Life in Balance: The Lifeflow Guide to Meditation

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Introduction

Being still and open is the blissful state in which we feel totally at peace with ourselves and the world.

Meditation is something we could all do naturally and easily as children––we just didn’t know what we were doing. If you observe a child watching something, completely absorbed, you see how still they become, how totally open and receptive they are, how concentrated their mind is and how comfortable they are in their body. The price of learning to think is that we lose this ability; in fact, it is often actively discouraged. I remember being told off as a child for daydreaming when I became completely absorbed in something. My parents were always telling me that I’d lose my head if it wasn’t screwed on!

The reason for losing this ability is that we can’t think and be in touch with our bodies at the same time. In fact, we spend surprisingly little of our waking lives in touch with our senses. Yet resting in the senses, receptive and aware, just taking in everything around us, is the natural state of our minds and bodies. Being still and open is a blissful state in which we feel completely at peace with ourselves and the world.

Meditation provides the means to consciously reintegrate the ability to become absorbed, while maintaining the skills of thinking.

The four streams of meditation

The meditation tradition has developed four distinct streams: Calm and Concentration, Insight, Tantra and Ethics. These have been developed because meditation is a tool that can be used in different ways to achieve different purposes. However, no matter what you are aiming for in meditation, everything rests on the calm, concentration and balance of the absorbed state, so this is where all meditation begins.

The stream of Calm and Concentration develops the skills of meditating, relaxing the body and calming the mind. It outlines how to deal with thoughts, keeping them in perspective so they do not drive us, and opens up the deep peace you experience when your mind and body are balanced and still.

The stream of Insight is a body of knowledge and practice for learning how to see clearly what is happening in our lives, how our consciousness and thought processes actually work, and how to avoid being caught in our emotions.

The stream of Tantra provides exercises for learning how to keep our emotions in a healthy state, so we can create good feelings for ourselves and learn to sustain them. This stream also allows us to come to know the naturally blissful state of our bodies, to understand our raw instincts and learn how to integrate and use them skillfully rather than being driven by them.

Finally, the stream of Ethics provides a way to apply the calm, clarity and emotional skill of meditation to our everyday actions. It opens up the possibility of basing what we do in our lives, and how we move our bodies through the world, on seeing clearly and responding directly to what happens, free from emotional conflict and ingrained habits. (These four streams are explained in more detail in Chapter 24.)

This book focuses on the stream of Calm and Concentration and is the first in a series of books dedicated to each stream of the meditation tradition. It explains how to balance your mind and emotions and maintain them in a healthy state. It also explores the advanced stages in Calm and Concentration and how to apply those skills to everyday life, to making major decisions and to studying and understanding emotions.

Meditation is a tool

Meditation is a tool for training the mind so that you can use it skillfully, creatively and productively and avoid being caught in the emotional traps which prevent us from living happy and useful lives. Meditation is learned in the same way you would learn a sport, craft, to play a musical instrument or to take up a discipline like science. You need to be guided skillfully by someone who has mastered it, and the more you are able to include it in your life, preferably as a regular practice, the more you progress.

Just sitting down to meditate doesn’t mean you will automatically reach a good state. Meditation is only a tool to achieve this and like any tool its use needs to be learned properly. I have met many people who have struggled for years with meditation, finding it very difficult or even impossible to meditate––often they assumed, or were told, that it was difficult. They were surprised to discover how simple it actually is when learned properly and, without exception, have been able to relate it to past experiences in their own lives.

For example, one woman remembered that she used to sit on the roof of a shed on the farm where she lived as a child. She loved doing this because she felt close to the sky and could see all around her. She would stay there for ages, feeling peaceful, still, in touch with everything around her and completely content. It was only when she experienced this same state in meditation that she recalled doing it as a child.

Maintaining your emotional health

Meditation brings your mind and body together so they work in harmony, with thoughts and actions supporting each other instead of being in conflict. In meditation practice you learn to achieve your balance––physically, emotionally and mentally––whenever you choose, and to rest in the core of your being. This is a state of keeping your cool, no matter where you are or what you are doing. You learn to understand your emotions and in particular, to avoid being caught in unhealthy emotions. Ultimately the aim is to be able to maintain your own mental and emotional health.

Since the Second World War, and the general prosperity the West has enjoyed, people have discovered that material wealth does not automatically lead to feeling good or happy. The upsurge in personal development and self-improvement, psychotherapy and self-help books bears witness to this, and they all rest on the promise of feeling better. However, everything that is self-focused is ultimately limited.

This is where meditation comes into its own because it is based on the understanding that our identity and sense of self is a product of how we think, so trying to feel better through thoughts doesn’t work– –being caught in thought itself is the problem. We forget, or didn’t ever notice, that feeling good is a feeling. It’s based in our bodies, not in our heads. Meditation takes you out of thoughts, out of the self, into a wider, deeper view: the world of the body and senses.

Meditation is used to rekindle the ability we had as children to become absorbed in our sense experience. This is the natural, blissful state of our bodies, and in the Zen tradition it is called our natural mind, or original mind. Meditation, therefore, is used to rediscover the mind we had before we learned to think. We can do this while maintaining and enhancing our thinking skills for two reasons: firstly because we can then become aware of our direct sense perceptions (as children we were not aware of what we were doing) and secondly, because when we know what it is like when we are not thinking, we can be aware when we are thinking, and instead of being lost in thought we can use it. Thinking becomes a skill that serves us well.

So meditation is an invitation to come home to the rich world of our senses. It’s a simple thing to do and easy to learn, but the effects can be profound and blissful.

The philosophical questions

Many people come to meditation with questions. These range from personal questions about health to philosophical questions they have been thinking, talking and reading about for years. For example, I was brought face to face with the fundamental questions about our lives in my teens. What makes us do what we do? Where does ambition come from? What drives us? Is it simply a need for love and approval? Where do emotions come from? Who are we trying to please and impress?

With meditation, you can observe your own mind, emotions, thoughts, reactions and mental processes. You can also study consciousness itself and the whole process of thought. Questions that philosophers, scientists and psychologists are still battling with were explored and answered in the meditation tradition thousands of years ago. The Eastern tradition has mapped this territory thoroughly and Western psychologists are now finding the insights and methods of this tradition extremely valuable in their own work. (My earlier book Insight and Love¹ is dedicated to the stream of Insight and to exploring the fundamental questions.)

When you begin to meditate you find that your mind becomes clear and alert––this kind of clarity is a natural consequence of an absorbed state of mind, which you learn in the stream of Calm and Concentration. As you learn to sustain this, you can become aware of things and points of view you normally would not notice. This quality of awareness allows you to see clearly into the habits, situations, emotions and assumptions of your own life. As you develop this awareness in your meditation, insights can naturally occur which enable you to change those habits and assumptions.

The answers or insights into fundamental questions gained through meditation practice have a direct effect on how we see ourselves, our lives, life itself and our place in the universe. These are not theoretical answers––ideas and thoughts that are interesting for a while but don’t actually affect your feelings and habits––but direct experiences that completely penetrate your mind and body. Your body and your own experience are an integral part of the answer.

Part One: Getting started

Chapter 1:    Setting the scene: what is meditation?

Chapter 2:    Beginning to meditate

Chapter 3:    Developing calm and concentration

Chapter 4:    The seven categories of meditation

Chapter 5:    The deepening stages of meditation

Chapter 6:    Spot Meditations

Chapter 7:    The Three C Technique

Chapter 8:    Letting go of emotions

Chapter 9:    The weather patterns of the mind

Chapter 10:  Informal meditations

Chapter 11:  Retreat

Chapter 1:   Setting the scene: what is meditation?

Mind training takes into account everything we experience, from the sensations and feelings of our bodies to the undercurrent of emotions and thoughts that run our lives.

The English word meditate means to think about something deeply or to reflect on something. It originally comes from the Latin word meditari, which means to reflect upon. If you did any kind of meditation in the Western tradition up until quite recently, you would have been given a theme or text to meditate on (to think about). If you were in holy orders, or even if you went to do a short retreat, all your meditation would be concerned with reflecting on ideas, prayers, verses and so on. So meditation has always been equated with thinking.

However, in the East, reflecting on ideas is only one form of meditation––there are many others (and they are all explored in this book). Therefore, meditation is not really the right word for this Eastern practice but it is the closest and most popular term for describing it. Meditation in the Eastern tradition is something quite new to our contemporary culture (although there were similar practices in the West during the Middle Ages).

The original meaning of meditation in the Eastern tradition is mind training or mental development. Mind training has nothing to do with either thinking about things or the vague, fuzzy state you might get into when you first set out to meditate. These are the two states of mind our culture is very familiar with and which we tend to take for granted. We’re either thinking and working hard, being sharp, planning and remembering, or we’re switched off and fuzzy or asleep––slightly comatose.

From a very early age in our culture we’re taught to look after our bodies. We feed, wash and clothe ourselves each day to maintain our physical health and we know that exercise is good for us. Most of us have spent at least ten years at school gathering knowledge and learning to think, so we also have a certain amount of mental training.

What about feelings? What training do we get emotionally? Every time I ask a student or client this question I invariably see a puzzled look until they realise that we don’t actually get any. One teenage boy answered this question very succinctly when he said, You wing it! It is left to chance and to what we pick up from our own parents’ behaviour and habits.

We also take for granted the idea that emotions are personal, involuntary, vague and caused by what happens around us or other people. However, in the East (for example, Tibetan culture) emotional knowledge and training has been developed to the same degree the West has developed physical, technological and scientific knowledge.

Meditation, in its original sense of mind training, takes into account everything we experience, from the sensations and feelings of our bodies to the undercurrent of emotions and thoughts that run our lives. It is possible to train our emotions and thought processes, to learn how to use them extremely skillfully and provide the basis for a happy, productive life. None of it has to be left to chance.

This chapter explores the basics of meditation, explaining how it actually works and what effect it can have.

What does meditation do?

Putting it simply, meditation is a tool for developing and maintaining mental and emotional health. We have much more control over this than we realise, and learning how to use meditation can save us from many of the problems that have become endemic and which are totally preventable.

Our mental and emotional health can also have a profound effect on our physical health. Dr Andrew Weill, in his book Spontaneous Healing, says: "All illnesses should be assumed to be stress-related until proved otherwise. Even if stress is not the primary cause of illness, it is frequently an aggravating factor²." I would add that the same applies to nearly all the common psychological problems which have become so prevalent.

Meditation moves the focus of your mind from your thoughts to your senses; from the endless conversation in your head––the plans, hopes, worries and fears––to your body and what you are actually experiencing. With meditation you can become aware of how your thoughts and emotions operate, see where they come from, how they relate to each other, and how they affect your body and your life, and learn to work with them with a great deal of precision.

Like all tools, meditation can be used skillfully or unskillfully depending on how well you learn to use it. A meditation teacher is exactly like a sports coach, mentor, or music teacher; you would take for granted having tennis or music lessons if you wanted to learn these skills. While you could eventually learn them by yourself, it would be a rather long and inefficient process. As human beings we learn best through imitation, by engaging our bodies, through watching and feeling what it is like when someone who knows how to do something shows us.

In summary, meditation is a tool for doing three things:

1.  maintaining your mental and emotional health by knowing how to calm and balance your emotions whenever you choose. By moving the focus of your mind from your thoughts to your senses you literally come to your senses and re-establish contact with your body. This brings your mind, body and emotions into alignment so they feel completely connected and balanced.

2.  developing the clarity of mindfulness and awareness. When your thoughts are connected with your body––with what you are doing and feeling––you are mindful of what is happening. Your thinking is focused on your sense experience and as you rest with this, your sense awareness opens up. Your senses are always aware, and you experience this without any thinking at all. As you open up to your inner sensations you also open your awareness to the world around you, because your sensations are the gateway to both your inner life and the outer world.

3.  exploring your inner life. As you rest with the inner sensory experience of your body, you open up the world of your inner experience. Your body registers everything that happens and has ever happened in your life. In meditation it is perfectly safe to open up to all this information. And, of course, it doesn’t stop with your personal experience. Your body is the repository of the coded, genetic information that is handed on from generation to generation, and so is the storehouse of all human experience. This is the world of your intuition.

Finding and maintaining balance

One of the most wonderful things about meditation is that you discover what it feels like when your body, emotions and mind are simultaneously balanced, which is an extremely blissful state to be in. It is the resting point of our lives, the space of deepest relaxation and maximum potential, both still and dynamic––an alert, clear and calm state from which it is possible to move in any direction. It is relaxed and poised, with all the senses alive and open.

Achieving this calm state of mind is the basis of all meditation practice. It is not necessarily an end in itself, but it is essential for training our minds. So it’s the place where all practice begins and the majority of meditation exercises exist for the purpose of bringing the mind to a calm and concentrated state.

The mind has two qualities––it can move and it can be still. When the mind is moving it scans different objects and thoughts, moving from one to another. When the mind is still it is open to everything. The way you bring the mind to stillness is to focus on a meditation object. It’s not the object itself which is important––just the fact that it serves as a single focus point on which your mind can rest. Naturally the mind moves away, but as you keep bringing it back, it gradually becomes calmer and calmer and eventually stays with the object and becomes still. It’s rather like training a puppy to sit––it keeps getting up, running away, looking for attention, but gradually learns to stay in one place.

As the mind becomes stiller, the object of meditation becomes less and less important and the mind opens to its natural, fundamental state of just being aware, without being aware of anything in particular. This is the stable core of our minds––the foundation of the mind––and is the great discovery of the meditation tradition. All meditation experience, inquiry and discovery are built on this foundation. It has many names––the heart of awakening, the mind of awakening, the ground of being, the core of our being, the natural mind. It is a clear, open, vibrant, spacious stillness, beyond separation and