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.

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.

Delight in Sensing the World - Audio

Attention and mindfulness happen through the senses. When you are aware of thinking, it is through internal sensing: you see a mental image in “your mind’s eye,” you hear a thought or you feel one. You can even call up thought-smells.

Take your time to check in with your senses, at your own pace. Explore smell, taste, sight, hearing, balance and let them take you into meditation.

The first few times you meditate with the senses, it may take many minutes to engage fully with one of the senses and experience its range. Over time, by simply thinking of one sense for a moment, it will awaken. Tuning into each of your senses every day will enrich your life in subtle and wonderful ways.

The more you let your senses open up and rejoice in meditation, the better. When you pay attention to a sense, it comes alive. If you do so consistently, the brain literally creates more neural pathways to appreciate that sense.

It does not take much to awaken the senses; even the lightest touch suffices to start the process. The payoff is usually immediate — we find ourselves just a little bit more alert to the beauty of the world around us. Go for those tiny changes.

Grab some mini-meditations here and there throughout your day. Two minutes here, thirty seconds there. These will teach you how to develop a meditation practice that you want to do each day.

Five-minute guided audio meditation

Breath Meditation - Audio

Breath has sound, it has texture, it has motion. As your body moves with the inflowing and outflowing breath your body balances automatically. Breath even has an impact on the visual field; there are subtle differences to notice.

Breathing with awareness is one of the essential meditation techniques cherished the world over. Simply pay attention to the flow of air with appreciation for the gift of each breath. Doing this even a few minutes a day will bless your life. A human being develops senses for whatever she pays attention to. If you pay a lot of attention to wine, you will learn to identify what type it is just by a sniff of the bouquet. If you watch a lot of baseball, you will learn to see what type of pitch is coming at the hitter earlier and earlier in the wind-up or release. Mothers can tell the state of their babies at a glance. If you pay attention to breath, your body will over time evolve the senses to really, really enjoy it as one of the Fine Things of Life.

Breath has to be mostly automatic and out-of-awareness by default, because our life depends on it every minute. We each breathe many times a minute, whether we are awake or asleep. In a day we breathe more than twenty thousand times. Each of these breaths connects us to the entire planet. Appreciating this connection is joyous but optional — it is what you do after survival is assured.

The movement of attention to cherish breath is instinctive, for all living things have a natural attraction toward that which gives them life. Meditation is an instinctive urge, a calling, as deep as any of the ancient yearnings that move human beings. All the hundreds of techniques are just ways of cooperating with that urge. In order for meditation to feel that innate, it helps to learn it at your own speed in your own way. Start now.

Take a breath, have fun.