Svatantra - Your Own Army

One afternoon at Kripalu, a young woman yoga teacher who had been paying attention, said:

"I feel like I am on my own side."

She said this with a sense astonished delightedness.

She explained later that what she was getting from our teaching was the sense that meditation is *being on your own side*, commander of your own forces, with all the energies of Prana and Pranashakti as your allies, as your team, as being on your side, having your back and your feet, both propelling you and surrounding you with blessings.

She was standing as she said this, for we often stand when we are expressing our relationship to The Radiance Sutras.

*Svatantra: *Independence, self-will, freedom, one’s own system or school, one’s own army, free, uncontrolled, full grown.

*Tantra: *A loom. Metaphorically, a framework or network of interconnected threads. A system. From the root *tan: *to extend, spread, be diffused (as light) over, shine, extend towards, reach to, to stretch (a cord).

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Geek alert, a note

Historically, yoga and meditation have been presented as the opposite of svatantra. "Give up your selfhood. Grovel before me." This is a path for certain people, the joy of submission. There is such beauty in it. But it is unskillful and harmful to present yoga and meditation as having anything to do with submission and bowing down.

Both bowing down and standing tall are beautiful postures or asanas. In the modern West, the whole trend of what our ancestors died for and lived for was the chance to explore what it is like to taste freedom, to have the freedom to stand tall and be an individual.

So both submission, which is subordinating ourselves to a greater good, and standing free, are valuable.

When we love someone, we joyously submit ourselves to taking care of their needs - this is one of the greatest joys in the whole world. Ask any parent or dog person or horse person. This submission is totally different because we have chosen it from a position of freedom. We willingly take on this journey of relationship.

There is an interplay between the two asanas, that of taking care of other people's needs, and then recovering your sense of self.

The Brilliance of the Monkey Mind

The brilliance of the monkey mind…

- and also the brains of pigeons, rats, and crows.

Brains make lists. This is because brains have to prioritize actions and elements for survival. They have to line up action sequences - that's what a daily life is. The only people who don't need to do this are those who just follow orders, who have no life, and just do what they are told.

If you have responsibilities - a job, a home, friends, family, pets, people who rely on you - in meditation, you will notice, your brain spends time prioritizing your lists and refining your action sequences. This takes place because you are at ease, on a sort of vacation, and meditation is a good time to practice being your best self.

This is one of the reasons why the term "monkey mind" in the meditation traditions is actually a toxic mental parasite designed to weaken you.

When you are daydreaming and thinking about your shopping list, you are actually practicing the yoga of sequencing actions. You are running through a choreography, with more of your instincts backing you up, more senses employed, more of your chakras supporting you, more relaxation. More in your body.

The Software Lobotomy

Monks just do what they are told. They have taken vows. So they want to lobotomize the parts of their brains that have desires and make decisions. In the place of that, they install the power structure of the ashram they are in. This aspect of meditation technology is a kind of amputation. A blessing for that small percentage, probably less than 1% of a population, that are natural renouncers. Their path truly is to renounce everything, including their individuality, desires, personal life, ego, any capacity for intimacy, any desire to be touched or to have sex, PERMANENTLY. In exchange for sacrificing their individual life, a monk or nun gets to be supported to pray all day. In the meditation traditions, this concept of "the monkey mind" as a something negative is a teaching that is only for those on the path of Renunciation. If you are not a nun or monk, it will harm you, like injecting chemotherapy poison into your bloodstream if you are healthy.

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From psychologist Greg Jensen of Columbia University and colleagues:

"Monkeys can keep strings of information in order by using a simple kind of logical thought.

Rhesus macaque monkeys learned the order of items in a list with repeated exposure to pairs of items plucked from the list, say psychologist Greg Jensen of Columbia University and colleagues. The animals drew basic logical conclusions about pairs of listed items, akin to assuming that if A comes before B and B comes before C, then A comes before C, the scientists conclude July 30 in Science Advances.

Importantly, rewards given to monkeys didn’t provide reliable guidance to the animals about whether they had correctly ordered pairs of items. Monkeys instead worked out the approximate order of images in the list, and used that knowledge to make choices in experiments about which of two images from the list followed the other, Jensen’s group says.

Previous studies have suggested that a variety of animals, including monkeys, apes, pigeons, rats and crows, can discern the order of a list of items (SN: 7/5/08, p. 13). But debate persists about whether nonhuman creatures do so only with the prodding of rewards for correct responses or, at least sometimes, by consulting internal knowledge acquired about particular lists.

Jensen’s study adds to evidence suggesting that, like humans, monkeys can mentally link together pairs of items into lists that guide later choices, says psychologist Regina Paxton Gazes of Bucknell University in Lewisburg, Pa.

That’s probably a valuable ability in the wild, she says, because many animals need to monitor where group mates stand in the social pecking order. “An ability to construct, retain, manipulate and reference ordered information may be an evolutionarily ancient, efficient [mental] mechanism for keeping track of relationships between individuals,” she says."

Accessing Our Inner Resources in Meditation

Our bodies have evolved over a billion years to deal with all kinds of environment changes and challenges. There is genius in here at every level. One aspect of the magic of adaption is that our bodies grow stronger when subjected to challenge, as long as we have time to recover, and some nutrition so we can rebuild.

Think of working out. Going for a long hike, or carrying a load, or dancing for hours, challenges the muscles. We are sore the next day or two days later as we feel the microscopic damage to the tissues. Then the body rebuilds itself stronger. This is what "conditioning" is, strength conditioning. This leads to "being in shape."

When you first take up guitar, or ukelele, or any stringed instrument, your fingertips get very sore. Over time, your fingers build up callouses. This is another form of adaptation.

When our bodies are exposed to a virus, if it is novel to our immune system, at first we don't know we are being invaded. The virus just replicates itself, using our cellular machinery for its own purposes. After awhile, the body realizes, "Hey, that's not ME! That is something else, using my cellular machinery for ITS purposes! And the body generates an immune response. Very often, we are forever after immune to that virus. This is why we never get the same cold twice. There are about 200 cold viruses circulating in the world, and over a lifetime we may get a bunch of them, but is is actually a different virus each time.

Part of taking care of yourself, a fundamental life skill, is making sure you are exposed to enough of life's challenges to keep your emotional immune system challenged, your physical immune system activated, and your mental and spiritual immune systems active and in play. This means you have times of challenge or exposure, and times of rest and recovery.

Meditation is a tool for recovery, because it allows for a rest deeper than sleep, according to decades of physiological research at Harvard Medical School and other centers.

During meditation, the body cycles through waking, dreaming, and deep sleep-like states, adjusting its biochemical balance for each and surveying the adaptive challenges that the organism is facing.

This is why meditation can be so disturbing, because the bodymind system is built to adapt to reality. If there is a life challenge that you are not facing, or are trying to hide from, your meditation instinct will bring it to your attention so you can develop an adaptive response to it, can have the proper immune response to the stress.

This is also why you want to make your meditation as pleasurable, indulgent, luscious, adorable, and inviting as possible. You need that bodily pleasure in order to invite the body into deep restorative, recovery, healing mode. Then when the awareness of stressors arises - all the things in your life that are toxic, or challenging, you can meet them in meditation with all your best resources at hand.

Meditation is inner play, where you are gaming out, like in a video game, the adventure of life with all its allies, enemies, challenges, and obstacles. You can explore this option and that option, and keep on accessing your deepest strengths. In meditation, it is okay to fail again and again, because each time you notice you have failed, each time you think of something toxic or damaging and lose your sense of integrity, you can then go deeper into your inner resources and then come back to face the foe again.

It's desperation that makes us dive deep into the essence of life and get the inner medicine we need, forge the inner alliance. It is always a crisis, on some level, that makes us want to meditate.

Buddha was in a total crisis when he set forth on the path to become the Buddha we know, or have heard from. His first son had just been born and he was so scared that he fled the house in panic, ran away and never went home again. He was driven to go off and starve himself in the forest and try to invent a path through this world. Although he abandoned his family, he did his best to become a kind of good father to the whole human race. Someone who could utter wisdom to guide us. Someone to clear a path and show the way to walk through this world of wonder and terror.

We each have access to our inner Buddha. Your inner Buddha is inside you, inside your crises and challenges.

Meditation has thousands of gateways, thousands of variations. You will know the ones that work for you because after meditation you find that you are more resourceful -- you have the sense, "Oh, I've GOT THIS. I can handle it."

Healing From Betrayal (Meditation and Intuition - Part 6)

If you have been betrayed, you know how much noise it makes in your head. This is because to be betrayed, we have to have been sold out or attacked by someone we trusted and considered a friend. Betrayal feels completely different than when we are attacked by enemies or competitors.

When a friend betrays us, the damage goes deeper than attacks by enemies. There are two reasons: one is that they are closer to us, inside our guard; the second is that when a friend betrays us, we have to doubt the part of us that trusted them in the first place. We come to doubt our whole relationship to the world. We may recover from the external damage that the betrayal does to our life. But the lasting damage, more difficult to heal, is that we turn against the part of us that trusted them. In other words, being betrayed can damage our ability to form friendships and to trust anyone in the future. Then, because we have to form alliances with someone, we become more open to being betrayed again in the future because our whole signaling system is out of calibration.

For meditators, this is important because healing the damage from betrayals is as painful as having porcupine quills or cactus needles pulled out of your leg. It's a series of ouch, ouch, ouch moments. And there is no Novocain for it because the type of healing that is needed is conscious healing. The last thing you ever want to think about again is your friend who betrayed you. The very thought of them is like a virus that crashes your computer. But when you feel safe and relaxed during meditation, their image will come up, the mini-movie will start playing, and you will be inside a debriefing session as your inner intel staff and your inner Sun Tzu sit around and work on the problem of how did you get there, what damage did you take, how were you deceived, how does your intelligence gathering and assessment system need to be revised, and what exact steps to take today to move toward a solution. And how to prevent a scenario such as this from happening in the future.

As part of recovering from betrayal, you have to learn to distinguish between different kinds of pain - the pain of the needles in your body, the pain of the infection around the needles, the pain of pulling the needles out, the pain of cleaning the wound, the pain of the scar tissue as it forms, the pain of working the scar tissue so it becomes more supple.

If you are in the process of healing from a betrayal, don't give up on yourself. You can heal, and you can be better than before. But ouch, the healing process hurts!

Wash The Fear Out of Your Body (Meditation and Intuition - Part 5)

Sometimes just a little bit of meditation gives the nervous system enough juice, relaxation chemistry, that a significant amount of fear is released. This is possibly because some of our chronic fear is fear of relaxation itself. We are afraid to let go of the continual vigilance and shift over to really living. When we make the decision to meditate, then, that decision has a lot of personal power behind it. This means a lot to many of us, especially those who have not done such things before.

The basic mental focus of meditation is some aspect of life's rhythm: the continual flowing of the breath, or the flow of a yummy sound such as a mantra, or the flow of energy in the body. A sense of steadiness does emerge in this flowing rhythm, but you do not need to focus on it. The more you allow yourself to perceive rhythm, the more an underlying sense of stability will emerge.

As the senses become absorbed in perceiving rhythm and stability, the muscles of the body relax and let go of tension.

Now, let's go over that sentence again: "As the senses become absorbed in perceiving rhythm and stability, the muscles of the body relax and let go of tension." This is so obvious that it's easy to miss.

More on the Debriefing Process

What happens when the muscles let go of tension? Often, we become aware for a few seconds or minutes of what we were tense about. We see little mini-movies of what we were doing when we tensed up – an unfinished conversation, a disagreement, a negative emotion that came up between us and someone we love, a tense situation at work, a failure, a success, a deadline. This is your mind/body's natural debriefing mechanism at work.

In the military, whenever anyone comes back from a mission, they get debriefed on what happened, so that the intelligence agents obtain a more accurate assessment of the environment and the forces arrayed. Football teams also debrief about their games, and probably most professional sports use the technique.

If you have been meditating every day consistently, then most of your debriefing may be about current events, because you have caught up with yourself. If you have just started meditating, or have recently been through a lot of battles of some kind, then the debriefing that comes up during meditation may cover the whole time period. You will find your brain reviewing in excruciating detail crucial events of your life and how you responded to them.

How long does debriefing take? This is the weird part. Thoughts come in unpredictable bursts, just when you are most relaxed. This is because the body loves to do the debriefing while at ease, whatever level of repose is available at the moment. Unless you have some comfort in your nerves, you won't be able to filter away the excess tension.

Note here that the intelligence in your body does not care about you being relaxed. It only wants efficiency, and relaxation is usually the most efficient mode. The adaptive intelligence also wants you to have the most perfectly sensitive danger recognition and stress-response system. The keyword here is accuracy. The body wants totally accurate sensory information and totally appropriate response.

This is for most of us the hardest part of meditation, the toughest to take, this cycle of relaxation and tension release. While it may make sense logically to say, "Ok, when you relax, you let go of tension," in practice it is a bit of a bitch. You are sitting there all relaxed and at ease, and all of a sudden your brain is filled with images of when you were definitely NOT at ease, and your muscles are jumping with tension. What the f—- is going on here?

Again, what the f--- is going on is that your body/mind is taking advantage of the situation of meditation to wash the fear out of your system. You know this is happening during meditation because your awareness goes from being extremely relaxed, to replaying a movie of some time in the past when you were in a stressful situation, or some time in the future you think will be challenging. And what, really, is your body/mind doing? Practicing being relaxed while engaged in that situation, as relaxed as is optimal for your performance. Ask any martial artist, you are better off when you are relaxed. Ask a soldier who has been in combat. You are usually better off if you can keep your wits about you.

If you work from 8 to 5 each day, and meditate in the morning before going to work, most of your time during meditation will be spent thinking – your brain just going over the choreography of the day ahead, musing about your relationships, sorting, prioritizing, and mulling over anything that makes you tense. Only a few minutes will be spent in something like transcendence, where you are savoring the vastness of life, the delight of being alive, the incredible richness of the moment. These few minutes are precious, to be sure. But the unstressing aspect of meditation is just as important, because it allows you to live honestly in the sense of delight the experience of vastness gives you.

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

Reality seems to work by paired opposites.

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Interplay of Relaxation and Debriefing (Meditation and Intuition - Part 3)

During meditation, within a few minutes, you will find yourself relaxing deeply, as if you were several days into a vacation. Then suddenly, aaaoooah, you will find your brain reviewing something that feels like your personal car alarm. This happens because life is ruthless in its own way. You may want meditation to be a blessed respite from your life, and it will be, for a few minutes. Then your brain and entire body start to engage in a deep process of reviewing every time your alarm system went off, and assessing: was this really a danger? Does that alarm system need to be adjusted? In the military, this kind of after-action reporting is called a debriefing. Sports teams also debrief, often with video replays of crucial action.

You want meditation to feel like soaking in a hot tub, but suddenly you are in a room with Sun Tzu, and maybe a logistics guy, an intel guy, and a cartographer, and they are all interrogating you on why you pushed the panic button or called in an air strike on your own position. They are sitting there with clipboards looking at you and asking, "You called in Broken Arrow. What was your justification for that? What were you seeing, hearing and feeling?"

This aspect of meditation feels extremely uncomfortable, like watching a frame-by-frame replay of how you miscalculated something.

It is ruthless because your body-mind system wants to review exactly what your senses - your spies - were telling you, and exactly how you interpreted this data and said, "It's a threat," and then exactly what alarm or stress response you invoked. This will go on for a grueling 30 seconds or couple of minutes, then you will be in the hot tub again, relaxed more deeply than before, for a couple of minutes, then back to the room with Sun Tzu. (For an interesting story of when Broken Arrow was called, see We Were Soldiers with Mel Gibson).

Why does this happen? In essence, because it's natural. Your body, your brain, are part of life on earth, the hundreds of millions of years that nerves and senses have been evolving. This deep instinctive intelligence in you is a master of survival. Meditating is somewhat of an unusual situation because what you are doing is paying close attention to this intelligence functioning. Mostly you have to just let it work and learn from it and give it permission. Your body wants total elegance and grace, to move through the world with animal alertness, and an almost molecular precision in how much energy you expend on recognizing and adapting to dangers.

Your brain is not imitating the way the military debriefing or sports coaching works. It's the other way around. The military and sports coaches are utilizing the way the brain works. They conduct debriefings because this is the way the human brain works at its best, and they want to do what works. Military action and sports are always about success through exact application of force or energy, also speed, timing and synchronization. And they are always about learning from mistakes.

The debriefing process is painful and wonderful and educational, and when it is over, you can safely feel great, because you have learned from your mistakes on a deep level.

Keep in mind, when you meditate instinctively, your body goes into a state of rest deeper than deep sleep. This is healing, and your body-mind system conducts some of the brain rejuvenation that is usually does only during sleep. In meditation, we are simultaneously resting more deeply than sleep, and awake and alert. So we have to learn to put up with processes having to do with life maintenance that the body & mind do whenever we rest deeply. The brain and body do this same review when we are sleeping and dreaming, and the threats show up symbolically in the characters and plot structure of our dreams. When we are meditating, the review shows up as "feelies" – short video clips with sound tracks, emotions, and intense physical sensations. And we feel everything intensely because we are not only awake but more aware than usual.

The reason your body-mind system will zero in on the times during the day you felt afraid or invoked the stress response is because the response is so expensive energetically. The body stops everything else it is doing – resting, healing, digesting, learning, enjoying - and just focuses on the threat. This is absolutely great if you are in immediate physical danger of the kind that requires you to suddenly run a few hundred feet or instantly leap into combat. If the danger is not immediate, within a few seconds, you are like a car sitting in the driveway revving the engine up to 5000 rpm. A waste of good energy. Most human illness has a stress component, because the stress response wears out the body in various ways. Doctors have known for decades that 80% of all office visits are caused by the wear and tear of stress, and recently the percentage has been revised upwards.

I know this is a challenging point, but if you can stay with me here and really get this, it will change your life and meditation will forever be much easier.

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

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

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

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

"To Be Enlightened Is to Be Intimate With All Things."

Dogen

"To be enlightened is to be intimate with all things."

– Dogen-Zengi, Zen master in Japan c. 1200-1253 *
Founder of the Soto School.

In a cartoon that was on many refrigerators in the 90s, Ziggy walks up the mountain and addresses the sky, “What is the secret of happiness?” A voice from the clouds answers, “Fasting, celibacy and poverty!” After a pause, Ziggy asks, “Is there someone else up there I can talk to?”

Camille and I have been listening to that other voice, the one that speaks on behalf of intimacy. Our work describes a path that that embraces pleasure, sexuality, and abundance. We speak for the path of intimacy and involvement with life rather than denial. We celebrate meditation as a marriage of body and soul, earth and heaven, outer and inner, sensuality and spirituality.

When researchers ask Americans what they most desire in life, both men and women say, “A close and lasting intimate relationship.” We find the same craving in the people who come to study meditation with us: they seek more intimacy in life, and have a hunch that contact with their inner essence is the foundation for all outer relationships. They want to suffuse their bodies and hearts with loving energy and then take it out into the world. They suspect that this is what enlightenment really is: a full-bodied, deeply relational state of love.

This craving is beginning to revolutionize the field of meditation in the Western world. The needs of students ultimately dictate how teachers present the work, and right now people need meditation to be a place where every level of their being can come together. This emerging understanding is breaking up the old thought-forms of denial and dissociation that have for centuries been associated with meditation. It is not a loner enterprise anymore.

Many teachings on meditation ignore intimacy, or imply that your personal life is an obstacle to your spiritual practice. This is because until about thirty-five years ago, and for the previous thirty centuries, almost all meditation teachers were solitary, celibate males, removed from the world. They were not in intimate relationships and knew nothing about them.

Meditation is loving attention and loving attention is meditation.

Our premise is that meditation and love relationships go hand and hand. We point out the obvious but startling equation that “meditation is loving attention and loving attention is meditation.” Meditation provides a sanctuary of solitude to help you regenerate for contact; it opens the heart to give and receive love.

We describe a path that embraces every emotion, every longing in the heart, and every contact with other beings as a teaching on meditation and a doorway to intimacy. Relationship is challenging, whether it is with yourself, with life, or with another human being. You have to learn to tolerate new and intense sensations and emotions. Everyone can use some help. We speak realistically about the obstacles to intimacy and provide practical methods for navigating through them.

When we are tender with ourselves in meditation, the heart and soul can give voice to longing – for love, touch, communication, security, excitement, or acceptance. In our teachings, we describe beautiful sensory meditations that guide you, step-by-step, into engaging with these qualities. We illustrate how to use meditation to be at home in yourself, create inner security, and clarify your emotions.

In every relationship there is a dynamic between opposing desires: we want to be close, but we also want to be free; we want to be listened to, but we also want the other person to speak from the heart; we want to feel safe, but we also want excitement. These opposites are what attract us, drive us crazy, and make us laugh. What relationship does not dance with the opposites of passion and equanimity, pleasure and pain, relaxation and urgency, time together and time apart, talking and listening?

The tension between conflicting desires can tear us apart, drive us to drink, or call us into meditation. In our work, we reveal the realm of intimate polarities as the natural turf of meditation. Meditation techniques all emerge from the tension between opposites. The aim is to turn the tension into energy for life.

In our meditation teacher training, we teach about how each of these sets of opposites can co-exist harmoniously, in your meditation practice and in your everyday awareness. The opposites are not contradictory; they need each other. The health of every relationship, whether with yourself or another person, depends upon working out a balance of these polarities. Every point we make has a little practice, something you can notice in daily life and in meditation that helps keep love alive.

In our work,
• We address intimacy with both the self and with others.
• We give simple sensory practices you can do in meditation or as you move through your day.
• We propose the revelatory notion that the natural elements are the stuff of intimacy.
• We show how sensual and multi-tonal meditation can and should be.
• We take a both/and approach. Sometimes it is appropriate to be closed instead of open. Sometimes it is better to say no rather than yes.
• We show how meditations that over-emphasize detachment can harm your capacity for intimacy.

We correct some profound misunderstandings in the field of meditation itself. Techniques intended only for monks and nuns are frequently taught to people who are married and have jobs, and this causes confusion. Unless people know these secrets, they are liable to use meditation practices in such a way as to damage their ability to be intimate. The preponderance of the literature is still in the First Voice that Ziggy encountered – the one that insists that enlightenment can only be achieved through denial.

Meditation is above all intimacy with oneself. People often have a sense of failure when using rigid, traditional techniques. The struggle within meditation is not to block out thoughts, detach, or make yourself calm. The challenge is to tolerate the intensity of intimacy. Each secret we offer includes helpful tools for dealing with these challenges.


*actually, we haven’t been able to trace the source of this quote with any academic rigor.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Transcedental Meditation and Maharishi

One day in May 1968 I was walking down the hall in the Social Science building at UC Irvine and saw Betty, (the same woman who had showed me Zen Flesh Zen Bones,) talking to another young woman, who I think may have been called Linda. They were sparkling as they stood close together speaking confidentially about something. I could see a kind of peaceful and happy glow about them.

I walked up to them and said,

"What's happening? I am totally intrigued. What are you talking about?"

Betty, who was always grumpy, said, "It's private, go away."

I said, "Just tell me, please, what you are talking about."

Linda said, "We just learned blah blah blah meditation," this weekend. We are on the third day of a four-day training.

"Would you say that again?" I asked, pulling out a piece of paper.

She repeated, "Transcendental Meditation," and then turned away. I wrote it down, and then asked, "Where do you go to learn?"

"Westwood," Betty said, and then I left them alone.

After my classes were over, I went home, called information in Westwood, got the number of Transcendental Meditation, called them, asked them how to learn. They said I should go to an introductory lecture, and I wrote down the date and place of the next introductory lecture, which was in two days. The location was the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium, which I knew well, because I used to go there for surfing movies in the late 50's and early 60's. I went up to the auditorium and sat through an entertaining lecture by Jerry Jarvis, who was then one of the main organizers of the "Student's International Meditation Society."

Two weeks later I went up to Westwood, and learned TM (Transcendental Meditation). Because I was now getting to be part of the circle of people around the lab, they asked me to come in and have my brain waves measured before learning TM. So I jumped in my VW bug and drove to the out-in-the-boondocks place where the new EEG lab was, the "Interim Office Buildings." On my way to the lab I got pulled over by a Highway Patrollman for not having the registration sticker on my car. Beware of making detours on your way to learn to meditate, or not having your papers in order! Then after all that I drove the 55 miles north to Westwood.

Finally I got up to Westwood, and learned TM from a nice little old lady by the name of Beulah Smith. The session with Beulah was on a Saturday. Then Sunday, Monday and Tuesday evenings there were follow-up sessions. In a kind of careless arrogance I later found was characteristic of the TM organization, each of the evening meetings was in a different location and no maps were provided. Sunday night was in a certain hall at UCLA, which I managed to find. (UCLA is 60 miles north of where I was living at the time.) I drove up for the Monday night session but couldn't find it – it was some other hall at UCLA , different than the one announced, changed at the last minute, and the traffic and parking were bumper-to-bumper. As I recall, there wasn't even anywhere to park at 7pm on a Monday. So I think I missed one or two of the three follow-up sessions, which was bad.

Nothing happened for several day. I meditated in the morning and evening, but did not notice a thing. I felt blah. Then, around Tuesday, I was walking through the middle of UCI, and noticed that I was in Celestial Awareness. The world had very gradually turned from black and white to a very subtle Technicolor effect. Inanimate objects just looked very clear, but the grass, trees, and people were sparkling with life-force. The feeling came on very quietly, just a sense of glad to be alive, grateful to be here and breathing, delighted to be seeing, and wide-open to life. This was the kind of seeing and feeling I had been introduced to during the weeks of the EEG experiment. Perhaps slightly enhanced because I had been missing it and searching for it for several months. And here it was, some kind of inner union, my circuits functioning properly. That's what it felt like – if I was an engine, I was now running on all cylinders, with a properly adjusted carburetor. If I was a piano, I was now tuned.

There was no sense, by the way, of being better than anyone or in a spiritual state. Rather, I felt that I had just come to the party everyone else was already at. I was just now finally seeing what was going on.

So it was that I learned Transcendental Meditation, a wonderfully simple and elegant technique taught by Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. Combined with the basis I had in trusting spontaneity, TM was a fantastic technique for me. In 1969 and 1970 I attended meditation teacher trainings with Maharishi, and he made me a teacher of TM. For awhile, I was the only teacher of TM in Orange County. It was great fun, and I continued my pattern of surfing in the morning, taking classes at the university, participating in the scientific research on meditation, and giving lectures on meditation in the evenings.

Maharishi studied with Swami Brahamananda Saraswati, whose name means "the bliss of the Absolute." Swami Brahmananda Saraswati was a true forest yogi, wandering alone for many years in the wild places of India, living in silence, doing intense practices.

Swami Brahmananda Saraswati, scowling at the camera (what you lookin' at?). In spite of how fierce he seems, I feel only friendliness from him.

Maharishi was my friend and teacher in the 1960’s and 1970’s. This is my favorite photograph of him. He is in the middle. Tat Wala Baba is on the right. I don’t know who that is on the left.

Maharishi on the left, Lakshmanjoo on the right. This was probably around 1968.

Kabir on Sanskrit

And now – for another view on Sanskrit, lest we step unwittingly into a war that has been raging for thousands of years, about who controls the truth. Keep in mind that the whole idea of Sanskrit is that this is how the male priests of certain castes spoke in the Bronze Age, with its wife-burning, slavery, and oppression of dark-skinned people by lighter-skinned ones.

“Sanskrit is the stagnant water of the Lord's private well," Kabir said, whereas "the spoken language is the rippling water of the running stream."

“The bhakti poets composed in the regional languages, deliberately breaking the literary and religious hold of Sanskrit.”

The debate has been going on since before the time of Buddha, as people have railed against the control, secrecy, and dominion of the elite families of priests who have controlled all worship.

Sanskrit as Mrita bhasha, or a dead language

From The Times of India in 2009:

“For some, though, the mother tongue is a holy cow. They argue that only through the mother tongue can one express oneself effectively. Indian English writers, whose mother tongue is not English, give the lie to this claim. Franz Kafka, a great in European literature and a Czech, wrote his books not in his mother tongue, but in German. Similarly Arthur Koestler, Joseph Conrad and Jacob Bronowski, to mention only a few names, wrote theirs in languages that were not their mother tongues. There is a grouse that English subdues vernaculars, the way Sanskrit was accused of doing earlier. In the sixties, the literary world of Kerala was set abuzz with an anti-Sanskrit movement led by overzealous lovers of Malayalam. But it soon burnt itself out. The purists who wanted to rid Malayalam of Sanskrit influence were up in arms against writers using Sanskrit words. They argued that Sanskrit was a mrita bhasha, or a dead language.”

Portrait of Kabir, Bodleian library, Oxford, Mrs. Douce

“Kabir was probably adopted by an impoverished Muslim weaver. ... and as a result he was persecuted by both the Brahmins and the Muslim community.”

Kabir says, tell me, what is God?

He is the breath within the breath.

Tagore translations of Kabir.

---

“Kabir was born in 1398 a time of great political upheaval in India. Ramananda was his spiritual Master. He spent most of his life around Benaras, the seat of Brahmin orthodoxy. The Brahmins exerted great influence on every level of society, but Kabir denounced them in a satirical way. He also ridiculed the authority of Vedas and Quran as well as the Brahmin and the Qazi. Thus the orthodoxy of both religions hated him. However he had a large following and was safe from their persecution. He had won the hearts of the common people and influenced the religious beliefs of the simple rural folks by denouncing the heavy burdens placed upon them by the religious authorities. Kabir stressed a simple life, the equality of man and condemned religious bigotry. There are many legends surrounding his death, but according to British Scholar Charlotte Vaudenville, he died in the year 1448.” - from onetruename.com

- Women Writing in India: 600 B.C. to the early twentieth century By Susie J. Tharu, Ke Lalita

Proceedings of the Indian History Congress, Volume 47

How Is Instinctive Meditation Different From Other Approaches?

You don’t have to sit still.

Nothing in this universe is ever still. Physics teaches us that everything in the universe exists as a wave: light, sound, atoms that make our body. Don’t force yourself to sit still - move if you need to. Be refreshed by the flow of energy (pranashakti) in your body.

You don’t have to make your mind blank. Or quiet your mind. Or get rid of your thoughts.

Your mind is a mystery, a brilliant network of billions of neurons working together seamlessly to allow you to experience life.

In meditation, we can allow our mind to expand into the vastness of the universe. Melt into the space where all thoughts come from. Learn to be so immersed in meditation that thoughts fade away on their own.

Do I need to be detached to meditate?

No. Detachment can be harmful for people with families, jobs, lives.

Instead, meditation can lead you to discovering that everything in the world is connected. Meditation gives you the state of fullness, where you feel in touch with your Soul and the Soul of the world. Meditation is about connection.

Do I need to suppress or kill my ego?

“Ego” is the sense of “I am”, the sense of individuality. There is no need to kill your individuality in order to meditate. Celebrate your unique self. Dare to be your unique self. Let your meditation match who you are.

No need to sit cross-legged either.

Very few people can sit cross-legged for prolonged periods of time. The rest damage their knees. Be kind to your body. Give yourself the freedom to choose the position that allows you to be comfortable and give into rest and release.

Scrolling Through the Chakras

When we are cruising through social media, surfing the web, scrolling through Facebook, the ‘Gram, Twitter, we are moved by the instinct to explore. What’s happening, what’s the buzz, how are all my people doing, what is everyone’s relationship with everyone?

When we scroll through our chakras it’s the same basic instinct. What’s happening? What do all the chakras have to say to me and to each other?

Are any of your chakras feeling FOMO or even, IKIBLO - “I just KNOW I am being left out!”

Meditation is the practice of lovingly tending to the energetic dynamics of life, it’s very life that you’re living now.

Touch, Magnetism and Aura

The world is in the midst of a war against touch, unfortunately. It is necessary but still is a complete interruption of the natural.

If you want to get a sense of how human beings like to touch each other, watch dogs and people interact, the desire to touch each other every few minutes and the deep satisfaction this brings. Or if you have young children, notice how they love touch.

Around the world, the custom of shaking hands is now seen as dangerous. Standing two meters apart is encouraged. Even if you personally still like shaking hands, people you meet may fall into the habit unconsciously and shake hands, and then have a panic attack about it a few moments later.

Because of this many people are going around in a state of touch deprivation. Starved for touch even more than usual. Even before the pandemic, many people were living in a constant state of touch deprivation. If you are a yoga asana teacher, you may have found that some of your students come to class in order to be touched. That little adjustment may be the only real human touch they have all day.

As a meditator, you can give a small gift to everyone who beholds you by being in the delight of touch continually. We are always being held by gravity, wherever we are, unless we are in the Space Station orbiting the Earth. When outdoors we are caressed by the sunlight and the breeze.

If you increase your delight in simple touch, in light touch, you can gain great pleasure by this elemental touch.

By living this way, you will be modeling how to be in touch with the elements and gain satisfaction from your senses.

I am speaking from experience. For me, one side-effect of meditation, starting when I was 18 (52 years ago!) was that my touch sense popped open, and standing 6 feet or 2 meters away from someone feels intimate. I feel like I am touching them, in contact with their personal energy field. Actually it seems to me that we all have fields that go out in a sphere around us, to about 2 meters usually. Some people are larger. So standing 2 meters away means there is considerable overlap.

If you have children and dogs, you probably touch them a LOT, and enjoy this immensely.

When you go out into the world, however, you need to switch to a completely different mode, one you may have never inhabited before.

I am sort of used to it after 52 years but it still feels a bit strange. We all now have to, perhaps forever, forget about shaking hands. So when you interact with strangers, you can train yourself to be different in your body.

Your Prana Body

Before leaving home, you might do some magnetic hands exercises, activating your prana-senses. Breathe in and out with your hands dancing the flow of breath and prana, in and out and up and down. "Paint" the inside of your biomagnetic prana sphere, with a light touch of your hands.

With a thought, you can activate your force field, which is an energetic boundary around your form. Your aura, or prana body, is your sense of your personal space. Your sensations will vary greatly from moment to moment, most likely, but it's an interesting adventure.

People who are aware of their personal magnetism and the field of it, are perceived as having "a presence." Others can sense your field, on a quiet level.

When I am aware of my magnetic field, in other words, standing way far away from someone still feels intimate. I have the space to notice the sensations in my body, in my midline torso (the sensors we have in the middle of the body - the forehead, throat, chest, belly, and lower pelvis). Tracking the sensations in your body when you are interacting with someone enriches the flow of the conversation.

Touch Meditation

Some simple touch explorations to make part of your way of being in your body, day to day.

1. - Notice your morning tea or coffee, and food, as TOUCH. The touch sensations that go with drinking and eating.

2. - Develop little things, tiny favorite noticing of sensations such as the touch of your feet on the floor, the touch to your fingers of your favorite everyday objects, and the touch on your skin of your clothes. Train yourself to spend an extra 2 seconds feeling the touch of the sun on your skin, the touch of the air inside your nose.

3. - Create touch rituals, such as massaging your whole body after getting out of the shower. Expose yourself to temperature differences such as turning the water on cool or cold at the end of your shower, and savor that shock and tingle.

4. - Before and after meditation, touch your hands together, sort of in the "namaste" pose, but in order to feel the touch of the skin as each hand meets the other. Notice if you have some magnetic sensing in your hands, if your skin is alert to the prana sensations, which vary from tingling, to magnetism, to a taffy-like stickiness, to pressure, or just "something." Lightly touch your forehead, throat, heart, and belly, with the intention of blessing and greeting.

5. - After meditation, sit there for an extra 30 seconds and notice the subtle physical sensations of the space between you and any other objects. There is a very quiet, almost un-noticeable sensation of "proximity," of the spatial relationship between your body and the physical world around you in all directions.

This is a little thing you can do to enhance your tactile sense of your own life and help others get used to this weird new set of rules we are supposed to live by.

Trust Your Instincts

Meditation is a built-in ability. Your body already knows how to do it, as part of your survival instincts. The ability is there, in your nerves and muscles and metabolism, always ready and waiting for you to access it. There are thousands of techniques for meditating, which means there is something for everyone.

Meditation is the action of riding the instincts into your inner world. There you can rest, and at times rest from action completely. The instincts — hunting, homing, grooming, feeding, mating, exploring, resting, healing, adapting — are the wise motions of life. Meditation techniques access the instincts in infinite combinations and permutations.

The most important techniques are as simple as paying attention to your breathing. Find something interesting about your breath and hang out with it. Breath is our main food – we breathe about 22,000 times a day, and the oxygen in the air feeds the body. It's the oxygen that lets us burn the fuel to generate heat and power to move.

Meditation techniques are things people invented or discovered going on within themselves, then systematized and put into a formal system. But they emerge from an extremely informal, intimate way of being with life. The techniques the meditation traditions have so diligently collected and preserved over the millennia are there to remind you to create your own system. Always remember this. Coaches and teachers can help you to access your inner knowledge, but the basic skill is already there inside you. I advocate an instinctive, passionate, and natural approach to meditation as the best way to begin and continue.

The six books I talk about on this site - Meditation Made Easy, Breath Taking, Whole Body Meditations, Meditation Secrets for Women, Meditation 24/7, and The Radiance Sutras - are tools you can use to begin meditation, and if you already are meditating, sustain, enrich your practice.

I call the instincts "the wise motions of life," because they are deep impulses through which life is always renewing itself, evolving itself, creating its art.

What Are the Instincts?

They are the moves you are always engaged in, the rhythm and melody of your dance with life. You know what they are and you don't think about them.

Hunting is an instinct. If you are here on this website, you may be hunting for information about how to improve your life. Surfing the web is enabled by computers, but the real power comes from inside us, the human instinct to figure out how the world works. Curiosity is an instinct. Exploring is an instinctive behavior.

Making a trail is instinctive – if you found your way here, and perhaps bookmark the site, that is making a trail. When you go shopping for food or clothes, you are engaged in multiple instincts: you follow a trail or series of roads you know to get to the market or mall; you gather things you need, or you browse and search for things you need; and you bring them back to your nest. Saying something is an "instinct" is just a way of saying it is natural, a natural move.

We each have our own favorite instincts, combinations of instincts, and sequences. As individuals, we have preferred styles of activities, and things we don't like so much. Raising children involves many instincts: nurturing, bonding, communicating, protecting, setting boundaries, guarding boundaries, nesting. And, of course, getting in to position to have children usually involves the mating instinct.

The process of meditating itself is very playful. Playing is an instinct; all mammals play, and in playing they rehearse actions, practice moving in a coordinated manner, and engage their talents. When we meditate, the body gets a chance to rest more deeply than sleep; resting is an instinct, and we all do a form of resting every day called sleeping. Sleeping is an instinct, and when we sleep we dream. What is a dream? While we are asleep, the brain creates, directs and acts in mental movies, which we sometimes remember when we wake up.

When we meditate, the feeling of meditation itself alternates between resting, playing, communing, dreaming, and so on. Sometimes we feel we are being fed, nourished, by the peacefulness of the meditation. Other times we feel we are being stimulated, awakened, excited by the meditation experience.

Everyday life is structured around the instincts:

• Resting – sleeping and dreaming.

• Feeding - yourself and your family and pets.

• Grooming - bathing and getting dressed, doing your hair. Picking the nits out of your children’s fur.

• Gathering - foraging by going to the store or the garden and bringing food home.

• Hunting – searching for what you need in the environment, shopping for the best buys

• Exploring – looking and sniffing around to discover what interests you. Going on an adventure. Expanding your horizons.

• Homing – the navigational skills to find your way home when you have been out exploring.

• Nesting – building a home or tending to it, decorating, cleaning. Being cozy, snuggling in bed.

• Socializing – talking on the phone, getting together with friends.

• Playing - having fun, doing things for sheer enjoyment.

• Courting – flirting, considering possible mates.

• Mating – developing a love relationship. Having sex.

• Procreating – the urge to bear children.

• Communicating – expressing, singing out, saying what you know.

• Communing with nature.

• Protecting - the self, the cubs, and the tribe.

• Establishing dominance – competing in the workplace. Finding your place in the pecking order.

Enjoy Your Busy Brain (Part 3): Pull Out the Thorns and Tune Up

In meditation, give yourself a LOT of time to get used to the tension-relaxation-tension-relaxation cycle.

It often feels like pulling out the thorns, so go easy on yourself. Resist the temptation to say things like, “This isn’t helping; it’s making me worse!” (Although it’s easy to feel that way at first.)

I once had a whole series of vaccinations before traveling in equatorial Africa, and some of them made me feverish for days. But it’s a hell of a lot better than getting the full-blown disease.

In meditation and in life, it’s better to pull out the thorns than leave them to fester!

And it’s better to give your body a chance to explore more elegant ways of dealing with stress, rather than staying in Alarm Mode for long periods of time.

As you can see, meditation is NOT one single state, but rather a continually changing inner-theater of quiet/explosive/erotic/placid/turbulent intensity, in which each breath brings drama, catharsis, rebirth—and yes, even healing.

Take time to tune up.

Meditation feels different each time you do it.

Each breath, each moment of meditation is different from the next as your body rests up, revitalizes itself, and tunes up for action.

The more you cooperate with this process, the more the vaccination quality we discussed above will work for you.

You will become more skilled at handling the stresses you are facing; be they long hours, aches and pains, too many tasks to juggle, or a medical condition.

Should you find a moment to meditate each day, you will soon realize that here -- at last -- is the deepest quality of rest you have ever experienced. And as your body gets used to it, you will feel yourself healing very gently and gradually, on a deep level.

Enjoy Your Busy Brain (Part 2): Don’t Try to Make Your Mind Blank!

If there’s one golden piece of advice in meditation it’s this: Meditation is definitely not one monotonous state of inner blankness!

Even though everyone wants the brain to shut up during meditation, it almost never happens. Rather, meditation is a dynamic condition of relaxation and tension, inner peacefulness and excited musings about work and love.

When I ask people why they have quit meditating, the most common response I get is, “I just couldn’t get into it. I couldn’t make my mind blank.” They admit that yes, they felt relaxation, and yes, they felt better afterward, but all that inner noise -- that can’t be right, can it?

Learn new, more powerful responses to stress.

This play of opposites that occurs in meditation reminds me of the way vaccinations work.

When you get a vaccination, you take into your body a weakened form of a virus or bacteria -- and your immune system learns to fight it.

In meditation, the mind-body system instinctively enters a deep state of safety and relaxation, and then replays portions of what is stressing you -- so that you can learn new, more elegant, more adaptive, more powerful responses.

For example, in meditation you might find yourself replaying an argument you had with a loved one. You may experience snatches of conversation, the memory of muscular tension, and all the other aspects of what you feel emotionally and physically when stressed.

And then -- and here is the beauty of meditation -- you may spontaneously explore new and better ways of handling similar situations. You will actually get better at coping with stress!

This happens whether you want it to or not, for it’s an aspect of the body’s adaptation and spontaneous self-healing.

If you have a rich and full life, your brain is going to be very busy in meditation. This is good!

Enjoy Your Busy Brain (Part 1): Why Do I Have so Many Thoughts in Meditation?

During meditation, the brain is very busy!

At the same time, however, you may experience a great deal of relaxation and repose. The paradox is: you can’t relax without letting go of tension ... and in letting go of tension you remember all the things you were tense about.

Relaxation, tension, relaxation, tension.

Whatever thoughts, sensations, or emotions you have been holding back by staying tense are suddenly free to flood your awareness -- and be dealt with. Meditation is a highly alert state, and so you often find yourself shifting every few seconds between delicious rest and anxiety, until your system works out just the right balance between ease, excitement, and alarm.

This is what makes meditation ideal for managing the challenges in your life, including your relationships and your health.