and safety. This results in relaxation, which lets the body recharge its batteries. These instincts balance each other and we need both. Without some sense of urgency, we are out of touch with the dynamic ebb and flow of life, and without the skill and the will to take incredibly deep repose in ourselves, we fail to discover the finer qualities of what it is to be human.