Wild Serenity

To live in serenity, we need to welcome our wildness. If you want inner peace, welcome your desires and dynamic energies. That which we welcome showers us with gifts in return as it becomes an integrated part of the self.

The play of opposites in meditation is as natural as breathing out and breathing in. Meditation is a place where your inner opposites can meet and merge and learn to work together. A daily meditation practice can be a truly great boost for your physical health, your emotional resilience, and your ability to function well under pressure.

Meditation is a bodily experience, something our nerves, senses and glands know how to do. To meditate, we cooperate with this inborn wisdom. When we meditate in a way that is natural to us, the body goes into a kind of rest that is much deeper than deep sleep, according to research conducted at Harvard Medical School over the past 35 years.

The purpose of the class is to create a rich sensory experience so that your body can evolve your meditation to the next step for you, to enhance and support your immune system, your ability to forgive and forget, your courage to love, and your capacity to pay attention.

Serenity can be a lively, dynamic state that comes from accepting the energies of our wildness. Gratitude can be a richly sensual state, in which we use all our senses – did you know we have a dozen or more different senses? – to appreciate the world as we move through it. In these classes, we will create an atmosphere in which you can get to know your unique sensory rhythms.

Wild Serenity is a new meditation workshop with Lorin Wednesday evenings, 7:30 to 9:30 p.m, at the Continuum Studio in Santa Monica. To be in the class, just show up. The class will be open for several weeks, and if you miss one or two it's no problem, you can make it up the following month. The only prerequisite is a desire to meditate. If you are a rebel, or think you are too restless to meditate, all the better. call Lorin 310 821 0620 or email [email protected]

Peacefulness does not come from deleting everything interesting in life. Gratitude is not a state of denial. The more we use our senses, the richer our experience and the more powerful our gratitude.There are many levels of knowledge of meditation. The most useless kinds are are about techniques that worked for someone very unlike you, who lived way in the past, in a totally different world. These types of knowledge will harm you to the extent that you attempt to fit into their ideal.

This ongoing class is a situation where you can explore what actually works for you, and get feedback on the spot. It is a context for you to experiment and explore in a friendly, comfortable, interesting environment.

To live in serenity, welcome your wildness.

Why would I say that? Because life renews itself through the play of opposites. If you want to be rested and wide awake, you have to lie down and sleep for part of each day; if you want to breathe in, you have to first breathe out.

To meditate in a way that is truly healthy for you, you need to accept all your impulses toward action, all your restlessness, all your desires. Meditation is the process of riding these impulses inward, to rest in the self. When you get the hang of this, physiological research shows, you can rest more deeply in meditation than sleep. This is part of what makes meditation so refreshing, rejuvenating, and enlivening.

What is this workshop about?

The purpose of the class is to create a rich sensory experience so that your body can evolve your meditation to the next step for you, to enhance and support your immune system, your ability to forgive and forget, your courage to love, and your capacity to pay attention.

Meditation is a bodily experience, something your nerves, senses and glands know how to do.

We will be going through a series of meditative sensory awakening explorations, using subtle touch, subtle hearing, balance, half a dozen internal sensing pathways, and inner vision. You will learn how to allow your inner experience of yourself become richer, with more access to the peaceful grounded places and to the lively expressive qualities.

In addition to being very healthy for your body and your emotions, meditation can turn you on to rich inner and outer experiencing. Peacefulness does not come from deleting everything interesting. Gratitude is not a state of denial. The more we use our senses, the richer our experience and the more powerful our gratitude.

Did You Know?

Meditation is a way of accessing your natural self-healing instincts. The practice is so restful that within 5 minutes of beginning a meditation (once you know how), 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. This superb restfulness 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, 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. 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, such as the 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.