These are old newsletters. The page is here as an archive.
Meditation Newsletters

Let me know if you want to receive a newsletter from me by email or regular mail. I muse about what is happening with the meditators who come to see me, call on the phone, and email me from around the world to tell me their stories and questions. The newsletter could be a meditation of the week or meditation of the month. Often the newletter will be sent from Camille's domain (Camillemaurine.com), because she is better about managing email lists than me. We never sell or rent our list, and if you ever want to be take off, just notify me.

Here are some past issues:

Why You Are Not Meditating

June 20, 2005

People seem think the reason they are not meditating is because they are not disciplined enough. I have not found this to be the case. Sometimes it takes a couple of hours of listening to the person's whole meditation history to find out what went wrong. When people who have meditated in the past have quit, it is usually with good cause – they were doing the wrong technique, or something was off with the group they were with. Or they simply outgrew the technique they had been doing, fulfilled its purpose.
In short, if you used to meditate and quit, it is probably because:
1. You have outgrown the technique you were doing.
2. The texture of your senses has changed and you haven't gotten used to this new realm of sensation.
3. You were trying to impose on yourself an ideal that was harming you.
4. There is something else going on in your life that disrupted your rhythm.
In all these cases, what you need is not discipline, but skill – the skill of sensing who you are, where you are, and what is happening within you, and then adapting your meditation to fit your inner environment.
One of the great things about being an independent meditation teacher is that I get to meet meditators of all persuasions – Buddhist, Hindu, Yogis, Christian, and people just making their way. When I was a TM teacher, from 1970 to 1975, I did not get to listen to people very much – there is a set curriculum and no time for discussion. But when I left the TM organization in 1975, I didn't know what to teach, so I just listened to people, and found that over time, they sorted themselves out.


Keep It Simple

Meditation is NOT complicated. Meditation instructions are amazingly simple:

a) Find a place you feel comfortable.
b) Find something you enjoy paying attention to – the rhythm and flow of your breathing, a quiet sound such as a stream flowing or your memory of such a sound, a brief phrase from your favorite prayer. Then simply enjoy yourself, sensing whatever you sense as you pay attention to that focus. Your experience will change continually. Allow it to change.
c) When you mind wanders, which it will, no problem. Just wander back to the focus.

. . . and that's actually it. Anyone who makes it much more complicated than that is lying to you in order to have power over you, or convert you to their religion, or else they don't really understand meditation.
The challenging part of meditation is finding out about your individuality – what do you love paying attention to? What is your innate style? Learning how to not crimp your own style is usually the hardest part of meditation.


Listen to HeartWarming

If I were more savvy and persistent, I would already have a link to where you can purchase and download guided meditations for 99 cents. But hey, the Apple iTunes store has not responded to my email yet! I guess what with putting all music ever recorded into the store, they are busy. And Audible.com is kind of ignoring me, too. You can buy Meditation Made Easy from them for $8.95, as a download, but they have the audio for Meditation 24/7 and haven't made it available yet. So I am having to practice patience and breathe peace.
In the meantime, Meditation 24/7: Practices to Enlighten Every Moment of the Day (Amazon.com link) is for sale everywhere for about $15, and that includes the book and 14 guided meditations on a CD.
For instant gratification, the best I can do right now is offer samples - here is a link to Heartwarming, a guided meditation by Lorin Roche, part of Meditation 24/7. This will work best if you have speakers or a headphone plugged into your computer.
Nutritional versus Medicinal Meditations

You can read about the benefits of meditation here. Read that first, to get a sense of how powerful meditation is, then at least glance at the hazards of meditation. Also, you might breeze through the section where I make distinctions between nutritional versus medicinal meditations.
Some meditations are like eating a good meal that satisfies you and makes you strong, gives you energy to go and live. Others are like medications that poison you – but if you have a certain ailment, the treatment does more good than harm. Whether a given meditation harms you or benefits you is totally individual – it depends on your particular body type, your emotional type, your daily life, your relationships, your creativity, your religion and your direction in life.
Over on my Wild Serenity pages, there is a discussion about the dangers of studying with monks, monks and sex. The reason I have to mention this is because for thousands of years, until the last couple of decades, almost all meditation teachers were monks, and they are supposed to be celibate. Whether they are actually celibate or not is another issue, but their official stance is that they hate sex, and maybe life in general. So it is slightly dangerous to study meditation teachings that have been generated by monks – their hatred will rub off on you in subtle ways.


Why I Don't Use Much Spiritual Language

You may notice that I don't tend to use spiritual words and talk very much about compassion – that's been done, and has nothing to do with how to actually meditate. If you try to impose a "spiritual" quality on yourself, such as love, compassion, or peace, you will fail. It's sort of like throwing a pretty carpet over a big mess on the living room floor. You can't really live like that. If during meditation you accept your anger, and how irritated you are by people, then the meditation process will soothe your nerves and wash away the hurt that is the basis of the anger. Then you will find yourself being compassionate spontaneously, and will discover that this is your natural state. Discovering your natural love nature is a great experience. If you impose compassion, try to fake it, you may never discover that you already are compassionate underneath. Therefore, throughout my teaching, I use words very carefully so as to not suggest you approach your inner life in an artificial, fake, unnatural, straining manner.
The ability to meditate is built-in to the human body. You can meditate. And most likely, you could enjoy meditating. In order to get the great benefits a daily meditation practice offers - the ability to be relaxed and focused even under stress, strengthening of the immune system, healing of stress-related illness, and general happiness of the heart, you need to meditate every day. And in order to do that, there is a set of skills you need to learn.


Take Five

Just regular people, and children, go into and out of meditative states spontaneously, whenever they take a breath and savor the vastness of life, or pause and feel grateful for something. Usually this lasts only for a second, then attention moves on. Learning to meditate is a matter of learning how to extend that second, and learning how to handle the experiences that arise when you do.
The next time you sigh with fatigue and say "Whew," or "Whoooosh," at the end of a task, take two more minutes and sigh some more. Make quiet sighing sounds and notice how good it feels to breathe out. Then notice how good it feels to breathe in. Then close your eyes and savor that sensation for a few seconds. That is meditation.
Check this out right now if you want. Breathe out in a way that is interesting to you. By interesting I mean that any variation in how long you take to exhale, any change in the shape of your lips, any sound you make, may become part of your personal yoga. You may find that the tiniest variation in your breath triggers a shift in your body, so that you feel free to relax.
Start by doing this for a few seconds. Close your eyes for a few seconds and notice what happens if you enjoy breathing in and out as if air were great stuff.
You can go longer, and interesting things will probably happen, and the benefits will be richer, but it's all there in half a minute of sighing. The process starts and you can feel it. We are talking about something natural here. Something you can do. Anybody's meditation is made up of fifteen-second increments, which is the length of time it takes to breathe in and out a couple of times. If somebody meditates for half an hour, that's a hundred and twenty of those fifteen-second increments. Meditating for a minute is like taking a sip of juice. Meditating for half an hour is like sitting down and eating a whole meal. Both are good, and it just depends on what you want.
So remember, the actual techniques of meditation are simple. You are allowing yourself to appreciate the beauty of life. What is involved – not complicated, but intricate – is your individuality. Discovering enough about your inner nature to adopt an approach to meditation that feels natural.


The Feeling of Being Overloaded

Everyone I know feels overloaded, in terms of the stuff they deal with on a daily basis – chores, phone calls, emails, bills, items on their life to-do list. This is just the nature of time in this millennium, in the industrialized world. What does this mean in terms of meditation? It means that almost everyone has a lot of thoughts during meditation, because your brain will use part of your meditation time to sort, prioritize, delete, filter, review and plan. This is OK. Get used to it. And don't imagine that you have to make your mind blank in order to meditate. Just get over that whole fantasy of blankness.
One of the great things people experience after meditating is a changed sense of time – "I am in a flow, yeah I have a lot of items on my to-do list, but I am grooving with it. I am good to go." So during meditation you face everything and practice relaxing into urgency, and after meditating you really feel the benefits of relaxed awareness.
Meditation is a situation in which you work out your relationship with time and space. That's why it is such a classic practice. When you tend to this relationship, you can improve the way you show up for yourself and others in your life.


Meditation is Witnessing the Movement of Your Life

Contrary to popular misconception, meditation is not sitting still and making your mind blank. When we sit still to meditate, this is in order to savor the motions of life, just as, when listening to music, we sometimes sit still in order to hear it more deeply.
When you meditate, you pay attention to the flow of life energy in your system – in your mind, heart, and body. You act as your own best friend, witnessing the motion of your emotions and thoughts. Just as your breath is always flowing and your heart is always beating, so is the current of your own life force always flowing through you, as long as you are alive. So in essence, meditation is paying attention to the flow, the pulsation, the heartbeat of life. And life is always close at hand – as close as your breath and the beating of your heart.
Anyone can learn the basics of meditation, and get the benefits of relaxation, centering, and enhanced perception that come naturally as a result.
Along with sitting or lying down meditations, we recommend moving meditations. This is where you dance your prayers, you let your body move in a way that tunes you up for life. Over the past 36 years, I have been exploring these meditative movements, which strongly resemble Tai Chi. I have found that when I ask people to sense their own vitality and move with it, they make up Tai Chi moves, even if they have never seen the Tai Chi forms. One of the 14 practices in Meditation 24/7: Practices to Enlighten Every Moment of the Day involves simple energy movements you can do to prepare yourself to leave the house in the morning. We call this the "Good to Go" technique.




What The Word Meditation Really Means

Meditation comes from a family of words having to do with healing, balance, music, rhythm, harmony, measure, and paying attention. The Latin word meditarai means to attend, to be present, to look after, heal, cure. This mosaic of meaning points to meditation as the process of paying attention to the underlying harmony of life so that balance is restored.
The med of meditation is an ancient Proto-Indo-European (sometimes called PIE) root-word meaning "to take appropriate measures." Indo-European is the ancestor language from over 7000 years ago that gave rise to Sanskrit, Indic, Iranian, Slavic, Albanian, Anatolian, Greek, Latin, German, and then eventually English. Many of the words we use every day derive from Indo-European roots. Quite a few everyday words are based on the root med: meter, medicine, remedy, meditate, modest, modern, accommodate, must and empty. (American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, 1992, Houghton Mifflin Company).
When I first read this, I was surprised to see so many of the essential ideas of the meditation traditions in seed form. You can see for yourself at The American Heritage Dictionary. There is a whole teaching on meditation in these words:
Meter is the beat, the rhythm, and medicine is the balance. Thus, meditation is the harmony that heals, the music that heals you and restores balance.
Modest is to know exactly who you are, not inflated or deflated. Model refers to the template you are working from to build your life. Modern means, just now, current, what's happening.
Modify is to refine the design, make it better.
Accommodate is what we all have to learn to do constantly, accommodate ourselves and the world.
Empty is the way space itself feels. Emptiness is the arena for life. Things aren't crowded together, there is enough emptiness or space in our house, in our heads, and between us and the movie screen.
Just looking in the dictionary you can see the rich spectrum of what meditation means, and how the word is related to things you already know and love.
Each of these meanings will have vital importance to you if you continue exploring meditation. In one twenty-minute meditation you may find yourself fluctuating between feeling harmonious, then feeling alternately depressed and exhilarated for a few minutes, until balancing out in a steady knowing of who you are. A minute later you are electrified by a vivid awareness of the current of your life and how exciting that is. The excitement may then turn to fear as you wonder if you are up to some task ahead of you. Then your body works through the fear and massages calmness into it. Your mind turns to focus on where you are in your life and how time is passing. You may alternate between feeling full and empty, full of memories and experience or empty and hungry. As a matter of fact, this is a pretty typical set of qualities experienced by almost any meditator in any meditation. Meditation is accommodating yourself, being accommodating. Its being hospitable to your soul, all of it, every quality. I was very surprised to find all this wisdom about meditation technique just sitting there in the etymology section of a dictionary.


About As Difficult as Cleaning the Garage

June 8 2005

How difficult is it to meditate?
There is a lot of confusion about the kind and amount of effort required. The short answer is, on a feeling level it's about as difficult as cleaning the garage or a closet. For most of us, the hard part of such a task is the one that requires almost no physical effort. We have to tolerate the feelings that arise when we are in the midst of sorting. The brain does a lot of work.
Think of a time when you set yourself the chore of going through a box of stuff, for example old papers, magazines, momentos and photographs. You pick each item up, dust it off, study it, then decide to keep it or throw it away, and if you keep it, what box or folder to put it in. This sorting process is not in itself hard physical work. But there is something that feels "hard" about it, there is a set of uncomfortable sensations and emotions we sort through at the same time we sort the physical objects.
In meditation, there is no physical effort, and there is only as much mental effort as it takes to gaze at a tree. But there is a whole universe of uncomfortable sensations we have to sort through, because we are doing the inner equivalent of cleaning our mind's garage. What brings on this load of stuff you have to sort? Paradoxically enough, it is the intense relaxation of meditation. Because you are allowing your muscles to let go of tension, they are not holding at bay a whole lot of thoughts and concerns that have been trying to get your attention for some time. When you are at ease and relaxed, when a thought comes, it just comes. You can't be bothered to tense yourself up to try to fend it off.
To further extend the analogy, it is as if you have come home and are sitting on the sofa with your eyes closed, resting, and your maid keeps coming up to you and asking what category do you want to put this letter in, this note in. You feel a quick alternation of resting and being hassled, then back to resting again, then some new item demanding a bit of your attention. You have to tolerate both the unpredictability of it and the bizarre contrast between the luxury of relaxing deeply and then reviewing all the stuff that makes you feel frazzled.
If you want to make your life better, just decide at the beginning that you are going to welcome the sorting process and not resent it. This is approximately the same decision you make if you have kids, dogs, cats, or all of the above, to not resent them coming up to you and wanting attention the minute you walk in the door.
So what about mental clarity? Where is the inner peace?
Just get this, and save yourself a lot of trouble: the clarity comes after meditation. The inner peace comes from underneath, in the midst of your daily life. Sometimes, for a few fleeting moments, you will experience great moments during meditation, but really, who cares?
Moments of peace, sometimes very sublime, do come during meditation, but always unexpectedly, and usually when you have just finished some difficult-seeming bit of sorting.

The Vacation Paradox

May 20 2005

When you have gone on vacation in the past, you may have noticed that when you arrived at your vacation spot and settled down, you found yourself thinking of all the things you left undone back at home or at the office. This is a universal experience, and it's supposed to be that way. What better way to get perspective on your life, than to look at it from the vantage point of a thousand miles away, on a beach or mountainside?
Seeing your own life from the expanded perspective of a beautiful resort is healthy and natural. One of the lasting benefits of a vacation is that you can re-enter your life and bring a fresh set of eyes, a fresh way of seeing, to your daily life.
People resist this process of the mental review, both on vacation. They stay frenetically busy, drink and take drugs, or read thriller novels in which other people face tremendous life challenges.

Training to Handle Stress

December 18 2002

Day in and day out, why does it seem like half of your meditation time is spent reviewing past, present, and future stressful events? The short answer is that meditation is about training you for life, and that means being able to meet challenges with your wits about you. The intrinsic wisdom of your body-mind is always interested in preparing you to live fully and function at your best. To accomplish this, you'll find that your attention shifts back and forth between relaxation and tension while you are meditating, often several times a minute.
If you meditate for 5 minutes, the sequence might be something like this:
- Random-seeming busy thoughts, whatever was on your mind before you closed your eyes. First half a minute.
- A sense of peacefulness and muscular relaxation starting to emerge. Second half of a minute.
- Deeper relaxation, a sense of settling in. 60 seconds to the 120 second mark.
- You find yourself emerging from the relaxation to think of a situation at the office or at home that makes you tense. Third minute.
- You notice sensations of tension in your belly, arms, or chest. Fourth minute.
- As you pay attention to the tension-sensations, they slowly or suddenly dissolve, leaving you feeling relaxed again. Fifth minute.
This is tha basic pattern of a meditation, and it repeats itself again and again, as your body works at tuning itself up to have the exact appropriate level of tension and relaxation with respect to each of the relationships in your life. This is because meditation is a way of strengthening your capacity to adapt to the challenges of life. Meditation wants to train you to be a master of your circumstances, to have it all handled.
You CAN interfere with this process, and many meditation teachings recommend you do so. This is because for the past 2500 years, the meditation teaching traditions have been run by monks. And monks are not supposed to have a daily life or relationships. They are supposed to get up in the morning, then meditate for a long time, then maybe read some scripture, and then drift around being obedient to whoever is the head of the order. The monk path is about killing off your human identity and being born again into an immaculate identity as a member of a spiritual order. This is fine for those who want to do it, but it is not for everyone.
It is profoundly wrong and delusional to consider this process a waste of time, or a monkey mind, or a lack of concentration. In fact, your body-mind is focusing with intense concentration on freeing you of the stresses that are bothering you. So you have lots of thoughts because because you have a life and meditation is a situation in which your body tunes itself up to perform at its best in that life. Part of what the nervous system does while you are meditating is to practice staying relaxed while facing challenges. So you will be sitting there feeling peaceful, and all of a sudden you find yourself seeing an image of someone at work, or a task you have been putting off.
When you are sitting relaxed in meditation, and one of your stressful issues comes to mind, this is your system giving itself a vaccination against stress. What is a vaccination? A vaccination is when we are exposed to a weakened form of an illness-causing virus. It is a fragment of a challenge to the immune system. It's part of a living system – a virus – that could harm you, and It calls up a memory particle of stress, a weakened fragment of a stressor, and then allows the psychopsysiological immunne system generate a response, an adaptation to that stress.
Stress is a natural and protective response to situations of danger. It is really an exquisite total - body set of changes that prepare the body to deal with immediate physical emergencies - within the next few seconds. If your body was a car, the stress response would be revving the engine up to redline. Great for fast getaways, but causes unnecessary wear and tear if you do it all day.
Problems arise when we have our threat - detectors set to go AHOOOGA every time a dog barks or we even think of something that scares us. The stress response is not very useful if you are meeting a new person, an important client, asking for a raise, asking someone to marry you, talking to your kids, driving in traffic, or most other situations. The stress energy is only good for a few minutes of high - octane running or fighting, and then you are exhausted. In fact, many challenging and even dangerous situations we encounter can actually be dealt with better when we are relaxed.
The brain is designed to keep track of every possible threat and have a continually updated map of where danger is, where food is, where safe places are. But if you do not let your brain do its necessary maintenance, there will be a lot of random stress - firings during the day and night, which will reduce your quality of life and lead to stupid fights with people you love. Maybe to pointless fights with strangers.
Meditation is a kind of maintenance time for the brain and senses, in which the nervous system reviews everything that is bothersome, every threat signal, and then revises its approach. Nature loves elegance, and the body strives always to have the most elegant, economical approach to any challenge.
What happens is, meditation is a state of rest and relaxation deeper than sleep. An incredible resource for healing and renewal. In that sublime repose, your entire body and mind can review what the challenges are and practice dealing with them. This mental rehearsal is just as important as the inner silence.
This is why teachings developed by and for monks have only limited relevance for people who live in the world. Monks and nuns attempt to not have a personal life. They try to kill off attachments, and not be bonded to anyone on a personal level. They are bonded only to their tradition. They are very attached to their tradition, their robes, and their religious order. And the whole idea is that these do not change very much from century to century.

Appreciating the Rhythm of Life

November 10 2002

Life is rhythm, myriad levels of intersecting rhythms. Go as tiny as you want, into the dynamics of a cell, or as large as you want, into the global ecosphere, and life manifests as fluctutation, ebb and flow, rhythm, and ocsillation. Life is a dance.
When you meditate, you place attention right into the heart of the rhythm of life. Meditation techniques point you there - be aware of the flow of breath, be aware of the pulsing of a mantra, be aware of the ever - changing sensations in your body. But even if your technique is not about rhythm, you will be called anyway to experience the beating of your heart, the ebb and flow of breath, the tiny motions of balancing as you sit vertically. The body is never still.
I have been meeting meditatiors who come at the pratice angry at life because they do not experience instant stillness. It is a bit odd, when you think about it, that people feel entitled to instant inner silence, microwave spirituality. There is a seed of truth to this, though, because the brain works very quickly. The way there, the way to speedily experience inner peace is the way of opposites. If you want stillness, accept motion. If you want peacefulness, accept your fears and stress. If you want love, accept your anger. The whole skill of meditation is about embracing experience and letting it transform itself. You do not have to force. Taking an accepting attitude toward your inner world is itself a kind of peace - on - the - fly, and it does not take long to change your attitude.
If you accept the rhythms of your experience and ride them, you usually get a sense of peace - in - motion, a flowing harmony with yourself. There is a quality of motion that is more silent than actual stillness. A living stillness.

Do not make your meditation an opus contra naturam, a work against nature. Work with nature. Flow with your own rhythms.

Allowing Fear to Wash Through You

November 4 2002

In day-to-day experience, when your fears arise during meditation, they often do not present themselves as a whole picture. You may get a feeling tone, a buzz in your nerves, maybe part of an image. The fear arises, seemingly from nowhere, while you are meditating, stays a couple of minutes, and then fades away again. The nervous system, in its wisdom, often gives you just one sensory detail as an icon for a whole complex of feeling, takes a chunk of excess tension away, and then goes on to other business. If you are afraid of depression and dark feelings, you may, during meditation, become aware of darkness. It’ll sneak up on you so that you can realize that darkness can be really restful. Or you may have sinking feelings during meditation, and find yourself being so relaxed that you feel you are sinking into the floor. In this way, you get over the fear of descent, bit by bit.
When you are meditating for half an hour before work or when you come home in the evening, your body knows that you have to get up and go function. So your meditation may be a mixture of restfulness, review of the day, with just one minute for bringing some release to a deep fear. Meditation is in the service of your adaptation to life, so the whole process tunes itself to help you thrive. The body does not want to carry around unrealistic fear. It wants to have only accurate, useful fear about current-life situations.
When you meditate in the way I recommend, which is following your instincts, your inner wisdom regulates this whole process. The inner world of self-balancing is at play in you. And you generally don’t get more than you can deal with in any given moment. You just release some fear during a meditation, then go about your day with a sense of relief and inner freedom.
It’s all different when you are on a meditation retreat, say for three months or a year. That is a special situation in which you have set aside all other concerns and can just give over to the process. You invite all hell to break loose, so that you can witness it and bring the light of awareness to every dark place.
Once when I was in the midst of a nine month meditation course, I spent a month in a completely dark room. Not one speck of light. I did have a watch with a glowing face, so that I could sleep regular hours. I got up at 4 a.m. usually, and meditated for about forty-five minutes, then did pranayama and a whole set of yoga asanas, and then meditated again. I did this all day until about 6 pm. In the middle two weeks of the month I visualized that I was chained to the chair, so that I would not run screaming out of the room. This was because the flow of fear was very strong. Because I was so relaxed and at ease in meditation, every fear, every trauma, every heartache, every pain, every betrayal I had ever experienced came up to be re-experienced and felt through. I felt into every event in excruciating detail, feeling things much more vividly than I did at the time, with full-body awareness. Over and over and over and over the images and feelings came, and I had to face everything. Every last little particle of horror, every image, every bit of disgust, horror, grief, guilt, rage, shame, and dread, until only awareness remained. Underneath it all, I was in cosmic awareness. I was very aware of the whole solar system, not just the earth, but the whole field of space encompassing the earth. Simultaneously I was in a horror movie, with a continuous blood-curdling scream emerging from my cells. I went into and out of that state all day, every day, for several weeks. From the outside, I would have looked peaceful. But in my inner world, all hell had been set loose. Also, heaven had been set loose.
I want to point out the syzygy here, the balance of opposites. It was because I was so deep in meditation that the deepest fears could arise and be felt so thoroughly. If I had distrusted the process, and tensed up against the flow of fear, then this very tensing would have stopped the flow. In this way, the nervous system is self-regulating. Facing fears is mostly voluntary, because all you have to do to not have fears come up in meditation is to sabotage the depth of your meditation. To ruin your meditation, simply get involved in a struggle to concentrate; use a technique you hate or are bored by; or sit in a posture that hurts your knees, so you are involved in an artificially induced pain, rather than your deeper, existential pain.
In fact, it is quite a trick to get yourself so deeply established in serenity so that your fears can freely flood through you and be healed. You have to stay at ease and breathing easily, otherwise the healing process will stop of its own accord. So cherish the experience if and when your fears and pains come up during meditation. Know that this is healing.
If you need to, get external support, in the form of hobbies, training or therapy. Singing lessons, studying a musical instrument, engaging in athletics, taking dance or theater classes, or any of the innumerable forms of therapy can give you great tools to help you release your fears when they arise.


Facing Your Fears

November 3 2002

The biggest complaint about meditation is also one of the biggest benefits. People complain that they have many thoughts, complain about the content of thoughts, and complain, bitterly, about the feeling tone of the thoughts, the current of anxiety running through these thoughts. I keep thinking of things I don’t want to think about. This can’t be right. This can’t be meditation! I am having TOO MANY thoughts.
The principle here is that the relaxation of meditation inspires your muscles and nerves to let go of the tension they are in. You could also say that when the body recognizes it is in a state of safety, it takes that opportunity to review all the unsafe feelings it has accumulated, and heal them. If you can somehow subvert this process, and make your mind blank, then you also delete most of the long-term benefit of meditation.
In experience, what this means is that your attention will go in one moment to sublime restfulness, and in the next moment to whatever scares you.
You face your deepest fears, and bring the elixir of relaxation, poise, balance to the places you need it the most.

Innateness

October 1 2002

One of the startling, yet commonsense features of meditation is that the ability is built in to the human body. You meditate by accessing your own instinctive nature. This is very different than the idea of imposing an alien, imported discipline upon yourself, by stint of willpower.
In pratice, instinctive meditation means you can fly by the seat of your pants, follow your hunches, trust your gut feelings. Meditation is, in fact, not only dependent upon you paying attention to your gut feelings right off the bat, but it is one of the best things you can do to clarify your intuition.
Years ago, around 1975, I was studying with a woman who was teaching clairvoyance. She remarked one day that she had found that in essence, you can not teach clairvoyance. But if you teach people to meditate, their intuition becomes clear as a side effect.

June 19, 2002

The Fine Art of Playing

It is true that meditation is good for you. But that doesn't mean you have to be serious about doing it. What the hell, you are just making 20 minutes here and there to sit with your eyes closed.
There is no one tone that IS meditation. There are many: pure inquiry, play, wonder, exploration, following trails, making trails, guarding the perimeter, communing, feeding, resting, grooming, healing. These are the instinctive tones, and each will last for a few seconds or minutes until a need is fulfilled, and then the body will shift to another tone. The more you know and accept these instincts, the more you will enjoy and benefit from meditation.
Even though the body is resting more deeply than deep sleep while you are sitting there, a lot of activity is going on to tune you up for your life. You will feel sensations, emotional release, and be aware of thoughts concerning unresolved situations. This almost always feels noisy, but it's an essential part of meditation. The instinct of the body is to bring the relaxation and ease of meditation into every area of your life, every arena in which you act.
Consider not taking meditation seriously. After all, the techniques themselves are child's play. What could be simpler than following a gut feeling into your solar plexus chakra? Or enjoying your breath with all your senses, or listening to the hum of the universe in the form of a mantra, and following it as it vibrates here and there in your body?

Meditation as a Call to Adventure

November 10 2002

Meditation is always an adventure. And like all big adventures and great stories, meditative experience runs through a series of cycles. Similar to the structure of myths, novels and movies, these cycles include hearing the call to adventure, leaving the everyday world, finding the Path of the Quest, encountering obstacles, meeting allies, and returning home again with the boon or elixir that restores life.

In meditation, this cycle of adventure can take place several times a minute, and repeats and transforms itself over and over during a twenty minute meditation. This is contrary to what most of us assume about meditation. This certainly doesn't sound like an empty mind.
When you approach meditation in the morning, The Call can be a residual feeling of fatigue and a desire to wake up, or a desire to prepare for the day to come. In the evening meditation sesesion, the Call can be a different kind of fatigue, or a craving to make contact with your essence and emerge renewed, so you can have a more lively evening.
Meditative experience continually changes, often ever few seconds. Thus you may go from feeling a need for something, to following a path, such as following your breath, following a sound, or following a bodily sensation into the depths of your being. You encounter obstacles, things you do not want to face. Eventually, you attain a bit of peace or inner harmony, and then you are called back to the world. You hear a sound and wonder, what is that? Then the whole cycle begins again, and less than a minute has passed. A 20 minute meditation may be made up of 20 such cycles.
Sometimes the rhythm is faster, sometimes slower. But speed and slowness are not signs of success or failure in meditation. There are many factors that make up your periodicity.
This chart is from Whole Body Meditations. In the book I discuss this rhythm as the motor, the power source of meditation. The fundamental rhythm of life is to satisfy its needs on all levels, from raw survival, to love, to spiritual fulfillment.
I first started drawing this cycle around 1972, after teaching meditation for a couple of years. The basic structure of the phases of adventure is inspired by the work of Joseph Campbell, particularly The Hero With a Thousand Faces.
My weird job in this world has been to listen to meditators, and wanna be meditators, and coach them along their path as they learn the skills they need. I listen a lot. And what shows up, again and again, in moment-by-moment experience of meditation is a rhythm. The fundamental rhythm is a movement inward toward the Self, then a pause or a moment of contact with the inmost being, then a movement outward, to orient toward action in the warld. If you think about it, this is a perfect rhythm, and nothing could be better than that this rhythm should rule meditative experience.
But many ideals and stereotypes get in the way of accepting this rhythm.
This continually alternating cycle of being called inward, touching your inner essence, and then being called outward toward the exterior world, mirrors the rhythm of dreams, myths and stories. In meditation, the cycle occurs every few seconds. Learning to ride this rhythm is one of the primary skills of meditation.
Here the rhythm is charted as a quest. In everyday life, when we meditate we are on a quest for something, the same as when we pick up the phone to talk to a friend, turn on the TV to watch something, go to the refrigerator to look at what's there. We need something - contact, or stimulation, or relief, or entertainment, or nutrition. The urge to meditate is the same as these everyday urges.

Seeing Your Whole Life Pass Before Your Eyes

November 5 2002

One of the things that happens when you meditate is that your life flashes before your eyes. Say it’s 6 in the evening, you have just come home and are sitting on the sofa. You close your eyes to meditate, and you are craving peace, and instead you start to see scenes from your life, uncomfortable scenes and unfinished situations. This can be quite vivid. You feel you are there in the tense situation, and then the next second you are relaxed and resting in meditation, and then a few seconds later you are seeing a scene again and feeling the tension. This goes on for twenty minutes and then you open you eyes and say, Whew.
People tend to see this process as failure. I often hear, I can’t meditate because I can’t make my mind blank. Everyone knows, you have to make your mind completely blank in order to meditate. But this false sense of failure is camouflage for the feeling of dying. There is a fundamental paradox at the heart of life, which is that in order to live more fully, we have to go through a process that feels like dying. We die into life.
One of the reasons we are all so ignorant about this paradox is that we are unconscious when we sleep. Sleep is a letting go, a descent, surrender. That’s what it is. And we have been sleeping every day since the day we were born. Even before we were born.
Many of the thoughts that come during meditation are from the same review process the brain does whenever we have some time to daydream. But it’s deeper. Physiologically, meditation is a much deeper state of rest than even deep sleep, and so the content of your own life hits you in a different way. This intense restfulness happens in part because you are so sublimely undefended. You are not resisting life or what life wants to teach you.
When you emerge, you are changed. Usually, you do not remember what you were thinking about during meditation. Scenes from the movie of your life passed before your eyes, you found some peace in the midst of it, and now all you notice is that your senses are more awake to what is around you. And when you find yourself in the midst of your life, you find yourself acting with more centeredness and presence.

July 5, 2002

Relaxation and Vigilance

Relaxed attention is the most effective way to be vigilant. Meditation is a great way to cultivate relaxed attentiveness. Meditation washes the fear out of your body so that your signal-processing brain can work more accurately. Therefore meditate every day, and live large, taking great pleasure from life.
Americans and Europeans are in the position where they are being stalked, by some terrorists. The situation of being stalked is not unusual in human history. As a matter of fact, our bodies and senses and brains evolved to deal with it. Our brains are superb pattern-recognition devices. Our brains are also good at imagining things, and that is a totally different skill set than being in contact with reality. Effective vigilance means that you are in contact with your senses, and at ease, so that if you have a fear signal arise in your body, it is accurate, it is related to a direct perception of a danger. If you imagine a terrorist behind every bush, in every airplane, you will be afraid all the time, which will degrade the quality of your life, and your fear will mean nothing. Your fear mechanism is crying Wolf! continuously.
The way to let your nervous system spot the out-of-ordinary, the anomaly, is to be deeply relaxed and attentive as you go about your day. The more immersed you are in the sensual, sensory texture of what an ordinary day is, and the more at home you are in your environment, the better you will be at spotting actual danger.
What does it mean when 700 million people are being stalked by a couple of hundred or a few thousand individuals? It means that the chances of encountering a terrorist on any given day, or even any given year, are one in a million. Through the media - the Internet, television, radio and newspapers, we hear about things happening all over the world. This makes us like dogs with super hearing and super vision, that can see every mailman on every street in every town in the country - there is always something to bark at, every second of the day.
The number-one killer in Western civilization is age. People live, on average, into their late 70's and early 80's. Historically this is amazing, since the average life span for much of the last few thousand years was about 35. Then there are the stress-related illnesses, such as heart disease. And down the list are traffic accidents. 40,000 Americans die each year on the road. A momentary distraction in traffic, reaching down to push a button on the radio or answer the phone, may be more dangerous to you than all the terrorists in the world. So the extra stress you feel from imagining yourself in danger, and the distraction, can actually be a much greater danger to you than anything outside of you.
In one of my books, maybe Meditation Made Easy, published several years ago, I recommended that everyone in Western Civilization read The Gift of Fear, by Gavin De Becker, an expert on celebrity stalking cases. This is the guy the cops call when they want to know how dangerous a threat letter is.
De Becker writes, "I strongly recommend caution and precaution, but many people believe - and are even taught - that we must be extra alert to be safe. In fact, this usually decreases the likelihood of perceiving hazard and could reduce safety. Alertly looking around while thinking, "Someone could jump out from behind that hedge, maybe there's someone hiding in that car" replaces perception of what actually is happening with imaginings of what could happen. We are fare more open to every signal when we don't focus on the expectation of specific signals.
He says that if we are "focused intently on what might happen, then no signal is reserved for when there actually is risk." (p. 280).
I used to study martial arts. My teacher was the most relaxed human being I have ever seen when it comes to walking down the street. He was in deep pleasure as he strolled, sort of glided along, with his energy field greeting everyone playfully. There was no fear in his body, so if he got a fear signal, which was rare, it meant something. There was someone plotting mischief.
Washing the fear out of the body is one of the most uncomfortable aspects of meditation. Almost everyone complains about it, and many people quit meditating because of this. What happens during meditation is that the body goes into a state of restfulness and relaxation deeper than deep sleep, and then while there in that state it reviews all the signals tagged as stressors and dangers. In other words, just when you are most relaxed, you start thinking of everything that bugs you.
The body does not want to have a sense impression tagged as danger! crank up the adrenaline! unless it is really necessary. The body is all about efficiency in action. So it take advantage of the relaxation that meditation provides to go over and over a stressful thought or memory until the unnecessary fear is washed away. If, for example, you have to give a presentation tomorrow at work, and you are anxious about it, your brain/body will review it over and over until you can breathe easily while imagining giving that presentation. This happens spontaneously, and is almost impossible to prevent. If you stay with it, allow the thoughts and keep coming back to your meditation focus when you can, then eventually the excess tension will be released. And you will do better while giving the presentation.
June 30, 2002

The Sweetness of Fatigue

When you are tired, at the end of a long day of expressing yourself into life, there is nothing better than to lie down and rest. There is no drug so delicious as the soft vibrating buzz in your nerves that you feel at the beginning of a well-deserved rest. And to be able to experience this consciously is one of life's little mysteries and joys. I think dogs know this one well. They love nothing more than to run and chase things to the point of exhaustion, then lie down and savor the fatigue in their legs and everywhere.
Sometimes I lie down to meditate, when I am tired, and just savor the buzz of fatigue. Other times I sit up, because that is a better way of surrendering to the sensation.
The fatigue I am talking about here is the sense of being well-used. There are other kinds of tiredness, many kinds, including a chronic feeling of fatigue that comes from not getting enough rest, day after day, month after month. For now, let's just look at this phenomenon of the sensations in the muscles after using yourself well.
Many people enjoy their afternoon or evening meditation more than the one in the morning, because of the superb sensations of rest.
Meditation has always been one of the most pleasurable things in life for me, because of this interplay of action and rest, being able to feel deeply into fatigue and let it go more quickly. It really helps if you have activities you love, so that you can get tired doing them, and then find repose in meditation.
June 28, 2002

It's About Rhythm

Meditation by itself is not THAT beneficial. Not so great that century after century people would rave about it so. Even though meditation is refreshing, healing, and energizing. leads you to this vast view of things, so that you see your incarnation here on Earth from the perspective of the whole Solar System. Still, to just meditate here and there, or go off for a year and meditate, is not that wonderful a thing. It does not necessarily transform your life permanently.
What's great is to meditate a small amount - yer basic 25 minutes or half-hour, and then go about your day. Then you carry with you some of that new perspective, just a trace. And a trace is all we can handle, all we can truly integrate in a day. Your perspective is just 1% enhanced.
I've done both - I have gone away for a year-long meditation, once even two years, and I have meditated for 34 years or so, half an hour in the morning and then again before dinner. Now, I needed those year-longs, because I was so wounded, and because I am a meditation teacher. But many of my most profound evolutions were when I was working hard all day long every day, and using my morning and evening meditations to rest up, tune up, and meet the challenges I was facing. So it's the rhythm of a day - meditating in the morning before entering the fray, then again after your major phase of activity. That before-dinner meditation gives you a chance to let go of the fatigue and stress of the day, and emerge refreshed for the evening's activities. It's this rest/activity rhythm that is so profoundly evolutionary.
June 27, 2002

Elegance in Meditation

When you are learning meditation for the first time, or learning anew, you will probably spend some time immersed in the details of how to meditate. As I mention below, you may need to refresh your experience and understanding of what attention is, what the senses are, and how the instincts propel you. For awhile, this may seem complicated. After you get enough of a sense of all this to move on, let go of the details and sleep on it. Let your brain put it together into a new mode of being. Then you will emerge into a fresh state of simplicicy, or elegance. The American Heritage Dictionary defines elegance as "refinement, grace, and beauty in movement, appearance, or manners." Simple elegance on a perceptual level feels exquisite.
This process of simplification is akin to listening to music. Say that you have a favorite band. For some time, you have been just putting on their music, as enjoying it. Then, for some reason, you undertake a study of each of the instruments being played. You learn all about the type of guitars, drums, and synthesizers being used, and maybe about the mixers and studio processes employed. The next time you sit on your sofa and listen to the band, it will be a different experience. Your attention is much more complex. You will hear all kinds of details. But are you enjoying more? At first, maybe not. But when you let your brain handle the details, you will be able to listen with the same kind of simpicity as before, and yet with richer sensing.
June 21, 2002

MTV Mind

Last night, teaching at The Learning Annex, I asked a woman what she experienced when she closed her eyes. Gesturing with both hands, she said she was aware of dozens of tiny visual flashes, each a photograph or moving picture, but she couldn't see any of them clearly. Another night, a woman remarked,"What I see when I close my eyes is like watching 50 TV's simultaneously, each showing a different MTV video." Then a guy chimed in saying, "Yeah, my mind is like going into Circuit City. Rows and rows of TV's and stereos and video recorders flickering and putting out noise." I said, "What's on?" He said, "I don't know, the whole fuckin' world. Everything under the sun."
It is interesting how when people close their eyes to meditate, they tend to think of whatever they find there as a problem unless it is total, instant silence.
I said, "So your mind is a multimedia center. If this was 50,000 years ago you'd probably be thinking of all the animals you saw that day. Maybe the fertility dance around the fire at the last full moon. Awareness of imagery is not a problem. The speed at which thoughts move is not a problem. You don't have to shut anything up. This is all your brain's data processing in action. Your tracking, hunting, sorting instincts in action. Those same instincts that will lead you into deep meditation. Meditation is riding the instincts into the inner world. Trust them now and honor them, and learn how they work."
June 20, 2002

Attack Of The Killer To-do List

What sometimes happens when you first begin to relax into your breathing is that you become aware of thoughts that you have been holding at bay. All of a sudden you remember the things you forgot to do or could have done better. Then you start remembering all the things you have way in the back of your brain but didn’t have time to think of in the past week. This process is painful, like being bitten by fleas or besieged by tiny conscience elves with their sharp little pickaxes. Ouch.
You have opened the door from the top of your mind to the next level in. Now what?
Say that you start doing one of the exercises in this book and within a few seconds you begin to feel relaxed. That sensation lasts for a moment but then you find yourself thinking of the many things you forgot to do today, yesterday, last week, and last year and feeling bad about them. There could be specific mental pictures, or it could be a vague sense of incompletion. What should you do?
Don’t fight the feeling, give it space and time. Allow the process to engulf you. The human brain is built to know that there are many things that need doing, and it seeks to optimize the rhythm for accomplishing them. The brain is built to take advantage of any quiet time and use it for sorting through its to-do list.
This briefing/debriefing function of the brain is essential for peak performance. In situations where people really care about doing their best—in athletic competition and in the military, for example—there is a briefing before and a debriefing after. In debriefing, you review all the mistakes as well as the successes so that you learn how to improve your game.
The regret and embarrassment you feel during this process is a necessary part of learning. It’s an aspect of your conscience: One of your instincts is saying, Hey, you are neglecting your health/social life/money/housing/playtime/rest/work. The intent is to help you bring yourself into balance. We are always neglecting some part of ourselves, some instinct, and that hurts. When we let this pain wash through us and we breathe with it, we stay connected to those neglected parts.
So accept every item on your mental to-do list and learn to breathe easily with them. Over time, the pain will pass and be replaced by pleasure, focus, or energy for action.

Welcome Yourself

If you are wondering about how to get into meditation, here is something you can do right now. Take a couple of minutes, sit down and welcome yourself. Open your arms wide to embrace the air, open your heart wide with a sense of invitation. Take the same attitude of gratitude you would to seeing a friend after a long absence, or a child, a cat, horse, or dog.
We all know how to welcome someone, how to radiate to them the sense that we are grateful they have come to be with us for a bit. This is an innate ability. When we greet, we extend our heart, we give something.
The secrets of meditation all have to do with welcoming life as it flows through you and shows up, knocking on the door of your heart. And life is always flowing through you with every breath, and in many other ways. So you can select any moment – now is as good as any – and put out the welcome mat for your soul.
Be Willing to Feel

To greet yourself or to receive an old friend requires the same courage. Courage means to have heart. And it requires heart because there is always the need to feel. When someone comes to see you, there is always the need to feel with the stories you are both living, and the stories of everyone related. There is a whole universe of sensations and emotions to tolerate and embrace.
In any meeting, there is joy at the reunion, and sorrow for the losses, obstacles, and the distance. When you meet yourself, it can feel as if ten friends and relatives have dropped in on you unannounced. Everyone starts talking at once, and the noise in your head escalates. You may want to say, "Everyone shut up and sit down," but that would be so unfriendly.
What if you want silence? Well, you can't impose it – unfortunately there is no OFF BUTTON for the brain – but if you listen with complete attention to all the voices, after awhile, often about 90 minutes, a sense of silence will gradually permeate the room. People will start to yawn and stretch and look around, and settle down. In the outer world, you could do this, if you hosted a party, even if a bunch of friends dropped in on you. If you don't have 90 minutes right now, give it 10 minutes a day for the next 9 days, or 5 minutes a day for 18 days, and see what happens.
Can you extend the same greeting to yourself, to the unknown but familiar self? Yes, you can. Everyone who meditates encounters this ongoing challenge, of how to greet all the aspects of yourself that show up, drop in, surprise you, and talk your ear off.


How Tension Resolves Itself in Meditation

You know how life seems to boil down to these impossible sets of opposites? Take that new job or stay in this one? Stay with this person or break up? Get married or stay single. Get divorced or stay together. Go back to college, or drop out of college. Stay in therapy or declare myself graduated? Start going to church, or yoga, or the ashram, or stop spending my time there. Have another child or leave it at one or two?
Often people come to learn to meditate when they are on the horns of such a dilemma. Their brains are percolating with conflicting desires, alternate routes, dreams and possibilities. This feels like noise to them, and they want relief. They want to be able to quiet their minds and see clearly. I usually ask people what brought them here, to a meditation session. What is propelling you?
They talk, and sometimes people need to talk for 45 minutes, an hour, or more, laying out the direction their life is taking, the choices ahead, with the subplot, "I need meditation to help me with this. I sense I need something to equip me for my journey."
At a certain point, which varies with everyone, they have said what's on their mind. They have told the story, run out of words. Their brain just stops doing what it was doing. They pause, and we just look at each other. We look out the window. The silence lengthens, and all I do is enjoy the silence, in a way that invites the other person to do the same.
Then I might ask something such as, "What are you experiencing now?"
Often the answer is something like, "I can see all the particles of thoughts, the elements of the story I just told you, sort of dancing in space. I feel peaceful, relaxed." Of course, no one says this so succinctly. It comes out in unique, individual ways, "I feel tingling," or "I feel like I am half asleep, but I am actually very alert," or, "I am just here, at peace. I feel like I can't move." It is usually difficult for people to talk at this point - they don't want to. I ask them to speak so that they themselves will realize what they are experiencing, as part of learning how to go there on their own.
What is going on here, part of it, is that the urgency behind the story, the tension the person has been under, has transformed just slightly, into electricity and space. If you look up the meaning of tension, all of them are relevant here, and you will see that one of the meanings is "voltage or potential; electromotive force." What was added, by them coming into the session, was a bit of relaxation and perhaps you could say space and time. I give them plenty of time to just be here. And with the addition of those simple elements, the person starts to go into meditation on her own.
Once you start to let the conflicts and tensions and polarities in your life have a home in your meditation, you are on your way. These very tensions provide the electricity, the power for meditation. All those rapid thoughts flying everywhere are the creative sizzling of your brain at work, your intelligence at work. When you breathe with the tension, relax into your worries, this is when the magic happens, and you start to turn your enemy - your problem - into your ally, your power source.
When we have a problem, the brain starts to generate solutions. Sometimes the solution isn't found on the level we are perceiving. So what the brain does is to rewire itself to have more processing power, so that the answer will become clear. The brain has many different areas, for each of the senses, for emotion, for self-preservation, for intellectual tasks, for moving muscles, regulating metabolism, activating sexual behavior, and timing your biological clock. And many other areas. Sometimes, in the way you are wired, the answer is not there. There may be too many walls or disconnections between areas, so you don't get it. You have left out too much of yourself. So, when you present yourself with a problem, the brain sets to work making new connections so that you become a person who can breeze through what previously was a problem.
When people meditate, the basic creativity of adaptation is at work, shimmering there in their awareness. I never ask people to "come up with an answer" during meditation. What I do is invite them to meditate, and then afterwards, I ask them to sense their bodies, re-bond with the outer world, and notice what they feel like doing.
The answers come when you are in action. That is where we need our creativity to be functioning, to come up with solutions to our dilemmas and paradoxes and problems. During meditation, the brain is tuning itself, making connections, taking care of business, changing the oil, sorting things out. It's after meditation that you see the benefits. That is why I say if you are wondering what type of meditation to do and if it is working, look at your life. If you are functioning better, then you are doing the right kind of meditation for you. If you are not functioning better - in your own terms - then you are probably NOT doing the kind of meditation that suits you. There are thousands of techniques - use only the ones that help you to thrive, and use them only in a way that really suits you. Not too much and not too little.


Trust Your Instincts

Meditating is one of the great things you can do for yourself, your health, and those you love. Meditation is a way of accessing your natural self-healing instincts. The practice is so restful that within 5 minutes of beginning a meditation, there is a 17% reduction in oxygen consumption, compared to the 8% reduction of deep sleep, according to research conducted at Harvard Medical School over the last 34 years and replicated This allows the body to heal itself deeply; cholesterol goes down, stress hormones are reduced, and the immune system is boosted. All the standard meditation techniques produce similar physiological effects, but the more natural your technique feels to you, the deeper you will go. Your technique should feel totally relaxing - a refuge, a vacation, a rejuvenating retreat.
If you are not meditating everyday, it could be that you do not know enough about the way your individuality meets meditation. You may be trying to squeeze yourself into too small a box.
Meditation techniques are a way of paying attention to the rhythm of life renewing itself. You, your body, are a local manifestation of life, an aspect of nature. In meditation, you are not paying attention to your own existence, so much as to the intersection of rhythms, of your life and the life around you. This is the whole secret. As you attend to the intersecting rhythms, for example of your breath, which is an exchange between your body and the body of the world, you can fall in love with how life renews itself. It is this falling in, this deep appreciation of life, that triggers the innate physiological response we call meditation.
The Tibetans say there are 80,000 meditation techniques. How do you know which ones work for you? To meditate every day and get the benefits, we need a practice that fits us so perfectly that we want to do it, crave it, and always find time for it. For this, personal instruction is best. Instinctive Meditation, pioneered by Lorin Roc he, is the art of discerning what is needed for each individual to thrive in meditation.
In one-to-one sessions, Lorin asks you a series of questions, such as what does your breathing feel like, how do you experience light, space and gravity. In this casual talking, you tend to slip into your own native meditation practice. It is yours, and happens naturally, yet it will resemble quite precisely one of the thousands of classical techniques.
Lorin offers private instruction, classes, telephone sessions and email support for those wishing to develop a meditation practice that suits their individuality. If you want to explore the idea of getting some meditation training, call 310 821-0620 or email Lorin


A Vaccination Against Stress

December 18 2002

Day in and day out, why does it seem like half of your meditation time is spent reviewing past, present, and future stressful events?
The short answer is, because you have a life, and meditation is a situation in which your body tunes itself up to perform at its best in that life. The purpose of meditation is that you live a full life, not that you have a groovy experience in meditation. Part of what the nervous system does when you meditate is to vaccinate itself against stress. It calls up a memory particle of stress, a weakened fragment of a stressor, and then allows the psychopsysiological immunne system generate a response, an adaptation to that stress.
Stress is a natural and protective response to situations of danger. It is really an exquisite total - body set of changes that prepare the body to deal with immediate physical emergencies - within the next few seconds. If your body was a car, the stress response would be revving the engine up to redline. Great for fast getaways, but causes unnecessary wear and tear if you do it all day.
Problems arise when we have our threat - detectors set to go AHOOOGA every time a dog barks or we even think of something that scares us. The stress response is not very useful if you are meeting a new person, an important client, asking for a raise, asking someone to marry you, talking to your kids, driving in traffic, or most other situations. The stress energy is only good for a few minutes of high - octane running or fighting, and then you are exhausted. In fact, many challenging and even dangerous situations we encounter can actually be dealt with better when we are relaxed.
The brain is designed to keep track of every possible threat and have a continually updated map of where danger is, where food is, where safe places are. But if you do not let your brain do its necessary maintenance, there will be a lot of random stress - firings during the day and night, which will reduce your quality of life and lead to stupid fights with people you love. Maybe to pointless fights with strangers.
Meditation is a kind of maintenance time for the brain and senses, in which the nervous system reviews everything that is bothersome, every threat signal, and then revises its approach. Nature loves elegance, and the body strives always to have the most elegant, economical approach to any challenge.
What happens is, meditation is a state of rest and relaxation deeper than sleep. An incredible resource for healing and renewal. In that sublime repose, your entire body and mind can review what the challenges are and practice dealing with them. This mental rehearsal is just as important as the inner silence.
This is why teachings developed by and for monks have only limited relevance for people who live in the world. Monks and nuns attempt to not have a personal life. They try to kill off attachments, and not be bonded to anyone on a personal level. They are bonded only to their tradition. They are very attached to their tradition, their robes, and their religious order. And the whole idea is that these do not change very much from century to century.
June 18, 2002

The Stockholm Effect

Human beings have lots of innate survival strategies, instincts and reflexes that come out at odd times. One of these is called (for lack of a better term) "The Stockholm Effect" and it refers to the phenomena of bonding with your captor. The term comes from the events of 1973 at a bank in Stockholm, Sweden, in which two ex-convicts took three women and a man hostage for six days, continually threatening their lives but also attending, in minimal ways, to their bodily needs. All four of the hostages reported having warm feelings for their captors, even months later, and two of the women later got engaged to their captors.
If you are taken hostage, and kept there long enough, you will start to identify with the terrorists who have deprived you of your freedom. If a group of AK-47-weilding creeps takes a bunch of bank customers hostage, exerts complete domination over them, and then gradually relaxes, eventually the women will start to feel sexually attracted to the terrorists and the men will start to see their point of view, how yeah, they have reasonable demands. All the hostages become docile and compliant. This is a survival instinct because if you are handcuffed on the floor for days, and the captors have total power over you, there is no overt way of resisting. You have to join with them. When they give you a sip of water or loosen the cuffs, it is perceived as a small kindness. The prey gradually comes to identify with and ally with the predator. In human history, and among animals, it often happens that your tribe is taken over by a new dominant figure with bigger teeth or a club and you have to adapt.
You can observe the Stockholm Effect at work whenever people are hostage to anything - their computer, their computer's OS (operating system), their religion or guru, or a dominating and terrifying boss who has power over your job. The Stockholm effect can come into play if you are sick and wind up in the hands of a doctor who gives you powerful drugs; you'll start to bond with the treatment.
In the field of meditation, it is very common for Dominant Males to present themselves as the Guru of the Age, The Only Salvation. Or else they have brought a Very Special Technology which is the Path to Salvation (usually called Enlightenment in meditation circles.) In other words, you all are their hostage. Their disciples, buying into this, become bonded to their captor.
Additionally, the meditation practice itself can become a captor, an internalized hostage-taker. This is because of the tendency people have to suppress themselves and try to crush their own individuality during meditation. Meditation, the one thing you would think is about personal freedom, becomes in this case a tool of self-repression and enslavement. I've lost about a third of my friends to gurus, because one of the related effects is isolation from other points of view - cult members cut themselves off from others who do not share the same hostageism.
This points to why I teach the way I do. I want you to bond with yourself, with life, and with nature. I don't want you to be bonded obsessively to one technique or to a particular personality, although you are free to be entertained by me.
Hostage to the Computer

I used to do computer consulting, and one of the surprises is to walk into someone's house, hear their story, and realize that this person just spent an entire Lost Weekend attempting to reinstall Windows, in order to get access to their checkbook which is in Quicken, which crashed, or their address and calendar program which they just put their entire itinerary in. Their computer is holding them hostage. It astounded me that regular people, non-technical people, would work for 12 hours continuously trying to figure out how to get their computer to work. They have bonded to their captor. And when the computer is eventually a little nice to them, they are immensely grateful. I think Bill Gates intuitively understands the Stockholm Effect and so the entire US is partially in thrall to Him and His minions.
The U.S. Navy may be somewhat bonded to their captor, Microsoft. Imagine what happens when an Ageis missile cruiser is completely run by Windows, and the OS crashes or goes off on a tangent. Would the Navy go to war to preserve the Microsoft monopoly?

June 17, 2002

Pleasure and Beguilement

For a human being with a reasonably intact nervous system, meditation is a pleasure. To close the eyes and savor the flow of life for a few minutes is enjoyable, slightly enchanting, and refreshing. You don't have to concentrate - you just have to tolerate the intensity of relaxation. Most meditation techniques call our attention to the flow of life in the form of breath, thoughts, sensations, blood, and other things that stream through us. Meditation also invites us to experience the underlying stability, the hum and vibration that perpetuates itself throughout time. So it's quietly joyful to just sit there for half an hour, being.
Life is beautiful, just the mechanics of it. Or, you could say, our nervous systems are designed such that they perceive reality as beautiful. We love to experience the design of the universe and of bodies. Meditation is the practice of letting your attention be called to the beauty you love and then falling in. That's what it's about. Let yourself be transformed by being immersed in the experience of what you love. Then open you eyes and go for it. Go make the world a better place.
When meditation is pleasurable, effort is not needed. It is not work to focus. But when the nervous system is not operating very well, the pleasure is not there and meditation is boring. Then effort seems called for. And when meditation is effort, and feels like work, you are by definition imposing something on yourself, rather than revealing something.
For some people meditation is not effortless. They can not find the quiet space underneath thoughts and sensations. This happens to me once in awhile. There are times, if I am really tired, or sick, when I can't sense anything of real interest that calls me, other than pain. I don't force it, I just pay attention to the pain and noise in my nervous system. But what about people who can't find the naturalness in meditation? The good news is that most meditation teaching is oriented toward effort. So they're in good company. My kind of approach only works welll for people who are organized such that simple breathing is a pleasure. I think this is about half of the population of people who want to meditate.
The innate pleasure of existing is important because if you find the act of perceiving to be pleasure, you won't have to force yourself to do it. This means that your whole body, your whole attention can become absorbed in meditating. You are not split, with one part of you trying to get you to focus and pay attention and block out distractions, and other parts of you rebelling against the martial law you have imposed.


The Marijuana Papers

Meditators get used to employing their sensory nervous systems as a testing platform. Meditation trains you to be alert to little tiny changes, so you start tracking all kinds of things. Some foods and substances dull the senses for varying lengths of time, so meditators tend to avoid them - but much of this is highly individual. Other things may be clarifying and strengthening. When you sit with your sensory nervous system for an hour a day, just noticing the space between thoughts, you perceive all kinds of nuances. You want the doors and windows of perception to be clean and clear.
People often ask what to eat, and if becoming a vegetarian is useful or necessary. My answer is practical and based on observation, not theological. I say, it's weird what you can get away with. Eating meat often makes for better meditations, and coffee, smoking cigarettes, and regular food that agrees with you is just fine. Alcohol in moderation has no lasting effect on meditation, meaning, if you have some in the evening you can meditate the next morning. Eating food you don't like, just because it is supposed to be "healthy" may interfere with your feeling of health and your pleasure in existing.
Various things can interfere with your baseline pleasure, the joy that you sense when you just close your eyes and breath. When I am sick, for example, meditation is not pleasurable usually. A cold does not influence me in this regard, but the flu does. When I have drugs in my system, for example after I come back from the dentist and he used novocaine, it's somewhat painful to meditate. The adrenaline they mix in with the novocaine (to make it more effective and restrict blood flow) leaves me with a slight hangover.
One odd thing some meditation teachers have noticed is that marijuana tends to dull the senses in a way that interfers with enjoying meditation, and the effects seem to last for a couple of weeks. During the 1960's this was observed, by teachers who were seeing large numbers of college students. Some people weren't "getting it." They would close the eyes to follow their internal experience, pay attention for awhile, and there was just nothing interesting going on there. Gradually the teachers identified marijuana as correlating with the dullness, and started experimenting with a few days, then a week, then two weeks as a suggested abstinence before learning to meditate. I became a meditation teacher in 1970, and found that this seemed to be true. I lived and taught in Laguna Beach from 1970 to 1975, and would often hear my students complain that they smoked some pot and then couldn't get back into meditating. What appears to happen is that the marijuana changes the subtle chemistry of the sensory system that meditation exploys.
Take your average 20 to 50 year old male or female. Invite them to pay attention to their breathing for a few minutes. The simplest of meditations. Chances are they will feel enough pleasure from the sensations that they keep coming back to the breath no matter how many thoughts they have. They'll have an enjoyable experience and emerge refreshed. Now take the same person but they got stoned a week before. When they do the same meditation, they tend to feel bored - so what. Ehhhhh. They just feel their own dullness. As if they have smog inside their brains and can't see or feel what is there. This is usually the case, but not always. I have interviewed people on chemotherapy, who use marijuana, and it helps tremendously, they say, and really helps them to be able to meditate.
This brings up the question about those who smoke marijuana daily and meditate. How is it that they can get away with it? Well, everyone is different. One thing teaching meditation for 32 years has taught me is that everyone is different - as different as you have senses to notice. Perhaps their nervous systems have learned to work around, or through, the marijuana smog. Perhaps the marijuana smog protects them from a worse smog of some kind. Like a white noise generator you have going so that other noises don't bother you.
I live in an apartment building on the water in a marina, and there almost always a breeze flowing from the ocean. Even so, the shape of the building creates eddies and swirls so you can smell when people are smoking cigarettes or pot. So I know that a couple of my neighbors get up in the morning and smoke massive amounts of marijuana each and every day. And sometimes they smoke in the afternoon as well. Some of the smoke circles around and comes into my apartment, and I don't like it so I go down the hall and open the door that faces the ocean and let the breeze flow.
This must be their meditation, the way they tune themselves for the day. Like my morning cup of coffee that I sip as settle into meditation. And I really, really love coffee. (Check out the Inca Harvest Espresso from www.thanksgivingcoffee.com)
It appears that maybe 30% of the people I know are daily marijuana users. They just live with it in their bodies. I don't say anything, but it is odd, because these are people who to me seem to be born to meditate - they are fun-loving, music-loving, intelligent and full of zest. They are just stuck with using marijuana as their meditation, for better or worse. They are married to the herb, with all the side-effects that sucking smoke into your mouth, throat and lungs every day brings.
One of my friends just went to the doctor because he'd burned a hole in the back of his throat. He didn't know it was smoking marijuana that did it - he just noticed that the back of his throat was really sore. The doctor examined him and said, "Do you smoke?"and he said, "No. Never." The doctor looked puzzled for a minute, and said, "Oh, but you smoke marijuana." My friend nodded yes. Then the doctor looked at the ceiling for a few seconds, apparently recalling his college days and visualizing. Then he said, "You use such and such a type of bong pipe." The doctor had figured out, from the burn pattern, what type of device my friend uses.

June 15, 2002

You Already Know How

Meditation is built-in to the human body. The ability is just there, waiting to be used. You access meditation by putting your attention in something you love, and resting there. The meditation techniques of the world call our attention to the dynamics of life renewing and evolving itself.
Think of any meditation technique - what is it? Putting the attention in some aspect of how life pulsates, and the relationship of that pulsation to the underlying silence. This is very musical and rhythmic. In music and drumming, a beat is the pause, and there is a bit of silence there.
Approached this way, meditating feels like giving in to something you crave. There is a taboo you have to be willing to break, a sense of nah, it can't be this immediate.
Although what I am saying is a bit counterintuitive at first, if you check it out you will see that it is actually very intuitive. Since meditation has been practiced primarily by monks for the last 2000 years, the ease and naturalness has been obscured. Monks can't tell the local farmer how much fun they are having, while he labors in the field all day to give them food to eat.
The way I talk about meditation may seem unspiritual and unreligious. This is true. I do not see spirituality as something separate from daily living. Meditation is so intensely spiritual in its effects that I find it is useful to emphasize its sensuality, so that you do not become ethereal.

What is a Meditation Technique?

Meditation is the process of putting your attention into the dynamics of life renewing itself. To meditate, you allow your attention to be called to some aspect you can sense (through any or all of your senses) of life's dynamics. For example, breath is a common meditation focus. We breathe every couple of seconds, and life renews itself. You could meditate with the heartbeat. Or with the pulsing of a mantra. In essence, the technique of meditation is to engage your attention through the senses and entertain the play of all these dynamics - attention, rhythm, silence or space or stillness. In so doing we become educated, we refresh ourselves in life's essence. Meditation is always a relationship, of awareness, the senses, and the focus of perception.

Drugs and Meditation

Some of my friends and associates do not like this naturalness of meditation, and they object to me "popularizing" meditation. They say I am "watering down" the teachings. I say yes, I am reframing the teachings on meditation as being as basic as water, air, sunlight, and earth. I say yes, I do make meditation earthy and sensual. Many of my friends want a meditation that sounds glamorous, difficult, exotic. They want their teacher with a cool-sounding Tibetan or Thai name, wearing robes. Name brand is very important to them, and it really needs to be foreign. The meditation technique they do is more like visiting Tibet than inhabiting their own body. Because they make meditation into work, they tend to do drugs to relax. I don't do drugs or smoke marijuana, and I ask the people who work with me to abstain from them. But this means I have to get the relief I crave, the intensity, and the mind-blowing revelations, from meditation and living, not from drugs or substances.
The marijuana smokers, ecstasy takers, LSD droppers, and ayahuasca journeyers I know tend to be interesting people, and they are usually much more fun to talk to than meditators. But I think it may be a separate path. They can afford to make meditation dry and tedious because they do drugs in order to relax and be themselves. Then they do mindfulness meditations to make amends to themselves for the lost weekends on ecstasy. They have a whole relationship going on with this.
The situation is weird because it is so awkward to ask people, for example meditation teachers, in public if they do illegal drugs. I don't think marijuana should be illegal, but it is. Used properly, it can be profoundly healing. But you can't really know where a teacher is coming from unless you know whether they do drugs or not. So many people are split - they preach one thing, say an arid, pretentious meditation technique, and then to get real and be sensual they do drugs.
If teachers were honest, and it is difficult to be honest about illegal drugs, then they would say, well, my REAL practice is to smoke a little weed every morning, then meditate for half and hour, and on weekends I really get stoned and then meditate. Others smoke marijuana or hash every evening.
The situation is similar with legal drugs, such as SSRI's (selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors). I know many meditators who do the standard monastic life-denying meditations that are so widely advacated, cutting themselves off and detaching. Keep in mind that most meditation teachers are either monks or were trained by monks, or were trained by people who were trained by monks. And what a monk is, is someone who has taken vows of celibacy, poverty, and obedience. Their path is to deny sexuality, deny desire, and deny individuality. The idea is, you can put all your eggs in one basket, all your desires into the desire for God or enlightenment. Detaching from your desires causes depression, but if you are a monk, so what if you are depressed for ten, twenty, thirty years? You are on welfare, all you have to do is meditate and pray, and depression seems spiritual anyway. It is well-known among teachers such as myself who deal with long-term meditators that many of them are depressed. They bought into the whole semi-monastic mindset of meditation and have killed or severely diminished their ego, their zest for living, and their desires. Finally, after years of this, they are taking antidepressant drugs and meditating. Lots of meditation teachers are taking antidepressants and don't talk about it in public. But their real practice is, they do depressing meditations and then take antidepressants.
I can't afford to do that. I can't afford to have meditation be a split-off, dissociated state. I need all my worlds to come together as one. This is my yoga, my alchemy, my syzygy of the inner and the outer selves.
I prefer to have my meditation be the time when I get real and sink into myself. I prefer to have meditation be my drug of choice, meaning, the chemicals my body produces on its own when I am in a state of restfulness much deeper than deep sleep. The only rule is that I pay attention to everything, and exclude nothing. When it's not painful, because I am facing what an idiot I am, meditation is ecstatic and joyous. Ah.
References - see Zig Zag Zen edited by Allan Badiner at zigzagzen.com.

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