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Meditation Point of Entry
By Swami Durgananda
(The excerpt reproduced here is copyrighted C 2002 by SYDA
Foundation, and is used with their express permission.)
Finding the right concentration technique for your meditation
practice means opening as many doors as possible.
In my early years of meditation, I wasted countless hours wondering
which technique to use. The teachers of my lineage offered several
basic methods: repeating a mantra, focusing on the space between
breaths, witnessing the thoughts. But an early mentor had told me to
decide on one technique and stick with it, and I reasoned that if I
had to choose one practice, it had better be the right one.
So I worried. I worried about which mantra to use, about whether to
meditate on the Witness—the observing awareness that remains
ever-present through all the fluctuations of our moods and mental
states—or follow my breath. I worried about when it was permissible
to leave the technique behind and just relax. It wasn't until I
stopped making techniques into icons that I began to discover how
liberating it can be to work with different practices at different
times.
We use techniques in meditation for a very simple reason: Most of
us, at least when we begin meditation, need support for the mind. A
technique provides a place for the mind to rest while it settles
back down into its essential nature. That's all it is really, a kind
of cushion. No technique is an end in itself, and no matter which
one people use, it will eventually dissolve when their meditation
deepens.
I like to think of meditation methods as portals, entry points into
the spaciousness that underlies the mind. The inner spaciousness is
always there, with its clarity, love, and innate goodness. It is
like the sky that suddenly appears over our heads when we step out
of the kitchen door after a harried morning and glance upward. The
Self, like the sky, is ever present yet hidden by the ceiling and
walls of our minds. In approaching the Self, it helps to have a
doorway we can comfortably walk through, rather than having to break
through the wall of thoughts separating us from our inner space.
Most of us already know which modes of meditation feel most natural.
Some people naturally have a visual bent and respond well to
practices that work with inner "sights." Others are more
kinesthetic, attuned to sensations of energy. There are auditory
people, whose inner world opens in response to sound, and people
whose practice is kindled by an insight or a feeling.
Once we become aware of how we respond to different perceptual
modes, we can often adjust a practice so it works for us. Someone
who has a hard time visualizing can work with an image by "feeling"
it as energy or as an inner sensation, rather than trying to see it
as an object.
A highly visual person might get bored with mantra repetition when
he focuses on sounding the syllables, but feel the mantra's impact
if he visualizes the letters on his inner screen. One person might
experience great love when repeating a mantra with a devotional
feeling, while a friend's meditation only takes off once she lets go
of all props and meditates on pure Awareness. Each person needs to
find his or her own way.
Perhaps the most important thing to remember about any practice is
to keep looking for its subtle essence. Every technique has its own
unique feeling, which creates an energy space inside. For example,
when repeating a mantra with the breath, a person might feel a
sensation of prana (vital force) moving between the throat and the
heart, as well as a subtle feeling of expansion or pulsation in the
heart space when the mantra syllables "strike" it.
Focusing on the space between the breaths, one might begin to feel
the breath moving in and out of the heart and notice a subtle
expansion of the heart space. One might notice that certain parts of
the inner body are activated by a particular practice; the space
between the eyebrows, for example, might begin to pulsate when one
imagines a flame there. Following the rhythm of the breath might
make a person especially aware of the currents of energy flowing
through the body.
That energy sensation, or feeling-sense, is the subtle effect of the
method and its real essence. It is the feeling-sense a technique
creates—rather than the technique itself—that opens the door into
the Self. For this reason, one effective way of going deeper in
meditation is to keep one's awareness moving "into" the
feeling-space created by the practice: into the sensation created by
the mantra as its syllables drop into one's consciousness, into the
sensation of the breath as it pauses between the inhalation and the
exhalation, or into the vividness of the object being visualized.
As we do this, we automatically release ourselves into a subtler
level of our being. This release will happen more easily if we can
allow ourselves to give up any feeling of separation from the
technique. Nearly always, when people have difficulties going deeper
into meditation, it is because they are keeping some sort of
separation between themselves and their method and between
themselves and the goal.
The antidote for nearly every problem that arises in meditation is
to remember that the meditator, the technique of meditation, and the
goal of meditation are one: that within the inner field of
Awareness, everything is simply Awareness itself.
Another reason to experiment with techniques is to keep from being
stuck in a particular method. Some people can take a single
technique and continue with it for a lifetime, going deeper and
deeper. Others, however, find that the original practice they
learned stops being effective after a time. Some people stick with a
practice they learned years ago, even when it no longer helps them
go deeper.
After a while, when the practice doesn't seem to work for them, they
come to feel that they aren't good meditators, or that meditation is
just too hard or boring, or even that it comes so easily they miss a
feeling of growth. Often their only problem is trying to enter
meditation through the wrong doorway or a door that once opened
easily but is now stiff on its hinges.
Ultimately no meditation practice is going to work unless you like
doing it. This piece of wisdom comes from no less an authority than
Patanjali's Yoga Sutra, a text so fundamental that every yogic
tradition in India makes it the basis for meditation practice. After
listing a string of practices for focusing the mind, Patanjali ended
his chapter on concentration by saying, "Concentrate wherever the
mind finds satisfaction.
" How do meditators know the mind is finding satisfaction in a
technique? First, they should enjoy it and be able to relax within
it. It should give them a feeling of peace. Once they've become
familiar with it, the practice should feel natural. If they have to
work too hard at it, that may be a sign it is the wrong practice.
Meditators who have received practices through a lineage of
enlightened teachers usually find that these practices are
especially empowered—infused with an energy that yields relatively
quick results as they work with them. Those without a lineage
teacher find that the sages of meditation have offered us countless
techniques—such as mantras, visualizations, practices of
awareness—that open up into the Self as one explores them.
I suggest spending some time experimenting with a particular
practice; work with it long enough to get a sense of its subtleties
and see how it affects meditation over time. When we clearly
understand that a technique is not an end in itself but simply the
doorway into the greater Awareness, we can begin to sense which
doorway is going to open most easily at a particular moment. Some
techniques energize while others kindle love or help quiet an
agitated mind.
Of course, we don't want to become technique junkies, flitting from
one method to another and never going deeply into any single method.
However, playing with different practices helps us get to know
ourselves and discover what works best. Everyone's road is unique,
and ultimately no one else can tell a person what he or she needs.
That's why there aren't any rules about the "best" way to meditate,
except that a practice should soothe the restlessness of the mind
and make it easier to enter the interior silence. This is discovered
only through practice.
Swami Durgananda, a female monk of the Siddha Yoga Meditation
lineage, is the author of the forthcoming book, The Heart of
Meditation: Pathways to a Deeper Experience (SYDA Foundation), from
which this article was excerpted.
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