How to Feel Safe by Cultivating Relaxed Alertness (Meditation and Intuition - Part 4)

Reality seems to work by paired opposites.

The yin/yang symbol is an eternal symbol of this.

If you want to breathe in, you have to breathe out first. If you want to be wide awake for the day's work, you have to go completely unconscious, in the state called sleep, for hours beforehand. If you want to jump up, you first crouch down into gravity, then you spring upwards. We are all used to the ways these opposites work together. We know these opposites are complimentary. We use this all the time without having to think about it.

Here is one that may be less familiar: if you want to be safe in a situation that has some dangers, cultivate relaxation. If you go around the world with a thorough sense of relaxation permeating your body, then when you get an alarm signal, an inner ahhhooooggaa or danger signal, you will know this is coming from outside. There is something to attend to. Your nervous system will configure itself appropriately to face whatever danger is there.

If you go around the world with danger signals blasting away in your head all the time, false feelings of emergency, then you will be too tired, stressed, and off-balance to respond appropriately if and when a real physical danger does arise. Your alarm system gives so many false alarms that you and everyone around you will weary of the noise you generate. So paradoxically, a way to cultivate a state of alertness, in which you go around in a state of responsiveness, is to cultivate a wide-open relaxation, senses wide open, body at play, instincts supple, at home and ready for anything.

For years, I have recommended that everyone who experiences fear on a daily basis read the books of Gavin de Becker. Now Gavin has a new book out, Fear Less: Real Truth About Risk, Safety, and Security in a Time of Terrorism.

All this points to the idea, don't walk out the door without meditating. Meditation, practiced the way I describe it in my books, is a great tool for tuning your intuition and living a relaxed life. One in which your survival signals only go off when needed, so you listen to them.

Re-Calibrating Your Danger Signaling System (Meditation and Intuition - Part 2)

A dog that barks at every person and every leaf that moves is worthless as a watchdog. A car alarm that goes off because the wind blows, or someone walks by, is worse than useless – your neighbors will be glad someone steals your damn car, just to get that horrible noise out of their lives for a few days. And if we are tense and suspicious all the time, this is not good armor and not good radar. No military can be on high alert all the time – things break down.

Meditation is adaptive – this means that the power driving meditation and making it work is your body's innate intelligence, which is only interested in helping you to survive and thrive. This is the natural tendency of meditation, by the way – you can observe this in yourself, and you can find it out through interviewing others. Instinctive Meditation is just a name I give to a system for recognizing and utilizing what happens naturally during successful and healthy meditation. I developed it by listening to people who were thriving in meditation and in life, and I learned in a different way by listening to people who were taking damage.

As part of this adaptive process, one of the dynamics that goes on during meditation is that your body and mind will re-calibrate your danger signaling system, to make it more accurate. You'll find yourself going deeply into relaxation, and then your nerves will jump a bit as they replay the memory of a threat that you perceived. Then your nervous system will study the relationship of that perceived threat with your current sensory intelligence about your world, and evaluate the best course of action. This is an almost involuntary process. It has great survival but everyone almost without exception hates it because they think it shouldn't be part of meditation. It feels like you are at home having dinner, or resting, and a technician from the alarm company comes over unannounced and starts testing the alarm system, opening and closing doors and windows and checking the perimeter. If you allow this process, you will find that after meditation, your danger signaling system is more accurate with fewer false alarms, and you can go through life more relaxed because you trust your sensors.

How to Have Good Personal Radar (Meditation and Intuition - Part 1)

One reason to meditate is so that you don't miss out on the beauty of your own life as you move through the day. It is so easy to lose the joy of life in the living of it, to get caught up in hurrying and mental chatter about how late you are, how many things you have to do. When we find the style of meditation that works for us, we often find that our senses open up, and our intuition becomes more accurate. And at the same time, we engage in the actions of our everyday life with more relaxation and ease.

Because of this, many people think that meditation is about being open and relaxed, but this is not actually true: meditation gives your nerves a chance to be in deeper contact with reality, and as a result you will be more open and relaxed much of the time, because there is not an immediate threat. And because your senses are more open, you can perceive both safety and danger more accurately. And ask any warrior: relaxation is a great place to come from when preparing for combat, if that is what's called for.

Another reason to not leave home without meditating is that if you are relaxed as your baseline experience, then when you get tense, it is a signal, a clear blip on your personal radar. Relaxation is like having a well-calibrated radar system, that gives few false signals.

Unless you are relaxed and at ease, you will have a lot of noise in your nervous system. If you are afraid all the time, and suspicious of everyone, you won't know when you actually are in danger, because your danger signaling system is blaring all the time. If your radar is showing threats that are not there, you will have to learn to ignore it to get any work done, and then real threats will go ignored.

This is why meditation is part of the training in many martial arts, and why meditation and martial arts training are complementary opposites, enriching each other.

As an aside, though, I have to mention that sitting on your ankles, or sitting cross-legged, can be very bad for the knees. Sitting in a chair with your feet on the ground is a great pose, plus it has that extra sense of groundedness.

In the following several sections, we cycle through the interplay between safety and danger, because this is the most basic of instincts. We will look at the way rhythm occurs in meditation experience, and we will approach the same point again and again, spiraling in at it from slightly different angles, because it is such a challenging issue for meditators. Most people never get it, and the lack of this understanding is a major reason people quit meditating. So forgive the repetition.