Why Befriend Yourself in Meditation

You may not consider how to befriend yourself in meditation, but when you shift your mindset, you can develop a friendly and compassionate approach to the practice. Try the following five practices and approaches to meditation.

 1. Let Yourself Love What You Love

Think of meditation as immersing yourself in the flow of love. Yoga means “connection,” and in meditation we allow our attention to connect intimately with the flow of the life force, so deeply that we fall in love, merge, and come into union. One tangible flow of the life force is breathing, and each breath connects us with the mystery of life within us and all around. In meditation, breathe in the way you do when engaged in what you love – walking in nature, making love, playing sports, dancing, listening to music, cooking, savoring the aroma of wine. The essence of all meditation techniques is savoring the thrill of aliveness.

2. Love Your To-do List when you Befriend Yourself in Meditation

People with busy lives generally spend half of their meditation time, or more, simply sorting through their to-do lists. This involves skillful attention – feeling the energy or passion or tension that goes with each item, each action, and choreographing the action flows. To the brain and body, your to- do list is an asana flow and the sequencing is important, as are transitions.

When we are meditating and shift from inward absorption to outward orientation, this is yoga. This is connecting our inner world with our outer world. Whatever we think about in meditation becomes infused with prana and flow, and later when we are in action, there is a kind of sparkle and flow to our daily life. What this means moment-to-moment in meditation is to celebrate every thought that arises, welcome it as a little package of prana, welcome whatever urgency or feeling is associated with that impulse toward action.

3. Delight in the Rhythm of Inner and Outer

During meditation, our attention often switches every half a minute between feeling sensations of relaxation in the body and then becoming absorbed in mental movies about what to do in the outer world. This is a natural rhythm of inner and outer, a pulsation of life. Sometimes you will find yourself pulsating inner- outer every few seconds, sometimes every couple of minutes. Think of this as an inner asana flow, as beautiful and natural as breathing in and breathing out. There are days when it seems like we are daydreaming the entire time we are meditating, even if we sit there for 20 minutes.

When you emerge from a long sequence of thoughts and remember, “OMG, I am meditating! What time is it?” Be gentle and humorous and loving toward yourself. Do not “return to the mantra” or “bring your attention back to the breath.” Rather, just sit there and enjoy yourself and be sensitive to where you are in your rhythm of inner and outer. Take a few breaths and savor the sensations in your body.

4. Sit with your Feet on the Ground

The best meditation posture for many of us is in a comfortable chair with back support, and feet on the ground. This is called the Maitreya Asana and it has a lot of advantages. One day in 1969 I was meditating at Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California, sitting cross-legged near the cliff overlooking the ocean. My bodyworker, Ed Maupin, came by and when I opened my eyes, said, “Let’s have a talk.” He explained to me that even the half- lotus can over-stretch the connective tissue around the knees and lead to arthritis and injuries later. It turns out that Ida Rolf studied Tantra Yoga from 1920 to 1930 with Pierre Bernard, the first American yogi, and he taught her Yoga Massage. They figured out, a hundred years ago, that the lotus and even half- lotus can be damaging. Because of this insight, my knees are great, even though I am 72 and have spent about 25,000 hours in meditation over the past 52 years.

Meditation Teachers Lorin Roche and Camille Maurine

5. Don’t Judge your Meditation Experience

If we practice meditation in a way that is healthy for us, our body and heart and brain will just take what they need. This is because we feel safe to heal, safe to be ourselves. It is common for people to cry the entire time they are meditating, for months after beginning. It is such a relief to be able to “just be myself and feel my heart.” Then one day the tears cease to come and you feel renewed, years younger. Or you may feel filled with sexual passion during meditation, with tingling electricity flowing around under your skin. You might be angry, or sad, or start laughing.

Welcome all your moods and emotions. Meditative experience is infinitely varied and includes the interaction of all of the senses, all possible emotions, innumerable bodily sensations, and all the instinctive motions of life. In one minute we are at home, feeling safer and more relaxed than ever in our lives, and this is followed by a gush of electricity that is so intense as to be scary and taboo – how can I handle so much power of aliveness?

As you experiment with fitting meditation into the flow of your daily life, judge your meditation by its effect on your ability to live. This is how to judge meditation – how does it enhance your ability to work, love, play, and rest? If you give half an hour in the morning to meditating, does it enrich the other 23 1/2 hours of the day?

Meditation is a universal human instinct, we all can do it. The key to how to befriend yourself in meditation is to practice in your own way.

Lorin Roche

Dr. Lorin Roche began practicing with the Vijnana Bhairava Tantra in 1968 as part of scientific research on the physiology of meditation. He has a PhD from the University of California at Irvine, where his research focused on the language meditators generate to describe their inner experiences. He is the author of The Radiance Sutras and Meditation Made Easy. With his wife, Camille Maurine, he wrote Meditation Secrets for Women. A teacher of meditation for 46 years, Lorin’s approach centers on how to customize the practices to suit one’s individual nature. Lorin leads the Radiance Sutras Meditation Teacher Training, a 200 hour certification program registered with Yoga Alliance. Lorin teaches regularly at the Esalen Institute and around the world.

www.meditationtt.com

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Meditation is a Superpower

Selecting the Pathways to Practice

Benefits of Meditation Include:

• Improved Ability to Focus
• Increased Creativity
• Deeper Level of Relaxation
• Improved Perception and Memory
• Development of Intelligence
• Natural Change in Breathing
• Decrease in Stress Hormones
• Lower Blood Pressure
• Reversal of Aging Process
• Reduced Need for Medical Care
• Reduction in Cholesterol
• Increased Self-Actualization
• Increased Strength of Self-Concept
• Decreased Cigarette, Alcohol, and Drug Abuse
• Increased Productivity
• Improved Relations at Work
• Increased Relaxation and Decreased Stress
• Improved Health and More Positive Health Habits

Meditation, Stress, and Rest

Chronic stress often interferes with our ability to fall asleep and stay asleep. So people can get stuck in a negative cycle – they need rest desperately, but the body-mind system has taken some damage and is not able to access its built-in healing system called sleep. Millions of Americans take some kind of pill to try to fall sleep, and about half of adults say they have trouble falling asleep at least once a week.

One thing wrong with a lot of the thinking about stress, both in science and in meditation gossip circles, is the idea that stress is bad somehow. It’s not. Stress is wonderful. It’s a genius capability that life put into our bodies. You could be deeply asleep and if you smelled smoke and realized there is a fire, you could zoom around like a superhero, gather up the dog or baby or both, and race out of the house.

There are several levels of challenges in meditation.

Meditation is a Key Tool for Survival

Lorin Roche

Dr. Lorin Roche began practicing with the Vijnana Bhairava Tantra in 1968 as part of scientific research on the physiology of meditation. He has a PhD from the University of California at Irvine, where his research focused on the language meditators generate to describe their inner experiences. He is the author of The Radiance Sutras and Meditation Made Easy. With his wife, Camille Maurine, he wrote Meditation Secrets for Women. A teacher of meditation for 46 years, Lorin’s approach centers on how to customize the practices to suit one’s individual nature. Lorin leads the Radiance Sutras Meditation Teacher Training, a 200 hour certification program registered with Yoga Alliance. Lorin teaches regularly at the Esalen Institute and around the world.

www.meditationtt.com

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Why Stress is Useful: Meditating With The Radiance Sutras

The Flow of Opposites

Measurable Meditation

The Opposite of Stress

The Internal Asana Flow

Continuous Flow of Love

It’s All About Survival

The Thrill of Aliveness

There are two major challenges to learning to meditate.

Meditation Teacher Training

Lorin Roche

Dr. Lorin Roche began practicing with the Vijnana Bhairava Tantra in 1968 as part of scientific research on the physiology of meditation. He has a PhD from the University of California at Irvine, where his research focused on the language meditators generate to describe their inner experiences. He is the author of The Radiance Sutras and Meditation Made Easy. With his wife, Camille Maurine, he wrote Meditation Secrets for Women. A teacher of meditation for 46 years, Lorin’s approach centers on how to customize the practices to suit one’s individual nature. Lorin leads the Radiance Sutras Meditation Teacher Training, a 200 hour certification program registered with Yoga Alliance. Lorin teaches regularly at the Esalen Institute and around the world.

www.meditationtt.com

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The Thoughts that Arise in Mediation

“Oh my God, it is such a relief to just sit down for a minute.”
“F**K, there are a million thoughts flying everywhere.”
“All I can think about is all the unfinished stuff on my to-do list.”
“This can’t be right. All I can feel is the pressure to do more.”
“My mind is like fifty televisions playing simultaneously.”
“My nerves hurt. They are just buzzing with fatigue.”
“Ouch, I am soooo tired.” Zzzzzzzzzzzzzz.
“What time is it?”
“I just felt the muscles in my throat relax – guess I was holding something there.”
“My heart is racing. It’s like I’m nervous to feel what’s in store.”
“That conversation was weird this morning. Why did I respond like that? I could have just said no.”
“Owww . . . it is so uncomfortable to sit here and face my feelings. I think I will just stop meditating right now and check my email.”
“I don’t want to get up. God, I haven’t been this relaxed in days.”

The Impulse toward Action Continues in Meditation

In the real world, these are the kind of things you hear if you listen to people who have busy, active lives as well a thriving meditation practice. When people grab a few minutes to meditate, the impulse toward action continues. There is an alternation of restfulness and restlessness. Accomplishment-oriented thoughts cycle in a rhythm with restful sensations, as the brain clears its mental desk and the body settles into relaxation.

There is often a review of the to-do list and the items that have been done or are awaiting completion, with a few seconds of relief and satisfaction here and there. If you can tolerate the intensity of all this, you’ll emerge refreshed in twenty minutes, relaxed and ready to go. Meditation is a bath in the life force.

The Movement of Prana in Meditation

In yoga terminology, there are some great clues to all this. Prana (prana) is “the breath of life, vitality, vigor, power.” And prana flows and pulsates. This is the nature of life, which is continually healing itself, renewing its vitality, and making the body ready to engage in action. Yoga texts talk about this dynamic, ever-changing brilliance of prana as composed of five rhythms: prana, apana, samana, udana, and vyana. Think of each word as having a spectrum of the following energies.

Prana – propulsion and momentum.
Apana – the vital force flowing downward and outward, elimination.
Samana – assimilation, absorption, consolidation.
Udana – upward movement, speech, expression.
Vyana – expansiveness, diffusion, free circulation everywhere.

Notice that there is no hint here that you are supposed to calm down, make your mind blank, or suppress the dynamic dance of prana. Rather, when we meditate, we are invited to experience the genius of prana as it dynamically flows through our entire being on all levels and rejuvenates and restores us. In meditation, prana may continually change its energetic tone from propulsion and momentum to elimination, to assimilation and absorption, to expression and expansiveness. These changes often happen by surprise and are almost shocking in how powerful they are.

Pulsations of Prana in Meditation

The first pulsation is action and rest. So we find ourselves alternately feeling active and feeling restful. Everyone likes feeling totally restful and relaxed in meditation. But many find it a challenge to sit there buzzing with excitement – even though this is an equally essential phase of meditation. The next pulsation has to do with what happens when we rest. Our bodies heal up and retune themselves.

So we fluctuate between pleasant restfulness and the painful sensations and emotions that have to do with healing. This tends to happen every few seconds and then every few minutes, over and over. When meditators develop bad habits, the bad habits may often take hold here in the transitions between resting to healing, and resting to feeling excited and active.

Meditation is Pure Improvisation

Meditation is pure improvisation, with the five pranas bouncing off each other. The five pranas are combining, transforming into each other, and activating your instinct to survive and thrive. If you want to have a good time in your meditation, and have your practice be healthy, cultivate the attitude of delighting in each phase of prana as it appears. Savor the delight of the breath of life flowing through you, be grateful for each wave, each pulsation, each changing experience. Life is a genius at maintaining itself.

When we meditate in a way that is in tune with our own prana flow, we feel how our power is flowing and where it is stuck. The stuck sensations are uncomfortable. And if we gently attend to them, they usually figure out how to reestablish a healthy flow. Meditation allows everything to get unstuck and circulate.

By the same token, if you meditate in a way that is not suitable for you, you may find it frustrating and depressing. Monks, for example, take vows of celibacy, poverty, and obedience. So their meditation practice needs to help them suppress the flow of sexual desire and kill their ego. If you are not a monk, and practice in the style of a monk, you may just end up lonely and broke.

Meditate in a Way that Supports your Purpose

The great challenge of meditation is to discern what your type is, and then meditate in a way that supports your purpose of living. For example, if you have a love life, or want to have a love life, cherish every impulse of passion as it arises in meditation, wherever it sparks in your body. If you feel a tingle of lust, or an urge to express emotion, or a creative urge to jump up and rearrange the furniture, love those impulses in themselves. Stay there in meditation, savoring the impulses, for however long you intended to meditate, ten minutes or thirty minutes or whatever.

Think of meditation as an invitation to the dance. The internal dance of the five pranas. Take inspiration from prana, apana, samana, udana, vyana, as the basic rhythm pattern of the dance of life.

Lorin Roche

Dr. Lorin Roche began practicing with the Vijnana Bhairava Tantra in 1968 as part of scientific research on the physiology of meditation. He has a PhD from the University of California at Irvine, where his research focused on the language meditators generate to describe their inner experiences. He is the author of The Radiance Sutras and Meditation Made Easy. With his wife, Camille Maurine, he wrote Meditation Secrets for Women. A teacher of meditation for 46 years, Lorin’s approach centers on how to customize the practices to suit one’s individual nature. Lorin leads the Radiance Sutras Meditation Teacher Training, a 200 hour certification program registered with Yoga Alliance. Lorin teaches regularly at the Esalen Institute and around the world.

www.meditationtt.com

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How Meditation Upgrades Your Flight for Free

Let’s look at some ways yoga can enhance your ability to enjoy your flight and arrive at your destination more rested and relaxed.
 

1. Prepare yourself before your flight.

For several days before your flight, practice simple breath awareness in an informal way as you move about in your world doing your chores. Again and again throughout the day, savor the free flow of air and the immediate sense of relaxation that comes from enjoying a breath. This is anaha, breathing freely.
 
Breathing is a multisensory experience: there is a subtle sound, a whoosh of air, and there are sensations throughout the body, from the nose down through the mucous membranes of the throat, into the expanding and contracting lungs. In this way, breathing is not so much concentrating on breath as delighting in it.
 

2. Develop a 15-second practice.

From time to time, breathe out slowly, twice, through the mouth. This takes about 15 seconds. All you are doing is extending the exhalation slightly and making a soft whoo sound as you breathe out. Make up your own name for this, I call it the ‘whoosh’ breath. This tends to invoke the “soothing response,” the body’s built-in antidote to anxiety or the stress response.
 
Learn to identify the sensations that go with bodily relaxation, including stress-release sensations. As you are relaxing, your body may ask you, “Are you sure you don’t need this tension?” Continue to breathe, and relaxation will gently permeate the tension and dissolve it. A 5-minute practice is a series of 15-second cycles.
 

3. Develop a standing practice.

Whenever you are standing in your living room or in line somewhere, develop a quick tense and release practice. Pick an area of the body and introduce a bit of tension into it – you could start with your feet – and tense, then let go. Then your calves, buttocks, shoulders, and face.
 
Experiment with tensing and releasing for longer and shorter periods of time. You will be able to do this invisibly while standing, waiting, or sitting, anywhere.
 
With the body, everything goes in opposites. To breathe in, first breathe out. In order to be awake tomorrow, get a good night’s sleep tonight. To be relaxed, you can introduce tension to your muscles then let go.
 

4. Practices for the day of the flight.

Before walking out the door to catch your flight, sit for five minutes and enjoy the flow of your breath. Practice welcoming the sensations you feel, which often are complex: relaxation, excitement, anxiety, joy, sorrow, impatience, fatigue, jumpiness. Welcome them all, for whatever you feel, you heal.
 
Whenever stressful or anxious thoughts and sensations arise and you breathe with them, you soothe them and wash away a bit of the excess tension. Then stand and practice simple breath awareness – it is so simple. Much of the airport experience is standing and waiting in lines.
 

5. Find Ease in your seat.

As soon as you get settled on the flight, experiment with some 15-second practices such as the whoosh breath and the tense-to-release exercise.
 

6. Meditate on the joy of takeoff.

As the engines wind up and the plane accelerates down the runway, this is a great time to savor the sensations throughout your body. It’s a thrill.
 
Delight in the feeling of your body being pushed back into the seat and being slightly heavier as the airplane lifts up into the air. Sheer power!
 

7. Experience the exhilaration of flight.

Being up in the air traveling through space is intrinsically ecstatic, and an interesting situation for meditation. Patanjali’s Yoga Sutra mentions flight: kaya-akasayoh sambandha-samyamat laghu-tula-samapatteh ca akasa-gamamam. If we take one small molecule of meaning from this, we could evolve a practice:
 
First cherish the sensation of being in your body, resting in the seat.
Then simultaneously be aware of moving through space at great speed.
 
Now delight in the wonder of these two marvels, your body + motion through space.
 
Enjoy a sense of lightness and freedom on your flight.
 

8. Orient yourself to where you are going.

Part of a healthy meditation practice is a review of your to-do list – the items on your list are simply tasks or activities that make your world a better place.
 
Whether you are traveling for work or pleasure, envision a place where you are likely to be. It may be that conference room or even the beach, and visualize being there in a relaxed state.
 
In this way, through using simple yoga skills you can upgrade your flight experience for free. You can feel first class in your body even if you are in economy.
 

Lorin Roche

Dr. Lorin Roche began practicing with the Vijnana Bhairava Tantra in 1968 as part of scientific research on the physiology of meditation. He has a PhD from the University of California at Irvine, where his research focused on the language meditators generate to describe their inner experiences. He is the author of The Radiance Sutras and Meditation Made Easy. With his wife, Camille Maurine, he wrote Meditation Secrets for Women. A teacher of meditation for 46 years, Lorin’s approach centers on how to customize the practices to suit one’s individual nature. Lorin leads the Radiance Sutras Meditation Teacher Training, a 200 hour certification program registered with Yoga Alliance. Lorin teaches regularly at the Esalen Institute and around the world.

www.meditationtt.com

The post Upgrade your Flight for Free with These 8 Meditation Practices appeared first on LA Yoga Magazine - Ayurveda & Health.

Photo by David Young-Wolff

Millions of people want to learn to meditate, and yoga teachers may not be ready. In a typical 200 hour Yoga Teacher Training, there might be as few as one to three hours of instruction in teaching meditation; the quality of meditation instruction in yoga studios tends to reflect this neglect. Students expect yoga teachers to be as competent at teaching meditation as they are with pranayama and asana, but imagine a yoga class where the teacher had only one to three hours of training in how to teach asana! When students receive unskilled instruction it can be a frustrating experience—stifling and repressive. As a result, people are going elsewhere to learn meditation––to Buddhist organizations or multinational corporations that specialize in meditation and offer a higher quality of instruction. It doesn’t have to be this way.

Meditation is half of yoga and the yoga tradition has a wonderfully rich body of meditation techniques. In the Ashtanga model of yoga––yama, niyama, asana, pranayama, pratyahara, dharana, dhyana, samadhi––the last four angas are purely meditative. An ancient yoga text, the Vijnana Bhairava Tantra, (my interpretation is called The Radiance Sutras) describes 112 types of yoga meditation. These include breathing, subtle internal motion, dancing, eating, music, chanting, laughing, silent inner listening, gazing at nature, lovemaking, prayer, and being in a state of wonder, gratitude, or amazement. Just as there are dozens of different physical asanas, there are dozens of different antar asanas, or doorways into meditation. Find one that suits your nature, enter there, and all the others open up gradually over time.

For a teacher, learning to be aware of 112 or more doorways into meditation is a fascinating challenge, because these are all human experiences of delight, wonder, and amazement. Meditation is a basic human instinct that people can access through their love of life. In yoga terms, meditation is falling in love with prana, the flow of the life force. When that is allowed to happen, in a couple of minutes practitioners access a level of restfulness and relaxation deeper than sleep, according to decades of scientific research at Harvard Medical School and other institutions.

Meditation is a natural release into restfulness, and so the basic approach of a meditation teacher can be one of curiosity, rather than dogmatic authority ––“Let’s explore and find what is working for you now.” Over the past 47 years of teaching meditation my experience is that when we offer students a variety of doorways, they are likely to find what works best for them. Meditation then becomes thrilling, an adventure, and a powerful internal vacation that leaves students feeling refreshed and in touch with the essence of life. This is much more interesting and beneficial than simply telling students to sit still and nagging them to concentrate on their breathing.

Meditation is inner yoga (antar = within, interior). As such it is basically invisible. You can’t see what someone is doing inside during meditation, and it takes considerable training for a teacher to find out what the students are experiencing. Antar yoga requires a somewhat different skill set and language than physical asana. A teacher can’t see, for example, if people are injuring themselves by meditating in a way that goes against their nature.

It is important to avoid aggravating injuries, just as with asana. If someone comes to class with a physical injury, such as a sore wrist, yoga teachers know how to make modifications to avoid making that injury worse. It is the same with meditation –– people come to class with sore, overloaded nerves, from living intense lives and working hard. On the level of the nervous system, many of our students are like triathletes who have just come from swimming, biking, and then running a marathon. When this is the case, meditation can feel like doing asana with sore muscles and tendons, with lots of painful and tender sensations. Additionally, one third of Americans are sleep deprived and operating in a state of stressful overload. For many people, yoga is their only quiet time in the week, so they have a backlog of processing to do. When they lie down on their mat at the end of class, or sit to meditate for a few minutes, they are in a raw, vulnerable state. If the teacher indicates that having a busy mind is a sign of failure, they may take this feeling of failure deep inside.

Stop thought-shaming people. Thinking and reviewing one’s to-do list is a natural part of the meditative experience. I have interviewed thousands of people about what they think of during meditation, and many of the thoughts are related to the people they love––in other words, they are being in the heart, sorting emotions, and choreographing the asana flow of everyday life. It is damaging when a teacher says, “You have a monkey mind!”

Meditation is a deeply restful and quick vacation. People who are trained to meditate in a way that suits their inner nature experience meditation as a blessed relief. Even if they are exhausted and stressed from a long day, meditation feels like listening to music or receiving a loving massage.

Asana teachers are potentially among the best meditation teachers in the world, because asana was developed originally to prepare the body for meditation. Around the world, I have witnessed yoga teachers inventing sublime meditation instructions that are breathtakingly beautiful and effective. As a community, we need to embrace this creativity and systematize it.

A 2016 survey sponsored by Yoga Journal and Yoga Alliance found that the number of yoga practitioners has zoomed up to 37 million from 21 million over the past four years, and over half of these people are coming for stress relief. 90% of those surveyed think of yoga as a form of meditation. They want access to guidance with their meditation practice. This is an exciting time. Let’s up our game together to welcome these students.

Lorin Roche

Dr. Lorin Roche began practicing with the Vijnana Bhairava Tantra in 1968 as part of scientific research on the physiology of meditation. He has a PhD from the University of California at Irvine, where his research focused on the language meditators generate to describe their inner experiences. He is the author of The Radiance Sutras and Meditation Made Easy. With his wife, Camille Maurine, he wrote Meditation Secrets for Women. A teacher of meditation for 46 years, Lorin’s approach centers on how to customize the practices to suit one’s individual nature. Lorin leads the Radiance Sutras Meditation Teacher Training, a 200 hour certification program registered with Yoga Alliance. Lorin teaches regularly at the Esalen Institute and around the world.

www.meditationtt.com

The post The Art of Teaching Meditation appeared first on LA Yoga Magazine - Ayurveda & Health.

Photo of Marti Nikko Bradley by David Young-Wolff. Marti is meditating and wearing top by Balini Sports and pants by Bali Dog.

The Sanskrit word Yoga, has a dynamic meaning that suggests joining things together for motion and power — to get things done in the world. The first definition for yoga is “the act of yoking, joining, harnessing,” as it pertains to horses. Sanskrit words often have a central image, which is to be taken literally and figuratively. If we take this meaning metaphorically, the suggestion is “saddle up your horse and ride” –– get connected to your horsepower and go! This image is especially relevant when we consider that we all each need to learn to love and train our busy brain–a brain full of horsepower. This is where yoga–and within yoga–meditation come in to play.

The term yoga has what is called wide semantic range, or lots of meanings. Additional definitions of yoga include “Put together a team. Perform. Equip your army. Put the arrow on the bowstring. Put on your armor. A remedy, a cure. A method, a device, a way. A trick, a strategy, a fraud. An undertaking, a business, work. Gain, profit, wealth, property. Any junction, union, or combination. Exertion, endeavor, industry, care, attention. Application of the thoughts, abstract contemplation, meditation.” *

It’s clear from these dictionary listings that yoga applies to all areas of life, and the emphasis is always on skillfully connecting the organs of action and the organs of perception with the innermost soul. Get fully connected with your soul power and go live your life.

I find all these definitions useful as I attempt to cope with my busy brain, which is usually like six stallions pawing the ground, tossing their manes, and charging across the landscape. It’s always wild when I close my eyes to meditate because I never know what will happen from one thought to the next. I may have to be there, paying attention, as my horses race around the whole universe, now jumping into the sun, now zooming off to another star system, now plunging into the center of the earth, now flying across the ocean, until finally, miraculously, they come together and say, okay let’s get some work done here on Earth. Once in a while (once a week if I’m lucky) I close my eyes to meditate and I’m instantly immersed in a hum of energetic peace, a sublime vibration as if a giant invisible orchestra is playing Ommmmmmm.

I spend many hours a week listening to meditators describe their experiences, and this dynamic dimension of meditation is very common, almost the rule. We all feel like wild horses. We all are having what feels like hundreds of thoughts a minute. We all want to jump up after two minutes and run off and do stuff. The definition of yoga suggests that this is a good thing. The body of knowledge and skill that yoga represents is here to help us stay connected to our wildness and use this power to support love, play, work, and freedom.

There is an incredible power in me, in you, in all the meditation students and teachers that I have worked with, in everyone,––and this power wants to live and be expressed in the world. There is an urgency to it, because time is precious. During meditation, this power expresses itself in urges, emotions, sensations, and thoughts of all kinds, especially impulses toward action in the world. At the same time, we crave healing, we look for remedies, we long to be connected to our own essence and at the same time to be part of a team and tribe. If we look again at the definition of yoga, we see that all these are mentioned specifically.

The next time you think that your mind is “wandering” during your practice, consider instead that all the impulses flowing through you are wanting to join together into one coherent wholeness. The longing to be at one with ourselves, and at one with the life force, is one of the human beings’ strongest urges. It’s unstoppable. It will never go away. Every thought, every image, every sensation, is a tiny aspect of your longing to be at one with your essence and then somehow to express that essence in the world.

The more you welcome the speedy intensity of your mind, and bless every single impulse that comes to your awareness, the more you can feel at peace in the middle of the hurricane of thought that is a human mind. Brains are designed to think and plan, and this is no obstacle to meditation––it’s an ally. The more you welcome your speedy mind, the better it is for meditation. Each thought is a tiny package of electricity and intelligence, and when you cherish the flow of thought, you can be at ease inside. Scientific research indicates that even the simplest meditative practice lets the body rest more deeply than sleep.

Experiment with this yourself. For a month, take five minutes to meditate and approach each session with an eagerness, as if you were going to a really good party and want to hear what everyone has to say. Only, in this case, you are in a sense going in to listen to what all your chakras have to say. Consider each chakra, or vortex of power in your body, as a hum of creativity and intelligence. Each chakra has a specialty–– survival, sexuality, personal power, love, vocal expression, insight, and wide-field awareness of the wholeness of life––and each one wants to be lined up as a team with all the other chakras. You are here to listen to and feel what they are saying. Explore in this way for a month and, when you have internalized the skill of welcoming all of these powers of life, then go longer, up to 20 minutes. Learn to love your busy, brilliant brain.

*These definitions are from the Monier-Williams Sanskrit-English Dictionary, page 856. Similar definitions are to be found in the Apte dictionary. Both are available online, in many places, in PDF form as well as searchable and indexed text.

The Sanskrit word yoga is derived from a Sanskrit root, yuj, “to yoke or join or fasten or harness horses or a chariot. To make ready, prepare, arrange, fit out, set to work, use, employ.” Our English word “join” is based on the same root sound, and also “junction, jugular, conjoin, conjugal, injunction, rejoin.”

Lorin Roche

Dr. Lorin Roche began practicing with the Vijnana Bhairava Tantra in 1968 as part of scientific research on the physiology of meditation. He has a PhD from the University of California at Irvine, where his research focused on the language meditators generate to describe their inner experiences. He is the author of The Radiance Sutras and Meditation Made Easy. With his wife, Camille Maurine, he wrote Meditation Secrets for Women. A teacher of meditation for 46 years, Lorin’s approach centers on how to customize the practices to suit one’s individual nature. Lorin leads the Radiance Sutras Meditation Teacher Training, a 200 hour certification program registered with Yoga Alliance. Lorin teaches regularly at the Esalen Institute and around the world.

www.meditationtt.com

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Sunset over Santa Monica Photo by Jeff Skeirik/Rawtographer

The word ocean is so beautiful that it is a mantra all by itself. Listen to the sound of it––Ooooohhhhh turning into shhhhnnnnn. It has a susurration* that lends itself to meditation, a variation on OM. The physical reality of the ocean is a great arena for meditation, meditative focus, and meditation instruction for those who love vastness and waves. Some of us have a primordial intuition that we come from the ocean.

Our bodies are mostly water –– salty water. We are, in a sense, a part of the ocean that is up here walking around on Earth. We carry within us a private ocean: our bloodstream is flowing and pulsing through tens of thousands of miles of blood vessels, many of them microscopic, barely bigger than a blood cell. When we meditate we are invited to delight in this inner sea and be refreshed.

Another ocean that we are part of is the atmosphere. The Earth is a sphere and the atmosphere is an ocean of air surrounding the world. When we breathe in, this ocean of air comes into our bodies as a wave and circulates to every cell. The universe flows in and suffuses us with fresh air that is always new in every moment. In this meeting of the outer ocean of air and the inner ocean of our fluid bodies, life is renewed. This renewal is a cause for celebration.

Meditation can be thought of as a meeting of oceans––the outer ocean of air and the inner ocean of our fluid nature. In many Sanskrit meditation texts a number of words refer to the ocean or include ocean in their definitions. Nitya, a central term in meditation texts, is defined as “innate, native. One’s own. Eternal. Constantly dwelling or engaged in. The sea, ocean.” If we take this one word and play with it we can hear, “I am a native of eternity. I am at home in the ocean of eternity.”

Samgama is used in the instructions for sexual meditation and is defined as “coming together, union, intercourse, the coming together of a river and the ocean, a joining of two rivers or the rivers and the ocean. The sacred coming together of two rivers, sexual union.” In lovemaking, the rivers of energy streaming through the body come together and it is like two rivers joining, or rivers flowing into the ocean. Orgasm is a doorway into oceanic experience, the sense of floating in peaceful vastness.

Marut is used in the instructions for breathing meditations and has an exciting set of images and meanings: “The flashing or shining ones, storm gods, children of heaven or of the ocean. Wind, air, breath, the five pranas of the body: prana, apana, samana, udana, and vyana.” Marut means all of this and suggests that the air we breathe is born of heaven and of the ocean.

In The Radiance Sutras, a version of the Vijnana Bhairava Tantra, Shiva and the Goddess are talking about the love play between a human body and the ocean of air.

Enter these turning points,
Where the rhythms of life transform
Into each other.
Breath flows in, filling, filling,
In this moment, drink eternity.

Breath flows out, emptying, emptying,
Offering itself to infinity.
Cherishing these moments,
Mind dissolves into heart,
Heart dissolves into space,
Body becomes a vibrating field,
Pulsating between fullness and emptiness.

na vrajet na vishet shaktih
marut–roopa vi-kaasite
nir-vi-kalpatayaa madhe
tayaa bhairava–roopataa

na vrajet – Not moving.
na vishet – Not in a specific direction.
shakti – Power, ability, strength, might, effort, energy, skill.
marut – Prana-suffused air.
rupa – Appearance, color, shape, grace, beauty, splendor, nature.
vikisita – Caused to expand, expanded, blown.
nirvikalpa – Free from change or differences, admitting no doubt, not wavering.
madhye – Middle, the middle that embraces all. In the middle of the body. The belly, abdomen. A woman’s waist. In algebra, the middle term or the mean of progression. The middle finger. In music, a particular tone, also a kind of meter. The middle of the sky. The space between (the eyebrows).
taya – By or through.
Bhairava – A name of Shiva (Siva). Terror or the property of exciting terror. In music, the name of a raga.

As always, 32 syllables of Sanskrit chanting resonate with vast meaning. There are many hints for practice here. Find your way into the middle (madhya) and be unwavering in-between the two turning points, where breathing changes from in to out and from out to in. Where is the middle? The middle can be the current of sensation flowing at the center of the spine. Savor the turning points from the central channel of your spine.

Many different approaches to breath meditation are suggested here. One hint is to experience how breath flows in as a wave and pauses at the furthest reach, then flows out again. Today in class, a woman said, “That is the juicy point for me, where the breath turns from in to out and out to in.” She was sparkling with delight as she said it.

Life is rhythm. Our hearts beat, our brains flash with electrical waves, breath moves in and out, and we flow in a sequential pulsation of waking, sleeping, and dreaming. Meditation is not a stoppage and stagnation of the rhythm of life, rather it is a way of being centered and in tune, following the beat of our own heart. When we delight in the rhythm of breathing many senses give us information about what is happening—smell, temperature, touch, motion, balance, and hearing, to name some of the more obvious senses. As we attend to these senses our experience of life itself is enriched.

Wave motion is a natural and essential movement of the life within us. When we allow our attention to be enchanted by the wave motion of breath, it is sensual. There is no particular reason to sit still when meditating with the breath. We can join with the motion of breathing by dancing and undulating. It is particularly profound to let wave motions ripple through your spine, from one end to the other. When you tune into your inner world, you realize this subtle wave motion is always going on, which feels like coming home to your body, to nature, and to the primordial movement of life.

*susurration is related to the Sanskrit svarati, “sounds, resounds.”

** Thanks to Dr. John Casey for consulting on Sanskrit pronunciation.

Lorin Roche

Dr. Lorin Roche began practicing with the Vijnana Bhairava Tantra in 1968 as part of scientific research on the physiology of meditation. He has a PhD from the University of California at Irvine, where his research focused on the language meditators generate to describe their inner experiences. He is the author of The Radiance Sutras and Meditation Made Easy. With his wife, Camille Maurine, he wrote Meditation Secrets for Women. A teacher of meditation for 46 years, Lorin’s approach centers on how to customize the practices to suit one’s individual nature. Lorin leads the Radiance Sutras Meditation Teacher Training, a 200 hour certification program registered with Yoga Alliance. Lorin teaches regularly at the Esalen Institute and around the world.

www.meditationtt.com

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One of the genius insights of yoga and meditation traditions is that we can pay attention to the flow of life through our bodies. We have the power to be intentionally self-aware at any time, in any place, in any way. Pranayama, asana, and meditation are practices designed to encourage  merging of awareness with the free-flowing energies of life. A central definition of yoga is “joining, connection, union,” and this joining of awareness with the life force is an exciting affair, an intimate relationship, a marriage, a party, a celebration, and an adventure. Meditation is a full-bodied relationship, touching every level of our lives, employing all of our senses, emotions, and energies.

The word “mindful” has come to be the standard jargon for paying attention in a meditative way, but the word does not do justice to how rich and varied attentiveness can be. Because of the hypnotic power of words, some of us interpret mindfulness as an attempt to calm down, to be detached or distanced from our experience, rather than intimately involved and rejoicing  in aliveness and vibrancy.

Meditation is antar-yoga, where antar = interior. In meditation awareness flows through an internal asana sequence of attitudes. In an asana class, you generally do not do just one asana—you enter one, stay with it, and then transition to another. You can train yourself to move between asanas of the mind, as needed. This is skillfulness. Breathing is one manifestation of the dynamic pulsation of life energy. Breath is handy and accessible, so let’s explore some of the many rich ways to engage with the breath.

Fullness.

The first yoga meditation practice given by Shiva in the Vijnana Bhairava Tantra is to savor the nourishing fullness of breath. He uses the word bharita – “nourished, full.” Breath is our primary food – we breathe continually, about twenty thousand times a day. The oxygen we breathe in allows our solid food to be burned as fuel.

Bountifulness.

This is the stunning realization that there is a bounty of air for us to breathe. No matter how much you breathe, no matter how greedily you inhale, you cannot use up the air of the world. It is bountiful and renews itself.

Lustfulness.

Some scholars derive the meaning “mindful” from the Sankrit word smara, “Remembering, recollecting. Memory. Loving recollection, love, especially sexual love.” And the root word of yoga is yuj, “to yoke or join,” which has a wide range of meanings including, “to offer prayers, to be absorbed in meditation, to be united in marriage, to inject semen.” During meditation, it is healthy for most people to actively celebrate every impulse of sexual desire and every tingle of erotic sensation in the body.

Heartfulness.

Breath is continually flowing into us, caressing our hearts, flowing out into the universe, and then flowing in again. The universe loves us into existence through this intimate exchange.

Playfulness.

There is no reason to be serious about breathing. Play freely and explore.

Soulfulness.

Yoga is defined also as “the union of the soul with matter,” and “the union of the individual soul with the universal soul.” However we want to define “soul”, this inner marriage is a tender mystery.

Tearfulness.

Be free to feel sorrow and let the tears flow.

Prayerfulness.

We can breathe with our prayers, our heart’s desire. Breath itself is considered an ongoing, involuntary prayer to the Goddess, to Shakti. To breathe is to pray.

Tunefulness.

Breath is song. As the air flows over the soft membranes of the nose, mouth, tongue, and throat, it makes a whispered susurration that can be heard as a mantra.

Truthfulness.

You can be your natural self. No need to impose anything. Be true to your instincts.

Delightfulness.

Be free to simply delight in breathing.

Gratefulness.

With every inhale, the universe is giving us life. Receive each breath with gratitude.

Restfulness.

Breath can feel soothing and relaxing.

Wakefulness.

Breathe with the intention to wake up and become more alert to the grandeur of life.

Youthfulness.

With every breath, we receive new life. When we engage with this renewal, there is a sense of being reborn and rejuvenated.

Peacefulness.

As we accept every aspect of the flow of out and in, we can settle into peace.

Blissfulness.

There is a current of bliss underlying all life, intrinsic to the nature of consciousness.

Powerfulness.

This is Shakti-fulness, when we become aware of the power of life, the infinite energy pulsing everywhere.

Awe-fulness.

Full of awe. A sense of sacredness or reverence.

Joyfulness.

Be permeated with pure joy in the midst of breathing.

Suspense-fulness.

It is fun and entertaining to suspend the breath for a moment at the end of the exhale, and at the end of the inhale.

Trustfulness.

The sense of trusting that when you breathe out, the air will be there for you to breathe in again.

Thoughtfulness.

There are many times when you are paying attention to breathing, or some other object in meditation, when you will find yourself considering thoughts about your life.

Wonderfulness.

Life is flow and rhythm. With a slight shift of awareness, we enter a world of wonder as we notice how life sustains itself. Breathing is one form the pulsation of life takes, and it is a wild one – atoms of oxygen and nitrogen that have been breathed by other beings on Earth for millions of years come into our bodies, are absorbed by our bodies, and are borne by blood throughout our bodies to permeate every cell. Then we breathe out and give the air back to the world. This happens every couple of seconds. As we breathe, we interact with the whole world; air flows freely all over the earth, from one ocean to another, over land and mountains, through all the leaves of plants and trees, high up into the sky, and then down again to flow through our lungs. Learn to be surprised and delighted by the tiny differences each fresh breath brings.

Whatever style of “fullness” you engage in, you can be alternately thrilled and soothed, nourished and purified, energized and relaxed by the flow. Skillfulness in meditation means accepting and appreciating all the wild and serene energies flowing through your body in every moment.

Lorin Roche

Dr. Lorin Roche began practicing with the Vijnana Bhairava Tantra in 1968 as part of scientific research on the physiology of meditation. He has a PhD from the University of California at Irvine, where his research focused on the language meditators generate to describe their inner experiences. He is the author of The Radiance Sutras and Meditation Made Easy. With his wife, Camille Maurine, he wrote Meditation Secrets for Women. A teacher of meditation for 46 years, Lorin’s approach centers on how to customize the practices to suit one’s individual nature. Lorin leads the Radiance Sutras Meditation Teacher Training, a 200 hour certification program registered with Yoga Alliance. Lorin teaches regularly at the Esalen Institute and around the world.

www.meditationtt.com

The post Fullness appeared first on LA Yoga Magazine - Ayurveda & Health.

Have you ever seen something so beautiful that you just wanted to fall down?

That puppy was so cute I had to kneel down and grab him.

We hiked through the forest and came upon a lake so breathtaking I had to sit down.

She looked so marvelous that I wanted to throw myself at her feet.

I wanted to drop to my knees in gratitude.

If you know this experience, you already know that beauty is a gateway to divine perception. It’s unmistakable. Undeniable. In the love song of The Radiance Sutras, Shiva sings to his beloved, Shakti:

Find something so enchanting to behold

That you are transfixed—ravished.

Allow yourself to be captivated.

Gaze upon its form

With the eyes of wonder.
Attend to details—
its shape, texture, these colors . . .

How can something so beautiful possibly exist?

With a steady gaze, melt into
The field of space embracing that form.

At once,

Be at one with the Creator, who is
Looking through your eyes, loving creation.

Constructing a glossary, we see that these thirty-two syllables of Sanskrit contain vast meaning:

Sthula – Massive, huge, dense, tangible, material.

Rupa – Outward appearance, color, grace, beauty, splendor. Character, peculiarity, reflection, a single specimen, a show, a play.

Bhava – Becoming, being. Transition into. True condition. Passion, emotion, love, attachment. The seat of the feelings or affections – heart, soul, mind. Wanton sport, dalliance. The world, universe. An organ of sense. The Supreme Being. Meditation.

Stabdha – Firmly fixed, supported, stiff, rigid, immovable, paralyzed, senseless.

Drishti – Seeing, viewing, beholding, also with the mental eye. Sight, the faculty of seeing. The mind’s eye, wisdom, intelligence.

Nipat – To fly down, settle down, descend on, alight. To rush upon. To fall down, fall upon, fall into, to throw one’s self at a person’s feet. To be lost. To enter, be inserted, get a place. To direct the eyes towards.

Ca – And

Achirena – Brief. Instantaneous. Speedily.

Niradhara – Without a receptacle or support. (Dhara – holding, supporting, containing.)

Manas – Mind in its widest sense, as applied to all the mental powers – intellect, intelligence, understanding, perception, sense, conscience, will. The internal organ of perception, the faculty or instrument by which objects of sense affect the soul. Thought, imagination, invention, reflection, intention, desire, mood, temper, spirit.

Kritva – Creating, making.

Shiva – “In whom all things lie.” Auspicious, gracious, favorable, benign, kind, benevolent, friendly, fortunate. Happiness. Liberation. One of the names of Shiva is “The Lord of Sight,” Drishti-guru, (d???iguru – “sight-lord”).

Vrajet – Achieve, attains. Vraj – to go, walk, travel, wander, move. To go to a woman, have sexual intercourse with.

There are so many meanings suggested in the Sanskrit. The heart is an organ of sense. The eye is an instrument of wisdom. The mind is the way the outer world touches the soul. The yoga practice pointed to here is an instantaneous practice, for, as they say, “Beauty lies in the eye of the beholder.” In the blink of an eye we can go from beholding the beauty out there, to the inner experience of falling down, into a deep place inside.

Informally we could say, find what makes you swoon. Explore your experience of being in the presence of overpowering beauty, and let this inform your path of yoga. Let your meditation attune your senses and your heart so that you are ready to perceive the divine beauty in the world. The beauty you are perceiving transcends that person or thing—an aspect of divinity is shining through, and you catch a glimpse of the Creator’s design. There is a sense of wooing here: be alert to being courted by the divine shining through the embodied, and the embodied flirting with the Divine.

James Joyce termed this experience “aesthetic arrest.” When we behold beauty, the mind goes quiet in awe as our senses come alive. We could be watching a dance or a movie, or see something while we are out walking, and be captured by the loveliness. We are held in rapture and there is a suspension of time. The expression of this feeling is individual—you may feel your heart skip a beat, or you may feel as though you die and are reborn in an instant. You might sense quiet wonder and delight. For a moment you fall in love, and this can feel like physically falling. This experience is to be savored, and worked through as athletes do in training or competition. When you find yourself falling, turn toward the direction of the fall and dive.

One of the movements of attention in meditation is from outer to inner. Awareness is enticed to the beauty that is there on the surface, and then travels to explore the subtle inner splendor, and then onward to the spacious vibrancy that is the source of all. In meditation we are invited to engage with the most beautiful images (rupa), sounds (mantra), and movements (mudra), that have ever been discovered, and allow ourselves to be delighted and carried away, so that we rest in our essence. One of the things that makes meditation fascinating is the unpredictability—you can be sitting there thinking that breath is not very interesting, and then suddenly you realize, “Oh my God, a small part of the ocean of air surrounding Planet Earth just entered my lungs and is part of my bloodstream, giving me life right now.” This is always a stunning realization, and why it is a mistake to try to get the mind to go silent in meditation, a misunderstanding of how things work.

Whenever we pay attention to the outer or inner world in such a way that we are thrilled and filled with awe, we are on a journey of discovery—a journey with our relationship to the eternal. Being able to perceive beauty makes you wealthy, a tangible richness of experience. The blessing goes both ways. You are receiving darshan (a glimpse of the Divine) from the person or object, and they are blessed by being seen in truth.

Meditation Teacher Training

Study in a Meditation Teacher Training with Lorin Roche and Camille Maurine. Learn more: https://www.meditationtt.com/online-meditation-teacher-training-200-hours-certification-program-full-details

Lorin Roche

Dr. Lorin Roche began practicing with the Vijnana Bhairava Tantra in 1968 as part of scientific research on the physiology of meditation. He has a PhD from the University of California at Irvine, where his research focused on the language meditators generate to describe their inner experiences. He is the author of The Radiance Sutras and Meditation Made Easy. With his wife, Camille Maurine, he wrote Meditation Secrets for Women. A teacher of meditation for 46 years, Lorin’s approach centers on how to customize the practices to suit one’s individual nature. Lorin leads the Radiance Sutras Meditation Teacher Training, a 200 hour certification program registered with Yoga Alliance. Lorin teaches regularly at the Esalen Institute and around the world.

www.meditationtt.com

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Are you looking for the ultimate feeling of rest?

You may find it in meditation

Did you know that certain forms meditation can give you a deeper rest than deep sleep? There are actually thousands of techniques that are all lumped together under the name “meditation,”with each one has different physiological effects. Some are not very restful. But, there is one approach we can call effortless meditation that has been studied in-depth by scientists.

For many years, those who use this approach of effortlessness have been going into medical and physiology labs to be tested. Scientists like to measure things, and oxygen consumption is one index of how hard the body is working – it goes up when we exercise, and down when we are relaxing and resting. According to research conducted at UCLA and replicated at Harvard Medical School, the body settles into a state of wakeful restfulness during meditation, which correlates to a 10 to 17 percent decrease in oxygen consumption. This happens within the first three minutes of meditation. By contrast, oxygen consumption decreases gradually over the first few hours of sleep until it arrives at about an eight percent reduction.

A Restful Meditation

Think of the deepest, most refreshing sleep you have ever had. Now double that and consider what it would be like to have access to that in three minutes whenever you want. Immediate access to this profound and restorative repose is one of the great gifts of meditation. When I am rested, the world is a different place — colors seem brighter, food tastes better, the wind and sun feel more wonderful touching my skin, and my overall experience is delicious. My mood is steadier and buoyant energy arises steadily from within.

We all need rest, and we have all had the experience of waking from a deep slumber with a sense of being renewed. And, we have all had the opposite experience when we don’t get enough rest, waking to feel miserable and exhausted. Sleep allows the body to repair itself and tune its circuits. When we work our muscles hard, in athletics or yoga, we may need extra sleep, because that is when the body can repair damaged muscle fibers. If you are not getting enough sleep, you might be denying your body the time it needs to repair everything. While we are sleeping, the brain integrates what has been learned the previous day so the skills we are practicing become more readily available.

Meditation Allows Shakti to Revitalize Us

Sleep is powerful. And, meditation is powerful. Think of meditation not as a substitute for sleep, but an additional way of allowing life — the intelligent functioning of pranashakti — to restore and revitalize us, body and soul. Pranashakti loves to lead us into deep restfulness and to heal and rejuvenate us while we are there. Meditation skills help us learn to cooperate with this restorative power of the life force, the healing and rejuvenating processes that happen everywhere in the body and the mind while we are simply sitting there with our eyes closed.

The Three Phases of Meditation Practice

If we look at what happens moment-by-moment during meditation, we see that there are at least three major phases of meditation that we flow through continually. These are the following.

1) Deep restfulness.

2) Sorting through emotions and releasing muscular and nervous tension.

3) Rehearsing future actions.

Each of these phases is an aspect of the restorative power of meditation and a gift of pranashakti. The restfulness creates conditions for the release of muscular and emotional tension, and then in that relaxed state, the body practices staying relaxed while choreographing your to-do list.

One of the essential skills of meditation is welcoming and cooperating with these phase changes. When you welcome these surprising and unexpected phase changes, you stay in a deeply restful state on a physical level even when your muscles, nerves, and emotions are healing.

The Resting Phase

Each phase has its challenges. With the “resting” phase, trying to meditate backfires, just as trying to go to sleep makes you stay awake and struggle.

Sorting Emotions and Releasing Tension

The “sorting emotions and releasing tension” phase is challenging, because in essence, whatever you do not want to face will come right up to be healed. The paradox of meditation is that you can’t relax without letting go of muscular tension. And when that tension in your nerves and muscles releases, you will feel uncomfortable sensations. Sometimes, you will see intense mental movies about what has been making you tense. At the same time, it is a relief to sit relatively still and allow waves of relaxation flow to through you and wash away the tension.

Rehearsing Future Actions

The “rehearsing future actions” phase is when you are completely immersed in the movie of your life, visualizing your to-do list, or rehearsing some action you want to perform. This process happens spontaneously, and your mind is not wandering – it is practicing being relaxed while mentally choreographing action. You don’t have a monkey-mind. 

After meditation, when you are out in life doing those things, the awareness and relaxation carry with you. “Yoga is skill in action,” as it is said in the Bhagavad-Gita. Remind yourself that this choreography is a practice and helps to bring the peacefulness and relaxation of meditation into your daily life. Don’t beat yourself up because you have an exciting to-do list. 

Pranashakti and The Three Phases of Meditation

These three phases – resting, sorting, and rehearsing – tend to cycle over and over, in unpredictable sequences whenever we meditate. Each is an aspect of the restorative and evolutionary functioning of pranashakti. A phase can last for twenty seconds or three minutes, and sometimes we may be just sorting emotions for half of our meditation time. What we experience moment-to-moment in meditation is always surprising. We are wild and serene at the same time.

Honor the Phases of Meditation as Rest

The next time you are lying on your mat in savasana, or luxuriating on your sofa in meditation, remember these three phases and honor them. Welcome resting, welcome sorting, and welcome rehearsing. These are the three loves of pranashakti, each one is tuning you up for life, and each is a blessing.

Lorin Roche

Dr. Lorin Roche began practicing with the Vijnana Bhairava Tantra in 1968 as part of scientific research on the physiology of meditation. He has a PhD from the University of California at Irvine, where his research focused on the language meditators generate to describe their inner experiences. He is the author of The Radiance Sutras and Meditation Made Easy. With his wife, Camille Maurine, he wrote Meditation Secrets for Women. A teacher of meditation for 46 years, Lorin’s approach centers on how to customize the practices to suit one’s individual nature. Lorin leads the Radiance Sutras Meditation Teacher Training, a 200 hour certification program registered with Yoga Alliance. Lorin teaches regularly at the Esalen Institute and around the world.

www.meditationtt.com

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These flashes may come after working hard pursuing your passion – you just did a hard yoga class perfectly matched to your skill level, and now you are on your mat happy and exhausted. You labored for a month to put in a garden and are standing in the morning light beholding a little world of green. There is a new baby in the home, and now you are watching her sleep. You have been dancing for hours and the music has carried you away into a realm of pure motion. You traveled to a yoga retreat, and after days of asana, it feels miraculous just to breathe. You are drinking in the juicy essence of life, and it’s holy.

We can call these elixir moments. After enduring, sweating, applying skill, and finding the right alignment, there is a gush of vitality. The universe doses you with a love potion, and now you are filled with vital energy and in love with life itself. One day during my meditation teacher training in 1969, I noticed that meditation encourages these moments to come more frequently and last longer. My teacher said, “Meditation gives the body the conditions it needs to produce its own inner elixirs – subtle hormones that nourish the senses and make the world seem delightful. Meditation is the practice of being in love with the essence of life, and you get better with practice.” After 47 years of practice I have found this to be true.

The yoga tradition has many names for the inner elixir produced by the body during practice. One of my favorites is amrita – “the nectar of immortality produced at the churning of the ocean of eternity.” According to scholars, amrita refers to the drink that confers immortality and also to vitality and vital energy. This Sanskrit word amrita is related to the beautiful Greek word ambrosia, “elixir of life.” Amrita, ambrosia. In meditation, you can rest so deeply within yourself that profound metabolic processes take place. The cells absorb infinity. The cells of your body metabolize eternity and drink the elixir of life.

Science also has names for the blissful chemicals the body produces during meditation. During the 60’s and throughout the 1970’s I was an experimental subject in physiological research at the University of California at Irvine and UCI Medical Center. Scientists there, in cooperation with others at UCLA and Harvard Medical School, found that during meditation, the body often enters a state of restfulness deeper than sleep, and this happens in just a few minutes. In this wonderful wakeful restfulness, the body can heal itself on a deep level and the mind can reboot its whole operating system. It’s an incredible blessing. There are profound changes throughout the brain and body which have measurable benefits for health. Physiologically, meditation is the mirror opposite of the stress response, and this shows up almost immediately in measurements of metabolism, blood pressure, heart rate, breathing rate, muscle tension, and brain waves. I have to admit, though, that it was weird to be meditating in a physiology lab, with people in white coats running around sticking needles in my veins to take blood samples and putting wires all over my head and body to measure brain waves, heart rate, and electrical conductance of the skin.

More recent research indicates that meditation, yoga, and pranayama stimulate the brain to produce its own chemicals that are similar to the active ingredients in marijuana or cannabis. In honor of the plant, they gave these hormones the name endocannabinoids, from endo (internal, within) + cannabis. The brain has receptors for these types of molecules, called cannabis receptors, and it has lots of them – that is why an external substance such as cannabis has an effect on physiology. The brain also has the ability to produce its own happy hormones including the endocannabinoids, when stimulated by running (the runner’s high), yoga, music, meditation, and breathing exercises.

When I was a student at UCI in the 60s, many of the students and my professors assumed I was happily stoned, because I walked around laughing at everything. People would come up to me and ask where I got the stuff I was on, because it seemed to produce such a mellow buzz. I would patiently explain that I got up at 4 am, did two hours of yoga, pranayama and meditation, then went to the beach for a dawn patrol, caught a few waves, practiced Tai Chi on the beach as the sun rose, and then went to class. If we were in calculus class at 9 am, I already had five hours of delight in my body. What they were sensing was the effect of all that, not puffing on a weed.

You want to find the right mix of exercise and styles of yoga, meditation, and pranayama that excite your body to produce its own bliss hormones – your native endocannabinoids – and suffuse you with the elixir of happy vital energy. This brings its own challenges. Meditation is much wilder than you think, because intense relaxation leads to intense release of stress. This release of muscular and emotional tension is as hard to tolerate as running that last mile or staying in a difficult pose for another few minutes. When you let go of chronic muscle tension, you let down your guard, and whatever the tension has been holding at bay will be right there asking to be healed. Although more research on the biochemistry of meditation is needed, interviews indicate that the most powerful hormone rush comes from facing your deepest fears and letting go into profound states of ease in meditation.

This aspect of meditation is very muscular, and has some parallels to the physicality of sports. Meditators who are utterly at ease in their practice often experience tension release as extremely uncomfortable, like the “wall” that runners encounter, when they feel, “I can’t take one more step.” When you stay there and feel the wall, and then let it dissolve, there is a gush of joy as a reward. The fear is transmuted into excitement, and there is a liberation of shakti. A tangible, chemical satisfaction comes from within.

Life likes it when we are on our personal path of adventure, facing the inner obstacles and calling on our inner resources to handle them. This physical aspect of meditation also may help to deal with addictions to substances. Sometimes our bodies can become overly reliant on certain foods, drinks, or herbs in order to experience some blissful relief. Sanskrit has lots of words for addiction, such as rasikatva, “taste for, devotion to, addiction to.” In meditation, we can reconnect with the body’s natural bliss hormones, and this may help in recovery from relying on substances we have become addicted to.

The quest to find your personal practice is often perplexing, for we each have different elemental constitutions. To be truly at home and vibrantly alive in meditation, we need to customize the practice to suit our individual yearnings and preferences. For example, many people hate to sit still and close their eyes, “Why waste a minute stifling my energy when I could be dancing?” Other people detest being inside for one more minute, “Let’s go outside and sit with our eyes open and commune with the beauty of nature!” Others absolutely love to sit still, close their eyes, and surrender to the world within. Find the style of practice that suits your inner constitution, and meditation will feel like the most natural thing in the world.

Lorin Roche

Dr. Lorin Roche began practicing with the Vijnana Bhairava Tantra in 1968 as part of scientific research on the physiology of meditation. He has a PhD from the University of California at Irvine, where his research focused on the language meditators generate to describe their inner experiences. He is the author of The Radiance Sutras and Meditation Made Easy. With his wife, Camille Maurine, he wrote Meditation Secrets for Women. A teacher of meditation for 46 years, Lorin’s approach centers on how to customize the practices to suit one’s individual nature. Lorin leads the Radiance Sutras Meditation Teacher Training, a 200 hour certification program registered with Yoga Alliance. Lorin teaches regularly at the Esalen Institute and around the world.

www.meditationtt.com

The post Quest for the Inner Elixir appeared first on LA Yoga Magazine - Ayurveda & Health.

It’s eight in the morning, and suddenly the desire for a beer pops into my consciousness. Wait, what? An image has just flashed in my awareness – a glass mug filled with an amber fluid. The mug is tilted slightly and dripping with condensation. As I start walking toward the kitchen, I wonder, “Why do I have such an intense desire for a beer right now? What am I wanting?” Then I get it: I have been standing here at my desk for four hours, chanting Sanskrit and decoding layers of meaning, and now I need water, carbs, and a feeling of celebration. A beer is all of that – or rather, a beer is a symbol of all of that.

Desires are designed to propel us into action. This particular desire managed to motivate me to go drink some water, eat a bowl of quinoa, and take a moment to rejoice in a good half-day’s work. In the midst of eating and drinking, I was entertained enough to notice that the image my brain used to get my attention looked just like an app on a phone – it was a cartoon-like, almost neon, the international bro-symbol for party time. When I “touched” the icon with my awareness, it opened and showed me what I needed in the moment.

You can do this with any desire. Any desire is an app—you touch it with your awareness and as it opens, notice what it is made of. You may find its elements are quite different from the little symbol used to get your attention. In Sutra 73 of The Radiance Sutras, Shiva sings to Shakti:

Just as a desire leaps up,
And you perceive the flash,
The sparkle,
Quit from its play.

Maintain awareness
In that clear and shining place
From which all desire springs.

jhagit i?cca?m? samutpanna?m avalokya s?amam? nayet |
yata eva samudbhu?ta? tatas tatraiva li?yate

jhagit ichchhaam sam-ut-pannaam ava-lokya shamam nayet
yata eva sam-ud-bhoota tatah tatra eva leeyate

jhagit – a sparkle, flash
ichcham – desire, wish, hankering, longing, craving, urge, will
samutpatati – rise, ascend, spring up
avalok – to look upon or at, view, behold, see, notice, observe
shamam – equanimity, tranquility, to end
naya – prudent conduct, good management, wisdom
yata eva – verily, wherever
samudbhuta – sprung up, arisen, born, produced
tatas – from that place, thence, thereupon, after that, afterwards
tatra – in that place, there, in that case, under those circumstances
liyate – become dissolved, melt or vanish away, absorbed

In this practice, we allow ourselves to be entertained by a desire, and welcome its sparkling energy, without necessarily going into action with it. We allow the desire to play out in our inner world and study what the craving is composed of, and then we have choices. We can absorb the energy, the pranashakti of the desire, and put an end to it. We can redirect the desire from the package it came in, toward something more practical. We can accept the desire as it is and dedicate ourselves to good management. It takes a lot of good management and wisdom to manifest any desire.

With any desire, the basic internal moves are:

Welcome the craving, give it space in your inner world and in your body to express itself.
Look at it, see the imagery it is using, feel it, and notice the sensations in the body. Listen to whatever sounds are part of the desire, use all your senses.
Inquire into what the desire is really about, what gift the desire is giving you.
Use your management skills to absorb the energy of the desire and be in equanimity with it.

For example, say you are at work and your boss is being somewhat abusive and bullying. A desire flashes in your awareness to slap her face or walk out – just walk out the door, shouting, “I don’t have to take your #*@!” In this moment, the desire is giving you the gift of power, reminding your that you have choices, you don’t have to take this. Immediately some of the stress of the situation is lifted, because you are not trapped. And if your boss has a wit in her head, she will immediately recognize that look in your eyes and realize, “Uh-oh, I crossed a line.”

Desires can come from any part of your body, any chakra, any instinct. If you are at a party or on the street and you see an attractive person, you can savor the sparkle of desire, taste it like something delicious for a moment, and then let it dissolve into peaceful vitality. If you are in a restaurant and see an amazing-looking desert, but you don’t want all that sugar, you can imagine eating it, feel the flash of delight, and then feel lit up inside just at the thought of something so delicious.

Sometimes we have less than a second to notice a desire and explore what we are really craving. That’s part of what makes this area of practice so entertaining. Brains work rapidly, and we have to be on our game to catch what’s going on. As you are reading this article, you are probably recognizing several words every second. Third-grade students read about 150 words a minute, that’s 2.5 words a second; college students average about 450 words a minute, that is over 7 words per second. When we are involved in friendly conversation, the rate is often about 110 to 150 words per minute, or 1.8 to 2.5 words per second, and that can feel slow.

One of the purposes of our asana, pranayama, and meditation practices is to keep us tuned and intimate with the life force, so we can be at play with the gift of desire and find our way to be at peace in the midst of the passion.

Lorin Roche

Dr. Lorin Roche began practicing with the Vijnana Bhairava Tantra in 1968 as part of scientific research on the physiology of meditation. He has a PhD from the University of California at Irvine, where his research focused on the language meditators generate to describe their inner experiences. He is the author of The Radiance Sutras and Meditation Made Easy. With his wife, Camille Maurine, he wrote Meditation Secrets for Women. A teacher of meditation for 46 years, Lorin’s approach centers on how to customize the practices to suit one’s individual nature. Lorin leads the Radiance Sutras Meditation Teacher Training, a 200 hour certification program registered with Yoga Alliance. Lorin teaches regularly at the Esalen Institute and around the world.

www.meditationtt.com

The post Desire for Mischief appeared first on LA Yoga Magazine - Ayurveda & Health.

I love sex. I love food. I love sleeping. I love music. I love dancing. I love parties. I love dreaming, chocolate, movies, and walking the dogs. I love travel, seeing new places, and then returning home.

We all have our favorite everyday motions that are deeply satisfying. These are also doorways into meditation. When we give in to the inward motion of love, and rest in the pure deliciousness of it, we enter a meditative state.

Our bodies are built for love. Meditation is a way of cultivating our love—savoring, giving in, and being intimate with life. Rejoicing in the flow of breath, listening to the inner music called mantra, delighting in the dance of energies in our bodies and chakras—these techniques are ways of making love with the energies of life. This is enriching on every level of body, heart, mind, and spirit. The essence of meditation is simple: select some aspect of life’s self-renewing rhythm that you are attracted to and dive in. Allow yourself to be intrigued and accept everything that you experience as part of your conversation with life. Let meditation be the most natural thing in the world.

The urge to merge, to melt into love with the essence of life, is one of a human being’s strongest urges. It’s unstoppable. All the techniques of meditation, the thousands of different approaches, emerge from this primal yearning to be in an intimate loving relationship with the life force. In yoga, we call the life force pranashakti, (prana = the breath of life, respiration, spirit, vitality, + Shakti or ?akti = power, ability, strength, might, effort, energy, capability.) Meditation is a way of allowing our bodies to be in love with pranashakti and be loved in return. This love is the primordial attraction of the individual being toward the universal energies that sustain and nourish us, and this is the power source, the engine of our evolution. When we awaken to the realization that meditation is resting in the current of what we love, then the whole world opens up. Deep practice and deep rejuvenation become possible.

If you are not in a consistent meditation practice that excites and soothes you, it may be because you are going about it in a way that is against your nature, what is called pratiloma—“against the grain, contrary to the natural order, adverse, hostile, unpleasant.” It is easy to fall into what for you is pratiloma, because most meditation techniques were evolved to suit the needs of male monks, Buddhist or Hindu, in the past. Monks generally take vows of celibacy, poverty, and obedience; their meditation practices often involve detaching from desire and attempting to kill the desire for sex. Monks aren’t supposed to jump up from their meditation and have sex. For a recluse, practicing detachment is dharma; it leads to freedom. But as Krishna says in the Bhagavad-Gita, “The dharma of another brings danger.”

Whatever style of life you have chosen you can tune your meditation practice so that it energizes you for whatever activities you will do for the rest of the day. If you are not a monk living in a religious order, then you may want meditation to support and inspire a great sex life, a dynamic work life, and the freedom to express your individuality. Anuloma—“with the hair or grain, in a natural direction,” during meditation practice is to celebrate every desire in every part of your body. On the lover’s path, you want your meditation to inspire you and fill you with vital energy so that you want to ravish, or be ravished by, your lover, then go live life to the fullest. An anuloma practice feels like a relief, a vacation, and you look forward to the next time you get to treat yourself to meditation.

When I interview people who are lit up from inside with joy from their life and their meditation practice, this is how they speak:

I love meditating in the morning with my husband, it is wonderful. Every moment is different. Sometimes we make passionate love after meditating, sometimes we kiss and run out the door.

I love having the time to catch up with myself, sort out all my thoughts, be with all my feelings. During meditation my mind is so busy usually, but afterwards I feel so clear, and this clarity carries through the day.

Meditation for me feels like a party, to which all my chakras are invited, and I am there serving drinks and appetizers while they chat away to each other and occasionally get into arguments about who is most important.

I love taking the dogs for a long walk in the morning, and afterwards I sit and meditate, and attempt to breathe each breath with as much gusto and enthusiasm as the dogs do as they inhale every smell.

When I meditate, I feel at home in myself, more than at any other time in my life. And at the same time there is a sense of freshness, I am continually discovering new levels to who I am. It’s like travel. Sitting in one spot and traveling the universe.

People who thrive in meditation year after year, say things like this and discover new combinations continually. It’s very personal. An anuloma practice creates a sense of novelty, delight and adventure.

Take a Walk

The next time you take a walk or have some time to yourself, give yourself the gift of wondering, “What do I love so much that I want to melt into it, merge with it, be suffused with it? What aspect of pranashakti, of life’s undulating energies, am I in love with?” In so doing, you are recalibrating your compass, your internal guidance system, orienting toward what helps you to partake in the richness of life.

Love calls our attention and engages us. Life is a mysterious, self-renewing process. The techniques of meditation are ways of allowing the ecstasy of pranashakti, the life-force at play, to renew our bodies and souls. Ask your body to teach you and to take you on adventures into intimacy with your own essence.

Dr. Lorin Roche is the author of The Radiance Sutras, a fresh version of the Vijnana Bhairava Tantra, a classic yoga text describing 112 doorways into meditation. With his dancer wife Camille Maurine, he is co-author of Meditation Secrets for Women. Lorin has been teaching meditation for over 40 years and has a PhD from the University of California for his research into the language of meditative experience. He works with individuals to fine-tune their meditation practice to fit their unique inner nature and outer life, for health and happiness. Visit lorinroche.com or email lorin@lorinroche.com

Lorin Roche

Dr. Lorin Roche began practicing with the Vijnana Bhairava Tantra in 1968 as part of scientific research on the physiology of meditation. He has a PhD from the University of California at Irvine, where his research focused on the language meditators generate to describe their inner experiences. He is the author of The Radiance Sutras and Meditation Made Easy. With his wife, Camille Maurine, he wrote Meditation Secrets for Women. A teacher of meditation for 46 years, Lorin’s approach centers on how to customize the practices to suit one’s individual nature. Lorin leads the Radiance Sutras Meditation Teacher Training, a 200 hour certification program registered with Yoga Alliance. Lorin teaches regularly at the Esalen Institute and around the world.

www.meditationtt.com

The post What Do You Love? appeared first on LA Yoga Magazine - Ayurveda & Health.

How the air we breathe can teach us about our environment

During a workshop, I heard a woman say, “Breath is exciting.” She spoke with the delight a person would reserve for talking about a delicious and slightly dangerous love affair. Victoria (not her real name) continued, “Ever since I was a little girl, I have known this. I grew up in Australia, in a wild area on the northeast coast. Starting when I was about seven years old, a group of us girls would go for long walks in the wilderness. One of my friends was Aboriginal and she was a little older, maybe eight. She was completely at home in the wilderness. We learned by walking behind and beside her, doing what she did. We would walk for hours in silence through the forest, sniffing the air, listening to the sounds of nature. I learned that every footstep is quietly thrilling. And when you breathe in, the air teaches you about everything around—what kind of plants and animals are there surrounding you.”

The group wanted to hear more, so she added, “When you walk in nature with your senses open, every step is full-body sensuality; you feel electricity everywhere. Your skin wakes up and you can feel the life around you in all directions. It’s almost sexual. You greedily sniff the air, and you really use your nose as you smell the scent of the trees and plants and animals. Your eyes open in a new way as you see each leaf, bug, and bird. The light and sky, how they change every moment. If you are trying to walk quietly, you feel the ground as you gently place each foot.”

The Radiance Sutras, Marut, and the Breath

In the workshop, we had been reading The Radiance Sutras, and one of the words used to describe breath is marut. It has many meanings: “Lightning and thunderbolts, roaring like lions. The flashing ones, shining ones, storm gods, Indra’s companions, children of heaven or of the ocean, armed with golden weapons. Wind, air, breath, and the five winds, or pranas, in the body. The god of the wind, father of Hanuman.” (The Monier-Williams Sanskrit-English Dictionary, p. 790).

Victoria read this definition to the group and added, “This is why I have never understood why meditation teachers are always talking about breathing to calm down. They make it so boring. Who wants to calm down? I want to be thrilled to be alive. I want to feel connected to nature. I want to feel how exciting it is when storms blow in off the ocean.” We all just sat there in stunned silence, because we knew we were hearing something fresh and real.

Practice with the Breath

The many meanings of the word marut suggest that breath is wild and magical, like lightning. When you pay attention to the breath, feel free to let go of your civilized self and welcome your wildness, your storms. You are part of nature, part of the Earth, you are a dynamic and self-sustaining little system within the larger ecosphere. The electrifying magnificent heavenly breath, marut, keeps on quickening the life-force, rolling on, rotating between an inward and outward flow.

When you are meditating with the breath you can do nothing. Take an attitude of ease and simply enjoy the show as this magic stuff flows inward, turns, and then flows outward and turns again. You can luxuriate in the flow and welcome the flash of ever-changing sensations, emotions, and thoughts. Breath is self-propelling, and you breathe just fine even when you are not aware at all—when you are sleeping. If you make an effort to pay attention to breath, you may miss out on experiencing its magic.

Marut suggests that lightning is flashing in the body. Breath is moved by sparks of electricity in the muscles of respiration. All these pulsating tissues that work to welcome each breath into the body and then push it out. Even our thoughts are waves of subtle electricity blinking on and off through your body and brain. Your heart beats every second or so, and each pulsing of the heart is incited by a little spark of electricity. Welcome it all. Revel in it as you would the rain if the land is dry. Breathing is part of nature.

Surprisingly, one of the common reasons people feel they are “failing at meditation” is because when they close their eyes they immediately begin to feel something akin to little tiny electrical shocks. Nothing has prepared them to welcome the dynamic electricity of the life force that is showing up in every moment of breathing, feeling, and thinking. The peace is there inside the electricity. Breath is exciting, and it propels itself. It’s a charging, dynamic process of life, roaring along. If you want to know peace, let breath excite you.

If you want to explore your relationship with the electricity inside each breath, you might whisper one of these thoughts to yourself:

I am awake to the electricity of life.

The dynamic power of breath is renewing me

moment by moment by moment.

Nature is wild and serene, and so am I.

When you use a phrase such as one of these as a tool of thought in meditation, pulsate with it. Whisper or think the phrase, very lightly. Then notice whatever feelings, sensations, or images the phrase evokes. Enjoy the sensations of breathing for a few moments. Then gently think the phrase again. Welcome all random thoughts, and don’t judge your experience. Anything you are tempted to try to block out is actually some part of your own life’s electricity and wildness—your marut energy—that needs your attention.

We human beings sometimes have a better intuitive grasp of our tools and gadgets than we do of our own bodies. We know our electronics run on electricity and our phones need charging. As you explore the sensations that are flowing in your body right now as you are breathing right now, welcome all the sensations, whether they be of tension or delight, as manifestations of the ongoing flash of lightning that is life itself.

Lorin Roche

Dr. Lorin Roche began practicing with the Vijnana Bhairava Tantra in 1968 as part of scientific research on the physiology of meditation. He has a PhD from the University of California at Irvine, where his research focused on the language meditators generate to describe their inner experiences. He is the author of The Radiance Sutras and Meditation Made Easy. With his wife, Camille Maurine, he wrote Meditation Secrets for Women. A teacher of meditation for 46 years, Lorin’s approach centers on how to customize the practices to suit one’s individual nature. Lorin leads the Radiance Sutras Meditation Teacher Training, a 200 hour certification program registered with Yoga Alliance. Lorin teaches regularly at the Esalen Institute and around the world.

www.meditationtt.com

The post Breath Is Exciting in Meditation appeared first on LA Yoga Magazine - Ayurveda & Health.

Rivers of Power: Meditation with the Radiance Sutras by Dr. Lorin Roche

It’s a hot afternoon in the desert, at Bhaktifest in Joshua Tree, and my energies are starting to fade. The chanting has been going on around the clock for days and I feel saturated. What sounds good right now is to go jump in a nearby cool salt-water pool. As I get out of hearing range of the festival, I realize the chanting is still going on inside me. And although it is quieter, this internal soundtrack feels powerful. Somehow my atoms are dancing and singing the hymns of praise to the Goddess and the God, Devi and Shiva, Radha and Krishna. It’s the Bollywood of the atoms. Maybe that’s what atoms are – tiny powerful electrical charges dancing in circles, vibrating with ecstatic praise. After swimming, I lie down and fade into something like a nap, but I remain conscious. There is a festival within. And it’s calling me.

In The Radiance Sutras, Shiva sings to Devi, the Goddess:

Rivers of power flowing everywhere.

Fields of magnetism relating everything.

This is your origin. This is your lineage.

The current of creation is right here,

Coursing through subtle channels,

Animating this very form.
Follow the gentle touch of life,

Soft as the footprint of an ant,
As tiny sensations open to vastness.

Power sings as it flows,

Electrifies the organs of sensing,

Becomes liquid light,
Nourishes your entire being.

Celebrate the boundary
Where streams join the sea,

Where body meets infinity.

When the sound of the ancient, gorgeous language of Sanskrit is transcribed into Roman letters, we see:

sarva sroto nibandhena pra?n?a s?akty ordhvaya? s?anaih? |

pipi?la spars?a vela?ya?m prathate paramam? sukham

If we spell out the sounds:

sarva srotah ni-bandhana praana–shakti–oordhvayaa shanaih

pipeela sparsha velaayaam prathate paramam sukham

Looking in the Monier-Williams Sanskrit-English Dictionary we see a rich spectrum of images.

Sarva – whole, entire, all, everything, all together, completely, in all parts, everywhere.

Srotas – the current or bed of a river, a stream. Rushing water. The channel or current of nutrition in the body. An aperture in the human or animal body. An organ of sense. Lineage, pedigree.

Nibandha – binding, tying, attachment to, intentness on, basis, root, origin, a grant of property, any literary composition or work, song, singing. (Bandha refers to many types of bonding or connection and has a wide semantic field including: a tendon, arranging a sequence of musical sounds, arranging the body during sex.)

Prana – filled, full, the breath of life, respiration, spirit, vitality, vigor, energy, power, poetical inspiration.

Shakti – power, ability, strength, might, effort, energy, capability, skill, effectiveness of a remedy, regal power, the energy or active power of a deity personified as his wife. The power or signification of a word, the creative power of imagination (of a poet).

Urdhva – rising or tending upwards, raised, elevated, erected, erect, upright, high, above, higher.

Sanais – quietly, softly, gently, gradually, alternately.

Pipela – ant.

Sparsha – touching, the sense of touch, contact, the quality of tangibility. Feeling, sensation.

Vela – limit, boundary, end, distance, boundary of sea and land, limit of time, period, season, time of day, opportunity, leisure, tide, flow.

Prath – to spread, extend, unfold, become known or celebrated, to come to light, appear, arise, to occur to the mind, reveal, shine upon, give light to.

Param – far, distant, remote in space, opposite, farther than, beyond, on the other or farther side of, previous in time, former, ancient, past. Later, future, next. Following, succeeding, subsequent. Final, last. The Supreme or Absolute Being, the Universal Soul. The highest point or degree. The wider or more extended meaning of a word.

Sukha – originally applying to chariots “having a good axle-hole,” running swiftly or easily, agreeable, mild, comfortable, happy. Prosperous. Virtuous. In music, a particular m?rchan?  or style of music. One of one of the nine Shaktis of Shiva. Pleasure, happiness, joy, delight in.

Practice

There are moments when we awaken to the delightful life force that is always active everywhere – this may happen in the middle of practice, whether it be dancing, singing, asana flow, pranayama (breath techniques), or meditation. Awakenings may come to you by surprise, in the hours or days after practice. When we sense the currents of pranashakti flowing through our bodies, we naturally respond with awe, wonder, and delight. Awe is healing.

In any such awakening, let all your senses drink in the nourishment, for prana is singing as she flows, nurturing everything. Be awake to touch, smell, taste, vision, hearing,  both on the outer and obvious levels, and in the realm of tiny, tingling, little sensations.

Power is always flowing everywhere in your body. This is your origin and lineage. You were born this way. When we practice meditation, we don’t have to make energy flow – our practices allow our senses to delight in the flow already present. There is a happiness here that does not depend on anything other than accepting the gift of existence. We are invited to absorb nutrition from prana, sense it, feel the motion, the current of life, and know this is my origin. This is my lineage. This is me.

The stream of the life force can feel like a rushing current or a subtle flow.

A way to practice this is to breathe or chant vigorously, then let go and pay attention to subtle sensations. You could chant out loud for five or fifteen minutes, then sit quietly and listen as the resonances of the chants continue spontaneously in your mind and heart and body, and you are carried into the festival within.

Dr. Lorin Roche began practicing yoga and meditation in 1968 as part of scientific research at the University of California. His first taste of practice was with the Vijnana Bhairava Tantra, and it has been a daily love affair ever since. He is the author of Meditation Made Easy and The Radiance Sutras. Lorin and his wife Camille Maurine are authors of Meditation Secrets for Women. Lorin trains meditation teachers and works with individuals to develop meditation practices that go with their nature. Website: lorinroche.com. Facebook: The Radiance Sutras. Twitter @lorinsez, for Sanskrit word of the Day. Join Lorin and Camille to rock the Sutras at Shaktifest in Joshua Tree May 15-17, and at Esalen in Big Sur, June 19-21 with Dave Stringer.

Lorin Roche

Dr. Lorin Roche began practicing with the Vijnana Bhairava Tantra in 1968 as part of scientific research on the physiology of meditation. He has a PhD from the University of California at Irvine, where his research focused on the language meditators generate to describe their inner experiences. He is the author of The Radiance Sutras and Meditation Made Easy. With his wife, Camille Maurine, he wrote Meditation Secrets for Women. A teacher of meditation for 46 years, Lorin’s approach centers on how to customize the practices to suit one’s individual nature. Lorin leads the Radiance Sutras Meditation Teacher Training, a 200 hour certification program registered with Yoga Alliance. Lorin teaches regularly at the Esalen Institute and around the world.

www.meditationtt.com

The post Rivers of Power appeared first on LA Yoga Magazine - Ayurveda & Health.

When we go for a run, we are on a special type of journey where the aim is not necessarily to get somewhere. The journey itself is the purpose. We are in motion because the body loves motion and thrives with movement—our muscles are flushed with blood and fresh oxygen, the nerves tingle, we say hello to the world and rejoice in our ability to traverse it. If we pay attention, during each of these journeys, an entire world of meditative practices opens up to us.

As you cross the threshold from your home to the path, what is the first thing you notice? Is it the quality of light at dawn, the coolness of the air, the smell of trees, the sound of traffic, the tightness of your shoelaces? Every step we take invites us into the practice of sensing the universe around us. Running is great for meditative alertness because it does away with the stereotype that we are supposed to sit still, make our minds blank, and be “mindful.” Mindfulness can be thought of as paying attention to the news the senses are bringing us in each moment. When we run, hike, or walk the dog, we can develop awareness skills to help us navigate our inner worlds.

When I step outside in the morning to watch the sky turn from dark to light , the first people I see are usually runners. They are trotting, striding, and gliding along by the water, savoring the morning air, radiating the joy of movement. Runners tend to be the more alert people around, because many things out there are bigger than them and moving faster. Each car and bicycle that shares the road or an alley is a potential threat to be avoided, so there is a continuous scan of the all these other bodies as runners move through space. Runners engage with many types of alertness in quick succession: pleasure, awareness of time, awareness of the path, getting into a zone, and sometimes careful scrutiny of bodily sensations: Is that a cramp coming on? At all times, runners need to be able to switch, in a fraction of a second, into wariness and caution: Is that dog going to chase me? Does that driver see me?

Whenever we are moving through space, while running or walking, we must notice the uneven surfaces—each brick, curb, and patch of gravel. There may be places where a tree root has lifted the sidewalk, creating a raised crack to catch our toe. The brain tracks and responds to all this subliminally, so we can function on automatic much of the time. But when we add our conscious appreciation to the process, something wonderful happens—a sense of grace emerges. We become engaged with our senses more intimately, and the continual, skillful adjustment of our stride and the placing each foot can feel automagical. [Whoa, is that a word? cool]

Play with the senses.

The human body comes equipped with many sensory pathways that tell us about the world within our skin, as well as the world in the outer environment around us. We can sense acceleration and balance, body position, temperature, hunger, thirst, taste, smell, and blood carbon dioxide levels. We can sense sound waves (hearing), and light waves (vision). Unless we have some visual impairment, the visual sense lets us see straight ahead, also to the left and right, and above and below, so we have a spherical visual field we are running through. Our kinesthetic intelligence integrates various inputs: from our feet, ankles, knees, legs, hips, and all the joints of the body, with information from the inner ears along with signals from our tendons and muscles to give us the ability to move through the world in balance. No matter who you are, you experience your life through your senses.

To make a game out of the senses as you run, you can use the name of each sense as a mantra, and notice it for a few breaths as you go: seeing, hearing, feeling. I am seeing the path in front of me, I am hearing the whoosh of the breath, I am feeling my feet touching the ground. Or you could use breathing, balancing, accelerating. Take your pick of sensory inputs that interest you and rotate between them. Simply honoring one or more of the senses as you run or walk, even part of the time, can make for a more refreshing outing.

Another dimension of running experience is the relationship of our bodies and the body of the earth below us. There is a mysterious attraction, called gravity, between all physical bodies. Gravity is not an obstacle. We are nourished by gravity—it actually allows for our muscles and bones to grow stronger. The astronauts floating around in the space station work very hard to keep their muscles from atrophying, but no matter how much time they spend exercising, their bones weaken in a process called spaceflight osteopenia. For every month spent in space, astronauts lose 1% of their bone mass. The calcium just dissolves into their bloodstream.

For us here on Earth, when we run in the gravitational field of this planet, we are engaging our entire skeletal system, making it work, and this keeps the bones healthy. We have the word “gravity,” but we could just as well call it love. The earth loves our bodies and attracts them, and our bodies are in conversation with the earth. Every step is a conversation with breath and balance.

Play with gravity.

Notice each foot as it rises off the ground, and follow its arc until it reaches the height of its lift, then switch to the other foot as it rises. In this way,  you are savoring a moment of lightness or levitation several times a second. Track the momentum as each foot leaves the ground and zooms upward. This is a teeny tiny awareness, and it can be very interesting.

A beautiful Sanskrit word for journey is yatra, (“journey, march expedition.” The a’s are long, so it is yaatraa). Runners know, as well as dog walkers, hikers, strollers, and joggers all know, that the body loves to journey and is enlivened by it. You can love every step, because being right here, in movement, is the aim of the expedition.

The yoga tradition teaches that all the meditative techniques you need are already inside you. Explore and you will find them—already there in your most intimate spaces. Your senses, all of them, are marvels of engineering, created by the universe to perceive itself. The more you attend to the senses as you venture on your yatra, the richer your experience of embodiment becomes.

Dr. Lorin Roche is the author of The Radiance Sutras, a fresh version of the Vijnana Bhairava Tantra, a classic yoga text describing 112 doorways into meditation. Lorin trains meditation teachers worldwide and works with individuals to fine-tune their meditation practice to go with their physical, emotional and spiritual constitution. Visit radiancesutras.com. With Dave Stringer, Donna De Lory, and Joni Allen, he has just released Elixir, a musical album based on The Radiance Sutras.

Lorin Roche

Dr. Lorin Roche began practicing with the Vijnana Bhairava Tantra in 1968 as part of scientific research on the physiology of meditation. He has a PhD from the University of California at Irvine, where his research focused on the language meditators generate to describe their inner experiences. He is the author of The Radiance Sutras and Meditation Made Easy. With his wife, Camille Maurine, he wrote Meditation Secrets for Women. A teacher of meditation for 46 years, Lorin’s approach centers on how to customize the practices to suit one’s individual nature. Lorin leads the Radiance Sutras Meditation Teacher Training, a 200 hour certification program registered with Yoga Alliance. Lorin teaches regularly at the Esalen Institute and around the world.

www.meditationtt.com

The post Meditation: Love the Journey appeared first on LA Yoga Magazine - Ayurveda & Health.

When the dog jumps up on your map, how do you hold her? What about when the cat glides onto your lap? When you are walking down the street and see a friend, how do you hug him? What if it has been a really long time and you are flooded with surprise and delight? Or if it is a “shaking-hands” kind of relationship, what is the quality of that contact? How do you hold a baby, a five-year-old child, a teenage boy? And when you are alone with your lover, how do you hold them?

Holding is sweet science. In every moment, each creature in our lives, every being, needs and deserves a different way of being held. A different nuance of holding is called for in every instant – holding tight, or touching lightly. When we are away from the people we love, we hold them in our hearts and cherish the communion. Holding is not just physical, it is mental, emotional, passionate, and sensitive.

Yoga, our favorite word, refers to physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual holding. The Sanskrit root of yoga is yum, “To join, unite, connect, to embrace, exciting, an exciter.” This makes sense because where there is union, there is an exciting embrace, a continuous continuum of communion.

Dharana, is “holding, keeping in remembrance,” and is one of the angas (limb, member, subordinate division or department) of yoga. Dharana invites us to pay attention to a thousand ways of holding – hold a post, hold your breath, hold the sound of a mantra (tool of thought) in your awareness, hold the image of a mandala (circle) or yantra (diagram) in your mind’s eye. In meditation, select an aspect of the life force, pranashakti, you love, hold it in your awareness, and then allow yourself to dissolve into it. While you are practicing meditation, the manner of holding changes as rapidly as when we are holding anything in the outer world – a continual adjustment and dance of responsiveness, changing many times per second.

Meditation is the intimacy with the energies of life. When we practice, we are in close communion with the vibrancy of pranashakti. As with any intimate relationship, we are continually called to improve our skills at noticing and responding to the ever-changing moods of our lover. In each moment, there is a particular way of embracing, cherishing, and adoring the rhythm. For example, if we are alert, each moment of breathing is an interplay of nourishing, purifying, soothing, exciting, inspiring, and informing. When we breathe in, we embrace the incoming air and may hold it for an instant at the end of the inhalation; when we breathe out we give our breath to the world. At the end of the exhalation, in that emptiness, we may experience being held by the ocean of air. An essential gift of the experience of holding is being held by something larger, embraced by the benevolent forces of creation.

Many kinds of people in the world are skilled at touching. Dancers are in touch with every part of the body as it moves. Race car drivers have incredible kinesthetic awareness of the vibration of the engines as it comes through their feet, legs, and seat, and can feel the road with their fingertips. People who love babies know how to hold them just right. Horse riders and whisperers can communicate with the animals through minute touches of their hands and legs. Musicians of all kinds know how to caress their instrument, whether they are touching strings, drums, or keyboards. Sex is an unlimited universe of touching, holding, and embracing. We all love touch, each in our own way, and touch is ecstasy.

Embracing, holding, touching – these are central skills to meditative practice. What we learn in the outer world, as we greet our friends, hang out with people we love, and interact with animals, teaches us how to be in touch with the inner world. Over the past 45 years of teaching meditation, it is always great fun to work with people who are skill dat touch because their ability to tolerate intimacy lets them become advanced meditators, right from the beginning. They may have only been meditating for a day, but when I listen to them describe their experiences with touching and being touched by the flow of prana in their bodies, it sounds like poetry, and a fresh revelation of the yoga texts. Meditation invites us to engage with the internal music of mantras, the inner massage of breathing, and the inner artwork of mandala visualizations. Paying attention in this way, we continually learn subtle nuances of what it is to hold and cherish one another.

The wrong approach to meditation can damage your capacity for intimacy. There are thousands of styles and techniques of meditation, and many of them were developed as a support for those on the path of denial and detachment. For centuries, meditation teachers have tended to be out of touch males who are desperately lonely. They set themselves up as gurus in order to have control over other people, because they know so little about a relationship built on equality. This is the Wizard of Oz complex – a lost professor who puts up a screen and creates a grandiose persona. This particular type is over-represented in the file dog meditation, and the language they use tends to be distancing, cold, and elitist.

The best meditation teachers are those who are good at intimate communion, in whatever field interests them: sex, babies, therapy, sports, music. Blind people would be great meditation teachers because of their alertness to sound and touch. So come on, all you people who are good at embracing in any realm: learn to meditate, and learn to teach meditation in a life-affirming way, and bring the warmth of your love to life to this aspect of yoga. We need you.

Lorin Roche

Dr. Lorin Roche began practicing with the Vijnana Bhairava Tantra in 1968 as part of scientific research on the physiology of meditation. He has a PhD from the University of California at Irvine, where his research focused on the language meditators generate to describe their inner experiences. He is the author of The Radiance Sutras and Meditation Made Easy. With his wife, Camille Maurine, he wrote Meditation Secrets for Women. A teacher of meditation for 46 years, Lorin’s approach centers on how to customize the practices to suit one’s individual nature. Lorin leads the Radiance Sutras Meditation Teacher Training, a 200 hour certification program registered with Yoga Alliance. Lorin teaches regularly at the Esalen Institute and around the world.

www.meditationtt.com

The post The Embraceable Universe appeared first on LA Yoga Magazine - Ayurveda & Health.

Life is Full of Surprises

Unless you live in a cave, life is full of surprises. Even meditation is full of surprises. In the relaxation of meditation, we are often presented with mini-movies of whatever we are stressed about, including traumatic events from the past and whatever we are gearing up to deal with in the future. You get a few minutes of restfulness, then suddenly, you find yourself feeling agitated, excited, or jumpy as you re-live a moment of fear or worry. Everyone hates this and is convinced they have failed at meditation: “I just can’t do it! The thoughts won’t stop. I can’t sit still.

The Radiance Sutras on Awakening

In the Radiance Sutras, a new translation of a classic yoga meditation text, the Vijnana Bhairava Tantra, Sutra 95 points out that any difficult moment can be used as a gateway to awakening:

At the beginning of a sneeze,

That weird tickling sensation,

An uncontrollable explosion of breath –

And a stunned, tingling feeling afterwards.

When afraid, alarm bells

Ringing in your body,

Hair standing on end.

Or when lost and confused,

Sighing in desperation.

The gnawing, light-headed feeling

As hunger comes on, turns ravenous,

Then the deep satisfaction after eating.

When transported with delight,

Running away from a fight,

Intensely curious or impatient.

Intensity awakens,

Wild attentiveness everywhere.

Ride the shockwave inward

To touch the Great Self,

The power from which you arise.

And the Karaoke version:

kshut–aadi–ante bhaye shoke gahvare vaa ranaat–drute

kutoohale kshudhaa–aadi–ante brahma–sattaa–mayee dashaa

The Sanskrit Meanings

Kshut – sneeze. Adi – beginning. Ante – end. Bhaya – fear, alarm, dread, apprehension, terror, dismay, danger, peril, distress. Soka – burning, hot, flame, sorrow, anguish, pain, trouble, grief. Gahvara – deep, impenetrable, confused in mind, a hiding place, thicket, wood, an impenetrable secret, riddle, a deep sigh. Rana – delight, joy, battle (as an object of delight), war, combat, fight, conflict, motion.

Druta – speedy, run away, melted. Kutuhala – curiosity, interest in any extra-ordinary matter, eagerness, anything interesting, fun, surprising, wonderful, celebrated. Kudh – hunger. Brahma – a priest, the one self-existent Spirit, the Absolute. Satta – existence, being, goodness. Maya – measuring, art, wisdom, supernatural power, creating illusions (said of Vishnu), one of the nine shaktis or energies of Vishnu, compassion, sympathy.

Dasa – the fringe of a garment, loose ends of any piece of cloth, skirt or hem, a wick, period of life, circumstances, the fate of people as influenced by the position of the planets, aspect or position of the planets at birth, the mind.

The Sanskrit here points to all kinds of terrifying, burning, painful, confusing, delightful, joyous, surprising and wonderful adventures. Right here, in the midst of your most intense challenge or desperate situation, when your mind has melted in shock or vital interest, is an opportunity to wake up to the One Self-Existing Spirit. In terms of yoga practice, the suggestion is, “Pay attention right at the beginning – in the very first instant (adi) you notice something happening – all the way through the development of the crisis – to the end (anta), and you will sense something of Maya, the great art, the supernatural power, of the divine.”

Notice Your Cravings

Notice your cravings for intensity as well as serenity. When you go to the movies, sporting events, opera, theater, concerts, and performances, aren’t you going there to drink in every moment and be thrilled and surprised? The mantra-like sounds that arise from the audience, Ahhhh and Ooooooh, are astonishing in themselves. If you read novels, watch television or YouTube, don’t you following what captures your interest? Spiritual awakenings are not to be had only in the calmness of deep meditation. The combination of having a rich outer life open to the wonders of the world, plus having access to deep meditation, is the gateway, the door to ecstasy, pointed to in this sutra.

If you think of meditation as “calming down,” and “slowing down,” you will miss out on a lot of what life is offering you. Any time we are quiet and relaxed, the body-mind system, the intelligent life-force we can call pranashakti, will tend to review stressful events we have experienced. This will happen whether we are meditating, on vacation, falling asleep, in therapy, or on the massage table. You haven’t failed at meditation if you have a few minutes of relaxation and then are immersed in an intense movie made up of everything you are scared and excited about. It is the relaxation and ease that open the door to your inner life.

Savor your Life in Meditation

Here is a little secret, which you can memorize right now: meditation is a perfect place to savor your life. All of it. Every color (roga), every feeling (bhava), and every fear (bhaya). When you feel serene and safe, the wisdom of your inner life automatically brings up whatever needs to be healed. When you relax, you let go of stress, and when you let go of stress, you re-live the stressful events. To the extent you feel safe in meditation, you will re-experience your traumas and victories as your inner wisdom tunes your body and soul to accept the sheer wildness of the universe in all its stunning diversity. This is what makes each meditation a surprising and unpredictable sequence of pleasure, pain, pleasure, pain, pleasure, as your practice massages the tension out of your body.

If you don’t know how to meditate, learn. When you find the style of meditation that suits your nature, it is one of the greatest gifts you can give yourself and those you love. You will know your style because you feel utterly at ease and at rest in yourself. This creates an inner serenity that lets you tolerate the surprises life tosses at you day by day.

Lorin Roche

Dr. Lorin Roche began practicing with the Vijnana Bhairava Tantra in 1968 as part of scientific research on the physiology of meditation. He has a PhD from the University of California at Irvine, where his research focused on the language meditators generate to describe their inner experiences. He is the author of The Radiance Sutras and Meditation Made Easy. With his wife, Camille Maurine, he wrote Meditation Secrets for Women. A teacher of meditation for 46 years, Lorin’s approach centers on how to customize the practices to suit one’s individual nature. Lorin leads the Radiance Sutras Meditation Teacher Training, a 200 hour certification program registered with Yoga Alliance. Lorin teaches regularly at the Esalen Institute and around the world.

www.meditationtt.com

The post Surprise: Meditation with the Radiance Sutras appeared first on LA Yoga Magazine - Ayurveda & Health.

You are supposed to be hurt at these insults. You are supposed to get angry in return and have a bad day. But what if you don’t respond? What if you don’t give random people power over your inner emotional state?

In The Radiance Sutras, a new translation of the Vijnana Bhairava Tantra, Shiva says:

It’s always the same.

Barbarians and blockheads,

Rival queens and rival kings,

The drama rolls on and on.

When people honor you,

You are supposed to be glad.

When they disrespect you,

You are supposed to sulk in indignation.

One minute you are cruising on a throne in the sky,

The next you are standing on some bleak patch of dirt.

I say, the Sun regards all with a steady eye.

The force sustaining Earth and Sky

Calls everyone to awaken from this trance.

This whole world revolves around an axis, and I am that.

When you are friends with the Friend to All Beings

Nothing is the same.

Rich beyond measure, abundant beyond counting,

You can move through this life laughing.

Opinions of others have no rulership over you.

samah shatrau cha mitre cha samah maana–ava-maanayoh

brahmanah pari–poornatvaat iti jnaatvaa sukhee bhavet

The Sanskrit here sounds like the plot of a daytime soap opera: m?na means “opinion, arrogance, indignation excited by jealousy, sulking, blockhead, an agent, a barbarian.”

• sama – smooth, flat. Same, always the same, equal, like to or identical. impartial towards. Easy. Peace. In music, a kind of time. “On level ground”
• ?atru – an enemy, rival, a hostile king. The sixth astrological mansion.
• ca – also
• mitra – a friend, companion. In the Rig Veda, Mitra is described as calling men to activity, sustaining Earth and Sky and beholding all creatures with unwinking eye.
• m?na – opinion, notion. Self-conceit, arrogance, pride, a wounded sense of honor, anger or indignation excited by jealousy (esp. in women), sulking. In astronomy, the name of the tenth house.  Also a “blockhead; an agent; a barbarian.”
• vim?na – devoid of honor, disgraced. Disrespect, dishonor. Traversing. A car or chariot of the gods , any mythical self-moving aerial car.
• brahmahmanah – supreme consciousness.
• pari – round, around, abundantly, richly.
• p?r?a – filled, full, filled with or full of, abundant, rich, fulfilled, finished, accomplished, ended, past, concluded (as a treaty), contented, drawn (in augury). Full-sounding, sonorous and auspicious, said of the cry of birds and beasts.
• jñ? – to know, have knowledge,  perceive , understand  experience, recognize. To recognize as one’s own, take possession of, intelligent, having a soul, wise.
• sukha – ease, easiness, comfort, pleasure, happiness, pleasant, agreeable, gentle, comfortable, prosperous. Originally, “having a good axle-hole,” running swiftly or easily. In music, a partic, m?rchan?, of one of the 9 ?aktis of ?iva. In astrology, the name of the fourth house. Joyfully, willingly.
• bhavet – becomes. (representing a possibility, a hoped-for state, a potential “It could become.” From bhava – becoming, being, turning or transition into, true condition, temperament, any state of mind or body, way of thinking or feeling, intention, love, affection, attachment; the seat of the feelings or affections, heart, soul, mind.

This sutra points to a daring level of equanimity that any of us can inhabit, spontaneously or intentionally. Sometimes we find ourselves full of our own sukhi, our own pleasure, and just don’t have time to join other people in their bad moods. We can also set an intention to explore equanimity. A good time to set an aim is at the end of your meditation time in the morning. Take fifteen seconds and say to yourself, “Just for today, I am not going to let other people control my inner life. Other people can have whatever mood they are in. I am going to be in mine.” Say it in your own language, in a way that is intriguing to you: “I am interested in learning about equanimity.” Or even, “God, Great Spirit, teach me about joy and emotional freedom.” Rest your attention on this thought at the end of your morning meditation practice. Then prepare yourself for interesting changes in your emotional reactiveness during the day. You might find that you suddenly step into a new kind of internal stability.

Whenever we set any such intention, we embark on a road of adventure in which we remember, and forget, and remember again. In the morning, we are all set with our emotional freedom, and by noon, we have been jostled and impinged upon and we forget. Setting an intention never means we are perfect, it just means we are asking life to teach us about a topic – we have signed up for that class. No one comes to yoga because they are already perfect.

You also might find interesting challenges – Valerie Jarrett, a senior White House advisor, said recently, “If somebody’s trying to get you angry, the calmer you get, the angrier they’ll get.”

This sutra is a hint that after meditation, you can keep favoring the inner happiness and fullness percolating up from your deepest bhava (becoming, existing, transition into.) Let the soap opera continue on its own, without you – all the other actors will be fine. And why not give everyone a free pass to be a blockhead once in awhile?

Lorin Roche

Dr. Lorin Roche began practicing with the Vijnana Bhairava Tantra in 1968 as part of scientific research on the physiology of meditation. He has a PhD from the University of California at Irvine, where his research focused on the language meditators generate to describe their inner experiences. He is the author of The Radiance Sutras and Meditation Made Easy. With his wife, Camille Maurine, he wrote Meditation Secrets for Women. A teacher of meditation for 46 years, Lorin’s approach centers on how to customize the practices to suit one’s individual nature. Lorin leads the Radiance Sutras Meditation Teacher Training, a 200 hour certification program registered with Yoga Alliance. Lorin teaches regularly at the Esalen Institute and around the world.

www.meditationtt.com

The post Blockheads and Barbarians appeared first on LA Yoga Magazine - Ayurveda & Health.

What happens when I meditate?

I have two totally conflicting desires: I love to travel, and I love to be at home. Fortunately, meditation satisfies both.

Minds don’t wander, they journey, and the purpose of all this travel is to return home enriched. Human beings have a hunger for fresh experience. We are always exploring, this is our nature.

Travel in novel environments is food for the mind, heart, and soul. The senses are tickled alive with new impressions. We delight to see an unfamiliar palette of colors, hear enchanting sounds, smell exotic fragrances, and engage with a different culture.

Meditation, if you allow it, will rearrange your senses in the way travel does. It is an inner journey that takes you to completely surprising realms of experience. No one knows what will happen from one moment to the next. This is what it is supposed to be. As you meditate, your body’s instinctive intelligence seizes the opportunity to update your map of the world, where you have been and where you are going. One of the secrets of meditation is to allow the wild adventure to unfold.

In meditation, you are invited to perceive each breath, sensation, sound, color, and texture as new, surprising, and even shocking. It is a fresh revelation of pranashakti. This happens if you let it, if you allow naturalness to be your guide. The body, brain, and nervous system know how to rewire themselves for optimum functioning.

If you are a world traveler, you may have noticed that when you finally arrive at your destination, you might just want to let go. There you are at the beach in Costa Rica, lying on the sand, soaking up the sun, and suddenly you find yourself mulling over a problem at home or in your business. Welcome this unwelcome intrusion – it is a spontaneous meditation. It is smart of the brain to use the beauty of a different place to get perspective on your daily life. In other words, the brain wants to connect the resourcefulness of your traveler’s mind with the challenges back at home, where the need is.

When we meditate, we let this process of gaining perspective happen right here on our mat or cushion. We travel through our inner senses and visit the intimate terrain of subtle sensations, sounds, and imagery. We bring the rejuvenating elixir of this inward quest back to our relationships and work. Seasoned inner travelers know that a half-hour meditation can revolutionize our perception as much as a trip around the world.

All the world’s meditation practices are invitations to perceive the improbable magic behind the most ordinary everyday experience. The sacred purpose of travel is to wake up to what is right here. The fulfillment of our exploration – whether an inner or outer journey – is to expand our perspective on life. We develop a deeper understanding of what the world is as well as a new appreciation of home.

William Anders was one of the first three persons to have left Earth’s orbit to travel to the Moon in 1968. Upon seeing our planet from way out in space he said, “We came all this way to explore the Moon, and the most important thing is that we discovered the Earth.”

I close my eyes

… and instantly I am flying through space,

Accelerating toward the unknown.

Okay, this is normal, I say to myself,

This is just reality –

The Earth itself is moving through space

At over 60,000 miles an hour,

And our galaxy is spiraling at 1.3 million miles an hour.

That’s how fast we are moving when sitting still.

Another breath and suddenly

Thousands of shooting stars are flashing in all directions.

What is this?

Oh yeah, just the brain doing its thing – 80 billion neurons,

Each connecting with ten thousand friends, all of them chatting away in Tiny bolts of electricity, texting each other and laughing

As they build my virtual reality.

How do I get some inner peace around here?

In the next breath I am falling into darkness.

As my inner eyes adjust, I see

A world of trillions of little bits of something

Vibrating away in quiet luminosity.

Aha, this must be some kind of cellular awareness –

The human body is about 100 trillion cells, give or take a few,

All pulsating as they do their job of sustaining life.

Now I am walking along a trail in Tanzania with a Masai guide,

Swatting at pesky flies,

Drinking good coffee at a café in Copenhagen,

Meditating at midnight near the volcano in Hawaii,

Freediving off the Kohala coast.

My to-do list suddenly leaps onto my inner screen.

I am lost in a long sequence of tasks,

Intricate mental movies, scene by scene

Actions that are calling out: “Do me! Do me now!”

Next I find myself replaying a movie I saw in the theater,

Where the hero faces obstacles much more difficult than mine.

Another breath,

My entire being enters a state of awe at simply existing.

A beautiful hum fills me

With something better than silence.

Slowly I open my eyes. The world is still here.

Surprisingly, my head feels completely clear.

When I look around, everything is aglow with vitality.

The ordinary appears magical because my senses are awake.

My motor is revving, I am eager to live.

Dr. Lorin Roche began meditating in 1968 with the Vijnana Bhairava Tantra as his guide, and his translation of the text, The Radiance Sutras, is available from lorinroche.com.

Lorin Roche

Dr. Lorin Roche began practicing with the Vijnana Bhairava Tantra in 1968 as part of scientific research on the physiology of meditation. He has a PhD from the University of California at Irvine, where his research focused on the language meditators generate to describe their inner experiences. He is the author of The Radiance Sutras and Meditation Made Easy. With his wife, Camille Maurine, he wrote Meditation Secrets for Women. A teacher of meditation for 46 years, Lorin’s approach centers on how to customize the practices to suit one’s individual nature. Lorin leads the Radiance Sutras Meditation Teacher Training, a 200 hour certification program registered with Yoga Alliance. Lorin teaches regularly at the Esalen Institute and around the world.

www.meditationtt.com

The post Explorer’s Mind appeared first on LA Yoga Magazine - Ayurveda & Health.

We are all powered by Shakti, and when we practice Yoga, we are invited to notice that every thought we think is a sparkle of Shakti across our inner senses; every heartbeat is a pulsation of Spanda Shakti, the vibratory power of creation; every breath is a wave of Shakti. In each moment of our lives, the Shakti in us is interacting with the Shakti in the world around us. As individual beings, we are participating in the life of the world with its infinite layers and forms of Shakti: from subatomic particles to the dance of galaxies. Shakti is everywhere and she is ever mysterious. Our lives are a play of Shakti.

Like any good Sanskrit word, shakti (?akti) has many meanings. The first definition is “power, ability, strength, might, effort, energy, capability.” Then comes “faculty, skill, and effectiveness or efficacy (of a remedy).” Shakti is also The Supreme Being, the Goddess, the energy or active power of the Divine. Shakti is creativity in all forms and can be destructive –  a weapon such as a spear, missile, or sword. In the war that started just after Krishna and Arjuna had their little talk in the Bhagavad Gita, Shakti is the name of a fearsome weapon used by Karna, Arjuna’s older brother, who is fighting against him. All these definitions only hint at the infinite energies referred to by the word shakti.

Meditation is a process of being intimate with Shakti as she pulsates in us and rejuvenates our bodies, hearts and minds. The techniques of meditation invite us to engage with her many subtle forms. These have great names – yogashakti,  mantra shakti (the power of sound), pranashakti (the universal energy appearing in us as “the life force”), dharana shakti (the power to understand and grasp the deeper meaning of the sutras), dhyana shakti (the power to melt into meditation), and samadhi shakti (the power of joining with, becoming absorbed into, bringing into harmony.) All of these shaktis, and many others, occur to us spontaneously and feel completely natural. We are made of shakti and all these energies are already inside us, flowing along quietly, keeping us alive, whether we notice them or not.

Let’s look at shakti as “skill,” for there is a whole set of little skills we need to employ as soon as we start to play with pranashakti. One of the joys of meditation is the gift of melting into the flow of shakti as the brilliant and caring intelligence of life. There is an ever-changing texture of energy as we are renewed. If you ask a meditator what she is experiencing moment-to-moment in her practice, she may say, “I feel soothed by the flow of prana,” then a few seconds later, “I feel at home,” or “I feel nourished by subtle shakti,” and then, “I feel electrified and inspired.” Each of these textures arises spontaneously and unpredictably, lasts for a few seconds or minutes, then gives rise to the next. We feel alternately restful, cleansed, understood, heard, felt, held, supported, and renewed. A major skill in meditation is to accept all these impulses that arise naturally, as blessings and forms of pranashakti.

Here are some more skills to explore in your practice:

Let meditation be the most natural thing in the world, an extension of your exploration of life. There are many hundreds of different meditation techniques; choose the ones that affirm your essence.

Welcome surprise and sudden shifts, from relaxation to excitement to restfulness again, as part of the natural flow of experience.

Regain your instinctual curiosity. While you are meditating, many different energies, or shaktis, appear and dissolve quickly as life heals and renews you. If you are curious and welcoming, they will teach you about themselves.

Tolerate the intensity of your longing for love. The urge to merge, the longing to melt in love with the essence of life, is one of a human being’s strongest urges. It’s unstoppable. In meditation, we give in to the yearning for love – this is one of the shaktis that informs the whole process.

Learn what effortlessness is. When you allow your attention to be called to something you love, the flow is effortless. Effortlessness is a great skill; it emerges spontaneously from operating in accord with your essential nature, or prakriti. Effort only comes in when you try to block out your thoughts and feelings.

Love calls us to freedom, and love calls us to action. There are two incredibly strong impulses of life which are the power source for meditation: one is the movement toward inner freedom, the other is the impulse toward action. First, you want to relax and be free in yourself, then you want to jump up and express yourself. These are the two primary cycles of meditation, so welcome both with open arms. It is even okay to sit there vibrating with excitement, wanting to jump up the entire time you are meditating. Usually these two impulses alternate every few minutes whenever you are practicing meditation, but some days you are mostly on one side or the other. One of the great arts of dancing with Shakti is to embrace the play of opposites.

It is always startling to recognize that we are never separate from Shakti in any way, and never will be. Every spark of life in each of our cells is a flame of adoration to the mysterious divine energy out of which we are made.

Dr. Lorin Roche began meditating in 1968 with the Vijnana Bhairava Tantra as his guide, and his translation of the text, The Radiance Sutras, is available from lorinroche.com. 

Come to Esalen for a 5-day immersion in the joyous practices of The Radiance Sutras, May 12-17 2013, in Big Sur, California: Esalen.org. There will be a Sutra Jam at Shakti Fest in Joshua Tree, California, May 19: Bhaktifest.com.

Lorin Roche

Dr. Lorin Roche began practicing with the Vijnana Bhairava Tantra in 1968 as part of scientific research on the physiology of meditation. He has a PhD from the University of California at Irvine, where his research focused on the language meditators generate to describe their inner experiences. He is the author of The Radiance Sutras and Meditation Made Easy. With his wife, Camille Maurine, he wrote Meditation Secrets for Women. A teacher of meditation for 46 years, Lorin’s approach centers on how to customize the practices to suit one’s individual nature. Lorin leads the Radiance Sutras Meditation Teacher Training, a 200 hour certification program registered with Yoga Alliance. Lorin teaches regularly at the Esalen Institute and around the world.

www.meditationtt.com

The post Radiance Sutras: Mighty Shakti appeared first on LA Yoga Magazine - Ayurveda & Health.

Yoga As Your Box of Toys

Come on kids!

Let’s meditate on the outward appearance of the body (rupa) and give ourselves the power of invisibility. (Yoga Sutras 3.21) We can be like Invisible Woman and sneak around — no one will see us!

Let’s meditate on elephants (hasti) and become strong as the Hulk! (YS 3.25).

Let’s meditate on the impressions in the mind, (samskaras) and have knowledge of our past lives! (YS 3.18). I was a pirate in the Indian Ocean! ARRRR!

Let’s meditate on the pit of the throat (YS 3.31) and conquer hunger. . . .UH OH, must have done it wrong, I am totally craving hamburgers. Off to Smashburger!

These and thousands of other yoga techniques utilize the power of make-believe to explore inner and outer space, and liberate ourselves from the strict confines of daily life. Make-believe or pretend are one element of play. Another is free choice and self-regulation. In the realm of meditation, exploring our inner worlds, the time we spend playing allows us to develop a healthy relationship with the energies and elements we encounter.

The yoga lineage playground includes every area of your body — from the areas around the base of your spine all the way to the top of your head, including your feet and hands — not just your physical body. You have many subtle bodies, of subtler and subtler dimensions along the matter/energy continuum. Each body has many senses: outer and inner vision, outer and inner hearing, smelling, tasting, touching. All of your bodies and all of your senses engage and play around with fire, swim in the water, walk on the earth, fly through the air, and travel through space. The combinations are infinite.

You could meditate every day for a lifetime and never experience the same thing twice. As a matter of fact, if you are meditating in a way that suits your nature—that is the way it will tend to be. There is so much to explore that you are continually experiencing new combinations and sensations. When we enter any new world, we are children again. As new vistas open up inside ourselves, we need to give ourselves several years to playfully explore these new domains and map them out. I think it is essential for our emotional health that we do so.

Pretend play involves the imagination and leads to immersion in experience, or ananyacetas– “giving one’s undivided thought to.” What makes something playful is that it is intrinsically or instinctively motivated. The urge comes from within; we are totally immersed in our field of play. When you meditate with breath, your body becomes a musical instrument that the breath of life is playing. Spirit is playing with the flesh. When you meditate with a mantra you go deeper, allowing a spirit to play and improvise with the sound. You never tire of a mantra because you are hearing it new and fresh in every moment. You are playing with it because you love it.

I have mantras I have used every day for 45 years and they still seem totally new each second. The mantra carries me into the wave forms of the inner universe – that’s what they are for. And yet most mantras are simple euphonic sounds similar to what children make up when they are playing.

Last year, I went through lots of comic books of many genres, including manga, and found they contain the basic seed syllable mantras. The cartoonists use them as sound effects for the action happening in each frame. In a comic book, the sound effect for the bell at the desk in a hotel is BING – a guest is here, pay attention. In meditation, one of the seed sounds is ING and variations on that basic sound, and the meaning is the same: pay attention, listen up. The artists who drew the comics and made up the sounds were truly gifted. They must have meditated in their own way to discover what works.

In the yoga lineage, we have thousands of mantras available to us. Their perfection becomes available if we play with them. The people I know who are dead serious about mantras often create a stultifying and oppressive atmosphere in themselves. This is the dark side of tradition, like becoming a walking museum piece. The playground of yoga meditation is vast, inviting us into multiple universes for sport. Even the elements that you would think are serious — ritual worship, for example — have strong elements of play. In a puja, you might dress up the goddess or god as a doll, talk to her and give her little bits of food. Ullas, used in the context of consuming ritual offerings, means “to radiate, be brilliant, to come forth, to sport, play, dance, be wanton or joyful. To divert, delight. To cause to dance or jump.” Look at the definition of bh?va: “Any state of mind or body, opinion, intention, love, affection, attachment. . . Wanton sport, dalliance… contemplation, meditation.”

The word lila (pronounced leela) is Sanskrit for play and amusement, and the sense that all of manifestation is an act of play by the divine. When you take a playful approach to meditation, a surprising benefit is that you get to witness the soap opera of your own life with greater amusement. Everyone reviews their daily life during meditation – the mental movies just come in and won’t be denied. God did not build the universe to be an obstacle to meditation. Our inner lives are not an obstacle to meditation, they are the pathway. Anything you can think of or perceive, the ancient yogis had an app for that.

Around our house, meditation time is play time. Inside, the world’s best music is playing; a subtle light show illuminates the unlimited sky, prana is giving the best bodywork. On the outside, it looks like Camille and I are just sitting in the living room. No candles, no music, no incense, no props. Just the miracle of meditation. There is no effort whatsoever. The flow of pranashakti is so entertaining that we are enraptured. The life force never tires of restoring our tired nerves.

If you have been working at meditation, explore what happens if you put yourself in a playful bhav before you meditate – indulge in some “wanton sport” or pastime you love. Play cards, ping pong, watch a comedy show, sing karaoke, just to loosen up. Then pretend to meditate, with the joyous curiosity of a child. Through play, find your way.

Lorin Roche began practicing with the Vijnana Bhairava Tantra in 1968 and it has been a love affair ever since. He is the author of The Radiance Sutras, Meditation Made Easy, and Meditation Secrets for Women (written with his wild Shakti wife Camille Maurine). He has a PhD from the University of California at Irvine in Social Science, where he studied the language yogis and meditators develop to describe their inner experiences. Lorin does one-to-one coaching and trains meditation teachers. Visit lorinroche.com to order copies of The Radiance Sutras.

Lorin Roche

Dr. Lorin Roche began practicing with the Vijnana Bhairava Tantra in 1968 as part of scientific research on the physiology of meditation. He has a PhD from the University of California at Irvine, where his research focused on the language meditators generate to describe their inner experiences. He is the author of The Radiance Sutras and Meditation Made Easy. With his wife, Camille Maurine, he wrote Meditation Secrets for Women. A teacher of meditation for 46 years, Lorin’s approach centers on how to customize the practices to suit one’s individual nature. Lorin leads the Radiance Sutras Meditation Teacher Training, a 200 hour certification program registered with Yoga Alliance. Lorin teaches regularly at the Esalen Institute and around the world.

www.meditationtt.com

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Meditation by Dr. Lorin Roche 

A meditation from The Radiance Sutras, on people we love.

Johnny Depp. Natalie Portman. Robert Pattinson. Jennifer Lawrence. Denzel Washington. Angelina Jolie. Leonardo DiCaprio. Scarlett Johansson.

Are you daydreaming about an actor? Have you ever? Believe it or not, there is a yoga for that. I am not making this up. A yoga text from 800 AD gives this as a meditation practice. The text uses the word patra, which has many meanings, including “a drinking vessel, a meal, a master, an actor in a play.”

The journey begins here,
With whatever is capturing your attention.
Are you looking at the patterns on some wall?
Are you daydreaming about a celebrity?
Is there someone you love and long to cling to,
Disappear into,
A soul who is a chalice for
Beauty to pour into the world?

Whatever your focus,
Give your whole being.
Gradually, step by step,
The infinity from which you both have emerged
Will encompass you with blessing.

idrsena kramenaiva yatra
kutrapi cintana
sunye kudye pare patre svayam
lina varaprada 

idirishena – “in this way,” By adopting this means.

Krama-a step, proceeding, a course, order, series, succession, step by step.

Yatra – going, setting off, journey, march, expedition, pilgrimage, exploration.

Kutra api – there

Chintana – thinking, thinking of, reflecting upon, anxious thought, consideration.

Sunya – The void.

Kudya – a wall, plastering a wall, a curiosity.

Pare – another

Patra – drinking vessel, goblet, bowl, cup, dish, pot, plate, utensil; a meal; channel of a river; a capable or competent person, an adept, a master, an actor or an actor’s part or character in a play; a leaf, a measure of capacity.

Sva – one’s own, one’s self, the Ego, the human soul, the second astrological mansion.

Lena – clung or pressed together, attached or devoted to, merged in; resting on, staying in, hiding, dissolved, absorbed in, disappeared, vanished.

Varapradana – the bestowal of a boon, granting wishes.

This is the tenth practice in the Vijnana Bhairava Tantra. The first nine include various breathing, mantra, and spinal awareness techniques. Pranayama and mantra are ways to become intimate with life. You can ride the waves of breath, listen to the song of life resonating in your nerves, cherish the energies of the body as they flow.

The pilgrimage, the inner expedition, begins here, with whatever you are thinking. Any object of perception – the wall over there, a person you admire, a work of art – can serve as a focus for meditation. Attention follows interest. If you use something or someone you are intensely interested in as a focus for meditation, your attention will follow. If in this moment you don’t feel like doing an “official” practice, with breathing or mantras or energy running up the spine, just use what’s in your mind.

When you think of a charismatic actress or actor, for example, you are holding in your mind an image of their name (nama) and form (rupa). And if they have captured your attention, there is a feeling (bhava). So right there in that little thought you have the three classic props for meditation – nama, rupa, and bhava – and off you go. If you sit with your eyes closed and allow the natural rhythm of attention, you may drift beyond the name and form into subtle feeling, then into formless space in just a few seconds. Spontaneous celebrity worship can teach us something about how to let meditation feel natural and innate.

Meditation uses the senses to go beyond the senses. Breath is an internal massage, so we can go into meditation with the sense of touch and motion. Breathing is also an exchange of substance between our body and the ocean of air around us – so the sense of being nourished can carry us into a deep meditative awareness. When we enter meditation with the sense of hearing, called mantra yoga, we ride an inner sound into a groovy internal silence. Yantra practices employ geometric symbols to delight the sense of sight and engage our inner vision. Any sense, singly or in combination, can be used as a gateway into our inner life.

Thinking of someone we admire evokes a whole symphony of sensory impressions. Who to you is a chalice for beauty to enter the world? What quality of the human experience are they illuminating? If you are fantasizing about a celebrity or an actor, perhaps they breathe in a way that could be useful to you on your path. Maybe they have a way of moving through life that is courageous. Their voice may carry a resonance that has mantric qualities for you and can teach you about the power of speech. For many of us, the star in our lives is a child or grandchild, yoga teacher, or animal. Just to think of them is inspiring, fills us with love.

If you are meditating with a goddess mantra, and start thinking about Angelina Jolie or Jennifer Lawrence, you may be sensing the way they channel goddess energy in their roles. Your mind has not wandered; it is musing on something closer to home and wondering, “How do I live this energy? How do I work through the obstacles in my life?”

Dr. Lorin Roche has been practicing and teaching from the Vijnana Bhairava Tantra since 1968. He has a PhD from the University of California at Irvine, where his research focused on the language meditators generate to describe their inner experiences. The Radiance Sutras, a new version of the Vijnana Bhairava Tantra, is available from Lorin’s website: lorinroche.com. Email comments and questions to lorin@lorinroche.com or call (310) 570-2803. Become a fan of The Radiance Sutras on Facebook.

Dr. Roche does one-to-one coaching with individuals wishing to evolve their daily meditation practice and trains yoga teachers in how to teach meditation. Lorin is giving a meditation teacher training at Prana Yoga in La Jolla this June. Come to Esalen August 19-24, for Wild Serenity, a five-day immersion in movement and meditation with Lorin and his dancing Dakini wife, Camille Maurine.

Lorin Roche

Dr. Lorin Roche began practicing with the Vijnana Bhairava Tantra in 1968 as part of scientific research on the physiology of meditation. He has a PhD from the University of California at Irvine, where his research focused on the language meditators generate to describe their inner experiences. He is the author of The Radiance Sutras and Meditation Made Easy. With his wife, Camille Maurine, he wrote Meditation Secrets for Women. A teacher of meditation for 46 years, Lorin’s approach centers on how to customize the practices to suit one’s individual nature. Lorin leads the Radiance Sutras Meditation Teacher Training, a 200 hour certification program registered with Yoga Alliance. Lorin teaches regularly at the Esalen Institute and around the world.

www.meditationtt.com

The post The Celebrity Instinct appeared first on LA Yoga Magazine - Ayurveda & Health.