Learning to Meditate
To help you learn to meditate and get the benefits, we offer a spectrum of information. You can read books, listen to audio material, attend workshops, call and have individual coaching, attend workshops, and get intensive one-to-one instruction. Honor your learning style.
How you go about learning to meditate depends on your daily life – how much time do you have, what are your needs, what pace do you prefer. Just start.
What Are the Skills of Meditation?
There are a dozen or so little skills involved in learning to meditate. They are all great skills to have, and will help you in love, sports, hiking, hunting, enjoying music, and making love. These skills have to do with how you meet yourself – how you use your senses to see, feel, hear, balance, and move with the energies of your being. Every second you are meditating you will be flooded with sensations, images, remembered conversations, and all the emotions in your body. This can feel peaceful, sublime, better than music, if you welcome all your inner energies.
The challenge in meditation is that you need to have all these skills available to you right away, within a few seconds or minutes of beginning to meditate. Otherwise, you will start to develop bad habits that will take longer to unlearn than meditation takes to learn.
Elegance in Action
In this, meditation is like any physical sport. Think of any athletic activity – swimming, running, tennis, golf, basketball, or even just walking. What looks good and feels good is elegance – when we are moving with minimal effort, using only the exact muscles that need to be used each second, flowing along. Nature loves elegance, and the purpose of athletic training is to help each athlete discover and have in muscle memory the moves that work best with her or his body and sport. This is true even in things like writing by hand or typing on a computer. It's true for singers – much of vocal coaching is about learning to use only the muscles that should be used.
Much of the difficulty people have in meditation is dealing with these inefficient habits they have invented. Remember, meditation is invisible behavior – very few people on earth know how to sense what you are experiencing as you sit there with your eyes closed. I could train people to do this, but for reasons I can't fathom, no one has asked me to.
Anyway, because meditation is invisible, almost no one has ever gotten good coaching on their meditation technique. People stumble on the correct internal skills by accident and usually because they "break the rules." For one reason or another, they give themselves permission to customize their practice. Most meditators I have talked to in the past 37 years are a composite of little things that work for them, plus some attitudes thrown in that are totally inappropriate. It's a very strange thing about the meditation literature also – it is as if the actual skills of meditating are not known or discussed. Everything else in the universe is discussed, but notI think what has happened is that the literature is so vast, that the skills beginners need are overlooked. Also, in the past, people learned to meditate by going and living with their teacher and being their slave for ten or twenty years or more. In such a situation, you learn by osmosis. At least, some people can learn this way.
By the way, sometimes it is better to NOT study meditation at all – study something that is observable – yoga asanas, swimming, Aikido, singing – and get feedback from a coach or trainer. Then after an hour of that, close your eyes and just let yourself be.
The following is a statement of the skills – unedited. I just wrote this quickly one day at 5 in the morning, which is when I do much of my writing, and I probably said this much better in Meditation Made Easy.
By the way, the Search Inside feature at amazon.com is quite interesting (amazon link).
The skills are:
- the ability to enjoy simple things, such as the rhythm of the breath flowing through your body in every moment. You can develop your enjoyment skills by doing anything you love: listen to your favorite music, look at your favorite color, step outside and feel the sun on your skin, do your favorite yoga pose. Savor something simple, some simple pleasure for a couple of minutes, and then meditate.
- the ability to tolerate thoughts coming and going of their own accord. Thoughts includes mental images, mental movies, imagined conversations, memories of conversations, and all kinds of sensations. This is a skill and also a decision. You have to decide that thoughts are a part of meditation, and stop complaining – forever.
- the ability and willingness to feel the tension, the emotional and physical tension that goes with each thought. Each thought comes along with a symphony of tension. If you tense against the tension to try to block it out, you are lost. Your task is to tolerate the sensations and relax into them as best you can. The muscular and emotional tension you feel is not just background noise, it is information about the exact way your body, your senses and your nervous system is involved in that topic. Becoming aware of tension is almost always unpleasant.
- the ability to be enchanted, charmed, or simply enjoy basic life processes such as the sun on your skin, the feeling of the breeze on your face, the sound of surf, the sound of wind in the trees, the feeling of breath flowing in and flowing out, the sound of your favorite song played very quietly, the crackle of a fireplace, the smell of flowers blooming, food cooking, the scent of a woman or man, the sight of the stars at night, or the horizon.
- you need to be able to lose your focus for meditation, whatever it is, and then return to it without struggle. Without resenting the fact that your mind was wandering. This is partly a skill, partly a decision to trust the process of enjoying a focus then wandering off, then returning.
- the ability to tolerate surprise. You need to be willing to allow your meditation experience to be unscripted, a surprise, like traveling in a new country without a tour guide. You need, moment by moment, to have that kind of trust to your own exploration instincts. If you become afraid, then you will start to control, and when you do that, there is no meditation anymore, only control. Control can be good – it just is not meditation.
- the ability and willingness to let your senses become sensitive. Really sensitive. Meditation works by allowing your senses to perceive their full range. You can explore this with any one sense, and eventually all senses. Let's use touch as an example. Think of when you grabbed someone in a bear hug because you were glad to see them. Or someone hugged you, and you were glad for the embrace. Now think of a light touch – you are looking at someone and touch their hand lightly. Or you put your hand on a dog or horse. Now think of an extremely light touch – the sun on your arm, warming it, or the touch of a breeze. Now think of a touch that is so light you barely know it is there – a friend or lover sitting near you, and your bodies touch imperceptibly. That is a brief description of the range of the sense of touch. Meditation works by using the range of one or more senses. The skill is to know how to enjoy and allow this.
- the ability and willingness to let your mind go quiet. Everyone craves mental quiet, but the brain is designed to adapt to the world and keep track of all your projects and ensure your survival. So it will only go quiet when it is sure that the world is OK for now. The mind will go quiet, usually, only when you have willingly faced enough of your tensions and fears. This creates a situation in which there is no noise in your mind, because you are not imagining fears. You are attuned to the real world in your senses. Oddly enough, people often complain about real inner silence – because it comes when it comes, not when you want it to come.
- the skill of knowing how to give your fears and anxieties what they need. Meditation does not bring up any fears that are not already inside you – you will only have to face the same fears that are there when you sleep and dream, when you go away on vacation, and in each of your love relationships. If you are afraid of someone leaving or abandoning you, that feeling will come up in some manner, some day, when you are meditating. Or you might be attracted to a meditation technique that involves self-abandonment. If you have the opposite fear – that people will intrude on your space and crowd you, that will come up in some way. You will probably find that you are crowding yourself somehow, and to get through it, you will have to learn to give yourself the exact right amount of space, not too much and not too little.
- the skill of shifting levels of awareness while awake. In meditation, you are awake most of the time. And yet you shift into a kind of restfulness that is deeper than deep sleep. You even have dreamlike thoughts. So you are going places while awake that you have deen doing every day of your life, but while asleep. So it's weird. This is a little like learning to drive a car with a stick shift. There are many little transitional moments in meditation, in which we shift from our ordinary waking mode of awareness to an extremely relaxed mode of restful alertness. The body and mind make little thunks as they shift through the levels. At first you have to allow a minute for the shifting, where you do not force anything, you just breathe and relax into the alertness as much as you can. You need to be able to give the lightest touch on the gear shift - a hint of a touch - and then put your attention back on driving. If you don't learn this within seconds, you may get all involved in struggling with the gearbox, and never get to where you wanted to go.
These skills need to become reflexes within a few minutes of beginning a meditation. By reflex I mean, this is your automatic response, or one you can call up within a second or two. If you do not reflexively relax into a tension, for example, you will start to tense against the sensation of tension releasing, and tie yourself in knots or give yourself a headache.
A good way to get these skills is to read Meditation 24/7 and listen to the CD. Both the written and the audio content are well-constructed, brief, easy to work with.
