The Beautiful Skills of Attention

Attention is tending. When you meditate, you are tending to your sore places, restoring circulation and equilibrium to all the nerves you overuse, all the places in you that are carrying too much responsibility or energy. The ability to do this is instinctive, and is similar to befriending. The kind of love we manifest or crave to receive in a healthy and loving relationship. This is the most challenging concept for most busy people to understand. People want instant relief.

What is a daily practice?

A daily practice is that which makes you thrive - something you do that sets the tone for your day. It is a time to set aside to do those movement, meditation and awareness practices that tune you up to function at your best. What works is different for everyone, and it can be quite challenging to discover what it is for you. The class is a supportive environment for you to bring your desires, your cravings for respite and inner peace and access to your own energy and inspiration. We work together to help you find daily practices of movement, prayer, and meditation so that you can rejuvenate and move forward.

Having a daily meditation practice is one of the most powerful things you can do for your physical, emotional and mental health. According to a series of research projects at Harvard Medical School, meditation enables the body to enter a state of rest much deeper than deep sleep. This happens even with beginners, and it happens in 5 minutes. Until recently, it was not even known that humans could rest so deeply. But relaxation and rejuvenation are not the only effects of meditation the brain wakes up in interesting ways, and fine-tunes its own functioning. Check out the scientific research section for more information about the benefits of meditation.

A meditation technique is a way of attending to the rhythms, pulsations of the divine energy flowing through us always — and out of which we are made. This is a sensual experience that leads to transcendence.

Whenever people start paying attention to the subtle energies of the body, they tend to discover or invent within themselves the same classic techniques. In this way, meditation arises from within. There are a hundred or so basic meditations, with innumerable variations. You can read a short ancient text here that briefly describes them.

From the introduction to The Radiance Sutras:

Meditation techniques alert us to the presence of the sacred that is always permeating our bodies. All of these methods involve savoring the incredible intensity underlying the most common experiences and they work by activating the senses, extending their range further into the inner and the outer world. The basic dynamics of life such as breathing, falling asleep, waking up, walking, loving, all of these are used as gateways into alignment and enlightenment.

Each meditation is a dive deeper into life, into the underlying reality of what life is. Balance is there at every step: the unshakable serenity of the depths is used as a foundation so that we can tolerate the electrifying vastness of the universe. We are invited to cross the threshold, walk through the guardians of the gateway, face the terrors and make our way into the immense and timeless depths that are always calling us.

Many of these meditations are surprisingly informal: notice a moment of powerful emotion, or hunger, or desire, and enter into the awareness of that with total abandon, so that you go with it right into the root of the movement of the universe. When making love, put your awareness into the flame of desire flowing through the body, and become that flame. When falling asleep, pay attention to the transition from waking consciousness to unconsciousness, and catch a glimpse of what consciousness is in itself. Or go outside on a moonless night and be there for a long time, simply merging with the darkness and vastness of space. The text also describes what we think of as traditional sit-down meditation techniques, ways of savoring breath, sound and internal luminosity. The informality and intimacy with the self implied in this teaching means that meditation is not a technique imposed from outside. Rather, the techniques emerge naturally from one’s relationship with the Self and with Life.

Beginning Again

If you have meditated in the past and want to get back into the practice of daily meditation, or occasional meditation, then treat yourself as a beginner. Select one of the books - Meditation 24/7 or Meditation Secrets for Women and slowly savor it.

Most likely the reason you stopped meditating was not lack of discipline - it was that you changed somehow. You may have fulfilled the intention of the meditation you were doing, or something in your body or your life changed - and so the meditation you had been doing was no longer appropriate.

I know lots of people who have never missed a day of meditation – they kept going, no matter what, decade after decade – and in general, I am not impressed with the results. If you meditated in the past and quit, there was a good reason, and for the vast majority of people, there was something in the technique you were doing that did not match your individuality, so it is good that you stopped.

Meditation is a built-in human ability, and your desire to meditate may be your inner wisdom urging you to let it help you in your life right now. From time to time, even if you have been meditating for years, your inner wisdom may prompt you to develop a new approach to your practice. A completely different style, or a slight adustment, or an opposite but complmentary technique.

No matter who you are, you have probably already meditated, in your own way, spontaneously. You may have been listening to music, watching a sunset, making love, gazing at the horizon, but almost everyone has meditated beautifully at some point in their lives. It is most likely the memory of that meditation that is calling you now, urging you on. Human beings are infinitely individual, so your way into meditation may feel and look different from anyone else's.

You don't need to know much before you begin – you can just start by meditating for a couple of minutes. playing with meditation, resting with meditation, exploring. Do the exercises for a few minutes here and there and do not use any effort at all. If you use any effort, it means you are trying to force yourself to do something unnatural.

Don't believe anyone who says that meditation is hard or unnatural. I have been teaching meditation for 38 years, and I will admit that the belief "meditation is hard" is nearly universal. Everyone seems to have it tattooed on their hands. Being alive is often painful, and in meditation, you feel everything. You feel your aliveness intensely. This is joyous, restful, exciting, rejuvenating and painful. But the word "difficult" is not apt. Many of the skills of meditation involve learning to pay attention in such a way that what was a "difficulty" is now a dynamic flow of energies that you are noticing.

A Little Review of the Basics

Meditation is ancient, and because it works so well so consistently, people have been raving about it for thousands of years, saying, "Check it out, this is such a great way to start your day."

The basic idea is, get clarity and relaxed focus and then plunge into action. Get centered in your essence and then go live your life.

My experience as a meditation teacher the past 37 years is that everyone can meditate. It's a built-in human instinct. When you read this site, you may be shocked, surprised, dismayed, and delighted. The primary reason for this is that the language I use is based in thousands of hours of listening to what works. The Holy Grail I pursue is, "what works for this individual?" Even though I love the old ways of talking about things, I feel obligate to tell the truth, even if it costs me. For example, people who just make their own way, develop their own techniques and don't have a guru, often do better than those who have all the "officially sanctioned" training.

Meditation is a Universal Human Ability

My work emphasizes the simplicity and naturalness of meditation. My experience over the past 38 years or so has been that virtually everyone can meditate and enjoy the practice. Meditation is a universal human instinct and ability.

The difficult part is that you can't do someone else's meditation. You have to do your own, because meditation is about your inner freedom and your unique approach to loving life.

What makes it interesting is that everyone has their own unique path into meditation. In listening to people – and I spend many hours a week just listening to meditators (beginning and advanced) talk about their experiences, I know that experience is very individual. Meditation is being intimate with life, and like all intimate relationships, it's infinitely varied and ever-changing.

Time Traveling

Hundreds of books on meditation from 300 B.C. to 300 A.D. are still in print. So when you browse meditation literature, you are time traveling. You are dropping in on a conversation that may assume that of course, you are a Buddhist of 100 B.C. and of course you are a homeless wanderer, like Buddha. Or of course you are a devout Hindu. Or of course you are Japanese, the only true humans, and you worship the Emperor, practice Zen, and also go to the Shinto temple to worship your ancestors. All these texts are interesting in the way that history and archaeology are interesting – wow, how people lived then – ten people living in a mud hut 10 feet by 10 feet, no sanitation, no health care, and you were OLD if you survived to 30! This is both good and bad. It's good because there are so many different techniques and approaches available. It's bad because the teachings are mostly rooted in the religions and tyrannies of the distant past.

American Style

I take a very different approach. I'm an American, in the modern West, and I love democracy. My work emphasizes meditation as it fits into a dynamic day, full of inventiveness, adapting to changing circumstances, and rich in ever-changing relationships. The language I use emphasizes passion, involvement, dynamic creativity, relatedness, intimacy, and adaptation – not robotic calmness and detachment.

I live in Los Angeles, where people move, change jobs, and interact with people from all over the Earth on a daily basis. In the apartment where I live, on the beach in Los Angeles, there are people from all over the United States and Canada, Mexico, South America, India, China, Iran, Germany, Sweden, Japan, and many other places. We are all here by choice. I was born here, about 10 miles away, and I live here by choice, but this is the exception. Almost everyone I know was born somewhere else and migrated here, for the freedom and opportunity, and the chance to follow their dreams. Everyone in Los Angeles is homesick for their homeland, and at the same time, they know that the homeland they love no longer really exists – there is no peace to be found back in Guatemala, Kyoto, Shigatze, Moscow, Berlin, Bombay, La Paz, Amsterdam, Santiago, Cairo, Wellington, Kabul, Buenos Ares, Copenhagen, Prague, Caracas, Taipei, Madrid, Manila. You have to find peace in your heart or not at all. At the average party I go to, there are people from all over the United States and the world.

The Way of the Ancients

In the ancient world, everyone lived in a feudal system. Birth was destiny. If you were born into the family of a potter, you became a potter. Harry Potter, or Sam Potter. If you were female, you did not have the choice of being a potter, you were married off at age 9 or 10 or 14, and had baby after baby, and almost all of them died. About 70%, on average, died before the age of 10. Everyone lived within 10 miles of where they were born, and they did whatever their father did, if they were male, and whatever their mother did, if they were female.

Resignation was Adaptive

There was very little choice about anything. Marriages were arranged. Your job was predestined. Everything about daily life – what you wore, thought, and did, was pre-arranged. You could have a lobotomy and still cruise through life, because you didn't really need your brain. A good life, in the past, was one in which you just surrendered and did what you were told. Anything creative you thought of was just going to get you in trouble, so it's better to kill off your individuality. So the meditation systems developed for those people emphasized helplessness, futility, and detachment. This was just realism – if there was NOTHING you could do about your circumstances, then you may as well cultivate resignation, and call it detachment.

Varieties of Meditative Technique

I am in love with meditation, with the incredible benefits it brings to daily life, and I am in love with the diverse ways meditation has been adapted to the needs of people in India of 200 B.C., Tibet of 1100 A.D., China of 1300 A.D, and Japan of 1400 A.D. I love all these variations in the way that I love music from all over the world. We are here, now in 2005, and I am an American. It's just that with rare exceptions, the ancient ways do not work for modern people. Very few Americans, South Americans, Canadians, or Europeans, are better off being HIndus or Buddhists. Bless them – the 3 to 5% of the population that wants to reject their own cultural tradition and embrace that of the opposite side of the world. Good on them, as they say. But that path, if it is a path, is not for everyone. Many of my friends like to talk about meditation in the old languages and old terminologies – if it was good enough for the people of 500 B.C., it's good enough for me. I love Sanskrit, but I love English more. It's a beautiful and creative language.

Meditation is a natural human experience. You go into meditative states if you just sit on the sofa, close your eyes, and listen to your favorite music. Notice you can turn the stereo off and just listen to the music in your head – you can remember the melody and rhythm. You can use any sensory pathway: hearing, vision, touch. You could sit and think of the best sex you have ever had. Select one moment, any moment, and notice how your senses are working or playing in that moment: what are you seeing, smelling, hearing, feeling, how does your body feel, how does your skin feel, what do you see in your mind's eye? Simply breathe with that memory and allow it to teach you about breathing and loving. Breathe any way you want but otherwise, hold still.

Honor your style of learning

You need to find your style of meditating. You can't do someone else's meditation – it will feel like an imposition, and your inner nature will rebel. Style has to do with how your senses work and your personal preferences. You find your style by exploring and not forcing anything. It is somewhat like shoes; shoes that fit do not hurt your toes.

You discover your style by noticing what works for you. Do not take the attitude that whatever your preferences are, they are wrong. Meditation is not internal chiding – that your mind should be more silent, that you should be more spiritual and compassionate, that you should recycle more. These are all fine, religious-type thoughts, that have their place. But that is not meditation.

In meditation, you witness your thoughts. The particular way you witness or attend to your thoughts, sensations and emotions is as complex as a golf swing, or a pitch in baseball, or playing piano or violin. When walking, the body responds to the uniqueness of each footfall. In meditation, your nervous system and body are changing and responding that quickly.

Instinctive Meditation is concerned with the secret, invisible inward skills that help people to thrive in meditation. You can do any meditation technique you want, belong to any tradition. There are a lot of advantages to belonging to a tradition. Meditation is inner behavior, and very few people ever get any coaching on what they are actually doing in there, when they close their eyes. Instinctive Meditation has emerged from close observation of the interface of the individual with the technique. Where do techniques come from? People make them up. The better the technique, the more it feels like something natural, not a technique at all.

Find your style and go with it.

Old School

Whatever you do in the realm of meditation, do not pollute the ecology of your inner life. Do not degrade your inner integrity. Oddly enough, this happens a lot. Meditation is a "traditional" field, which means that people like to do things the old way. The old ways in meditation are really old – the way it was done a thousand, two thousand years ago. That far in the past, most of the teachings were about breaking your spirit, so that you would become a submissive, tame, obedient member of a group of males living an impoverished existence in some monastery.

The other day I noticed that with some of my favorite teachers, I do not read their books. As long as they are alive, I want to see them in person. Then when I am away from them, I meditate on their presence. Other teachers, I would rather read their books and am not as interested in seeing them in person. This is just some feature of my inner style. I don't fully understand it.

-There are teachers whose books I read. I am not as interested in meeting them in person.
-There are teachers who are good writers but I don't care – I want to be in their presence.
-There are teachers who I want to do exercises with.
-There are teachers who I want to listen to on my iPod and in the car. I have their books but don't want to get the info that way.