Lightning in Your Body

Long long ago, in a country far, far away, there used to be gatherings called Music Festivals.

This was over a year ago, and a year is 524,160 minutes, and who can remember what happened half a million minutes ago?

Camille and I were teaching a course on "Meditation as Microdosing" at Lightning in a Bottle, or LIB. Somehow tens of thousands of music lovers gathered peacefully for a long weekend and listened to music, did yoga, and took workshops. No really, this used to really happen IRL.

After one of our workshops, a young man came by and wanted to tell me about his meditation experience. He was really starting to crave a 10-day silent retreat, he said, and he has been doing them twice a year for a few years now. As we spoke, he told me how he works hard and parties hard, always seeking to find the right amount of getting stoned at night, or eating edibles during the day, so that he functions well at work and can make money to support more partying. Some nights you have to actually just go to sleep without any "substances" in your system so that you can function the next day. Sometimes, in the work parties that take place every night, he even says no to whatever is being passed around.

Life, as he told it, is an unfolding, ever-changing rhythm of getting enough sleep so you can function, getting enough nutrition in spite of the millions of ever-changing weird attitudes toward the purity of food that everyone is infected by, getting enough music and dancing in your body so you can feel ALIVE, working with your team to get everything organized, earn the respect and trust of your team and also make enough money to live, and then every few months going away on a 10-day retreat to catch up with yourself.

I was very, very impressed. What a rhythm!

I drew the figure-8 symbol in the air between us, ∞ and mentioned, what you are talking about can be called the pendulum swing between opposites. Jung called this enantiodromia. Enantios is opposite. Dromos is running, like a race course.

Then I asked him to tell me about how he experiences the full

∞

When he is on one part of the course, does he remember the other?

He said yes, that sometimes when he is dancing, or rocking out to music, he is aware that there is such a thing as sitting still for 10 days and remembering it all.

I said, Ah, that is a form of savoring the opposites while in the midst of one swing.

Then I asked him to tell me about what he experiences on the retreat.

He said that during the retreat, as he is focusing on his breath, he is often involved in movies, feeling his drug trips, ecstasy adventures, ayuahuasca journeys, and magical moments. He relives them over and over, sometimes they feel way more intense here in meditation than they did when he was actually in them. It took a little encouragement to get him to talk about this, because he thought it was "wrong meditation" and so he felt a little guilty about it.

He said, "But then they fade away and I am just being in the present moment again." As if reliving a drug trip in meditation is BAD and something to feel a little guilty over. It was clear that he had internalized the value system that permeates much of what we call meditation, that you are supposed to "be in the present moment" and that daydreaming and memories are sort of bad, and you are sort of supposed to slap yourself in the face and wake the f#$^ up. Let's call that the WTFU attitude.

This is where, for the first time, he started talking in a way that was unhealthy - he did not know it was unhealthy because he thought he was following the instructions of the retreat.

In reality, as he was sitting there meditating many hours a day, his brain was integrating all the realms of his experiences, so that after meditation, in his real world, he could be a more integrated person. Yoga means connecting, integration, and the body-brain-heart-mind system is ALWAYS seeing to do yoga, always working to integrate the best of what you are learning from life and bring it all together so that you can live your best life.

In reality, as he was sitting there attempting to follow the instructions, his body-brain-heart-mind system, let's call it BBHMS was, in that very present moment, in the here and now, dreaming and making connections and using the restfulness of the meditation to do its work.

When I explained this to him, he scowled, as meditators and yogis do when you tell them that meditation is not spanking yourself. It's not bondage and domination, and not a kind of ritual of humiliation, in which you continually tell your brain to just shut the f%^& up.

Wait, what? He said.

Yes, I said. When you are meditating, whether you are just a normal straight person or a psychonaut adventurer like you, meditation is journey time. Because you are not doing anything else, the wisdom of your Soul, in cooperation with the intrinsic wisdom of your body, work together to evolve your senses, learn from and integrate all your learnings, and bring it all together so that your everyday life has a quiet psychedelic quality.

The world seems brighter because your senses are alive, you feel more energy streaming in your body because your chakras have had a chance to recharge, and you are ready for life.

This feels like a journey, that every minute of meditation is a surprising journey in which you are dancing with the life force itself, having sex with the energy of life, drinking the magic elixir of the breath and getting stoned on it, getting healed by it, getting inspired by the ongoing miracle of breath. Meditation is basically taking the attitude that prana, the life force, it itself an elixir, and in any moment you can ask it to heal you, juice you up, help you find your way in life, heal you of the wounds of the past, and fill you with delight so you feel like partying. Prana, pranashakti, The Life Force, God, The Holy Spirit, the Goddess. Use any name you like or no name.

He thought about that for a minute. Processing.

At this point in the conversation, it is always essential to give the student time to think their own thoughts, review what they thought they know about meditation, and compare this to their lived experience.

Some meditators hear what I said about the journey model, have a flash of insight, and say, "Of course! That's exactly what I experience. I just thought it was wrong. What you are saying makes so much sense! This is so freeing. OMG."

Others need time, and reject the notion. A computation goes on in their minds: "All meditation teachers from the beginning of time, all over the world, everywhere, say you are supposed to sit still and silence the mind. Now this one guy, who I don't know that well, is telling me the opposite. Hmmm, I don't think so. It's a million voices against Lorin's one point of view, POV. Sorry Lorin, you're outvoted."

It felt like I was outvoted here. This was just too big a leap for him to make. He was in that moment preparing himself mentally to go on retreat, and he felt the repressive, stultifying rules, and how they sometimes work, and could not figure out how to be a rebel inside while there on the retreat.

Meditators often feel like "someone will know" what they are thinking.

They have to try to be good. Unknowingly, meditators think that when they are sitting there they are in Church or Temple of some kind, and must act Spiritual somehow, according to someone's rules. If you let your "mind," whatever that is, run wild, then God will punish you. Buddha will punish you, same thing.

Whether this attitude of inner strangulation harms you in the long run depends on how deep you take it.

Some people have layers.

Layers

Shrek: Ogres are like onions.

Donkey: They stink?

Shrek: Yes. No.

Donkey: Oh, they make you cry.

Shrek: No.

Donkey: Oh, you leave em out in the sun, they get all brown, start sproutin’ little white hairs.

Shrek: No. Layers. Onions have layers. Ogres have layers. Onions have layers. You get it? We both have layers.

Donkey: Oh, you both have layers. Oh. You know, not everybody like onions.

How you thrive in meditation depends on how many layers you have an how they interact with what you interpret as the "rules" of meditation.

I started noticing this 52 years ago when I was interviewing meditators as part of research at the University of California at Irvine. All kinds of people, other college students, women with babies asleep in their arms, business owners, university professors, and a few Marines, agreed to talk to me and share their stories and experiences.

Aside - Camp Pendelton

My mother was a surfer, and my father built boards, and we basically lived at San Onofre, a surfing beach that the San Onofre Surfing Club leased from the Marines. We had been driving past the Marine guard gate my whole life and even before I was born, so I have always felt friendly to Marines. And my older brother was a Marine.

Back to the Interviews

One thing I noticed early on in the years of interviewing was that healthy meditators - those people who were aglow from their meditation practice and their daily life - had layers. They never took the meditation "rules" deep into their inner life in such a way as to ruin everything. They never seemed to "abandon" themselves in order to be spiritual. They would have one layer of them that was sort of following the rules of meditation in a general way, and a whole set of other layers that were thinking their own thoughts, "doing it my way."

In other words, they had an instinct to not violate their own integrity, no matter what the meditation teacher or book or technique seemed to be saying. Their Inner Rebel is quite intact and alerts them if any of what are called sacred practices is really a Trojan Horse, just a way to enslave you and undermine your essential freedom.

I started doing these interviews in 1968, and about half the people I was interviewing had taken LSD many times, and had incredible experiences. They had been stoned and dancing at the legendary concerts of the time, when the great bands were coming through Southern California. They were telling me that sometimes in meditation, the whole time they would be reliving a sacred moment, of dancing in ecstasy, surrounded by thousands of people and many friends, carried by the music, every cell of the body alive with song. Heaven. Or remembering times of looking at the sky while on acid, or remembering being on a scary trip, that now, a year later, is kind of interesting.

People who thrive in meditation cherish every memory that arises, especially the ones that come and carry you away into an intense, absorbing movie. Then when they awaken from this long flow of experiences, and 5 or 10 minutes during meditation can feel like a month, they sort of laugh, wow, what a trip! They do not "hurry back to the mantra" or "focus on the breath again," they linger there in the afterglow of the memory, allowing the juices to flow.

When you come back from an inner journey while meditating, if you linger there, savoring the transition, your body has a chance to make deeper connections and adjust your hormone factory so that you can live your richness. It is as if, in these tender transitional moments, you are savoring, drinking a kind of elixir, allowing your sensory nervous system to manufacture its own psychedelic compounds, the kind that help you have a great day, that make you glad to be alive, that suffuse you with the embodied sense that it's good to be alive and I am full of life. I am good to go. Ready for anything.

There is a love of all human experience in these people who thrive in meditation, in spite of how creepy and anti-life the rules are if you actually follow them.

The Beauty of the Psychedelic Journey Model

Jim Fadiman, PhD, has been one of my teachers, and he invited me to Esalen in 1969 to assist a workshop he was teaching. Jim was one of the pioneers of psychedelic research and wrote "The Psychedelic Explorer's Guide: Safe, Therapeutic, and Sacred Journeys."

Jim and I have had a kind of joke going on for the past 51 years, in that I basically have never taken anything because I get up at 4 in the morning and do yoga and meditation, so I miss all the parties. If you get up early, basically you have to be in bed by about 9, otherwise you can't do it. I always envied my friends a little, who could smoke pot and go to concerts, but to me a concert ticket cost more than a day of meditation teacher training, or almost as much as a session of Rolfing. You have to make choices. So we are total opposites, Jim and I. Part of the joke is that I am always saying to Jim, "Meditation as people think of it and practice it is so boring. People are always editing their experiences and trying to just quiet down, as if meditation is Valium. Psychedelic explorers have the right idea: they take something and say to LIFE: Hit me! Wake me up! Take me on a journey! Make me face all my fears! I will GO THROUGH ANYTHING JUST TAKE ME TO THE OTHER SIDE. Bring me into the vivid psychedelic present. If people would approach each moment of meditation in this way, they would benefit so much more from the practice.

I smoked marijuana several times with my Rolfer, Ed Maupin, in 1969 and it was wonderful. Ed is a master of taking a tiny dose, enough to just light up your senses. But I noticed that there is a kind of fuzz or smog in my senses for a week or so afterwards, that gets in the way of clear meditation. Marijuana affects some people in this way, and others not. Everyone is different. My body produces so much intrinsic endocannabinoid, that day to day, I don't need an external supply. It is better, in my body, to do the practices that stimulate my own inner production of happy molecules. This generally takes half an hour to an hour a day of dissolving and dancing with delicious mantras.

I took LSD once, on Maui, at the Sacred Pools near Hana. Pools of ‘Ohe’o, they are called. Waterfalls and pools in a valley, fed by a rainforest stream. All my senses came alive to the beauty of nature in a very intense way, that LSD is famous for. We were way high up the hillside, and all day, only a couple of people came by, and only for a few minutes. I was treated to a communion with the grass, the rocks, the stream and the waterfall, who were telling me about what it was like long ago before any human beings came to Maui, and they sung to me of eternity. Really, I could live on that stuff. I could take LSD every day for breakfast if one could.

There in the Pools of ‘Ohe’o I was with a psychiatrist from Toronto by the name of Peter, who I had met at Esalen when we were both there for a month-long. I was leading a month-long workshop, and he was taking a month-long Gestalt Therapy workshop. He had been trying to get me to take LSD all during the month, because we would wind up sitting in the same hot tub at the baths, and would just talk about everything. Peter was a very experienced psychedelic guide, and was offering to guide me. I said, "I'm working. People rely on the accuracy and precision of my teaching, my ideas, my techniques, and feedback. I wouldn't be responsible to take LSD for the first time while I am on the job."

A few weeks after that month at Esalen, during which I did not take LSD, I was staying on Maui, working on a book. I had been swimming everyday at Makena Beach, and around noon I would get out of the sun and drink fruit smoothies at a stand a few miles north. There was a Safeway kind of store, and the fruit stand. I had nothing to do, had swim to my heart's content, and was just standing there in the shade. There was absolutely nothing to do except wait for the sun to move a bit over the sky and get less intense. It was summer on Maui.

So I am standing there with my big straw hat on, with the kind of clear mind that, truth be told, I only have after swimming a mile or so in the ocean. And in front of me, an old beat-up car drives up and parks. A guy staggers out, flinching from the glare of the noonday sun. I realize it is Peter, my friend from Esalen. I walk up to him and say, "Peter, it took you long enough to show up." This was a joke, I was pretending that him appearing right in front of me was not The Most Improbable Thing In The World.

At Esalen, Peter had told me that he had purchased an Round The World Ticket, RTW, and that his plan was to go to Singapore, then Thailand, then India, something like that, in some order. He never said anything about Hawaii.

Peter told me, "the plane stopped over at Oahu," and "I just felt like getting off on and looking around, it was just a spur of the moment decision," he said. "I went down to the beachfront hotels to get a room and they were so expensive that I just lay down and slept on the beach in front of a hotel. Then a policeman came at dawn and woke me up. So I jumped on a boat to Maui and got off at Lahina. Went to Rent a Wreck and got this car. Drove down the coast and here I am, somehow."

So I started taking Peter to all my favorite spots. He is a great traveling companion. He is totally up for any adventure, and really listens to the people around him. He hears and sees. And he never seems to psychologize, which is when you are constantly interpreting what other people are doing as a form of disease. This is a mental disease of some psychologists, that they view everyone else through a veil of pathology. The DSM has infected their brains and so that is all they experience of life. (The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders).

And that is how I wound up bringing him to the Pools and my one time of taking LSD, which I still cherish and learn from.

The whole question is always, "How do we bring this richness of perception into our daily life?"

What protocol, what meditation practice, what way of breathing, what way of eating, exercising, what substance, helps so that we approach our daily life with all senses alive, all instincts listened to, all chakras finely tuned and working together, so that we are in touch with our own Lightning in a Bottle, we live each moment infused by pranashakti, the essential Lightning of Life.