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.

Yukti 4 from The Radiance Sutras

Lorin Roche, PhD

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.

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.

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.”

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.

Meditation is Communion

Lorin Roche, PhD

Mallorca

So I went to Majorca, Spain, in February 1971 for more meditation. A bunch of us meditators jumped on a charter plane from Los Angeles that stopped in Greenland, then at an airport north of London at about 4 in the morning. We waited several hours for a customs officer to show up, and then after showing our passports, we got on a bus to ride through the fog and darkness to Heathrow, where I had an excellent English beer at 9 in the morning. It really hit the spot. We got on another plane for somewhere in Spain, probably Barcelona. There we were treated to a brief glimpse of Fascist Spain in all its glory. The airport was full of military-looking guards whose main job seemed to be to swagger around and look handsome, military, and imposing. They were like characters in a Mexican TV show – their sole purpose was to add a sexual charge to the atmosphere, in case there were any blonde women around who had S & M fantasies. They looked with scorn at any of the men with long hair, and with lust at the pretty young things in our group.

Majorca (in the middle)

There was a beach some miles away from Palma, with a row of four or five hotels. The TM organization had made them an incredible offer: "Let us rent your hotels IN WINTER." The locals said, "But this is not traditional! We are closed in Winter and open only in Spring, Summer and early Fall." I remember Jerry telling this story with great amusement. The TM people kept upping the offer until they had to say yes. That had to be quite an offer – let us rent a thousand hotel rooms for five months or so.

This is Mallorca, but we were somewhere with sandy beaches. Our hotels were close to the ocean like this.

For me, it was an incredible deal. I had saved up the money I made grooming the greens at Irvine Coast Country Club before dawn, then forgotten about it. I had about $1200 left over after paying for the Poland Springs and Estes Park courses. That money, because of the deals TM worked out, bought me round-trip airfare to Majorca, and three months of advanced meditation teacher training. Maybe it was a bit more or less, but it worked out to where for several hundred dollars a month I was staying in a hotel on the beach in Majorca. I was already a teacher, so I had no classes to go to, no one looking after me, nothing to do but make up my own schedule.

So there we were, in these really nice hotels right on the beach, looking East over the Mediterranean. I had never spent any time on a beach facing East. All my beach time, which has been extensive, has been on coastlines that face West. I have this image in my head, of the angels showing me Earth, before I was born, pointing out Southern California to me, and saying, "It's a lot like Greece in 300 BC." Anyway, I am usually right at home on a beach as long as the ocean is clean and swimmable.

Again Blessed By Darkness

After years of meditating and therapy, and months of rounding, I had gone through much of the horror of my earlier life, reliving and releasing the fear, grief, pain, rage, and annihilation. Here in Majorca I plunged in again to see what was there to be dealt with. I quickly became involved in something that had the feel of editing a movie – miles and miles of film, going back and forth through the story. In meditation, I felt my awareness rapidly moving through every event of my life, especially the stuck places, going backward and forward, stopping at any place in which I was stuck, working it over, then moving on. My attention seemed set on facing every pain, every bit of anguish, and releasing it, down to the tiniest molecule.

Some force in me was determined to face down my inner demons or die trying. It quickly became apparent that there was a lot more to be dealt with, split-off fragments of my own vitality that were running amok in my psyche. From Jungian Analysis I had learned, "Turn and face whatever is chasing you." And Jung had used an interesting metaphor once: "If you find yourself being sucked into a vortex, turn toward it and dive in." I was in the process of letting myself be drawn right into the center of the spinning circle of power. This went on for several weeks, and I started to get the sense of something – that there was perhaps a possibility I could be healed, but I needed time, lots of time.

There was a tension of opposites. On one hand the nature of the attention manifesting in me seemed determined to break down the structures and histories ruling me, limiting me, by reducing them to molecules, then atoms, then pure energy. On the other hand, there was a shortage of time. I was two weeks into a three-month meditation retreat of my own making. I had already completed my official meditation teacher training, this was an advanced course I had chosen or been called to.

And I didn't feel quite done – I really wanted to stay there in the room until I was. One afternoon, after being there a couple of weeks, I was meditating and thought, "If I could stay here for three more years, I would be enlightened."

So I went looking for Maharishi to have a conversation with him. In those days, 1970, early 1971, if you were on a course with him, especially if you were one of the teachers he had trained, you could just go wait outside his door and maybe get in to have a private talk. I walked down the beach to the hotel he was in. and went up to his rooms. He and his staff had the entire floor. Maharishi wasn't there, but one of his friends was, a man by the name of Sattyanand was there and he waved me in. Sattyanand and I had seen each other before, he was at the Estes Park course and I had enjoyed his wit and directness.
I stood in the doorway, uncertain. He gestured me in with his typical impatience.
"Come in, come in, but take off your shoes," Sattyanand said.
We sat and talked for awhile, and he asked me about my experiences, and then he said something that turns out to have really changed my life. "Do you have a friend who can bring you food?" he asked.
"Yes, I have a girlfriend in the same hotel, just down the hall."
"Ask her if she will bring you food to eat each day, and then stay in your room, a week, two weeks, maybe more. Whenever you have the impulse to go out the door, just put your attention on your body. Feel your body, and stay in the room. Then come see me again." (Feel de body. Hmm? Stay in de room.)

Joyce was a couple of years older than me, and we had been living together and having a wonderful affair the previous year. She had gotten me into Jungian analysis and I had gotten her into TM. We stopped having sex about 6 months previous to being there in Majorca, but we were still friends and she was a wonderful person to have down the hall. It was actually a total coincidence that she was on that exact course, in the same hotel, on the same floor. She was the kind of person who could bring you a plate of food and leave it outside the door without leaving one trace of mental noise. She had incredible grace and a quiet wisdom. She readily agreed to bring me food each day. Bless you Joyce, wherever you are.

I put a note on the door: FEEL DE BODY. Then I pulled the blackout curtains, closing out my view of the ocean, and making the room completely cave-like. It was pitch black – not a spot of light anywhere. The door onto the hallway was a double door, for some reason. If you were going out from in the room, there was a door, then a tiny hallway, then an outer door. This meant you felt completely isolated from the hallway, and soundproofed. Joyce brought me lots of Majorca oranges, which were incredible; bottled water, and lunch and dinner plates. I would leave her notes if I needed anything more.

My only problem then was that it was cold – we were on the beach in the Mediterranean in winter, and a cold ocean breeze was blowing all the time, and the hotel, to save money, did not have the heat turned on. I had two wool blankets, which was not enough to keep me from waking up shivering in the middle of the night. But I knew I could handle the cold – I was a California surfer, used to chilly ocean temperatures ranging from 59 to the low 60's most of the year. I knew that if you sleep in the cold, after a week or so your metabolism will kick in and start burning calories while you sleep, just to keep warm. I had read a research report on this years before. So I shivered for a week until my body got used to sleeping and meditating in the cold.

I had a watch that glowed in the dark. A faint uranium glow, just barely visible. I would make myself stay in bed until 4 in the morning, and then I would roll out of bed, toss one of the blankets on the floor, and glide through a full set of asanas. This is actually a great way to wake up in the morning. Then I'd do a couple minutes of pranayama and meditate for 40 minutes. Then go take a shower, and resume rounding. By 11 in the morning, I had been at it quite awhile, and would enter a kind of timeless rhythm. Some days I would do 14 rounds, each one lasting about an hour to an hour and a half. I would stop meditating usually by 7 or 8 p.m., in order to have some transitional time so that I could sleep. I had candles, and would light a candle each evening, and even striking the match was startling. My pupils must have been dilated all the way. Sometimes I would light a stick of incense – the TM movement at the time had access to a light sandalwood incense that was sublime – and I could see the walls just by the glow of the incense.

My entire life was there in that room. It was as if the story of my life came to a full stop and was paused, watching and waiting. You have to face this, or die. I took to the total darkness right away, doing my rounding, the asanas, pranayama, meditation, pranayama, asanas, pranayama, meditation.

TM is an ususual and sublime practice in that if you get it, you get the elegance of the technique, you pretty much cease to struggle with peripherals. The technique becomes like an old pair of jeans or shoes that are totally comfortable and durable. You don't worry about preserving them. You have great traction, and you just look where you are going. You forget the technique entirely, and are just left to deal with the contents of your mind and muscle memory. The downside of this, if you can call it a downside, is that you just zoom right to what is bothering you. There was a lot bothering me, memories of abuse, beatings, betrayals, and emotional torture. I was now 20, and the previous two years, 18-20 had been wonderful, but my teenage years had been shattering and soul-destroying. The call I was sensing was to go inside, face the intolerable and dissemble it.

How do you describe such a day? Once you truly wake up inside a meditation, each second counts. Tick, tick. Thump thump of the heart. You can feel the space between each heartbeat. Ka-thump. Ka-thump. Ok, now I am settling into the experience of being an individual entity, here I am on Earth. Whew. A breath. Another breath. Only 22,000 breaths to go today. Only 100,000 more heartbeats. An eternity starts to blossom in each moment, but it is not a happy eternity. And the experience is not boredom – anything but. I think the accurate clinical description would be something like holy terror. If you really go in there undefended, with undefended attention, you will die. But there is nothing else to do.

The great thing about TM, which the great insight, is that you don't make unnecessary effort. No wrong effort. Only the right effort, which is not effort at all. Right effort is to BE THERE. Meditation is being there witnessing everything and you don't run away. And the word effort does not describe what is called for. Courage is called for. The willingness to feel everything. Effort, or trying, is only a distraction and will only be effort toward the wrong thing. This is an astounding insight, because skill IS called for. It is very difficult to sit there and face everything, in total darkness and total silence, second after second, minute after minute, day after day, on and on and on. One of the brilliant gifts of TM is knowing how to make darkness and silence interesting. In TM, they are not afraid to let things be simple.

So there I was in the totally blacked-out room, and for several weeks I felt as if I were in a horror movie. In-between doing asanas, I sat in a chair most of the day, with my feet on the ground. I liked the feeling of having my feet on the ground, and I liked the altitude the chair gave me. I put the chair right in the middle of my room, I felt like I needed the space all around me. Because each meditation, when I would close my eyes, I felt as if I were coming face-to-face with a monster – a dragon, or an insane killer with a chain saw, slowly grinding through my flesh. So I visualized that I was chained to the chair. I actually did this – I imagined that I was chained to the chair so that I would not go running out of the room.

Ordinarily, even a few seconds of this feeling would make a person run screaming out of the room. But I had nowhere to go. There was nothing waiting for me back home. I had no money, I had spent every penny on the meditation teacher training. My plane wasn't for months, to take me from Majorca back to California. Many times I would get up out of the chair and go to the door, which I knew had the sign on it, FEEL DE BODY. I would almost put my hand on the doorknob, saying to myself, "I will just go out, go for a walk, maybe say hello to some friends." But then I would think, no, I am not ready. This is not authentic. And I would just sit down and pay attention to the restlessness, the urge in my muscles and nerves to flee this place, get away, run! I would just sit and breathe and track that sensation right into its essence in the life force, until instead of a driving restless urge to move, it became a vibration of life and an awareness of being.

At times when the sensation was too much to endure, a mental image of one of my teachers would come to me, or appear to my awareness. I would see their eyes. Many times I would be looking into the eyes of Ed Maupin, the psychologist and body therapist who did the Structural Integration treatments on me. Structural Integration is commonly called Rolfing, and is a kind of profound deep tissue work. By deep tissue, I mean that the Rolfer will put his elbow into your leg muscles, then use his skill to shift through the layers of tissue until he is in contact with the deeper layers, and then glide along, really putting his weight and strength into it. The idea is to break up the "holding," the static stuff that keeps the layers of muscle and tissue from really gliding.

I don't know if you have ever worked with a therapist or bodyworker, someone doing deep work with you, but there is a faraway look they sometimes get, when they are holding your soul in their hands, and they have to access their deepest resources to be there with you. They are wondering, hmm, if I was that person, how would I handle it? Sitting there in the darkness, I would see Ed, or one of my therapists, or my Tai Chi teacher Marshall Ho, looking at me. And I would GET IT. I would see myself through their awareness, and then their way of paying attention would combine with mine. I would see the universe through their eyes for a moment. Doing this would give me an added bit of strength of attention, a broader spectrum of attention, with which to attend to my present moment.

Dogs look at us with utter love. Anyone who has had a dog knows this. And there are times when a healer looks at you like a dog does – just pure love and soulfulness. The soul is looking at you. I had many such moments to draw upon, and they all came to me in my hours of need. These eyes looking at me were not generic attention – it was very specific, very personal, intimate and individualized. During the times when I could not bear to be in my own body, their awareness would come to me and help me make it though to the next moment.

It was a path inward – in to the space between the cells of my body. In to the space between the molecules and atoms my body is made up out of. In to the space of the heart. In to the space the mind thinks in.

Gradually, my sense of being expanded, and I was able to face the feeling of the monster with the chain saw. Really, for about two weeks the sensation was like having your teeth drilled – endurable for a few minutes maybe, but all day, day after day, enough to make you go insane. But I did not have the choice to go insane. I had to stay there. And as I stayed there, my deepest pain came to the surface, the feeling that I myself am a monster, so full of impurities that I should do the world a favor and go kill myself. I have seen too much evil, seen too much pain, seen too much abuse, and it has contaminated me.

There is a rhythm to meditation, and it matches the rhythm of a story or a movie. There is a call to adventure, then obstacles, maybe a refusal of the call, and then some kind of undeniable call saying, you will come. Then eventually allies or mentors show up, helpful spirits, and with them you get started on a long adventure. After many trials, you descend or penetrate to an inner cave where you have to obtain something valuable, which will restore your world to balance. And then there is the Return, the struggle to return to your everyday world with the gift, the boon, the elixir that restores life. And then the whole cycle starts over again.

In meditation, the call is the sense of a need. Something is lacking in your ability to pay attention to life. Becoming aware that something is lacking is the first, daring step. Admitting you have to go find the elixir, that you have to go on an adventure, is the second step. Finding allies is the next step. The process of meditating matches the rhythm of the hero quest exactly. The call to adventure can be as simple as noticing that you are craving contact with essence, craving to be in touch with that inner silence. The initial obstacles are many – I don't have time, this isn't the right time, I will just go for a walk, I will read a magazine, i will do something else, I am not ready. The allies are your technique, your inner knowing, the helpful feelings that show up and say, "You can do it. Come on. Let's go."

In movies, the tension builds and is often released in a mini-climax, which then just adds to the greater building of tension. In meditation, if you get really relaxed and at ease, then there is nothing to distract you from the ultimate pain you are in, which is being the weird you that you are, an individual, unlike anyone else and therefore unable to really take refuge in anyone else's path. You have to make your own way. And when you are sitting there in a dark room, you really are on your own. It's you and the blackness, baby.

With me, the tension built and built and built until after about two weeks in the darkness, every heartbeat was a screaming intensity of something unendurable. It wasn't pain anymore. It was just a fear of facing existence. It was just that sensation that makes you move on, change the channel, change the topic, move away from the conversation, turn your eyes away from looking at that person.

I started to witness the pain I was in, the sense of being fundamentally damaged, damaged beyond repair. It was as if I were the Soul, and I was examining this body I was in, and I was thinking or considering, "You know, this whole incarnation may be a loss. The human being is too damaged to continue. I'll have to pull the plug on this experiment."

Then I started to think, "If I WERE going to live, how would I get healing?" I had already been through intense, magnificent healing experiences with brilliant healers, therapists and teachers, who labored over me and gave me their best. And they trained me well, but most of them had not been through experiences as terrible as what I experienced as a teenager, the kind of torture and soul destruction I had undergone, year after year after year.

There was nothing else to do, sitting there in the darkness. So my awareness expanded. Some kind of energy field which was ME, permeating and encompassing my body and the space around me for several feet, reached out into space.

At first I felt, OK, here is the pain I am in. My physical sensation was that of being crushed, that the container I was in was too small. The space of my awareness is too small. I am here on a spot on the island of Majorca. And I drank in the comfort that came from existing there. Then it seemed that Majorca was not large enough to contain the pain – it was still annihilating, not enough to give me breath. Then my attention expanded to include the space for a thousand miles around, the whole Mediterranean. I breathed that air for a day or two, drawing in the comfort of that beautiful, stunning, magnificent sea and all the countries bordering on it, and all the courageous people who have ever sailed its waves. But then that was not enough space to disburse the pain. I would still die if that was all there was, I would do the world the favor of disappearing. Then my attention expanded to include all the oceans of the world, and that brought some real relief, AH. But still, the pain, the sense of being tortured beyond my capacity to endure was there, and I stayed there, feeling this tension, and feeling the planet, for a few days, with a mixture or sorrow and gladness. Glad to feel the whole planet. Sad that it was not enough, I was too damaged, too polluted, too broken.

Then at some point, I don't know whether it was ten days in to the total blackness, or twelve days, or fourteen. Something happened one day, and I started to sense the space within which our planet makes its rounds around the Sun. There is something there in space. I began to be aware of the space that embraces planet Earth. This space is somewhat larger than the orbit of the planet, and somehow it embraces the Earth, and loves the Earth with an undying love. I used to think that space was empty, and cold. But sitting there in the chair, with no one to help me, nowhere to go, and nothing to pay attention to but space, and also in absolute, desperate need of healing, I became aware of space as something almost like love, intelligent love. I made friends with something vast.

From then on, for weeks and months, it was as if I were looking at the Earth from out in space, looking in over the Earth toward the Sun, and that my awareness field was that whole area, the circle described by the Earth in its orbit.

I found that in this expanded awareness, I could rest. There, in the sphere of space that encompasses the Earth and the Sun, I could tolerate existing and not want to kill myself. This was a natural home for me. And with this as a place to rest in, I could face the petty terrors of my little life on Earth. This vastness loves planet Earth, and loves anyone who is foolish enough or courageous enough to go down there and take on a human body and become totally trapped in the human condition.

The sense of being at one with the space embracing Earth became my usual mode, and I would come and go from it casually. I started to have flashes of memories that were not of my lifetime, and having had lots of Gestalt Therapy and Jungian dream work, I just treated them as dreams, symbolic. Then I realized, "These are not dreams. These are memories." The therapy models I had been trained in had been incredibly useful, I think indispensable in helping me to face what I needed to face. But now that I was through at least one phase of facing my demons, it seemed that there was more to the story than therapy knows about. The awareness that lives in a human being outlasts the body. There is an awareness that selects bodies, lives through them, and then goes on to other realms, following some plan of its own. I started to see that I, and others, have been incarnating on Earth for a very long time.

And then I forgot about it, let the sense of reincarnation dissolve into the luminosity of the infinite now I was beginning to be in.

At this point, I had the sense that Sattyanand glanced at me. For a second. It was as if he could see me, through the walls and through the half a mile of space between us. I saw him smiling, as if to say, "Welcome to the world I live in. Weird but wonderful, eh?" From that point on, I felt I had friends in him and Maharishi, really intimate friends. I also felt extremely intimate with their teacher, Swami Brahmananda Saraswati. Then I really started to feel the lineage – that Swami Brahmananda had a teacher, who sent him to a cave. I felt a body-to-body transmission of something, just a silent expansion, of a heart facing the universe alone, then realizing that others have faced that.

At the same time that this was a great experience, it did not feel like it came from outside, and that Sattyanand bestowed something on me. Quite the opposite, really. I felt that Sattyanand had actually always been there, Maharishi had been there, Swami Brahmananda and his teacher, Krishnananda, had always been there. I just woke up. I just stopped being so stupid, is all. The only thing that changed was, I stopped being so fucking trapped in my dinky little world, and had let myself expand to live large, live in the Real World.

It was as if I were now inhabiting something true. I was now somewhat at home in a vast spaciousness of awareness, and that awareness also had a local incarnation – Lorin's body.

At the same time, I realized this was not actually infinity. I wasn't cosmically conscious. I was aware of part of the solar system. I was now living my life as a denizen of the solar system, in which I was aware at all times of the sun, and a couple of planets orbiting the sun, and very aware of the space within which all this orbiting was taking place. But this was still dinky compared to the universe. This was still local. I wasn't complaining – it was plenty vast enough for me to breathe freely, but it was also snug. I was in a house, a large house but still a house. I wanted to spend a lot of time exploring everything there was to see.

Swami Brahmananda Saraswati

Swami Krishananda Saraswati

From then on, and this was somewhere around day fourteen, my experience was of permeating a vast space, being someone whose natural home was the space surrounding the Sun, out to the zone between the Earth and Mars. And this being was contemplating its incarnation as Lorin. The jury was not in yet, but at least there was a sense that someone was at home. If I had died then, it would have been OK.

I'd roll out of bed before dawn (I knew, because of my radium watch) and start my rounding, and then hour after hour pay attention to the unendurable, now supported by something vast.

Oddly enough, the tension actually increased somewhat, because I was now more fully capable of tolerating the pain. It was like those moments in the dentist's chair, when he says, "It won't be long now, just let me get this last bit" and the really digs in and the what you thought was pain before you now realize was just the warming up. At the same time, I knew that this was not new pain – this is the pain I have always been in, what I have to break through in order to live.

There seems to be some kind of principle – the more aware you become, the more capable you are of experiencing pain as well as pleasure. And the pain and hideousness kept on increasing and increasing and increasing and I wouldn't blink or turn away, because I was more able to face it than ever. This went on for ten or more days, where I was in total ecstasy on the deepest level – where I WAS one with the vastness of space – and I was in total anguish on the human level – I am not worthy, I am too wounded, I am fundamentally flawed. This was a pure feeling, like an underground river.

Then, after one really long night in which I went to sleep around 10 at night, and woke up at 2 in the morning to start rounding, there was a kind of crescendo. I did not know it, but it had been a month in the room since I pulled the blackout drapes. At this point, it had been crescendo after crescendo after crescendo after crescendo. It was as if an orchestra playing a symphony seemed to end the piece, then after a pause built up to another, then another. Or as if a band came out for encore after encore. All morning, from 2 am onward, was a kind of gushing breakthrough. Something fundamental had shifted, not just in my cellular structure, but in the whole agreement between me and life itself. I was no longer the same person, with the same fate and the same karma. I had died, again and again and again and again. I had stayed there, conscious, as the chain saw cut through my face and my brain, and not gone insane and not flinched. I was breathing freely in the solar system. What I had thought of myself had died. Not just died – been killed and then the structure destroyed to the level of atoms, and then the atoms destroyed to being subatomic particles. And yet somehow I remained.

On this day, I really did not know how many days it had been. I had stopped counting at about twelve. I felt completely done with the cycle, and went to open the drapes, both the inner blackout drapes and the regular drapes. I stepped out onto the balcony overlooking the ocean, and found that it was a full moon. The ocean was glorious, with waves sparkling in the moonlight. Stars were visible, and a brilliant moon was behind me, getting near the mountains. I just stood there breathing on the balcony, the greatest breaths I had ever breathed. After awhile, there started to be a glow on the horizon as dawn neared. And I realized that I had been in the room from full moon to full moon. The feeling permeated my body, "Now I can live." This was the first time I had ever felt, I have the right and the fullness of feeling to truly live. I watched the moon set over the mountains, then awhile later the sun rose over the Mediterranean, and I looked forward to the coming day. I remember thinking, "Now I can live."

Back into the Sunlight and Moonlight

A brilliant thing about TM training is that they know how to protect such an experience. In TM-think, I was like a diver who had just spent a month at depth. You don't just come to the surface – you'll get the bends. You have to spend time at each level on the way up, letting your body and your blood adjust.

So I knew that I had to start gradually shifting from about twelve rounds a day, to eleven, then ten, then nine, and stabilize at nine for awhile – check it out, make sure your body is adjusting, then shift to eight, then seven, then six, then stabilize at six rounds a day, then five then four, then check – can you handle doing only four rounds? Do you need to go back to four or five in order to be fully integrated? Then shift to four, then cautiously shift to three. This is brilliant – the kind of thing athletic trainers know about, but no one in the meditation world has ever even had the thought, except for Maharishi and the bright people around him. And, this is the strange part, totally counterintuitive until you think it through – you have to have a sufficient number of days where you just meditate one round in the morning and one in the evening – a usual schedule. Because I had been so deep for so long, that meant that the entire last few weeks I was on the course I would be meditating just twice a day!

In the midst of this downshifting, I went to talk to Sattyanand, but he wasn't around, instead I found Maharishi, and I said, "I really feel if I could stay in the room for three more years, I would be enlightened." He looked at me – this totally impersonal look he has, and said, "No. Go and teach." That was it. I was dismissed. When Maharishi is done with you, that's it - just go. So I went out onto the beach and walked along, Maharishi already forgotten.

I started walking and walking, many hours a day. There was stuff going on in the hotels, some training of teachers, but I had no interest in it. I had almost no interest in being inside any walls. I would just take off in the morning and walk up the coast, and come back in the afternoon. I wandered for many miles each day, coming back to my room in time to do a set of asanas, meditate, shower and go to dinner.

Image by Mario Werner - link to his site

Surprisingly, my endurance was good. I could run for half a mile along the beach before even breathing hard, and I did not tire at all. After half a mile I would start to feel a bit warmed up, and I'd continue. I was at some level of exhilaration that I think dogs live in – where you can just run and run and run. I went for miles each way along the coast, just cruising along, not seeing anyone most of the time, going over sand and rocks, then rocky promontories.

For that last month, I had so much time that I would go to Maharishi's evening lectures 90 minutes early, two hours early. And it was there, sitting in a huge, nearly empty lecture hall, that I met the only other person in the room, who I will call Amanda. She become a teacher of mine – I would learn things just by glancing at her for a moment. Over the weeks I met other TM teachers and teachers in training from all over Europe and the US, and had fascinating conversations in the leisurely hour before the evening talk began. Actually, I would just listen and occasionally nod and say, "And then what happened?" My mind was quite empty so I listened with total attention, and if you have ever been in that state, you know it really gets people talking to you. They will just talk and talk and keep going, telling their story. What I had gone through made me totally uninterested in my own story – I had relived it so many times that I'd erased it. This was where I met the guy who told me about having hot sex in Asian monasteries.

The meditators I was sitting with in the lecture hall were the only people I'd had conversations with for many months, except for a couple of really short talks with Sattyanand and Maharishi, so I was happy to listen to them tell me their stories. A woman I will call Amanda, for example, was having incredible devotional experiences with Maharishi. She came to the lecture hall more than an hour early every night, and made a seat right in the middle of the front row. She spread out a silk shawl or something, a sweater and a coat, so that she was at home and able to stay warm. Several times she invited me to sit next to her, and she was luminous – I could see her shining with a pure white light, a creamy glow permeating her and surrounding her. When Maharishi would come in, Amanda would be quietly crying, tears running down her face in adoration. She knew somehow that Love is a Mighty Force. She seemed to completely endorse herself for being in love with this short, dark man from India, and she knew instinctively how to nurture this love and also contain it. She sat completely still, letting the love flow up from the earth itself through her body, percolating at its own speed, gently rising through her pelvis, to her heart, and out the crown of hear head. That's the way she looked, anyway, as I saw her in my peripheral vision.

I didn't know much about personal love, so it was educational to behold Amanda adoring Maharishi with a combination of tones. On the one hand, it looked to me as if she could see the radiance coming off of Maharishi's body. I don't remember if I ever asked her if she had that kind of vision. Some people don't see energies or hear them, but they feel them. And feeling is actually more informative than seeing. I could see luminosity and hear mantras, but so what? What does it mean? Seeing is in fact completely overrated.

What Amanda was doing was feeling. She was in the midst of a symphony of feelings, made up of a dozen instruments playing together. There was human lust – she was hot for Maharishi. There was a girl adoring a rock band. There was an absolutely wanton octave of feelings, "Take me, ravish me, make me your your bride, I am yours forever!" And this was sublimely contained in a meditative exterior. There was recognition, of a girl from the United States welcoming a man from India who had come to give us something we needed. There was service – I could see her making a determination that she was going to be of use to Maharishi's mission on Earth. She was going to be a supporter, someone to spread the word. And at the same time this intensity of feeling was rising in her body and heart, she was meditating on it, letting it carry her into an experience of God. I did not understand all this, but I could see it, and feel it a little by osmosis.

Getting used to this intensity of seeing has always been a challenge for me. It can be a great curse as well as a blessing if I do not choose well what to pay attention to. For me the danger is not inside, I found. It's been useful to look at everything inside – but being around the wrong people, suppressing my dislike for someone and seeing them with compassion is very dangerous to me. For others, the danger might be different, losing their inner balance. Looking around the lecture hall in those evenings, watching people come in, I had the sense that there are a million ways of dealing with your inner energies. Everyone just tries to figure out how to get through a day, how to get through a meditation, how to not be totally overwhelmed by it all. I could see that the people who were putting out their inner fires felt that what they were doing was scripturally authentic. They were inventing meditation and yoga to be like Christian repression.

Yoga and the Fluctuations of Mindstuff

By the way, what Amanda was doing with her passion is a central meaning of the yoga term nirodha, in my observation. She was carefully nurturing and cherishing her inner fire, keeping the flame burning clean and bright and at the same time keeping it in proper bounds. If you think of this as a craft, an almost physical skill, you can see that it is related to tending a fire.

In Patanjali's Yoga Sutras, one of the first aphorishms is Yoga chitta vritti nirodhah. This is usually translated as something like, "Yoga is the suppression of the fluctuations of mindstuff." In practice, everyone thinks this means that yoga is blanking out your mind. You flatten the waves. Yoga = union, chitta vritti = modifications or fluctuations, chittam = mindstuff; nirodhah = restriction or suppression. You can read hundreds of translations of Patanjali's Yoga Sutras and they almost all use some variation on arrest, cessation, stoppage, inhibition, restriction, and control. You are supposed to still the mind, they say. And I think they are all wrong. Sorry, boys. You don't understand your own tradition.

The best spin I could put on this sutra is "When you pay attention to the fluctuations of mindstuff, an underlying sense of stillness emerges." That is perhaps a fair meaning of this very unfortunate aphorism, which seems to have caused millions of people to fail miserably at meditation over thousands of years. Just think about this for a minute. What does suppression result in? More suppression. I get the feeling that what has been going on for centuries is that people have been failing at meditation. The ability to transcend is so delicate that if you even hint at resisting thought, you wind up with the feeling of sand in your gears. Instead of being able to slide up and down the levels, you wind up stuck.

Actually, this is an empirical question. Train one group to try to suppress thought, restrict flutuations. Train another group to welcome fluctuations as they meditate. Measure the ability to meditate in both groups over time. You can even explore this in yourself. Explore the nuances of gently, appreciatively holding your experience. Notice how that works. Then set out to restrict your thinking as a way of silencing your mind. What works better? One problem with taking a "scriptural" approach to truth is that you are always favoring tradition over what works.

If you look up the etymology of the word, some experts say, nirodhah (or nirodha) means containment. Rodha is an old Indo-European word pertaining to keeping a fire. Back in the day, everyone knew what it was to make and maintain a fire. You were always pushing ashes and rocks around, banking the fire, then fanning the flames. This was an everyday skill and the word rodha referred to this process of containing a fire. Usually you did not want to put the fire out.

So nirodha is misunderstood as the act of putting out a fire. A better sense of it would be to think of it as referring to the circle of earth you put around a fire. The embankment. David Brazier writes in The Feeling Buddha

Rodha originally meant an earth bank. Ni means "down." the image is being down behind a sheltering bank of earth, or putting a bank of earth around something so as to both confine and protect it. Here again we are talking about a fire. I find justification for this interpretation in Monier-Williams' A Sanskrit-English Dictionary, page 884, column 2, where "dam, bank, shore" are given as the etymology of "rodha." Secondary meanings include "stopping, confining, surrounding," which still are a stretch from the conventional interpretation of "extinguishing, exterminating, destroying.

More research needs to be done with this, but I don't see anything wrong with saying, Patanjali was wrong. Or we could say that in Patanjali's time, yoga was practiced by people whose lives were so routinized that they really did not need their brains to be active at all, and they could afford to stop their thinking process and just drift through life. Of course, just saying this is scandalous, because Yoga and meditation are secretly dominated by Fundamentalist thinking, which is where you retroactively interpret some old words as being the ultimate in truth.

What Amanda was involved in was having intense fluctuations of mind stuff and every other stuff a human being is made of, and sublimely witnessing it. She was embracing the passion. Holding it with an attitude of cherishing.

Think about that for a minute – the difference between "suppressing" the fluctuations and cherishing them, embracing them. There is a universe of difference there, and there are really innumerable separate distinct types of yoga in each degree of cherishing . . . . holding . . . . banking . . . . . containing. . . . . suppression . . . . restriction . . . .stoppage.

The the word, Yug, which is the root of yoga, is similarly polyvalent. It can mean the harness, like when you harness a water buffalo to the plow. It can mean union, linking together. So the word yoga can mean either enslavement, entrapment, or integration. Or everywhere inbetween. Yoga just means linking, and the word could just as well refer to tying someone up to keep them prisoner.

Of the thousand-something people in that room, they were probably practicing the entire spectrum of understanding and misunderstanding of yoga and nirodhah. Even though TM cherishes spontaneity and naturalness, I think that the terms completely sailed over the heads of about half the people there. They could get – sorta – that you don't resist thought. But actively embracing your individual experience? That was just too much, too off the map, unheard of. Too daring. Many of the people seemed to be pouring water on their fire.

Another process Amanda was involved in was attachment. Usually the word detachment is associated with meditative awareness, which I think is another mistake. She was bonding with him on several levels; woman to man, devotee to master. When she was focusing on Maharishi, there were ribbons of energy between her heart and the light surrounding his body. I couldn't see if her energy actually touched his body. There in the lecture hall, I don't think he was that personal. There was a brilliantly luminous ball of energy surrounding Maharishi, going out about 6 feet in all directions, and that surface was his inner energy skin. That was what you touched when you directed your attention at him. And he was very responsive on that level – I heard again and again and again from people that if they had something bothering them, a question or topic, that he would talk about that topic that night and then look right at the person and say, "Hmmmm? Is alright?"

Amanda told me that she went to his room almost every night, and sometimes got in to see him alone. She also mentioned that they did not have sex, although she would have jumped at the opportunity. By the way, I have never believed the rumors spread by some Beatles that Maharishi put the make on Mia Farrow. It just never rang true. I do not feel any need to defend Maharishi because I think sex is a good thing, and if he was having sex, good for him! But I was there watching him handle hot females, and I think it was more likely that Mia was freaking out and Maharishi invited her to come to his room to help her through a bad time. Mia seems exactly like the kind of whiny person who would hallucinate sexuality, who would fantasize that a man was sexually attracted to her, and then run away in shock. Shock! I don't blame Mia – she had polio as a child, which must really interfere with normal sexual development and with being able to track your own sensations.

Amanda's luscious vitality and enthuasiasm was in stark contrast to the pale, sappy passivity of so many of the people around Maharishi. Even sitting quietly, Amanda was totally dynamic – a female actively loving a man. Some of the people in the audience – maybe less than half – were lively, funny, and wild in their own way, but the mentality of the other half was sort of like iron filings attracted to a magnet. "I have no life of my own, fill me, charge me with your purpose and magnetism." These Hollow People eventually declared war on the individualists, a war they won years later and drove out everyone else, and turned TM into a sort of boring bureaucracy of the most tedious kind imaginable.

At the time, just glancing at Amanda was a great teaching about the illuminating quality of desire. At the time, I had no such desire for another person. That flame was not shining in me at that time. But I could see it shining in her. So it was quietly astounding to see someone going with that kind of flow, and letting it be spiritual. She was following a craving, a passion, and fusing it with lust, and going into the subtle realms with it.

I only had that kind of desire for a sunny day at the beach with clear ocean water and 5 foot high, well-shaped waves. (Five foot was about all I wanted to deal with in wave height). For me, that was entering bodily into the Kingdom of Heaven. I really did crave that kind of ocean conditions, and lived my life around being there for them, but it had never occurred to me to desire another person in the way she was. In my month in blackness, I met Maharishi and the lineage of teachers on inner levels almost casually, as witnesses of space. I was intimate in a very abstract way, on the level of the solar system and very quiet vibrations. I really did not know a thing about personal intimacy. It was many years before I even became capable of it, because I was sort of drunk on vastness.

During the month, I saw Maharishi a couple of times for private meetings, but it was all OK. We just discussed some details about my going to teach TM in Orange County. I told him a little about being in the room for a month but he brushed it aside impatiently, as if he already knew. Maharishi was strange that way – he was totally personal when you were in a group with him, but face-to-face, he was often impersonal. Looking in his eyes was like looking at vast space. I had a cat once who was like that – he would come in from being out hunting all night, and look at me, and looking into his eyes was like looking at the night sky.

I went to the evening lectures every night that month, and sometimes I would be thinking a question, and Maharishi would look right at me, his eyes would twinkle somehow, and he would say, "Hmm? Hmmm?" Then he would pause and chuckle, then move on. There were hundreds of people in the room, and it happened time and again that he would look right at me and say, "Does that answer your question?" Later, a few weeks later, I realized that I had sort of asked him those questions in our private meetings, and that he had deferred answering until we were in public and his answers could be shared with everyone.

Return to The World

One day I took a bus to the airport in Palma, and I remember sitting and waiting for the plane. I was in a large room, with a hundred or so people, and I put my dark glasses on, wrapped my trenchcoat around me, and pretended to be a businessman taking a nap. I closed my eyes and meditated, and all the noise of the airport became a gentle background hum, a pleasant song of life, people greeting each other and saying goodbye, getting ready to travel by plane or return home by car, coming and going with affection and anxiety. I welcomed it all, and was totally delighted to be there.

We flew all day and all night, and I landed at Los Angeles International Airport in the middle of the morning. No one knew I was there. No one had much of an idea what I had been up to. On impulse, I just walked from the airport to my father's house, about 6 miles away. He wasn't home, but the German Shepard in the back yard recognized me, so I went around back and let myself in and put my luggage down, then started walking again, down Lincoln Boulevard toward Santa Monica.


. . . this takes us to 1970. I am hoping someday to write about the teachers I studied with in 1975 through 1980!

Om Is Bring it On

OM is defined as “yes, verily, so be it.” OM is the hum of the universe, the primordial song of the universe saying YES to its own expansion.

OM is composed of the 3 sounds A U and M.

If you listen to people, A U and M, and sometimes OH are the kinds of sounds people make when they are saying yes to something. Ah, yes! Oh, yes. Mmm yeah. Yes, that is great.

People make these sounds when saying yes to satisfied desire.

OM is “Bring it ON!” Let the games begin. Let the play unfold.

Further on in the definition of OM it says, “OM is usually called pranava.”

As Chris Chapple writes in Yoga and the Luminous, 1.27

pranavah (m. nom. sg.) the sacred syllable "om' ; from pra (before, forward) + nava, from nu (sound, shout, exult) Its expression is pranava (om). “Exult” is generally defined as “to rejoice greatly. Be jubilant or triumphant. To leap upward, especially for joy.”  - Christopher Chapple. Yoga and the Luminous: Patanjali's Spiritual Path to Freedom (p. 152). Kindle Edition.

OM and pranava are nicknames of each other and pranava means a “shout of exuberance.” Latin exsultāre : ex-, ex- + saltāre, to dance, frequentative of salīre, to leap. Pranava suggests leaping forward. In meditation, we are attuning our nerves and senses, recharging, and getting ready to leap up and dance.

Mantra yoga is a way of bathing in your primordial yes to life and restoring it if you have lost it. When we go deep with a mantra, and allow for the whole cycle of resting and restoring, we can recover our exuberance.

Freedom to Move

At any moment when you are meditating, be free to move. You can stretch, yawn, jump up and go for a run or walk, do asana, take a shower,

You can lie down and take a nap.

This is a higher form of discipline because you are taking care of your needs and not creating meditation to be yet another place where you have to practice denial.

Your wiggly impulses are a spontaneous form of kundalini yoga. You are marrying the restful part of the cycle with the move it. Notice in particular any impulses in the muscles around your spine. From time to time, engage the muscles along your entire spine, from the base to the top of your head. Get into undulation, subtle or major, tiny motions or large.

When you are free to move and wiggle, at the same time your body is free to dive into deep relaxation. If you are meditating and get restless and want to go for a walk, this is a success of meditation, not a failure. Go walk and come back tomorrow.

Over time you will develop a sensibility about how to take care of your body, how to move with joy, which then sets you up to have a deeper rest cycle in meditation.

This serves meditation, because as you relax and go deep, your whole body becomes an instrument your soul is playing.

This is the skill: Give yourself freedom to move in any way that occurs to you. Lift up and down, expand and contract, be heavy and light, moving wildly or serenely. Continually give yourself this freedom. Break out of the mindset that meditation is sitting upright and sitting still.

Photo for the banner Javier Allegue Barros on Unsplash

Come As You Are

Come yearning. Come sad. Come exhausted. Come wounded, come broken. Meditation is here to refresh you. You don’t have to be other than as you are to come. Come natural, come informal.

When you find a meditation you love, it’s like accessing your own inner vacation spot, a spa, where you can rest, be healed, rejuvenated.

This is a Shakti-powered approach to meditation, in which you learn the skills of allowing the immense power of your innate healing capacity to refresh you. No pushing required. You don’t make an effort. Any straining will only backfire. If you love a certain meditation technique, you will be naturally attracted to it and want to explore it, play with it, luxuriate in it, melt into its embrace, just as you do with music you love.

The power, the Shakti, is life’s urge to be at one with itself. This is one of the most powerful urges in a human being, your innate love of the life force. The skills of meditation have to do with letting the power of your love carry you. Let the power of your own soul’s love for its human embodiment permeate you.

Effort is only for when you decide to do something unnatural to yourself. In the outer world, this can be okay – you might have to force yourself to get up and take a walk. In the inner world of meditation, the doorways open because your attention wants to go there anyway. You don’t have to “improve” yourself in order to approach your own inner world. Each mood you happen to be in will teach you something about the forms life energy can take.

You Ego Is Not The Problem - 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.

Spirituality and Sadistic Teachers

When someone invites you to come to a “spiritual” lecture, you never know what kind of a trap you are walking into. There are so many different types of cons.

In 1978 I was in graduate school at the University of California, Irvine. I was studying the language of ecstasy and peace – the way people speak when they are in the midst of experiences of meditative rapture, bliss, and transformation. I was interviewing meditators of all kinds, all traditions, all religions, and making notes.

Probably in 1979, a woman moved into an office two doors down from mine, let’s call her Bobbie. She kept inviting me to go to her Tibetan Buddhist lectures, and I kept refusing. I was traveling a lot, teaching meditation workshops around the United States and Canada, and also doing a lot of interviews.

One reason I was not interested was because this woman had no aura. She looked dead inside, just a walking husk of a person, with no vitality at all. Her forehead was perpetually wrinkled in exhaustion from her self-hatred. There was no meditation in her aura whatsoever, no vitality, so I did not want whatever she was up to. And I had already interviewed hundreds of people who had failed at meditation. I was very interested in people who were thriving in meditation and were healthy in their approach to this ancient practice – people who instinctively knew how to customize the classic teachings to fit their individual nature.

But one evening, I happened to be done working, and Bobbie was lurking in the hall when I walked out. “Come on, my teacher is in town. Come meet him. He is a very important lineage holder at Naropa, the Buddhist University in Boulder.” This was the first I had ever heard of Naropa.

So I said Okay.

I never thought about it at the time, but in the 70’s and 80’s, I walked around looking impossibly naive and enthusiastic, because I was doing two or three hours a day of meditation, yoga and pranayama. One of the side-effects of being born again is that you look like you were born yesterday. You feel like you were freshly born. If you do a yoga practice that suits your body type, you are suffused with prana. To some people, that made me look like an easy mark, ignorant and gullible .

I don’t have a photo of me in 1979. This was me four years later, in 1983. Still looking enthusiastic and, maybe to some people, gullible.

The location of the Buddhist lecture was near John Wayne Airport, just a few miles from UCI. Conveniently, the lecture room was right next to the airport bar. The man giving the talk droned on and on about Buddhist theology for a long time. It was an incredibly boring lecture. But I listened attentively.

After the lecture was over, Bobbie asked me if I would like to join her and the teacher in the bar.

We found a table and the teacher ordered a tall drink – Long Island Iced Tea, which I remembered because it was such a weird thing to order. The woman ordered a martini, and I got a beer. They settled in, started drinking and started to smile and loosen up. They started out with a grey pallor, but as they drank, color came into their faces.

The man drank for awhile, thirstily. Then he gave me a meaningful look. He looked me right in the eyes for a minute.
"So," he said, "Are you just a spiritual vampire that goes from group to group?”
Another deep, meaningful look.
“Are you a dilettante, just dabbling?”

This wasn’t what I was expecting – I had a slight hope that after giving the boring lecture the guy would open up. So I let that go, fortunately very quickly, less than a heartbeat. For a fraction of a second, I thought about protesting, saying something like, your girlfriend here has been after me for half a year to come to one of your events. I came here just to honor her and you. Then I realized this would be lame, and would also play into whatever game they were setting up. So I rode that little impulse and turned it into something else. I went completely, utterly still, and just watched the two of them.

Actually, taking his attack and examining the possibility – it had never occurred to me that there were spiritual vampires. I knew that often, people who meditate have a lot of energy – they shimmer. Meditation is feeding on infinity. The thought never crossed my mind that instead of going to the source and feeding from infinity, some people would just feed on the meditators. Hmmm. Why not just meditate?

Hmm. I also knew, from many years of training, that if a spiritual teacher accuses you of something, it is most likely a distraction technique. The teacher himself is doing that very thing, and the attack is to put you on the defensive. This is a well-known, and very effective technique.

So I took a breath. So far we are a couple of seconds into the encounter.

I let time slow down a little, and glanced at Bobbie. She snuggled closer to the guy, and spread her legs a little, and her nostrils flared. She was getting ready to enjoy watching someone get roasted and devoured (game on, let’s murder this guy and then go get a room and have sex.)

This was slightly interesting. Something is going on here, in this little booth in an airport bar.

I looked at him, and he was waiting for me to have a response, and was already gloating. Why is he gloating? I asked myself – oh, he had this moment rehearsed. He thought his little attack would stun me.

I kept on being silent, not moving, just studying, decoding their racket. This is why she has been pestering me to come to a lecture for months. In her mind, she thinks she is the bait, the honey trap, the seductive female that leads the fresh recruits to the predator-male so that he can feed. The situation and alcohol has made her feel beautiful, powerful.

I just looked at the two of them, staying at ease and yet studying their moves.

“What’s the matter, can’t you handle my scrutiny?” he finally said.

SCRUTINY. I had heard that word before, from people describing what their cult leaders had said as they tried to destroy whatever spirit of independence, rebellion, or self-worth was left in the member of their meditation cult. This was starting to be funny. These two deluded souls thought they were scrutinizing me! The boring, droning evening was starting to get interesting.

I just let his attack sail right on by, and kept gazing at him with amused interest. I realized that I was supposed to be shocked by what he said and by his “deep, meaningful gaze.” This must have worked for him in the past. People come to his lectures, sincerely wanting to learn about Tibetan Buddhism and spiritual practices, and they get HIM, and he gets to beat them up and stand there, dominant, howling, drinking their blood.

Oh, I finally got it. The plan was that the two of them would gloat as they tore me apart, and after it was over, they would walk away laughing then go to his hotel room and have sex.

Duh, I felt a bit stupid. I was slow on the uptake here. This was clearly a well-practiced routine they had developed. The reason the woman had been so persistent in inviting me was not just to be another body in the lecture room – she wanted to see me being dominated, beaten up by her man, and then maybe I would become a submissive member of their cult. At the very least I would be fresh meat for him to conquer while she watched and got turned on. Stupid for me to have fallen for their game so far – to get me there in the room, then in the booth with them, outnumbered.

So I kept on being still and silent and watching as they tried to discern the moment when they could strike. In that moment, they were both predators ready to pounce. They were looking at me and their venom glands were secreting what they thought of was just the exact chemical to paralyze me. He was very cool and she was almost salivating. They were enjoying the fact that I seemed to be shocked into silence by the "penetrating insight" of what they guy had just said to me.

So I just gazed at the guy peacefully. Then I started laughing.

He was as shocked as if I had slapped him. His mouth dropped open. This was not going according to plan.

I kept on laughing for awhile and then I said, “I am sorry,” I said, “I just can’t play your sadistic little alcoholic game. It is so grandiose, and so sad.”

“I don’t know anything about you,” I continued, “but if I had just the last few minutes to go by, I would say that you have modeled yourself on an alcoholic spiritual teacher, who has been playing the domination-submission game successfully and getting away with it. Maybe he is really clever. But wherever you are from, it is a sick system.” I did not know at the time that this was exactly the kind of group he was from, a Tibetan meditation group with a brilliant alcoholic lama. The group later became famous, and infamous, for the depth of insanity and degradation they sank to.

"Look at you two. LOOK AT YOU. What are you, 40? Already you're a couple of dried-up old alcoholics, playing sadistic drinking games that you call spirituality. There is no vitality here, in your bodies or your teaching. You have a debased notion of what the dharma is."

They were still shocked into silence – I had turned the tables on them temporarily.

I realized, I need to get out of here, so I put some money on the table and walked away from my tiny victory while they were still speechless. The woman was mad and was trying to generate some venom for a next attack.

I walked away because I know that I am not street smart enough to stay in such a fight – I'm not mean enough. I have too much sympathy for the Devil. I tend to feel compassion for people, even if they are out for my blood, and that slows me down. That booth was their turf.

Also, I do not believe in the “humiliation process” in the first place – the forced breakdown of someone's identity. I’d been through it, years before these two dufus dharma vamps had ever heart of meditation, and wasn’t impressed with the outcomes, in anyone - the teachers or students. This breakdown process does have a role in basic training for the military, and in the induction phase to a monastery or ashram. It also has a role in Alcoholics Anonymous and Narcotics Anonymous, in which it is essential to more or less murder the person's addictive ego so they can be reborn as a new person who has a chance at recovery. The military is probably the most skilled at it – they tear you down and then rebuild you as a proud member of your unit. Cults and thought-control groups use the breakdown method to dominate their members emotionally, mentally, and financially. You can get people to sign away their life savings to you. That’s how churches and spiritual centers have such good buildings.

I don’t judge the military for using the humiliation process. But in my experience, therapy groups and meditation groups that used it are always sick. Get away. Now. I had seen this again and again since the 60’s.

Fortunately for me, these were not very skilled predators. Usually spiritual predators are not so obvious and not so clueless. He was not thinking fast enough to come up with something that would “hook” me.

Walk Away

If you ever find yourself in such a situation, you might consider just walking away without saying a word, within seconds, and not looking back. You can't win. You are bringing a knife to a gunfight. You are outgunned and outnumbered before you even begin. It’s an ambush. The only possible way to win is to not be there, and if you are there, get out of Dodge right now.

One of my martial arts teachers was asked, “What strikes would you use if you were attacked in a dark alley?” The teacher laughed and said, “First of all, I would NOT go into a dark alley!”

Just by being in that bar with those two, I was kind of in a dark alley. It was a dumb move.

There were a couple of reasons why, that night, I had the relaxation and responsiveness to catch on quickly to what Bobbie and her boyfriend were doing and walk out, before they wounded and weakened me. Mainly, they weren’t very good and what they had to offer was sort of pathetic pseudo-Tibetan-Buddhism. Also, neither of them had really meditated in their lives – I could see from their dead, grey auras. They had chanted maybe, maybe played some mental games, and had some wonderful alcohol-inspired insights of grandiose emotions, but actual meditation? No, there was no evidence at all that they knew the way to rest in the self.

If I had been seeking to learn about meditation, I might have been vulnerable to them. My life was so rich and my meditations were so rewarding that I had no holes for them to fill. Another was that for ten years, I had already been around innumerable cult come-ons and cons, and had developed some degree of immunity, and had survived much more cunning and dangerous “spiritual” predators than these two. Southern California in the 1960’s and 70’s was totally infected with therapy cults, meditation cults, yoga cults, Christian cults, and workshop cults. They all wanted to “break you down’” “rip your face off,” “rip you a new asshole” “slay you spiritually,” “reduce the primary ego,” and then get you to drop your defenses and give them your credit card number or write a check. Most of them made millions of dollars and then self-destructed. The cult leader left town with a huge wad of cash and the followers staggered around and tried to get over it and move on. This had happened over and over and over and over and over. You can research it for yourself.

If I had kept on talking to these Tibet-oholics, I would eventually have given them something to beat me up with. I was in their arena, and this was a well-practiced con game. They had an entire tradition behind them – they were not just going to break me down and get sexually turned on by it, but they felt the inner applause of their Tibetan teacher, who had done this kind of thing to them. I could tell that their teacher had to be an alcoholic, and later I found out that he was. And they felt they were acting with THE FULL AUTHORITY OF TRADITION. They had no doubt that what they were doing was part of their tradition. There was no guilt, no remorse, any more than drunken frat boys hazing the new members felt guilt. The whole thing was sanctioned by tradition.

Years later I found out that their teacher was indeed an alcoholic, and that the system he set up was very sick indeed. He was also brilliant and gave many wonderful insights. He died quite young, age 50 or so, of alcoholism. The successor he appointed was advertised widely as THE FIRST ENLIGHTENED WESTERNER. In whatever the equivalent of YOGA JOURNAL was, in the early 80’s there were ads and articles about him. How exciting. The first enlightened Westerner, recognized by this Tibetan as his successor. Over the next couple of years, this successor gave AIDS to many of his students before he too died. On meditation courses, he invited men and women into his room, fucked them in the ass, and gave them HIV. When asked about it, he said, print, “Because I am enlightened, having AIDS will be good for their evolution.” When I read this, I said, Spiritual Fascism has come to America - again. His meditation center should be burned to the ground, a fence put around it, and a gravestone placed in the ashes saying, “This is the death of the notion of enlightenment in America.”

There are many variations on the sadism game, and it has many names, for example "Rip your face off," "Bust the ego," or "Break through the character armor." Versions of the game are adapted for each type of workshop, self-improvement seminar, spiritual training program, ashram, and even some yoga and meditation schools. This is immensely successful because if a person stays there and takes it, they become weakened and are more susceptible to the next con, which is to give your credit card number and sign up for more groups.

In some workshop programs, such as those held at hotels near airports, you should expect that before you walk into the room, the “assistants” will already have your credit report and an estimate of how much money they can soak you for. Many workshop and seminar businesses hope to get $50,000 or so out of each person over a period of several years. All charged to your credit card.

To understand why and how "spiritual" groups fall into using such tools, it helps to understand gang initiation rituals and kinky sex. You can look them both up on the internet.

The Ritual Beat-Down

In some gangs, it is traditional to give a newcomer a beating. Ten guys or girls will circle the new member, and beat and kick them to a pulp. This is the price of admission. Military training does it differently – you are broken down by lack of sleep and intense workouts. Milder forms of this are in fraternity hazing. The general pattern is, dominant members of the group inflict humiliation and emotional and/or physical pain on the plebe. This forms a certain type of bond. Human beings are social animals, and for better or worse, we have an instinct to bond with the abuser. We also have an instinct to try to establish our place in the pecking order. When you submit to a beating, physical or emotional, you are at least PART of the pecking order. You may be at the bottom now, but eventually, if you survive, you will be able to inflict beatings on other people. In gangs, the beatings are physical. In workshops and spiritual training, the beatings are mental and emotional. You attack the person's basic identity.

Dominance and Submission Games

Type dominance submission guru into a search engine. Look at what you get. This is another essential element to appreciate when encountering any spiritual group or self-improvement seminar. You will find people who become sexually aroused by mental or emotional spanking. They require someone to be humiliated in order to get lubricated to have sex. It's a form of foreplay, and someone has to be the Master, and someone else, or a group, has to be the Slaves. In the back of free newspapers, and probably in many places online, you will see ads for people wanting to match up – a dominant seeking a submissive, or a slave seeking a master. There are many codes, indicating what type of foreplay, what type of sexual position, what kind of a theme is being sought. If you ever are around organized spirituality, you should develop your own "field guide" to the types of predators and prey in the church, ashram, yoga center, seminar, or meditation school.

Probably all spiritual groups, meditation schools, and seminar businesses are run by cartels of dominants and submissives, who use the pretext of teaching to have an endless supply of fresh blood. People who enjoy their work can be good at it. Just because the teacher or the teacher's assistant get off on humiliating someone or busting them, does not mean they are not good at what they do. The problem is that whatever the group is called – this workshop series, that guru, something something meditation, that is just the name of the nightclub. The theme of the party. The words are bait to get people to come, and a kind of camouflage so that society does not catch on. This is great for people who are matched, sexually and emotionally, to the type of abuse and sexual slavery that the group specializes in and seeks to train you for. But if you actually just want to learn some skills, learn how to meditate, you are in trouble.

The problem is that many people actually want the teaching that is advertised, as opposed to what is delivered. Most people who come to take a workshop have a job, a life, friends, ambitions, a love life, bills, relatives, a spouse, children. They don't need to be spanked. The last thing they need is their ego reduced or broken. They don't need to run up huge credit card debt in the name of "Success!" Life is spanking them enough as it is. Anyone who loves, anyone whose heart is open, gets plenty of pain just by witnessing the world.

The Dominatrix

A friend of mine had been going to a workshop series for a year, the kind that has free introductory evenings, then an expensive weekend intensive, then really expensive week-long seminars in gorgeous locations in Hawaii and the Bahamas. He had racked up $55,000 in credit card debt and was about to declare bankruptcy, because the cult's promise that his "investment" in these workshops would soon pay off in extra business was not working out. So I went to one of their free seminars, held at a local hotel. It was really good. They had devised a series of nifty exercises based on hypnosis, NLP (Neuro-linguistic Programming), and the general format developed by Mind Dynamics in the 60's, EST and LifeSpring in the 70's, and The Forum in the 80's. Their timing was superb and the trainers were funny.

Toward the end of the day, one of the good-looking women assistants came over to me and started trying to seduce me into signing up for their intensive. She ran game after game on me, in a very charming way. I kept having a curious image in my mind when I was looking at her, and especially when I would look away.

Finally, I said, "I have this image of you with a whip. Maybe wearing high heels. And something about black leather."

"That's me. You got me," she said.

"What?" I said, genuinely puzzled. I had no idea what my image meant.

"I am a dominatrix. Or I used to be. I worked as one," she said, cheerfully.

"What is a dominatrix?" I asked. Still clueless. I had never heard the term.

She explained the concept to me a bit, and I was amazed again that I had gotten to be 40 without ever knowing that there was a whole profession, a type of prostitute who specialize in dominating, inflicting pain and humiliation. And furthermore, that dominatrixes are especially popular in Washington, D.C. The politicians go to these prostitutes to be spanked and whipped for being such bad boys, taking bribes and selling out the country. Then they lick the boots of the dominatrix and get to come.

Without the dominatrix, she said, America would be run by corrupt, lying men who are also sexually frustrated. A dangerous combination. When the politician grovels at the feet of his Mistress and confesses, "YES, I am nothing but a lying whore, taking money from corporations," this is the ONLY time he ever is telling the truth.

Anyway, that workshop business was very successful for a few years, mainly because the teacher had a dozen really good-looking women, most of them lesbians, all of them shameless about using their skills and attractiveness to recruit people of both sexes to come and play with them. It slowly faded away because the founder made enough millions to go into real estate investing and he retired. This was a relatively benevolent cult because the people running it were happily rejoicing in their power, money and sex. They weren't mean, at heart. Consequently, after a year of being involved with this cult, the typical member would be broke and somewhat tired, but well-fucked, and by damn, they had a wild year of adventures. Now it is time to declare bankruptcy and get back to work.

This also shows the value of hiring a professional. At least one of the girls had actually worked as a dominatrix, and she enjoyed it and knew how to do it right. In the workshops, she would abuse someone just the right amount to get an effect, then stop. She knew how to observe. If you go to one of the many workshops that proliferate across the United States in which the group leader attacks the students or "busts" them, you will often see what amounts to an unskilled person practicing medicine. The leader does not have the observational skills and training to criticize the person accurately, and in any case, a large group situation is rarely a good context for humiliating someone.

The only lasting damage from this workshop cult was probably their transmission of eating disorders. The founder of the group seemed to have a Doctor Strangelove - type food fanaticism, in which he was obsessed with colonics and food purity. Food purity is a weird name for the set of ideas which basically says that all food is disgusting and toxic except for these, approved ones. Whatever they are – green algae and sushi, or zucchini and wheat grass juice that has been put in a blender. These ideas are addictive and the practices are damaging to the body. Once you start messing with your digestion, the main result is often bad digestion, with all that implies. You lose the ability to eat what you like and not be troubled by it. And the weaker your digestion gets, the more you feel that food actually IS toxic because you can't digest it. A certain percentage of people who are exposed to the ideas of food purity will develop lasting borderline eating disorders. By the way, a very funny movie about food fanaticism is The Road To Wellville. Starring Dana Carvey, Bridget Fonda, Matthew Broderick, John Cusak and Anthony Hopkins. The story is based loosely on the life of John Kellogg, the guy who invented corn flakes.

One great thing about the movie is that it is basically true, and it takes some of the guilt off of California for being the center of health food wackiness. When you learn about Kellogg, you realize that people were being insane about colonics and fantasizing about "magic foods" such as graham crackers way back in the late 1800's and early 1900's, in Michigan. California, and especially Los Angeles, is not to blame. At least not alone.

The movie is based on the very funny book by T. Coraghessan Boyle.


I only learned about all this because I became friendly with several of the girls. There is no such thing as real friendship in such groups, because all relationships exist to be exploited in service to the cult. And everything is subject to change depending on each person's rise and fall in terms of status, money, and the favor of the leader. For example, the group leader would break up some of the lesbian couples by inviting one of them to travel with him for a year and be his special assistant. But the girls liked to be seen by me and we would run into each other at the same dance clubs. I was just seeing them on the various dimensions they lived on, not judging.

Every cult is different, and each person taking their workshop or training has different weaknesses and strengths and responds to the manipulations in unique ways. That being said, some organizations do really deep damage to people, leaving them emotionally scarred for life and deeply depleted.

Los Angeles, where I live, is full of people who have had the emotional/spiritual equivalent of a bad facelift. Have you ever talked to someone who has had a face lift, and can't make any expressions? Their face looks smooth because the nerves have been cut or injected with Botox. An analogous process happens to people who have had their "ego" operated on by the workshop leader or guru. When they "rip the person's face off" they also rip all the connective tissue and millions of nerve connections, that never really grow back.

An opposite, but equally damaging, result is the spiritual equivalent of a chemical face peel. The pink skin underneath is unprotected, vulnerable to infection, and easily burned by the sun. Some people have both: they are numb and unable to express themselves properly, and also oversensitive. This is actually a very common result of being involved in mind/body workshops, especially ones in which the doctrine involves ego-busting. Women in particular are vulnerable to this.

Almost all groups are beneficial to a certain extent. Just know when to leave. And remember the story about the frog in water. If you drop a frog in boiling water, he will jump out. But if you gradually increase the heat, he will stay there and adapt, until by the time he is alarmed and wants to jump out, he is too weak to move. I would say about half the people I started meditating with in the 60's, who have joined various guru cults, are now too weak to leave. It has been too long, and they have done too much that undermines their ability to live independently.

This is why I am really grateful to Maharishi for giving us advance notice in 1974, saying basically, "It's been nice, having all you free spirits running around teaching Transcendental Meditation. But the party's over. I want the movement to be an army, marching in step. I want people to be able to walk into a TM center anywhere in the world and the same words, exactly, are being spoken." Because he had said this so blatantly, and turned the TM movement so quickly from a lively creative institution to a militaristic one, I was able to jump out.When someone invites you to come to a “spiritual” lecture, you never know what kind of a trap you are walking into. There are so many different types of cons.

Photo by Lubo Minar on Unsplash