About This Course
Learning to meditate is a gradual process. Each week, this course has tweeted new techniques and facilitated new insights. The techniques either address particular problems that may arise when you meditate, or provide progressively more advanced methods which deepen your experience. It is recommended that you start by going back to week one's techniques and begin your weekly course at that time. The earlier exercises are not mere preliminaries. They are central methods in their own right to which you will return repeatedly - no matter how advanced your practice becomes.
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Greetings. The purpose of meditation is not to take a daily break from our lives. The purpose is to transform our experience of life so that we would never wish to take a break from it. This week’s email explains methods for extending meditative awareness from silent sitting into action.
Meditation In Action
Shi-nè requires non-doing – but the implication of meditation for life is not passivity or inaction. From meditation we learn awareness, focus, enjoyment, flow, and spaciousness. We extend—into life—freedom from judgemental thinking and freedom from emotional conflict. This facilitates a lightness of being which allows us to live with grace, courage, inspiration, persistence, and confidence.
The essence of shi-nè is to return from distraction and to remain with the presence of awareness. The essence of meditation in everyday life is the same: to bring awareness to all activities.
The easiest place to begin is with bodily awareness. It is impossible to feel your body unless you are here, now.
The easiest time to start is as you finish sitting meditation. Let go of the sharp division between meditating and non-meditating. Emerge from meditation gradually and smoothly. Stand up slowly, paying attention to movements and sensations. Massage any pain or stiffness, and continue to find the presence of awareness in whatever sensation arises.
See how long you can maintain awareness as you begin your next activity. If possible – choose something solitary and non-verbal, such as cooking, cleaning, or physical exercise. Activities involving words are more likely to distract you from awareness.
Walking Meditation
Walking meditation is a bridge between formal sitting meditation and informal meditation in everyday activities. It is also useful if you want to meditate for long periods continuously. Alternating sitting and walking provides a way to relieve the stress on your body without ever leaving meditation entirely. Walking also serves as an antidote to both the tiredness and restlessness that can obstruct shi-nè.
Walking meditation is easiest in a quiet place without distractions or obstacles. An empty room large enough to walk in circles is suitable. Even better – an unobstructed natural setting such as a park. Walking meditation is valuable but more difficult in an urban setting.
Walk with your eyes looking downwards at about 45 degrees – but keep your head upright. Allow your gaze to move smoothly over the ground, rather than jumping from one point to the next. This is much easier if you allow your eyes to relax and defocus, so that your vision is slightly blurred.
Be aware of each part of your foot as it presses the ground in succession. Be aware of sensations: of your trousers brushing your legs, of the rhythmic contractions of leg muscles, of the slight brush of air against your skin.
This is easier if you walk at about half the normal speed.
When you find that you are distracted by thinking – return to find the presence of awareness in sensations.
Pay no particular attention to the objects around you – but be aware of your body moving through space. As a variation – feel that you are motionless and that space is gliding past you.
Try this for fifteen minutes every time you meditate this week. That is enough to get the flavour. With experience, you can engage in walking meditation for periods of seconds to hours – and any time you need to walk.
Meditation In Everyday Life
The method of informal meditation in everyday life is simply to be with your action – rather than distracted by thoughts and feelings about something else. This does not mean avoiding thinking. It means using thought when it is actually useful – and allowing useless thoughts to drop away. It means remaining aware that you are thinking – as you think.
It is easiest at first to let unnecessary thoughts go by returning to bodily awareness. This is possible in any situation. Be aware of breath. Be aware of sensations. Recall that you have a body – which seems to disappear when staring for hours at a screen, for example. Scan your body from foot to head—are you contracting any muscles unnecessarily? Needless muscular tension and needless mental tension reinforce each other. Let both go.
During the day, it is often possible to enter the momentary spaces between activities, in which we can stop – to let go and let be. This momentary practice—at bus stops, walking to a shop, or lying in the bath—infuses our experience with openness.
Allow the world to remind you to return to awareness. Open to your senses. Whenever you see a vivid colour or hear a distinctive sound – allow its presence. Experience and enjoy food – rather than chewing mechanically and thinking about work. Enjoy washing dishes, a chore many dislike – but which becomes pleasurable in the state of flow. When exercising, be with your body and breath. Wearing an iPod when running—or watching television at the gym—is counter-productive.
Observe the pointless doing that arises from nervous compulsion – the fear of emptiness. Take time to just be in stillness instead. Allow effective action to arise spontaneously from that space.
Obstacles & Antidotes: Vajra Posture
This strenuous exercise can have fatal consequences. Please do not attempt it if you have any doubt about your physical fitness – and certainly not if you have a heart condition, high blood pressure, or are pregnant or menstruating.
Squat down on tip-toe. The balls of your feet should be touching. Your heels should be touching. Balance yourself by touching the ground in front of you with your fingertips.
Place your hands palms-down on your knees. Straighten your arms to push your knees downward a little. Spread your knees apart and straighten your back.
When you feel balanced – raise your hands above your head. Place the palms of your hands firmly together about an inch above your head. Your fingers should point directly upward.
Simultaneously attempt to push your hands up, and your elbows back – without separating your hands, or allowing your hands to rise further above your head. These two movements should be matched in effort so that they counteract each other – i.e. your hands and arms do not move. Keep your hands pointing straight upward. Increase the effort until your arms begin to judder.
Now raise yourself until your legs form the same angle as your arms. Remain in that position until you collapse and fall back flat on the floor – with your arms at your sides. Remain in that posture until breathing and heart rate have returned to normal—not more than four minutes, or you may lose the resulting sense of alertness and freshness.
Throughout this exercise – just let go and let be. When you sit up again – continue with meditation. Repeat this practice as many times as feels comfortable.
This exercise is called the ‘vajra’ or ‘thunderbolt’ posture. Its principle is to cause total exhaustion extremely quickly. When totally exhausted – it is difficult to think. Vajra posture helps find the condition of no-thought. Because exhaustion is reached extremely quickly – recovery is also rapid. Vajra posture leaves you feeling energised, clear, and refreshed. Therefore it is valuable as an antidote both to racing thoughts and lethargy.
The book Roaring Silence explains vajra posture in considerably more detail – discussing both its esoteric aspects and practical antidotes to difficulties with it.
Recommended Resources
Meditative traditions include many physical exercises that complement sitting meditation. Aro teaches sKu-mNyé, a series of 111 exercises that range from easy—for anyone—to extremely strenuous. sKu-mNyé brings about nyams (non-ordinary meditation experiences) in which the presence of awareness is discovered in highly peculiar physical sensations.
The Aro meditation resources page provides a range of learning methods.
