The Way of Love

Meditation in essence is a Path of Love, whatever terrain we are following, whatever map we are working with.

In today's world, astoundingly, almost all meditators are "just regular people," living their lives, and exploring meditation as part of their day, as a refuge, time of healing, and method of becoming more relaxed and centered in action.

We are all still mapping out this path, that we can call The Way of Intimacy, because it is very different to get up in the morning, walk the dogs, feed the kids, see them off to school, go to work, and so on – compared to waking up in a monastic cell and just following the monastic routine that is unchanged for centuries.

Previously, for thousands of years, "regular people who live in the world," were not much heard of in terms of meditation, the voices that have carried over the centuries are primarily those of specialists, almost exclusively males who separated themselves from the ordinary pursuits of relationships and business and having a home, and just gave their all to cultivating the techniques of meditation. I used to have thousands of books on meditation, from all manner of traditions around the world, and none of them contained anything resembling, "This morning I got up, grabbed half an hour of ecstatic meditation, then nursed the baby, make breakfast for the other kids, got back into bed to snuggle with my husband or lover, then went to work at my to-do list." 

In its origins, the meditation tradition is based on the notion that there are four general currents of desire propelling human life: Love, freedom, satisfying work, and honor. In Sanksrit Kama Moksha Artha and Dharma. The purpose of yoga (in the past, yoga=meditation) is to enable an individual to fulfill these desires to the best of their ability. Yoga, or meditation, is a technology to enhance the coordination of all that is best in a person and to help them bring this to meet the needs and opportunities of the outer world.

Even when the methodology of the discipline involves renunciation, detachment, celibacy, and poverty, the overall aim is to free the individual up from everyday concerns so that they can devote themselves totally to God, or Cosmic Consciousness, however they construe the Higher Power and higher purposes of living. 

Even when the path is The Way of the Warrior, it is still love, for warriors fight for the sake of the love of their team, and country, and cause. Above all, warriors train themselves so that war is unnecessary and unthinkable, and so that the rest of the 99% of humanity can just go about their business, and live their lives.

When the path is The Way of the Healer, we can see this is a path of love, certainly, attending to the wounds of body and heart and mind and soul, and encouraging health in all dimensions. 

As you explore, "What is my path, what are the essential characteristics of MY way," keep in mind that you may touch upon many different tones as you explore what works. You may have elements of the Warrior Way that you summon from time to time, when dealing with a difficult conversation, or if you are a mother raising sons and daughters. You may touch upon the Way of the Healer, summoning that inner power, when listening to a friend who is suffering. You may even have an inner nun or monk, a steady presence that inspires and sustains you as you walk this way of human incarnation.

On this Path of Love, which is also a Way of Individuality, there is a lot of wondering to do. Even though we know ourselves only to a limited extent, we have to guess and explore as best we can, and find what works, by experimentation, trial and error. We have to discover who we are in conversation with life, just as when we are in relationships with friends and lovers, we discover who we are.

Meditation is a conversation with pranashakti, with the Life Force, however we like to name it. There is a give and take, a sense of adventure, and continual surprise on this path

Swami Brahmananda Saraswati

How To Thrive In A Crisis

The new normal seems to be ongoing crises on every level of life, physical and emotional. How do we live, how to we breathe easily, in the midst of climate crisis, continual forest fires, pandemics, and all the craziness? Even previously stable democracies around the world are being tempted to degrade into dictatorships.

The good news is that our bodies evolved to deal with exactly this. How life on Earth started is a great mystery, but one thing we know is that every component of our bodies, from the individual cells, to the organs and tissues, nerves, senses, and our brains are the process of continual adaptation to total change.

Let’s Reinvent the Day

Consider a few small changes to your life, to the way you approach the day.

1. What if you just work 8 to 5, or 9 to 5:30, and never look at or answer emails or messages at any other time? What would happen?

2. What would it be like if you spend two hours a day just walking at an unhurried pace, looking at the world, smelling it, enjoying the contact of the breeze on your skin, the sunshine, the textures of it all?

3. What would it be like if you do not hurry at all, ever, except in the rare emergency?

4. What would the night’s sleep be like if you spend the hour before bed time being in your own sanctuary, with just the golden glow of a soft light, or candlelight, reading poetry or listening to beautiful music?

No matter the structure of your day, we all have things we can do, small changes that make a big difference.
I recommend reading this interview with Brunello Cucinelli, who started a company that makes cashmere clothes. He says, “I am a great supporter of memory. If I remember things, I do not need to go back and check and revise. In this company, you cannot send emails after 5:30 PM, when the company closes for the evening.” When they have meetings, he wants all the staff present to have memorized the relevant numbers, so they can be looking each other in the eye as they talk, and be more present. And no emails can be sent to more than two people, so that you don’t clutter everyone’s inboxes.

https://pi.co/tag/brunello-cucinelli/

What is The Radiance Sutras School of Meditation?

The Call to Be All That You Can Be, and The Need to Know Your Limitations

A wonderful feature of modern times is that almost everyone is living a long time. Global life expectancy in 2016 was 72 years – 74 years for women and about 70 years for men. Over the past hundred years, women’s roles have expanded to include all the functions that used to be male specialities. Americans have women fighter pilots. Women are heads of corporations. Because people are living so long, it’s as if they live three or four lifetimes in sequence or simultaneously.

Along with this increase in freedom comes an increase in expectations. It is as if every woman is supposed to be Superwoman. A full-on mother and also entrepreneur and social activist and wife and friend and athlete. This is wonderful, and exhausting. Guilt over not actually being Superwoman is now part of the female experience.

Part of daily meditative experience for women is sensing the fatigue and burned nerves that come from doing it all. If you can feel it you can heal it.

In meditation we bathe in this set of conflicting opposites: the call to be all that you can be, and the need to know your limitations. This changes daily, for as we push up against our limitations, sometimes we get stronger and they change. It’s like working out. Other limitations are more fixed. There are only so many minutes in a day (1440 to be exact).

Whether you are male, female, or a nonspecified gender, you will at some point be confronted with the fact that you are not Superwhatever. And there is an odd form of shame and guilt that arises when you realize this. Accept this shame and plunge into it. There are many skills inside this that you will only learn by practice and paying attention. The process is similar to working out on a muscular level. There is a science to pushing yourself just enough that you can heal up overnight. People who push too much without rest can develop chronic injuries. It is an eternal struggle: the striving to do more and awareness of your limitations.

Four Fields of Desire

Yoga in its origins is delightfully life-supporting and embracing of every possible desire. The yoga approach to meditation is always intended to support you in thriving, whatever your mission is in life. The techniques are ways of joining with pranashakti, the life force, and being tuned up so you function better as an embodied being.

Desires flow endlessly and each one is a little packet of energy and information to energize you and help you have a sense of direction. In the yoga literature, there is a succinct statement of the desire flow of life, summed up in four categories:

Moksha - Freedom. Liberation.

Kama - Love. Affection. Sensual pleasure. Sexual love. Enjoyment. Longing. Desire.

Artha - Substance. Wealth. Property. Money. Fulfilling material needs.

Dharma - Virtue. Morality. Religion. Good works. Justice. Ethics. Each of these is a vibrating field of energy, a current of desire flowing through a body, and we have come here to live.

All together these are called Puruṣārtha - “the object of human pursuit.” This is just a simple way of pointing to the flow of natural desires. Your body is always flowing with dozens, hundreds, thousands, of little desires. A hum of life.

These may play in any order and mix and combine. In any given moment, one may be teaching you, active, calling for attention, for tending, and the others rush in to support it.

When you are practicing mediation in a way that is cooperating with the energy of your own life, then the four purusharthas will play with each other, one will come to the surface to be felt and tended to, then another, then another. They may even join forces and make teams to help each other.

The texts suggest you keep in mind these four aims, called purusharthas, and be in a learning feedback loop to adjust the practices so that they are in the service of life.

One of the skills of meditation to cultivate is to notice which of the purusharthas is calling to you in a given moment, and give in to it. In meditation, much of your time will spent with your body processing the interaction of your energies and the demands and opportunities of the outer world.

Many of the thoughts, sensations, emotions, daydreams, and currents of desire you feel during meditation will be side effects of the way your body is processing the momentum of desire, pleasure, freedom, affection, wealth, and morality.

You want your practice to support you in pursuit of all your life’s purposes. All your pleasures and needs.

Don’t leave any part of you behind. Don’t turn your back on yourself in any way.

Embrace The Flow of Breathing - Audio

With this sutra, we are invited to attend with tenderness to how we embrace the breath. There are many yuktis here. One is to consider the lungs to be a pot for holding the breath. Kumbhaka has the connotation of a jug of elixir, a chalice, a vessel used in ritual offerings to the gods. We revere the air flowing in and out of our lungs as if it is an elixir, and we hold the breath as we hold a chalice of some precious substance we are imbibing.

In pranayama, you may hold the breath in the sense of stopping it. But in meditation, holding the breath can mean holding it as you would a lover. Holding is an embrace, a welcoming touch, contact skin to skin. In lovemaking, we hold the other person in order to allow them to move and allow ourselves to move. In certain sweet moments, the action pauses. Holding and embracing do not mean stopping the flow of movement. Embrace the flow of breathing as you would something infinitely valuable, and you will know peace. There is a world of skill in the way we receive, hold, embrace, cherish the breath.

How do you hold a baby, a cat, a lover? How do you hold a note when singing? Develop a light touch in your practice, so you can hold a thought, a mantra, a breath, as lightly as you would a hummingbird that has landed on your finger. It alights on you. There is no sense of capture. It is a miraculous meeting. Many meditation techniques emerge from your skill at holding, embracing, and cherishing your relationship with the world.

Meditation enhances our capacity for aesthetic perception and rapture. Put yourself in situations of such joy and surprise that your breathing pauses spontaneously in awe—“it takes my breath away.” As your capacity for this type of kumbhaka develops, fill it with the beauty of nature and great art, whatever is so beautiful you want to drink it in.

You May Need Better Armor

Meditation activates our senses and gives the heart time to feel. This can result in a brand-new and fresh feeling. Then contact with the regular world, of people who do not meditate, can feel like pollution. It’s like wearing white clothes, they pick up every bit of lint and dirt and show it.

There are a couple of ways of activating your armor.

1. Spend 5 minutes exiting from meditation. This allows your senses to recalibrate to the world of action. Toward the end of this 5 minutes you can run through you to-do list. Your body will automatically train itself to be properly configured for your day. Sometimes this is all that is needed.

2. Get excited about everywhere you are going to go and everyone you are going to see. This activates your own powers and the fire of your excitement is all the protection you need.

3. Develop a Prayer of Protection for yourself. Use any language that appeals to you.

“I am surrounded and protected by the Light of Christ. May Christ and all the Angels shower everyone I am going to meet today with love and healing energy. I am garbed, as if in silk, with The Armor of Christ, the Lord of Love.”

“I am immersed in the Flame of Love and surrounded by its gentle, purifying, protective flow.”

In Sanskrit the term for armor is kavacha. कवच. Each goddess has her kavacha that you can summon, each god has a different kind of armor.

You can feel the armor sometimes as if you are wearing an invisible coat of chain mail, like a knight in Arthurian times. This is a very tactile and a very real activation of the subtle body. It may feel like “an energy fur” or the sensation of being clothed in light. You may find you can activate your armor in an instant, with a thought.

When I was first beginning armor explorations in 1968, it seemed to take about 20 minutes before I felt the protection was happening. I went to the beach almost every day at dawn and would do Tai Chi-like motions, honoring the Sun and Wind and Ocean and Sand, then gather in all those energy-substances and pack them into the field around my body. It was quietly ecstatic and playful. I was just playing and dancing with the elements. Then I would notice that the feeling of being protected by elemental powers would last until late in the afternoon, when I would refresh it by another meditation session.

When you walk around the world with this kind of armor on, it also serves as advanced warning, a spider sense, a catlike whisker vibration sense that tells you about dangers and creepy people.

At the time in 1968, the Vietnam War was raging. If you blinked, you could get drafted into its death maw. The students around me were rioting and raging against the war and they were right. At the same time, the idealism of the students was being exploited by cunning political operatives who were cynically using people for their own strange agendas.

Everyone was smoking pot and you could not walk from one class to the other without being offered a joint or maybe you want to purchase a baggie of marijuana, magic mushrooms, speed, or some LSD? Sometimes the people offering were working with narcs, setting up campus activists to be arrested later. And the substances themselves, even something as benevolent as marijuana, were smuggled into the country by murdering whole families sailing off the coast of Mexico, and then sailing their boat into its dock in nearby Dana Point or Newport Beach. Weeks after the family was reported missing, the police would find an empty boat there at its spot, with blood splatters and traces of drugs all over the cabin.

With my armor on, I could effortlessly walk through all of this, gliding along in enjoyment, listening to my instincts, and learning about what intuition is, because all this was brand new to me. Because I was able to avoid all those traps, I was able to start my own learning center at the University and invite teachers from Esalen to come give workshops every other weekend. Armor helps us to stay clear of the toxic and frees up energy to do what we are really here on Earth to do.

To activate your armor, you may find Tai Chi is helpful, or just borrow some moves. You may find certain chants activate your force field. You may find that SPEED of intuition is all the armor you need – that if you listen to your gut feelings and respond within a moment, that you are protected.

You may find that pausing for a couple of seconds here and there gives you time to “gather your forces” and this is all the protection you need.

You may find that actively inquiring about everything is the protection you need, for example looking at someone and saying “What the HELL are you talking about?” An active dynamic mode keeps your life energy flowing outward to interact with the world, rather than passively accepting it all.

In all these ways, meditation and life are continually challenging us to continually up our game of survival, to learn to be savvy and discerning.

Click here to listen to the recording of our free meditation telegathering on power&peace (recorded on 21 Monday, 2020).

The Joy of Breath

There are moments when we stop taking life for granted and inhale deeply of the beauty that is around us. A cleansing breath drawn at glorious dawn; savoring the bouquet of a glass of fine wine before dinner; or, nestled in a lover's arms, surrendering to his or her smell-at such moments, you take life deeply into yourself and are intimate with something great. In the time it takes to breathe in and breathe out, you touch life and are touched by life intensely.

Miracles happen if you continue this appreciative awareness beyond the 3 or 4 seconds that such a moment usually lasts. To spend even 15 seconds in the same state, or 60 seconds, seems like a lifetime. And it can transform you.

Breath is a gift from God, a gift from the oceans and forests, from the universe. Breathing is, in fact, a relationship you are having with the natural world-a physical exchange with the sea of air surrounding the Earth. When you cultivate this relationship by attuning yourself to it, you are developing a gift that can bring you a lifetime of joy.

We can be interested in breath taking, fascinated by it, in the same way we are charmed by food, enchanted by sex, amazed by music. Most of the skill of aware breathing is in finding your pleasure circuits, those sensory pathways that light up when you breathe. Work at this; make a conscious effort to engage in your favorite activities with extra gusto and attentiveness. The more you link your adventures in breath to what you love--whether it is food, sleep, kids, horses, dancing, sex, or music--the better.

In my life, I am greatly inspired by yoga in all its forms. I draw on it deeply. But I don’t always use yoga terminology, nor imitate its methods to teach about breath. Rather, I present explorations you can do on your own, in the midst of your everyday life, so that you can develop your own yoga-- what works for you to develop harmony between body, mind, and spirit.

Yoga is a Sanskrit word meaning "union," or joining together. The discipline of yoga is concerned with joining together all the elements of human life into one seamless, harmonious whole. The word is derived from an ancient Indo-European root, yeug, which occurs in English in the form of yoke, jugular, conjugate, subjugate, conjugal, enjoin, injunction, juxtapose, and syzygy.

The yoga tradition of India is astounding in that followers for several thousands of years have made a dedicated effort to notice and record every possible breathing technique and have accumulated a vast repertory of methods. They have cherished each insight into breath they have come across and formulated it into a short pithy statement, or sutra, so that it can be memorized and passed on from generation to generation.

Yoga techniques have been developed for every human activity. There is the yoga of work, the yoga of war, the yoga of eating, the yoga of meditation, the yoga of sex, the yoga of devotion to God, and thousands more. There is more to yoga than can be explored in one human lifetime, or even a hundred, and there is more variety than any one human being can comprehend.

There is, however, one overall impression of yoga that predominates in the popular mind: that of the reclusive yogi, celibate, poor, living apart from society in a cave or ashram on a mountainside. There is a lot of truth to this archetype, and indeed yogi monks have done much great exploration. Their work has been so powerful that their approach--denying life, denying sexuality, and in general doing the things that monks are supposed to do-- permeates all of yoga. In other words, subjugation has been emphasized over conjugation.

As a meditation instructor, the approach I favor is to help people focus on becoming intimate with their own breath. When people tune in to their unique ebb and flow, they either invent the techniques they need to stay focused, or they are instinctively drawn to those that already exist and that naturally speak to them. This method of learning about breath may or may not be slower, but it's definitely more gentle than attempting to forcefully discipline your respiration.

The best things in life really are free. And if you are breathing easily while doing them, then they are even better. As we move through this mystery we call life, we are smitten often with different cravings: we want relief, stimulation, good food, companionship, a real vacation, and much more. It seems as if we would have to spend a lot of time or a lot of money to get these things. Maybe so. But first you should explore what is right here, free for the taking, ready to enhance your health and your life right now.

For millennia, people all over the world have found breathing to be invaluable for inspiring and healing. This is the message from all the ancient traditions, from Buddhism and the Sufis to Zen and the Vipassana monks with their beautiful walking meditations. Even today, singers and athletes testify that they can do what they do because they are centered in breath.

Breath is everyone's birthright. Its secrets are out in the open, under your nose, and inside you. I am convinced that the more people who know the secrets of conscious breath taking, the better. So take a deep breath--and let's begin.

From Breath Taking by Lorin Roche, PhD

We will offer a special workshop on breathing on October 3-4, 2020.

Click here for more details.

Getting High on Breath - Video

A chat between Dr. Lorin Roche and Tania Kazi about the wisdom of meditation and how it can lead to greater insights into our lives. This episode is on the magic of breath, and how to create breathing meditation practices that are unique to you.

We will be offering a special workshop on breathing on October 3-4! Click here for more details.

Photo on banner by rosario janza on Unsplash

GETTING INTO BREATH - BEGINNER'S MIND

A yoga teacher I know remarked that for the first 3 years she practiced yoga she had little interest in pranayama, the breath aspect, and that she felt uncomfortable with the techniques. Then one day when her back hurt and she couldn’t do her ordinary moves, she discovered that breathing meditations elped. Lying on her back, taking ibuprofen, and humiliated, she found a new world opening up to her. Each breath massaged her spine and rejuvenated her. She did not have to force anything; rather, she finally surrendered to her natural instinct to breathe and found herself letting go as never before in her adult life.

Prior to getting into yoga, this friend had gone through a difficult divorce and had called upon her willpower to help her forge a new life. Even after yoga had become a sacred refuge for her, she was unable to relax and truly let go. Striving, exercising her will, was what had saved her. Then that day, feeling how the breath was massaging her belly, her heart, the front of her spine, she relented. Now she teaches breath techniques enthusiastically, yet she knows from experience that it may take her students years to appreciate them fully.

Another time I was sitting with a wine merchant and I had him sniff the air, not so much for scent but just in appreciation—as the carrier for all the wonderful smells he had ever smelled. He instantly got what breath awareness is about and went into deep meditation, really enjoying himself.

One of the things students have taught me over the years is that there is no hierarchical organization to talent or intimacy with life. Beginners often know more than experts, and experts are often at their best when they come around to being beginners again.

If you want to meditate with breath, start with what you know. Everyone has something they do well, whether it is carpentry, keeping babies happy, or quickly sizing up a roomful of people. If you really know how to enjoy a freshly baked cookie, a glass of fine wine, or the scent of hay, then use that as a gateway into breath awareness. Life tends to specialize us. Our senses become shaped by what we do. But humans are not ants. We were not born to be specialized. We ache to explore and see life afresh. This possibility exists for you in every breath.

THE GIFT OF BREATH: Virtual Workshops With Lorin and Camille

Camille Maurine and Lorin Roche will be teaching two virtual workshops on breath in meditation on October 3rd and 4th (each class is 2 hours). Join us on either day - we would love to meditate with you. Early bird price (until Sep. 25th) is just $35 for each class.

Click here to read more

Dare to Get Bored

Rilke wrote to a young poet:

". . . it is so important to be alone and attentive when you are sad: because the seemingly uneventful and motionless moment when our future steps into us is so much closer to life than any loud and accidental point of time which occurs, as it were, from the outside."

One of the odd things about our time is that we have so many distractions that we never get actually bored and savor the feeling. Yet it is an essential gateway to the Self. There are strange moments when our future enters into us, and begins the process of embodiment. Our future self and our present self begin to relate to each other and merge. We have to be attuned to just ourselves and feeling into the new.

In the late 1970's I used to live in Santa Fe, New Mexico and teach meditation at Los Alamos National Laboratories and the staff there. Northern New Mexico has some of the most beautiful skies you will ever see, because the base altitude is over 7200 feet. You can see forever.

Driving between my home and Los Alamos was as beautiful as it gets, a good road winding through the hills and high desert and no traffic. Wide open emptiness. I had a jade green BMW 320i that I loved to drive, and one day I pulled into a gas station in the middle of that vast nowhere. There was nothing else for miles, not a store or shed.

As I pulled in, I saw a teenager attendant get up to greet me. He was totally alone there, and he looked as if he was drenched in loneliness. In 1979 there were no cell phones in everyday use, and Los Alamos was one of the centers of the internet but outside of universities, no one had heard of it. There probably was not even radio reception in this spot. So there was absolutely nothing for this kid to do, no distractions. He had to just be with himself. For hours and hours a day.

From his facial expression and the energy radiating off of him I could see that he was in the kind of desperation that only a teenager can bear. It was a plea of I WANT TO LIVE PLEASE GOD GET ME OUT OF HERE based in utter boredom and loneliness.

I must have seemed to him as if I dropped down from a spaceship. He looked at me with utter gratitude, sort of like a dog in the pound.

I was way early for my classes in Los Alamos, so I stayed there to talk to the kid.

He thought he was miserable, and stuck there at his uncle's gas station, but at the same time he was absolutely attuned to his POWER of yearning, he was daydreaming and visualizing what he wanted to do in life, and getting SO READY to go live. So the kid thought he was unhappy but actually he was in an extremely creative state, his energy field was big and vibrant and eager.

I was 30 and had been teaching meditation for 10 years, and had developed an approach to individualizing meditation for each person, that I was very happy with. I had been working on this for years, how to listen to each person and then help them develop a daily practice that fits their life and what they love. This for me was the answer to my prayer, that I had been yearning for since I was 18. When I began meditation, I was tutored by a circle of geniuses that helped me fine tune the practices so that I thrived in my physical body, emotional body, mental body, prana body, bliss body, and soul body. It was all about honoring your instrument. I loved this so much that my entire desire was to be trained so that I could offer this to other people. Now here I was, miraculously to me, living fully in the electricity of this desire fulfilled.

But a year before I began meditating, I was in a similar state to this teenager, actually way worse. I was so desperate that I said to the sky, I WILL DO ANYTHING. I WILL GO ANYWHERE. I WILL ENDURE ANYTHING. JUST GET ME OUT OF HERE AND INTO LIFE. It was a total, absolute commitment of the kind that probably only teenagers can make. So I resonated with this teenager.

One small thing you can do as a practice is to willingly "enter" little odd moments, transitional moments, when ordinarily you would look at your phone or computer or email or social media or messages.

Use the same impulse to browse, and instead of using any technology, browse in your sensations, in your electrical impulses of sensation, in your brain waves. Dare to be bored, restless, and seeking. This may take a few minutes, because our senses are so attuned to perceiving media. You may find you have to kind of grab your senses and reclaim them.

Media are called that because they are not immediate. The media place themselves as a substitute for your senses. They place themselves inbetween you and the world. And they are beautiful. But it can feel like an act of daring and aggression to take back your sense world.

You might formulate an intention such as,

"Just for the next hour, I am going to let my map of the world be only that which I see with my own eyes, smell with my nose, hear with my own ears, feel with my feet."

You also might cultivate an INTEREST in weird background sensations in the realm of boredom and strange restless feelings, and just for a certain period of time - 10 minutes or 20 minutes - tend to them.

Give it a chance. See if BOREDOM is a gateway for you.

For all of human history until the last hundred years, that is, for 99.9999% of human history, almost everyone had long, long periods of what we would call boredom. Long nights with no lights. Long winters with nothing to do. Long long long days in summer just harvesting wheat. Hours and hours and hours of just looking at nature. Everyone lived their entire life within 10 or 15 miles from where they were born. Almost no one ever traveled. Once a year someone who had seen a CITY would travel through and the whole town would come to hear stories.

So it's not like doing nothing, just breathing, and walking around in nature with no big plan, just looking at light and space, just listening to the sound of the wind, is going to harm you.

Here is a longer quote from Rilke

" seems to me that all our sadnesses are moments of tension that we feel as paralysis because we can no longer experience our banished feelings. Because we are alone with the unfamiliar presence that has entered us, because we feel momentarily abandoned by what we've believed and grown accustomed to; because we can't keep standing as the ground shifts under our feet. That is why the sadness passes over like a wave. The new presence inside us, that which has come to us, has entered our heart, has found its way to its innermost chamber, and is no longer even there—it is already in our blood. And we don't know what it was. We could easily be persuaded that nothing happened, and yet something has changed inside us, as a house changes when a guest comes into it. We cannot say who has entered, we may never know, but there are many indications that the future enters us in just this way, to transform itself within us long before it happens. That is why it is so important to be alone and attentive when you are sad: because the seemingly uneventful and motionless moment when our future steps into us is so much closer to life than any loud and accidental point of time which occurs, as it were, from the outside."

Borgeby gärd, Sweden, August 12, 1902

Letters to a Young Poet

Getting Enough Touch Meditation

We are all touch deprived.

The sensation of touch hunger is so unbearable that we block it out. The reason for our deprivation not just the pandemic, with this newly installed fear of contact.

Our technologies are so beautiful and alluring that we don't realize that they present the simulation of touch. We think we are in touch with our friends when we text them. The touch interface of our phones was designed by modeling natural human touch gestures, sorcery and shamanism. Mudra or magical gestures are used all over the world in every culture.

I love Zoom and Facetime and Skype but after awhile it is like drinking those totally artificial sports drinks. It will keep you alive but is nothing like real fruit juice. We are designed by nature to get up in the morning, rub shoulders, make a plan, then go off gathering. Come back and sit around the fire in the evening, side by side, telling stories, and fall asleep in a huddle by the fire.

Here are a couple of things I find useful. First, meditate in any way you like, even for 5 minutes.

At the end of meditation, linger in the subtle world of touch. The touch of the air as you breathe in and out. The touch of your clothes on your skin. As you linger there, practice luxuriating.

Create your own mantra such as, "I am awake to the world of touch." Or you might prefer, "Now I am awake to the world of touch." "-ing" words are also fun, so simply "touching" is a beautiful mantra.

“Now" is a fun little mantra. It is handy to make up a chant or word or phrase you like, and connect this with sensory activation. When you walk outside, develop a habit of pausing somewhere safe and beautiful and just feel the touch of sunlight and air on your skin.

"I am awake to the world of touch." Do this every day for a week or so, even for a couple of minutes.

When we form an intention of something we long for and hang out with it for even 60 seconds after meditation, it's powerful.

On a sensory level, you are inviting your brain to rewire itself so that your touch sensors are dialed up a bit. You can enjoy more, whatever amount of touch you are getting. Meditation is essentially a process of taking more and more delight in less and less, so that you are delighted to simply exist and be breathing.

If you want to make up a Sanskrit mantra for yourself:

avamarśa - touch, contact parimilana - touch, contact

pratyavamṛś - to touch. To reflect, meditate.

sāndrasparśa - soft to the touch. susparśa - pleasant to the touch, very soft or tender.

sparśendriya - the sense of touch. sparśana - touching, handling. Air, wind. The act of touching, touch, contact. Sensation, sense of touch, organ of sensation or feeling, sensitive nerve.

Monier-Williams Sanskrit-English Dictionary, 1899

We discuss these and some other issues in our virtual meditation intensive Wild Serenity. You still can register and join us!

A Vow Not to Act on Thoughts in Meditation

In meditation, one of the skills is learning to not edit. Welcome and transmute instead of suppressing. For example, if you were angry at someone during the day but had to holdback and not say anything, that anger will come up and fill your body when you meditate. There is a set of skills you can learn to turn that anger into good clean fire energy you can use for your own life. This can become almost instantaneous, with practice.

In meditation it is okay for any thought to come because you aren’t going to act on it. That is basically all you need to decide and it is kind of a vow: “I am not going to act onany thought that comes during meditation.” The second part of this is, “After meditation,in my regular waking state, I will decide how to act, in accord with my highest integrity.”

When you decide this, you are giving freedom to your heart and mind to get busy sorting and processing all those impulses and emotions. Thoughts don’t come from outside you. When you notice a thought it is just some aspect of the world your brain is tracking and wanting to make sense of.

If you want to learn how meditation can be nourishing, effortless, and fun, join us for a 5-week online meditation retreat called Wild Serenity, which begins tomorrow, August 16th.

Getting Through a Stuck Place in Meditation

To get through a stuck place in meditation, you may need a particular kind of nutrition and healing, of the kind that comes from inside our body when we face a crisis.

Nature knows how to heal. When we go as far as we know how to go and then take refuge in rest, the body heals and adapts. As we face each difficulty in meditation, each intolerable set of weird sensations, each strange combination of our own instincts, and then take refuge in rest and relaxation, the body brews up its own magic chemistry to support us on the jouney.

Yatra (yātrā) is journey, expedition, pilgrimage, and also “support of life.” Yatra includes the sense of provisions for the journey. Some of the provisions we need come from soma, the magical chemicals the body brews out of the wildness of our experience. There are body chemistry keys we need to get through some doors. The body produces these automatically in the interplay of the percevied urgency, then the access to rest deeper than sleep, then the activation of all your senses, and the welcoming of all our instincts. There are moments in which we give up. Then we rest. When we have done our part of facing our fears and then give it up and enter the state of ease provided by the mantra, the body knows what to do here. Our exhaustion is the most sincere form of prayer to the gods of adaptation. Having stretched ourselves, the genius of life repairs us and rebuilds us. Sometimes this happens in an eternal moment of meditation, one of those times when a minute is a long time of torture. Sometimes we need to go sleep. Sometimes we need to go wander in nature and Do Nothing. When come back, we find by surprise the way is open. The soma has done its work.

All this is why you want your meditation to be as luscious and juicy as possible. You need access to both the state of rest deeper than sleep and the nutrition you get from exposing your senses to beauty. This combination is what allows you to face the situations inside or outside that are crushing you. To use the metaphor of an engine, there is just a thin layer of lubricant allowing the piston to slide back and forth thousands of RPM, revolutions per minute. That thin layer is what allows motion. Inside ourselves, we need nerves and sensory information to flow together. We need the vision gifted by soma to enable us to see the path ahead of us.

Pranashakti

Bodies, all bodies, are saturated with genius. There is intelligence everywhere. You can conceive of it any way you like – evolution, God’s design shop, spontaneous divinity. At every level, from that of the atoms dancing through your body right now, to your cells, organs, muscles, and senses, there is awe- inspiring order. A body is a small part of the universe that has organized itself so that it can gaze in awe at the beauty of the vastness and dance with it. One aspect of the genius of bodies is that they know how to engage in action, then rest up, repair themselves, recover, recharge, and jump back into action again. We live our whole lives in this cycle. This self-repairing dynamic of life is a mighty power. In Sanskrit there is a beautiful word, pranashakti, for referring to this mighty power.

Prana: Filled, full. The breath of life. Respiration, spirit, vitality. Breath as a sign of strength. Vigor, energy, power—with all one’s strength, with all one’s heart.

Shakti: Power and skill in the use of power. Ability. Strength, might. Energy. Capability. Effectiveness of a remedy or cure. Regal power. Divine Feminine Power. The power of a word. Creative power of imagination.

Pranashakti is not other than your own life. The body you are breathing in right now is always flowing and pulsing with the genius of life in its rhythmic flow of action and rest. Meditation is a celebration of the rhythms of life.

Why You Can't Fall Asleep and Why Monk Meditation Won't Work - Video

A weekly series of short chats between Dr. Lorin Roche and Tania Kazi about the wisdom of meditation and how it can lead to greater insights into our lives.

Sutra 51: SVARŪPA

Svarupa

One’s own form or shape. Your own condition, character, nature. Your own peculiar character. Wise, learned. Practice

This verse begins with yatra yatra, “wherever, whithersoever.” Wherever your mind finds satisfaction, there is your meditation practice. Then we see the amazing word svarupa, “your own peculiar nature.” A reading of this verse would be, “Wherever your mind wanders, there you can experience the absolute bliss of your peculiar nature.” If you talk to people about their secret joy, that thing they love so much they live for it, there is an infinite range of peculiar activities. Rejuvenating old cars. Fly-fishing. Bathing naked in mountain streams. Training dogs. Gardening. Painting mandalas. Golf. Surfing. It doesn’t matter what you love. What matters is that you love it and you choose it freely.

Svarupa is the shape of your soul. In all these practices, in everything you do in meditation, follow the shape of your own soul. Practice in a way that feels to you like your favorite hobby or indulgence—that natural way you would putter in the garden if you love gardening, wander around a city if you are a traveler, curry the horse if you are a horse person, play your instrument if you are a musician—and you are just alone, exploring.

Para ananda svarupa is “the transcendental joy of your unique character.” This suggests that you get to the universal through the personal. No matter how wounded, wacky, or wonderful you think you are, celebrate your individuality.

From The Radiance Sutras by Lorin Roche, PhD https://lorinroche.com/the-radiance-sutras

The “I Don't Care” Technique

Your brain is maybe 86 billion neurons. That’s 86,000,000,000. During meditation, you don’t have to tell them what to do. Each of your billions of neurons has maybe 200 Facebook friends, I mean synaptic connections. They chat back and forth 200 times a second. The number of interconnections might be more than there are atoms in the universe. What are they doing in there? Managing the flow of life in your trillions of cells. Assimilating what you have been learning in life and organizing it so the learning is at your fingertips.

This is the hum of life. One of the sweet skills of meditation is learning to hear it as music, as a current like a river, flowing with song, with harmony, with essential goodness. You don’t have to tell it what to do any more than you have to tell the ocean how to make waves and tides, or tell the stars how to revolve in the galaxy.

Part of learning to meditate is unlearning any patterns of over-control you may have. Unlearn the habit, if you have it, that you are supposed to tell your brain to shut up. You may have 60,000 thoughts in a day that you can perceive, and just underneath that are trillions of tiny decisions your brain is making to adjust your metabolism, your heartbeat, your breathing, to adapt to life.

Here is a skill: With all the thoughts you can perceive, and those just outside your range of perception, practice the attitude, “I just don’t care. I don’t care if I have 60,000 thoughts. I don’t care if my mind is filled with thousands of thoughts the instant I sit down to meditate. Let it be.”

Care of the Self During Times of Pandemic - Video

Guru Viking interviewing Lorin Roche, PhD, on how to stay well during the pandemic.

Lorin Roche and Guru Viking talk about how to work with anxiety, fear, and panic? How to work with isolation? How to work with sickness and death? And how to help others having those experiences?

Fear, sickness, death are perennial human experiences, and so my hope is that these episodes will be of use not only to those who are being affected now in this situation, but also of use to others beyond it.

0:55 - Guidance for those who are afraid or panicked.

14:18 - Guidance for those who are sick

19:48 - Guidance for helping those who are sick or dying

21:21 - Guidance for those who are dying.

27:43 - Guidance for those in isolation.

33:13 - Concluding comments.

For more interviews, videos, and more visit: - www.guruviking.com

Music ‘Deva Dasi’ by Steve James

Audio: Meditation as Communion With The World

Meditation is a natural and instinctive human ability, part of the survival wisdom built in to our bodies.
Meditation is innate, and you can go in through many doors:

• Listening to music

• Gazing at nature

• Dancing

• Receiving a massage

• Making love

• Breathing attentively

• Savoring food

And hundreds of other ways.

If you take a deep breath and breathe out slowly, you begin to activate your meditation response. This can happen in seconds. Do it now. That little sense of relief is the beginning.

Our bodies have the ability to get stressed – to activate the fight or flight response. Immediately, our emergency reserves are tapped as our bodies and nerves mobilize for combat. Meditation is the opposite response, in which we enter a state of restfulness that allows the body to repair, recharge, and refresh.

There are thousands of different styles of meditation, just like there are thousands of styles of music and cooking. When you discover the style that goes with your individual nature, meditation is a joyous relief, something you look forward to each day.

Everyone already has discovered meditation on their own, in one or more of the hundreds of ways of activating it. Learning to meditate is a matter of noticing which of the doorways you already feel familiar with, and building on that knowledge.

Instinctive Meditation is a way of listening to the instincts as a guide in meditation. The word, "instincts" refers to the body's internal guidance system, refined over hundreds of millions of years. Hunting, homing, trail-making, gathering, nesting, resting, socializing, all these are primordial impulses flowing through the body at all times. When we learn to cooperate with them inwardly, meditation feels natural.

Scientific research indicates that meditation is a built-in ability of the human body, part of our instinctive survival skills. We all can do it.

We each have our own favorite ways of entering meditative states – our own unique style. We thrive in meditation when the approach we take goes with our own inclinations and instincts. Don't let anyone tell you that meditation is the realm of experts or gurus.