“The thing about meditation is: You become more and more you.”
Dear Yogini,
Meditation, dharana, is like your silent footfall upon the warm sifting of sand, your thoughts, grains of multicolored sand on the mandala of the mind, your attention alighting briefly, without regard. The mind is neither completely still nor empty of thought; it is just that you have become more adept over time and with practice at sinking beneath the habitual ripples of thought, the vrittis, to settle into the safe sanctuary of stillness within yourself where peace lies.
I came to meditation by way of a random compact disc and the sound of Jack Kornfield’s voice and gentle humor. The narration and brief meditative exercises softened the sorrow that sat in my heart after my father passed away, I would sit on my yoga mat and wonder where the energy was going to come from to engage my asana practice. I just sat and sat and sat. In essence, without realizing this at the time, I was sitting with my grief, with a sense of despair in the world.
My father’s memorial was held in Geneva, Switzerland (where I spent my adolescence). It would have been his 68th birthday—March 20th, 2003—the day a United States-led coalition of countries invaded Iraq (in breach of International Law) as part of a declared war against international terrorism and its sponsors, notably Al-Qaeda, following the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001. While the administration of U.S. President George W. Bush declared war on Saddam Hussein contending that the Iraqi government was in the process of developing (or had developed) chemical weapons and weapons of mass destruction, I stood in front of a sea of bodies and faces reading my posthumous letter to my father: “Dear Daddy…” Tears streaming, sobs caught in my congested throat, I gasped between words to catch my breath with the sincere hope he could hear me and know how many lives he had touched with his universally agreed-upon larger-than-life presence and generosity of spirit.
The mass of folk from all over the world—a testament to my father’s combined intention to befriend pretty much everyone he met and his lifelong plan to visit every country on the face of the planet (which he came pretty close to judging from the reams of paper in each of his multitude of passports)—spilled outside the physical bounds of the (Presbyterian) Church of Scotland. This Kirk stood near the hotel where we celebrated his life to the catchy beats of ABBA (his request) and in the company of family, his colleagues, and myriad friends.
I remember, on this beautiful Spring day, standing alone at the balustrade dressed in my purple—color of consciousness—cocktail dress, gazing out at the scintillating Lac Léman and Geneva’s most famous landmark, the Jet d’Eau, and contemplating the dichotomy between the peace of this singular moment in time and the shock-and-awe bombing campaign I understood to have just started in Iraq. Somewhere in that brief solitary moment the sounds around me faded, I saw nothing but the blue of the sky, a soft warmth pervaded my whole being, and I knew myself to be connected through some magic to the glory and spirit of my father or something vaster still that made me feel okay.
This was my first conscious understanding of meditation. I recollect many instances of absorption as a child and, given my proclivity to introversion and solitary pursuits from childhood to the present, this was perhaps more obvious to me than it might have been to most. Do you remember, dear yogini, when and why meditation became a part of your practice, if it is indeed something you practice, even sporadically? I once thought meditation to be the sort of practice that “other people” did. To be honest, I was a little above it at the time, which I’ll gladly attribute to my youth partnered with ignorance.
It’s ironic to hear folks explaining why meditation is not for them: “I can’t sit still and you want me to, what?” or “My mind is way too busy for that!” What better place to start a practice of meditation than with a busy mind! Of course, just the idea of sitting is an impractical impossibility if your body is restless and constantly seeking sensation or movement as distraction, which explains why Patañjali introduces your postural practice, or asana, as the third facet of practice, well before this monster of meditation. Your breath, remember, reflects your state of mind and has the singular capacity to influence the vagus nerve and the parasympathetic relaxation response, so attending to the breath, with the practice of pranayama to harmonize your nervous system, is advocated to precede the art of sitting for meditation.
Then there are your senses, a serious source of distraction given that your eyes, ears, nose, tongue, skin, and gut are constantly at play with the reality around you, and more and more devoted to seeking gratification outside of yourself. Do you notice how your attention gets swallowed up in the disturbing vortex of an accident on the highway or the gripping content of a reality show on television (or in the news), how you can become so entangled in someone else’s trauma or tragedy or caught up in the excitement of your adrenaline-laden virtual Amazon expeditions, only to become aware of being aware of how beholden you are to these distractions that are in actuality taking place outside of your immediate experience and separating you from yourself?
The same attention and awareness that brings you back from the brink of these sensory sinkholes—the practice of pratyahara—are also present in dharaṇa (contemplation) and brought to dhyana, or meditation, the seventh facet of our yogic path, as too to the initial states of samadhi. For most of us mere mortals, samadhi will be experienced as ephemeral moments of self-absorption—when we perceive the phenomenon of light’s spectrum in the rainbow after the storm, pause at day’s dawning to absorb the magic of the moment, appreciate the serendipitous encounters and coincidental contrivances of the universe at play, where, in that instant, we gain an understanding of what it is to feel ‘connected,’ at one with all, and at peace with one’s self.
Meditation, you see, is just the very simple practice of ‘plugging in.’ What is not so simple, and frankly quite daunting at times because of the plethora of obstacles, hindrances, and samskaras (conditioned patterns of perception and reactivity), is the sitting and being with the fickleness of the body and the mind. Meditation practice is really not not an option, not in this day and age of sensory overwhelm and soul deprivation. This idea is corroborated by the overused concept of “mindfulness” and purveyor of meditation in our present culture. You can spend a lot of money trying to figure out how to meditate, when to meditate, where to meditate, and how long to meditate for. The same holds true for yoga too, an industry which has grown by leaps and bounds in the last decade alone. There are such copious quantities of audiovisual, digital, online and the usual traditional resources nowadays, for yoga and meditation alike, that it is your responsibility, dear yogini, to be judicious in picking your sources of knowledge and any programming and training you choose to engage in. And while there are many platforms for practice, there appear to be fewer hours in the day and less-to-no space in our calendars in which to pursue our loftier intentions. And of course, do not neglect to attend to the resistances that reveal themselves to you in meditation; these are “truth-indicators” that help to guide you away from the resistance in the direction of meeting your own needs. Relish those quiet serendipitous moments when inspiration or insight arises in your consciousness and remember them when you may need them the most.
May you have a magical meditation experience.
Sincerely yours,
Nicole