"In the West, I do not think it advisable to follow Buddhism. Changing religions is not like changing professions. Excitement lessens over the years, and soon you are not excited, and then where are you? Homeless inside yourself."
– The Dalai Lama,quoted in Tibet, Tibet by Patrick French.
Keep in mind that Buddha called his path, "Going forth into homelessness," because for him, getting serious about The Path meant abandoning his wife and newborn son and walking off into the forest to starve himself. Look it up, and note your reactions. Do you have a thought-censor in your head saying, “No one is allowed to ever question anything Buddha is supposed to have done or said?”
What does this mean for you and me? For one thing, it is a good idea to consider that you do not need to imitate anyone else. Use the techniques of meditation to help you thrive in your life. You will be able to tell, by your own direct experience, what works for you.
Instinctive Meditation is for people who love and work and play, who have friends, jobs, children, and dreams. This is meditation to strengthen your zest for life and enhance your resilience. We want you to leap out of meditation, excited to go do things in your world. It is a fresh new approach based in the primary classic meditation techniques.
Traditional meditation teachings derive from the monastic traditions within Hinduism and Buddhism, and to a lesser extent, Christianity. Probably 98% of all meditation teachers historically have been monks, 1 % nuns. The teachings were designed by and for people who have taken the Vows – poverty, celibacy, and obedience. If you are not a monk or nun and yet you do their techniques, you won't get enlightened, you'll just wind up broke, lonely, and compliant.
Things That Have Nothing to Do With Meditation:
- Detachment
- Egolessness
- Emptying your mind
- Gurus
- Master/slave relationships
- Historical re-enactment of the Feudal system
- Bowing down to pictures of dead Asian males
- Vegetarianism
- Hindu gods or Buddhist non-gods
- Reincarnation
- Incense
- Devotion
- Sitting cross-legged
- Cultivating disgust for women
- Cultivating hatred of the human body
- Trying to kill desire and lust
. . .These Will Not Help You Meditate. They are all just aspects of Asian culture and religion as it was adapted for recluses. Much of what is called meditation is just diluted religion, primarily Buddhism or Hinduism and sometimes a light smattering of Christianity. For people who truly, in their hearts, are recluses, the practices of renunciation come naturally and are part of an amazing spiritual discipline that sometimes produces luminous human beings.
What Will Help You To Meditate:
Instinctive Meditation focuses on the skills you need in order to meditate and thrive in your daily life. Meditation lets you rest more deeply than sleep, and emerge refreshed with greater alertness. There are dozens of little skills involved in learning to meditate. These skills are similar to the kind of attention you use when listening to music, following a conversation, following the action in sports, communing with animals, and loving other people. In meditation, you engage those skills with your inner life, with your soul, in tender and gentle ways.
Every body responds differently to meditation – and changes second-by-second in that response. Since everyone is different inside, the teachings of instinctive meditation focus on how to adapt the standard classical meditation techniques to suit your individual nature.
"Do not believe in anything simply because you have heard it.
Do not believe in traditions simply because they have been handed
down for many generations.
-- Buddha, the Kalama Sutra
Instinctive Meditation is designed by and for people living in the modern West. It is primarily oriented toward people who have jobs, love lives, and families. The teachings are all about helping you to thrive in the midst of your daily life. Work. Love. Play. Rest. To-Do lists.
Instinctive Meditation is the opposite of traditional meditation in some respects. Instinctive Meditation focuses on supporting you to have a stronger ego, stronger boundaries, healthier instincts, good intuition, fast reflexes and an integrated personality. A richer sensual experience of daily life and lively engagement with action.
Traditional meditation teachings derive from the monastic traditions within Hinduism and Buddhism, and to a lesser extent, Christianity. Probably 98% of all meditation teachers historically have been monks, .01 % nuns. The teachings were designed by and for people who have taken the Vows – poverty, celibacy, and obedience. If you are not a monk or nun and yet you do their techniques, you won't get enlightened, you'll just wind up broke, lonely, and compliant.
What is a monk?Traditional meditation teachings are designed to be good for monks, or at least keep them out of trouble.
Embracing one or more of these will not help you meditate – far from it, they are just a set of Sanskrit or Tibetan terms to describe the way you just compromised your integrity. They will just interfere with your ability to meditate and translate the benefits of meditation into something useful for your daily life.
Most likely, tangling with these superstitions will make you quit meditating – about 95% or more of Americans who start meditating with Asian-flavored religions quit. This is actually healthy because it is better to quit than to persist in doing a technique that is bad for you, even if it has a cool name.
Many meditation teachers are actually priests and missionaries, and offer much more than I do: a religion, a god to worship, a cult leader who is the Pope of this god and must be obeyed, a diet, a set of rules, an altar to bow down to, and a sense of being dominated and controlled by a self-entitled male, or even a female dominatrix. These are all totally separate issues from each other, and each is a world of confusion, and none of them have anything at all to do with meditation. They DO have a little to do with historical re-enactment of the situations that gave rise to Buddha or Krishna.
The missionaries create an atmosphere rich in propaganda encouraging you to adopt at least some aspects of their religion, usually Hinduism or Buddhism, with their spiritual hierarchies, and the importance of obeying spiritual authorities. All this can be entertaining and hypnotic, but actually it has little or nothing to do with meditation.
Keep in mind, I have never in my life (in the 37 years I have been meditating) had a bad experience with a monk or nun, whether they be Hindu, Buddhist, Catholic, whatever. I love them. I feel deeply enriched by my exposure to the religious orders. But I am also an American, and it's my job to tell the truth about meditation.
Meditation is so often mixed in with these elements from Asian religion and culture that the actual skills of meditation are mostly overlooked. I have met innumerable people over the decades who sit cross-legged until their knees have arthritis, have photos of gurus on their altar, burn incense, live on high-concept diets that make them malnourished, and have taken initiations from high-ranking lamas, and they still don't know the first thing about meditation. They struggle with their thoughts, even after years and years of trying. They approach meditation as blanking out the mind, creating a white noise to drown the bickering voices in their heads. They have the paraphernalia but did not get the basic skills of meditation. Every year they are more pale and wan, more dissociated, less creative, more afraid and more obsessed with obtaining the guru's approval.
Learning the customs of India and Tibet is interesting, but it has nothing to with learning to meditate. And usually, the more complicated you make learning a skill, the worse you will do. If you want to use a computer, you don't have to bow down in the direction of Silicon Valley, and put a vacuum tube on a table and worship it as the Incarnation of the Deity of Electricity.
So – throw away everything you have ever thought or seen about meditation. Let's start fresh. Take a breath. Whew! Take another breath and make a whooshing sound, whew or huuuu.
Meditation can be a place and a time where you are suberbly relaxed and at home in yourself. That is what Instinctive Meditation is about.
One of the reasons that I teach the way I do is that many of my meditation friends over the past 38 years have changed religions, become Hinduized or Buddha-ized, and they really are homeless inside themselves. Imagine how many of this type of people the Dalai Lama would have to meet, for him to say what he said! When they close their eyes to meditate, it is as if they are a slave in ancient India or Nepal, groveling before their icons. They are much less free than before they started meditating. It is sad, and their plight and failures have taught me a lot.
This is why I focus on the process of meditation itself and how it fits into American lifestyles.
The downside of my approach is that my teachings are not as romantic and charming as they would be if I wrapped them in sanctimony. The upside is that I offer good clean coaching. Beginners and expert meditators with decades of experience can get individual instruction. I enjoy working with Catholics, atheists, agnostics, Buddhists, Hindus, Christians, surfers, athletes – it is much more fun for me to not be trying to convert them to anything. We can focus on the subtle internal skills of how your individuality meets the flow of life. Let religion be religion. Let food be food.
In Instinctive Meditation, you learn to be more and more at home in yourself.
Let Meditation be Meditation
Instinctive Meditation uses simple and life-based terms, because the more honest you are about your needs, what you need from meditation, the better you will be at it. The more your language reflects your inner truth, the more you will be able to align with it. For example, it is not clear than anyone is actually interested in "enlightenment," whatever that means. This is a cover story for something else – a quest, relief from pain or the burden of being an individual, escape from something, or a sense of permanent security that comes from the ideal of being "saved."
What I Do
In singing, there are voice coaches. They help you use your instrument properly
–– whether you are a rock singer or opera.
In tennis, there are tennis coaches. They help you develop your swing.
In body therapy, there are people who are trained to help you align your muscles and your joints in the way appropriate for your exact body at this moment in time.
In yoga, the teacher can observe your poses and adjust your posture.
Meditation is invisible internal behavior. So basically no one ever gets any coaching in the fine details. It is powerful internal behavior, and slight variations in how you "hold" your attention shape the way your energy flows, just as tiny variations in how you do any activity shape the outcome.
I am a meditation coach. My work involves helping you get a sense of your individual nature and how to meditate in a way that fits your adaptation to life and your evolution. We work together to help you learn to track yourself at the fine structural level of where your individuality meets the techniques of meditation.
Mostly what a coach does is help you to save time. If you had enough years, you would find, through trial and error, the approach and the techniques that work for you.
We believe in offering great meditation instruction and you keep your own religion.
No Groveling at the feet of Hindoo Gurus.
No robes. No sneaky conversion to asian religions. Just good clean information. The kind you need to thrive in meditation.
Instinctive Meditation is designed by and for people living in the modern West. It is primarily oriented toward people who have jobs, love lives, and families. The teachings are all about helping you to thrive in the midst of your daily life. Work. Love. Play. Rest. To-Do lists.
Instinctive Meditation is the opposite of traditional meditation in some respects. Instinctive Meditation focuses on supporting you to have a stronger ego, stronger boundaries, healthier instincts, good intuition, fast reflexes and an integrated personality. A richer sensual experience of daily life and lively engagement with action.
What is a monk?Traditional meditation teachings are designed to be good for monks, or at least keep them out of trouble.