A COMPREHENSIVE LOOK AT THE PRACTICE OF MEDITATION

WHAT IS MEDITATION?

Do we really know? Is it sitting in an uncomfortable pretzel like position for endless hours? Is it something we can do while working in the garden? Is it something that can only be of value when done in retreat, or can we find a practice even in the midst of the madness of a bustling city?

First, let us embrace that we need to recognize that any work we do to empower our minds to overcome the cause(s) of our suffering is going to require some type of meditative practice. This is non-negotiable because the noise of our minds is our worst enemy when it comes to our sanity and we need to proactively train our minds to let o of things. This is something that most of us are not trained to do in our youth. The good news is that does not require we sit like a pretzel, nor that we must be still, or that it needs to be any sort of competitive activity in which we push our selves beyond what is healthy for us or beyond what we need.

So, let’s ponder a little reality of life which is that not everyone is wired the same. Often when people fail to exercise, something critical to all of our health, it is because they are comparing themselves to athletic types of people. They see people pumping iron, on the screen with six pack abs, and then they give up before they start. They know they can’t keep up with the uber athletic type, not giving themselves permission to simply take that 10 minute walk around the neighborhood or do 5-10 minutes of stretching twice a day. For someone “out of shape”, these little things can be life changing and can add years to someone’s life not to mention help prevent injury and nourish the bodies natural ability to self heal. This has everything to with meditation because the person who sits like a pretzel for hours in silence is the spiritual version of the person pumping iron, ripped with the six pack abs. We don’t have to be that person. But we need, absolutely need, to give our selves permission to relax and just breathe even if that is just 10 or 15 minutes a day.

To identify the power of meditation we need to put thing sin their place. Is it the stillness? Is it chanting? Is it the faith or philosophy attached to our meditation, or perhaps a mantra we are repeating? First and foremost it is the breathing. Everything else is secondary. So, the good new is that anything that allows us to slow down our breathing, to do a simple, familiar or repetitive task has the capacity to take us into a meaningful and empowering meditative state. And I would argue it is far better to go work in the garden, relax, and focus on slow, relaxed breathing than it is to fight our mind sitting in some pretzel like position. And the same is true for hopping on a bicycle and taking a casual ride in which we allow ourselves to take a nice slow cruise while again, making sure to breathe deeply and slowly. We are just pedaling. No need to get anywhere quickly, nothing else to think about. This is meditation.

HARDCORE MEDITATION

Do we need to push the envelope? Just as some people who exercise are gravitated to push the envelope, to overcome pain and test the capacity of their bodies to strengthen themselves, so too are their people who do the same with spiritual practices. Keep in mind, in my world of teaching, spirituality is not synonymous with religion. It is synonymous with energy. Spirit equals energy, and we all need to use and manage our energy wisely. But there is something important to embrace here and that is sustainability and consistency. What good is it to be 27 years old, ripped, in ultimate athletic condition only to find our selves seriously overweight, stiff, and perhaps riddled with injuries at age 40? It happens all the time. In this case we are pushing hard for a particular phase of our life, but not for the long run, and I would argue that the most important time to savor our health is in the latter years of our life when our habits solidify, our healing capacity slows down, and we are far more prone to laziness.

If we choose to approach meditation from and intensive approach, we need to address the same issue. What practice are we creating that can still have meaning when we are 50? A practice that we will want to sustain. To this, we should let all of our health-centric practices be organic things. That is let them grow organically and make sure to listen to our inner wisdom as to what is best for us. Perhaps what is best for is to go on a retreat, meditate for an hour, or two, or four, or ten a day. Perhaps that will unlock a part of us we need to experience, reveal a strength and view of life that we did not know we had in us. We should never walk away from such a call of our soul anymore than we should turn away doing a much more simple, less intensive form of meditation if that is what is calling us.

Yes, the pendulum can also swing in our meditative practice, as in anything in life. We can generate a highly enlightened state of mind through intensive meditation and that can come crashing down, if we are not attentive to building our lives properly, to “ground” our energy. Yes, we can become a depressed, even mentally unstable person, just as easy with an intensive meditation practice as without one. It is all in how and why we go about it. For the record, I have spent many years in intensive mediation, sometimes 5 to 8 hours a day, and it has shaped my life dramatically, perhaps more than anything. However, it has also given me an ability to speak to the practice, not just from my own experience, but with respect to the lives that other people live. It has also shown me that anytime we push anything to the limit, it requires a far greater responsibility in how we do that thing, in order to avoid injury or harm. In physical exercise, it means our capacity to injure our self, if we are athletic, goes up if we are not paying attention to what we are doing. The same in our inner, mental world in regards to meditation. Of course, rewards require that we take on such responsibility and not simply use that reality that can apply to anything as an excuse not to do anything that can ultimately empower us.

Hardcore meditation is best when our souls call us to step out of a deeply destructive way of thinking and living. It can be a powerful component of a deep healing process. And even a brief phase of intensive meditation can help us find powerful forms of inner resilience and an ability to face and overcome fears that may be harbored or entrenched in us that are not serving us well.

ONE OF THE HARDEST THINGS YOU CAN EVER DO IS ABSOLUTELY NOTHING FOR A LONG PERIOD OF TIME.

STILLNESS vs MOVEMENT and SOUND vs SILENCE

There are many ways to deeply and powerfully practice meditation. When we relax and slow down our breathing we will find that every state we are in has a meaning, purpose and best practice. How we handle stillness, how we engage in movement, how we manage our minds in silence, and we how we manage them our senses are being stimulated, who can say that any of these is more important than the other? They are all pieces of our puzzle. Stillness strips away our gravity to be be busy and distracted. Suddenly we are left with the busyness and distraction of our minds without the ability to over ride that through some physical activity. This is why people struggle with sitting meditation, especially in silence. You have to be patient to get the reward. When people go to the gym, the first thing that happens is that you feel weak and then you hurt and then you go home and hurt some more. Then you start to realize that there is good pain and bad pain. Pain that hurts you and pain that heals you. Pain in meditation, is not pain. It is doubt, confusion, and the many voices in our heads all vying for our attention. These are the things that secretly wreak havoc on our mental well being. So we, like the person just heading to the gym for the first time, .have to realize that what we seek is on the other side of all of that. We are bringing calm to the storm of our mind. And if we can feel and empower that center, we can become addicted to that process in the same way that person who once hated lifting that weight, can’t wait to get to gym and put in a good workout. It’s after the workout that the body tells us we have done the right thing. Healthy practices are all things of investment, we do them over and over again and train our selves to love the work because of the reward. Life training!

While the purest forms of meditation exist in stillness and silence when it is just us facing and overcoming the restlessness of our minds, movement is also powerful. We mentioned the core power of meditation being in our breathing. What is the power of breathing? 1. It is what gives us life. It is at the core of what makes us living things. Before food, shelter, love and connection, there is breathing. It is the first and last thing we will do in our lives. 2. Repetition and simplicity. Breathing is so inherently simple it just runs on autopilot. The simply act of drawing in air and exhaling repeatedly bring to life and initiate everything we think and do. All the complex and miraculous systems that function in our bodies are awakened and called into action by our simple act of breathing. And as cosmic as it may sound, the binary act of inhaling and exhaling are direct reflections of receiving and giving, life and death, abundance and emptiness. Our breathing is the rhythm of life passing through us in every moment. To this, movement and meditation should empower this expression. Our movements when attached to meditation, should be simple, controlled, highly repetitive, and keep us in a rhythm. While we could surely pump weights are spin on a stationary cycle in a meditative state, it is recommended we do things not so physically demanding so we can feel the power of just slowing down and letting our breathing heal and guide us. Walking meditation is incredibly powerful, but it needs to be a slow walk. We are not training our self to think we need to rush through life. We feel the steps. Meditation should increase our sensitivity and awareness, not squash it,, which is what happens when we get too aggressive in our actions. We are not learning to fight with life. We are learning to hum with life. To listen to life and then to respond with wisdom and not just reaction.

Sound is a powerful thing to bring into ur meditation. That is why people have been chanting for centuries. It is less about the words and more about the power of sound to push our thoughts aside. If you struggle to get into a relaxed state of mind, absolutely use sound/music. The rules are the same. Calming and repetitive. Don’t listen to a playlist. Listen to one looping song. Part of this mental training is to allow our minds to find joy in repetition. We are learning that the power to reinvigorate and energize does not have to come from ever changing distractions, it can come from repetition. You will find anyone who has ever succeeded at anything does so because the are capable of getting up and doing the same damn thing over and over and over again and still bring that energy and meaning to whatever that is. If we can nourish that place where calm rules over madness, through sound based meditation, we will find it much easier to sit in silence because we know the place, the state of mind we are seeking.

FIND YOUR MEDITATION

Find your practice. At the center must be slowing down your breathing. I would say starting at 6 seconds inhale and the same exhale. You need to feel your breathing and you need to let your breathing “wash away” your stress. You could take a nice slow walk, a very casual non-aggressive bike ride, you can pull weeds in the garden, or check out something like Chi Gong (Easy slow movements). Yes, you could knit, paint, up to you, just bring your breathing front and center and if you have some calming looping music do it. That is a s spiritual as it gets. There is no competition to meditation. It is your opportunity to build a little temple in your soul, a little place of refuge in which you only need to give your self permission to let go, relax and get lost in your capacity to self heal through the simple act of slowing down and breathing. Does that 10 hour a day vipassana intensive retreat call to you? Go do it. See what happens. Again, not out of some athletic competitive impulse, but rather a desire to see what happens we you completely empty the tank, push your self to empty itself of everything it perceives to be reality. Of course we all have to come back! And that is life. Discovering and forging our selves and our truth and then diligently searching for ways to give that some place, however small, in this crazy world we all live in .

SOME THOUGHTS ON PRACTICES

SITTING
IDEAL: DAILY.
MINIMUM: 3 DAYS A WEEK (repetition!)

ENTRY LEVEL: 10 Minutes
GOOD DAILY PRACTICE: 20-30 Minutes
MENTAL MUSCLE BUILDING: 1 Hour or More
INTENSIVE REBUILDING: 2 Hours or More

WALKING/MOVEMENT
IDEAL: DAILY.
MINIMUM: 4 DAYS A WEEK (repetition!)

GOOD DAILY PRACTICE: 10-20 Minutes

Absolutely use calming music if you struggle with silence.

Avoid cluttered environments. Never be afraid of a park bench, a back yard, or anywhere that fosters a more relaxed place to let go and just breath. Take a couple minutes and move things so you can sit away from clutter. You will be surprised how quickly you can shuffle a few things and put them back where they were, often in just a minute or two.

SUPPORT THE ORANGE ENGINE WITH LSW

Check out some of our branded goodies that help to fuel the our mission.

COMING SOON.