Eliminate Mental Clutter Through Meditation

[stone]

Originally Posted by gypsy tears

Stoney, there is no Ego in Buddhism from what I've been reading. If ego is self and there is no self... .

I'll have to think on this and get back to it .

....

So, who/what is it that knows there is no ego?

[nandm]

Make it a point to sit down when you eat. When eating, be mindful (or aware) of each mouthful of food. Notice the texture as well as the taste. Chew slowly, savoring the flavor. Put down your fork between each mouthful. Eating more mindfully allows us to more fully enjoy our food and aids proper digestion. In addition, eating slowly gives our stomachs time to register the feeling of fullness, which reduces overeating.

If you often overeat, ask yourself why. Are you using food as a drug? To reward yourself? To fill a void? To cope with emotions or escape from life's problems? Try to get in touch with the real reason you overeat. It might be helpful to see a counselor who can help you sort it out. Once you know why you are overeating, you can begin to feed the real need within you.

[JT]

If I understand correctly the goal is to not be a prisoner to our thoughts or our ego...we are to be an observer....the true self.

[gypsytears]

Thanks JT. That certainly sounds plausible .

[gypsytears]

If you drive a car or ride a motorcycle or bicycle, use a few mindful breaths to calm you and bring you in tune with your vehicle and the act of driving or riding before you turn on the ignition or right after you mount your bike. Notice how you're holding your body, and let your breathing help you relax your shoulders, soften your face. See if you can break the pressure of pushing to get where you are going and simply enjoy the process of getting there. When you see a red traf?c light, allow that to be a bell of mindfulness and an opportunity to come back to your breath; relax your face and see whether a smile is possible. When someone cuts you off, try using awareness of your breath to calm your anger and fear.

from : DAILY LIFE MINDFULNESS

[gypsytears]

Showering meditation
Other activities that can also be used include simple things like showering or brushing our teeth. When you shower mindfully, you can be aware of the physical actions, such as rubbing soap onto your body, or the way you shampoo your hair. You can be aware of the water hitting your skin and running down your body. You can be aware of how your mind tends to think about what you’re going to be doing next, and get into the habit of bringing your awareness back to your physical experience. (Remember that the point in being mindful is not to think about your experience but simply to notice it.

from : Mindfulness and daily activities | Wildmind Buddhist Meditation

[nandm]

Get in touch with your emotions. Crying doesn't always mean you're sad. Sometimes we cry out of joy. Or we cry out of anger and frustration. And sometimes we take out our anger on people and things that are not at all our real targets. Ask yourself at regular intervals throughout the day: "How am I feeling?" "What do I need?" If you're reacting because you're tired, take a nap. If you want to unwind, call a friend. If you're stressed out, do some deep breathing.

[nandm]

There's no doubt that relationships are one of the most important components of our lives. Then why is it that we barely spend a moment thinking about them? Are you taking the time to reflect on how your relationships are going right now? Don't wait for signs of trouble before you start paying attention.

[gypsytears]

Assertive Mindfulness;

This is one that I have used often is being mindful of what I can change and what I cannot change.

Stop what ever you are doing whenever disturbed.

Bring to mind the Serenity Meditation;

• Accept the things I cannot change

• Change the things I can,

and

• Wisdom, to know what I can or cannot change.

Remember the ‘what it takes’ and ‘how to be’ skills mentioned above.

The wisdom usually comes after a few minutes or seconds. However, big problems can take longer.

from: Mindfulness for Recovery at Recovery Is Sexy.com

[nandm]

Visualize This: Therapy not working? Use meditation to break negative patterns in your life.
By Megan Othersen Gorman , Megan Othersen Gorman is a frequent contributor to Prevention Magazine.


Intro
It isn't easy feeling sorry for a model.

Kathy Freston used to be one, and you can tell. The 39-year-old author and meditation counselor is intensely beautiful: all long legs, gobs of hair, deep blue eyes that shine with warmth and intelligence, and a used-to-be-shy, nice-girl vibe. Yet for a woman who looks as though she could have George Clooney, Brad Pitt, and Colin Farrell wrapped around her finger all at once, her choices in men were once baffling.

"They were just plain bad," Freston admits, "terrible, really. Not only did I date men who were completely wrong for me," she says, "but I also tended to go out with guys who somehow drained my energy. Some were just boring, a couple were alcoholic, and one was downright abusive. I kept wanting to see something that just wasn't there, and I would try desperately to make right what was wrong. I scrambled to fill my heart with the illusion of love."

It's a familiar story, really--almost a cliche. Girl meets boy. Girl gets boy. Girl gets slammed by her own fool choice but still wants boy. Turn on Jerry Springer, and you can catch it every day. But for Freston, it wasn't just about the boy. Her neediness was driving her life. She desperately wanted the Cinderella ending: to be transformed into a beautiful princess through someone else's love. By the time she recognized her own personal story line, she was losing friends, jobs, money, and nearly herself.

In the end, though, it was Freston who rode to her own rescue in an offbeat, even inspired, way: She started meditating.
The Science of Monk Minds
Once considered strictly for hippies, meditation is offered in schools, hospitals, corporate offices, even prisons. It's to this decade what aerobics was to the '80s--the class you can't miss if you're truly interested in improving your health. It's even caught the eye of the medical establishment.

Of course, scientists have known for many years that meditation has a positive, short-term effect on the nervous system. In 1975, Herbert Benson, MD, who would go on to found the Mind/Body Medical Institute at Harvard Medical School, published a slim volume called The Relaxation Response, in which he introduced the idea--revolutionary at the time--that meditation can reduce the effects of stress and improve physical health by slowing heart rate, breathing, and metabolic rate.
The book became a runaway bestseller and marked the beginning of the American medical establishment's serious interest in alternative therapies. But it wasn't until the technological leaps of the past decade made it possible, through powerful scans, to actually see how meditation affects the brain. Only then did meditation morph into what many docs now consider truly worthy of scientific inquiry.

Richard Davidson, PhD, has studied the brains of the most-dedicated meditators on the planet for 10 years now. Director of the W. M. Keck Laboratory for Functional Brain Imaging and Behavior at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, he had long studied the nature of positive emotion when, in 1992, he received a fax from Tenzin Gyatso, the 14th Dalai Lama, essentially volunteering the minds of his monks. In the Buddhist tradition, meditation aims to calm the mind--to defuse sources of negative emotion and to cultivate more healthful emotional states. Davidson wired the monks to measure their neural impulses and ultimately found that meditation did reduce stress and defuse negative emotion for them. It also apparently facilitated more rapid, spontaneous recovery from negative reactions--exactly what Freston herself promises in her new book, Expect a Miracle: 7 Spiritual Steps to Finding the Right Relationship.

"Meditate for just 20 minutes a day, every day," she says, "and you will create the space in your life you need to truly listen to your heart, to fulfill its strongest desires, and to transform your life. That's why I call my own form of spiritual practice transformational meditation, because it brings forth positive, healthful, and permanent changes in your outlook on life, which is you at your deepest, most fundamental level."
And indeed, Freston may be right. In a study published in the Journal of Psychosomatic Medicine in 2002, brain scans of new meditators who were guided in meditation for 3 hours a week for 8 weeks showed significant increases in activity in a part of the brain associated with positive emotion. What's more, the heightened activity persisted for at least 4 months after the experiment when the study participants were scanned again. Meditation, it appears, literally changes the brains of those who practice it.

"When you show up daily for conscious contact with a higher power, what you're essentially doing is infusing your day/your personality/your world with the grace to trust in yourself and the universe," says Freston. "You can't think your way to that kind of optimism. You can only get to it through your heart--by closing your eyes, breathing deeply, and listening to the truth that resides there."

But Freston's twist on meditation takes it beyond listening. There's some talking too. In her version, while you've cocked an ear to your inner voice, you're also planting a "spiritual intention"--a vision of what you want out of life, love, the universe. It's not like a wish granted by a genie. And it's not for material things. "As you repeat an affirming mantra, such as 'I am still and centered. In my stillness, I am magnetic to miracles,' you're also visualizing what it is that you want in your life," she says. "For most people, it's love. To be seen, to be loved, and to rise to one's highest potential. To be who you are and to be loved wholly and completely and healthfully for it."


Escaping a B-List Life

As a model, Freston worked steadily, initially in Paris, doing a lot of catalogs, which is why her face may be familiar but not her name. In model world, this is not A-list work. It's a living, of course, but it's one in which rejection is implied, because if a model has landed coveted editorial or runway jobs, she doesn't do catalogs. Ever.

"I was 17 when I started, a nerdy girl from Atlanta with mall hair, zits, and an intense desire to please," says Freston. "And I just never felt like I fit in. The successful models were so cool. They would walk into a room and own it. I was less sure of myself and went through a lot of rejection--which, of course, made me feel even less confident. I remember photographers leaning in close, staring intently at my skin, and talking rapidly in French among themselves. Then they would send me home from the job--because of my pimples or maybe because I looked tired or insecure to them that day. It was a constant battle to keep up my self-esteem."
The local bibliotheque, of all places, supplied an escape hatch. Freston had become a model when most girls were going to college, so books were her teachers. "I read everything I could get my hands on about religion, philosophy, psychology, and alternative therapies," she says. "There was so much attention placed on how I looked, what my day rate was, and where I was booked next that I needed to go inward to find some validity--something that was going to make me feel okay when I was constantly feeling less than okay. I could have gone in the other direction, of course, gotten really angry and acted out--a lot of girls I know experimented with drugs and alcohol. But I didn't. I experimented with meditation; I learned about prayer."

But she also hooked up with men who tended to reflect how she felt about herself--lemons, nearly every one. It was one in particular who stung the most. "When I was in my mid-twenties, I met this guy," she recalls. "Something in me immediately connected with him, and it was powerful. At first, everything seemed great. He hotly pursued me, and he was successful, so that was very flattering to me. I fell head over heels in love with him. Then he started cheating."

Freston left him.

Then she took him back.

Then she discovered he was still cheating.

Then she left him.

Then she took him back.

Then she discovered he was still cheating.

Repeat seven times.

The pattern, while excruciating, became what Freston knew, accepted, and even expected of their relationship. It became her pattern. "Every time I came back, I got more and more attached to him and, at the same time, more and more degraded," she says.

"I felt so ashamed, because I knew I shouldn't be with him, but gradually I came to feel as though he was the only person who could make me happy ... if he would just change. So I began to police his world. I'd spy on him, check up on him. My world became all about him."

Freston began to look haggard. She lost modeling jobs. She lost money. She lost most of the people she then counted as friends. (They simply found it too painful, she says charitably, to watch her spiral out of control.) "I was pathetic," she says. "I hated looking at myself in the mirror."

When Freston did catch a glimpse of her reflection, she says, she didn't see her undeniable beauty. She saw desperation, and she believes that's what other people saw too. "We're all constantly communicating who we are through our physical being--through the vibrations our bodies exude," she says. "If you feel desperate and afraid, as I did, people sense that. They might not see a desperate person when you enter a room, but they sense something in you that they're not crazy about. It's your fear. It's palpable, and it's repellent.

"As Marianne Williamson says, 'A thought never leaves its source.'" Williamson, whom Freston quotes frequently, is the author of the New Age blockbuster A Return to Love and seven other books. It was Williamson's teachings and the steps advocated by Alcoholics and Codependents Anonymous to which Freston turned to get a grip. "I started putting together what I knew of spirituality and psychology," she explains, "because at their very best, I think that they ultimately get to the same thing."

What Freston got to was this: "I came to understand that I was always sort of looking for 'the one' and wondering why he wasn't showing up," she says. "It took 4 years with a boyfriend who was cheating on me for me to finally, finally realize that the common denominator in all my relationships was me. I was the one who was giving out my phone number."

In Expect a Miracle, Freston quotes Buddha: "We are what we think. With our thoughts, we make the world." "Once I understood that--really understood it--I began to purposefully think differently," she says. "And my life changed dramatically. It was pretty simple, really. Pretty miraculous, but pretty simple."


Meditating for the Perfect Blind Date
As it did with the Tibetan monks, meditation changed Freston's brain.

"Meditating transformed my energy from that of fear and desperation to quiet, hopeful confidence," she says. "It taught me how to be still, to be present in my life, and to attend to what I'm doing and how I'm feeling as opposed to what he's doing or how he's feeling. It gave me the strength, the focus, and the hopefulness I needed to break off my relationship for good."

As Freston tells it, she didn't hurl the random bookend or shriek obscenities: She simply left and stayed gone. She was finally that strong. "When you're constantly reacting to someone else, you're distracted," she says. "And that distraction keeps you weakened and away from the truth of who you are and what you're doing--and from your perfect relationship." Her own began a year later, on a blind date.

In the intervening months, Freston had morphed from model into meditation counselor. Her blind date was Tom Freston, chairman and CEO of MTV Networks. The two clicked immediately. "Tom's funny; he's lighthearted; he's full of love," says Freston. "He's as positive as my other relationships were negative--the yin to their yang. Yet I honestly think that if I'd met him several years earlier, he wouldn't have been interested in me nor would I have been able to see him. I was in a positive place when I met Tom; I was projecting positive energy. So I attracted a wonderful, positive man."
And a guy who was positive about her. "Tom was the first man I was attracted to who thought good things of me, who didn't put me down. I can be talking to him and have this huge piece of spinach in my teeth, and he'll tell me I look so beautiful. He really won't see the spinach in my teeth. He views me through a filter of 'Kathy is great.'"

But make no mistake: While she got her happy ending--she and Tom married 5 years ago--Kathy Freston isn't living the fairy tale she'd always wanted. The little girl in the cinders saved herself long before the handsome prince came along. She believes that Tom thought, "Kathy is great" because Kathy thought so too.

As a meditation counselor, she has a long list of clients ranging from novice meditators to cancer patients, most of who come to her through referrals. She finds the work spiritually nourishing. "I am a wholly different person now," she says. "I feel I can rise to my highest potential, not just because of Tom, but because of me."


A Cheat Sheet for New Meditators

Step 1: Be still. Find a quiet space that's both private and inspiring. It can be outside, in a church or temple--even a corner of your bedroom. Sit or lie down, close your eyes (to help you relax), and set a kitchen timer for 3 minutes, so there's no need to worry over when to end the meditation. As your comfort level rises, gradually increase the length of time you meditate to 20 minutes a day or, ideally, twice a day.

Step 2: Invite in the divine. Make your meditation space a sanctuary for spiritual practice by adding an element or two from your spiritual life--perhaps a candle, crystals, a cross, a Buddha, a picture of God as you understand him, even a tiny bunch of flowers--to remind you of why you're there. "When you create the space," says Freston, "action will follow."

Step 3: Have a spiritual intention. Start by repeating an affirming mantra, one that's spiritual and meaningful to you. Use it to help empty your mind and to relax as fully as you can. Then visualize what it is that you want out of life--what you want your world to include and how you want it to feel. ("For me, it's always about having serenity and creativity," says Freston.) Then actually invoke the presence of the divine, thanking God or the universe for what you have--or simply for help in the meditation process.

Step 4: Pay attention to what comes up. In the stillness you create, you will notice thoughts or feelings--some of them negative, some of them not--that you may not have been aware of because you had been masking them with activity. Don't try to make them go away. They are what's truly in your heart.

Step 5: Surrender. In other words, accept that things don't always go according to your plan. Relax under the strain of your self-imposed rules and actions. Dispense with your frustration or any negative emotions you might feel. Trust that everything will be okay. And surrender to the idea that miracles are your highest potential.

"My work in meditation, both as a counselor and a practitioner, is rooted in the belief that we create our own reality, that healthy relationships can occur only when we are healthy inside," says Freston, who says that the more she meditated, the more positive, confident, and cognizant of her own self-destructive patterns she became. "Healthy," in Freston's own Al-Anon-meets-the-Dalai-Lama jargon, primarily means mentally relaxed, emotionally supple, strong. "We tend to give our energy to what we fear instead of what we hope for," she says. "When you meditate, you do the opposite, strengthening your focus even as you direct it on what's affirming, what's positive. And as a result, you become more positive, you become healthier--and you start to draw people who are healthful for you to you."

[gypsytears]

Whoa Nandm! That's a long post. I must go back now and read it mindfully .

[nandm]

Originally Posted by gypsy tears

Whoa Nandm! That's a long post. I must go back now and read it mindfully .

:rof yes, as an afterthought I should have split it up into parts

[stone]

"Alanon meets the Dalai Lama", lol!

Good stuff though. I like the 5 steps.

[gypsytears]

Waiting Meditation
By Martha Henry





If I’m waiting for the subway, and it hasn’t come, and it should have come ten minutes ago, and two trains going in the opposite direction have pulled into the station, loaded up passengers, and gone on their merry way, and meanwhile, the crowd waiting with me is growing in size and growing in impatience, I often meditate.

I notice my reaction, my increasing level of stress, and how I’m amplifying my own unhappiness. If I’m lucky enough to be sitting on a bench, I close my eyes and begin to follow my breath. I try not to be in a waiting state of mind.

Sometimes this strategy works. Sometimes it’s completely unsuccessful, and after a few breaths, I’ll stand up, stomp my feet on the platform, and wonder where the hell the train is.

Perhaps I’d be better off just calmly waiting, rather than trying to meditate. My attempt to use the time constructively — to make every moment a productive one — seems like a particularly American flaw. It’s an aggressive impatience. Instead of seeing waiting as one of life’s inevitabilities, I see it as wasted time.

And then there is waiting for Peter. We started seeing each other a few months ago, and though there is much to like about the man, he is chronically late — usually by minutes, sometimes by hours.

I, however, am always on time, by which I mean never more than five minutes late. This contrast in our temperaments leads to friction. Yet if there’s one thing that I’ve learned from past relationships, it’s that people fundamentally don’t change. I’m not naïve enough or optimistic enough to think that I can break Peter of his lateness habit. Maybe there’s even something admirable about his disregard for time. Maybe not.

So I’m trying to adjust. I’ve learned to have Peter meet me at my apartment so at least I’m at home, rather than standing on a street corner, as the clock ticks on and he hasn’t yet arrived. Lately, I’ve decided to meditate while I wait for him. I sit on my cushion and try to examine my eagerness to see him, as well as my annoyance at his lateness, and then hopefully drop all that and get down to following the breath.

Because of Peter’s lateness, I’m meditating more than usual and in slightly different ways. For one, I’m much better dressed. I usually meditate in a t-shirt and yoga pants. Since I’ve known Peter, I’ve meditated in lipstick, mascara, and sometimes a little black dress. I also don’t know how long I’ll be meditating. I don’t set a timer — instead the meditation ends when the doorbell rings and I bound up to answer it.

But this waiting meditation makes me question my intentions. I’m clearly not meditating for the benefit of all beings. Rather, I’m mediating so that I won’t be bitchy when my boyfriend arrives. It’s a defensive meditation, perhaps trying to make the most out of a trying situation, but it’s completely dependent on someone else’s schedule, or lack thereof.

What I’m really striving for is compassion for who he is — and also for who I am. I want to be accommodating, but not too accommodating. Peter has been making an effort to be on time. I’m making an effort to be less impatient. Is it possible to create a loving relationship out of our two, often at odds, identities?

We’ll have to wait and see.

[stone]

RELAXING BY STRESSING

A very effective method to relax the body by stressing all the muscles, holding that 5 to 10 seconds, and then releasing the tension.

- Sit or lie in a relaxed way.
- Put an extremely tense expression on the face, straining as many face muscles as possible. Take a deep breath and forcefully hold it. ......
- Now slowly release the breath and the tension of all the face muscles, feel as if you breathe out all stress.
- Inhale deeply again and stress all neck and shoulder muscles.... then let go
- Inhale, make fists and stress the arms... let go
- Inhale, stress chest, belly and back.... let go
- Inhale, stress buttocks, legs and feet... let go
- If you still feel tension at some places, just stay relaxed, don't hold the breath now, but release all the tension while breathing out.
- Enjoy your relaxed body

[stone]

<object width="425" height="355"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/BWIrr_Q7uD8"></param><param name="wmode" value="transparent"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/BWIrr_Q7uD8" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" wmode="transparent" width="425" height="355"></embed></object>

[nandm]

Thank you stone, great contributions.

[nandm]

How do I know I'm meditating?

Whew! THis is a hard one. Meditation means different things to different folks. To a religious person, meditation may mean contemplation of God, in prayer or study. To a Zen practitioner, it is entering a space of "sacred emptiness." To a Transcendental meditator, it could be the mental repitition of a sound to the exclusion of all else. And that's just for starters. There are infinite roads to that intangible state called meditation, yet there is a commonality running through all its forms.

[nandm]

The stages of meditation

As you develop your practice of meditation, you will most likely find yourself moving through progressively deeper levels of stillness.

When you first meditate, you will get drawn into the mind's drama, then you will realize you've been drawn in. Little by little you begin to watch the mental activity. As would a benevolent observer, you just watch the mind. This is the process of the fifth of Patanjali's eight limbs, praryahara, or inner focus.

With practice, your mind will eventually settle down and behave itself. By aligning the breath and the inner focus, you experience one-pointed concentration. You find that you are able to direct your mind with your will and imagination. This is the realm of dharana.

As you go deeper, you will open into an inner space of awareness that changes constantly, yet you are solid and sitting, aware of all your thoughts without being involved in them. This is dhyna.

The last of the eight limbs of yoga is samadhi, the master realm of total identification with the spirit. You live as one who is grounded in what is often called higher awareness, or your higher nature.

[mike_mass]

I've been doing Zen meditation for over 6 months now with a group that meets Monday nights in Worcester. I have really grown to like it. I find that the practices I learn there (staying in the present, breathing) can be applied throughout the day.

[nandm]

Yoga means literally to yoke, to unite, to be whole. It comes from the ancient Indian language of Sanskrit. The Sanskrit word "yug" is the great-grandfather, so to speak, of the English word "yoke." Yoga's aim is to unite the body, mind, and spirit.

Every philosophy, every religion, and every therapy addresses the human need to feel whole. That's because when you feel whole, you feel happy, with everything finding its place---and its peace. This is where yoga comes in, harmonizing body, mind, and spirit.

A life that incorporates a practice of yoga is a healthy, happy, whole life, as modern as it is ancient. Even better, you don't have to believe anything in particular, or even give up on your own beliefs to practice it, because yoga is just between you and yourself. Yoga "yokes" all the separate parts of you into an integrated whole. This is why many people say that yoga makes them feel peaceful: You feel at peace when you are not conflicted, when your mind is not tugged in ten different directions, and when your body is relaxed.

You may experience what dedicated yoga practitioners confirm: That a peaceful calm seems to emanate from them and transform their relationships with others. When you practice yoga people will say, "You seem different somehow. I can't quite put my finger on it, but it's there." What they are sensing is your inner peace.

[nandm]

"A rose by any other name smells as sweet," and yoga by any other name creates health and inner peace. Taking a few deep breaths before you do something rash is yoga. So is stretching your body toward the sky while taking a deep breath, then letting it hang forward as you exhale, after a long stretch of driving. You can call these practices whatever you like, but the tool, the technology, and the process of getting to a place of peace within yourself began in a land that, in its original language of Sanskrit, called it yoga.

Forget those images of acrobatic backbends and pretzel-like postures! You are not required to be in perfect pysical shape to do yoga. Yoga is vastly adaptable. It works for you simply if you are alive and breathing.

TRIVIA:
Yoga journal magazine recently commissioned the Roper Poll in the US to do a nationwide survey exploring people's views on yoga. It found that 6 million Americans practice yoga regularly. An additional 16 million expresssed an interest in taking classes.

[stone]

Can Meditation Be Fun?
by Alan Watts

What we call meditation or contemplation -- for want of a better word -- is really supposed to be fun. I have some difficulty in conveying this idea because most people take anything to do with religion seriously -- and you must understand that I am not a serious person. I may be sincere, but never serious, because I don't think the universe is serious.

And the trouble comes into the world largely because various beings take themselves seriously, instead of playfully. After all, you must become serious if you think that something is desperately important, but you will only think that something is desperately important if you are afraid of losing it. In one way, however, if you fear losing something, it isn't really worth having. There are people who live in dread, and then drag on living because they are afraid to die. They will probably teach their children to do the same, and their children will in turn teach their own children to live that way. And so it goes on and on.

But let me ask you, if you were God, would you be serious? Would you want people to treat you as if you were serious? Would you want to be prayed to? Think of all the awful things that people say in their prayers. Would you want to listen to that all the time? Would you encourage it? No, not if you were God.

In the same way, meditation is different from the sort of things that people are supposed to take seriously. It doesn't have any purpose, and when you talk about practicing meditation, it's not like practicing tennis or playing the piano, which one does in order to attain a certain perfection. You practice music to become better at it, maybe even with the idea that you may someday go on stage and perform. But you don't practice meditation that way, because if you do, you are not meditating.

THE PRACTICE OF MEDITATION

The only way you can talk about practice in the context of meditation is to use the word practice in the same way as when somebody says that they practice medicine. That is their way of life, their vocation, and they do it nearly every day. Perhaps they do it the same way, day after day -- and that's fine for meditation too, because in meditation there is no right way and there is no idea of time.

In practicing and learning things, time is usually of the essence. We try to do it as fast as possible, and even find a faster way of learning how to do things. In meditation a faster way of learning is of no importance whatsoever, because one's focus is always on the present. And although growth may occur in the process, it is growth in the same way that a plant grows.

THE ESSENTIAL PROCESS

This is the beginning of meditation. You don't know what you're supposed to do, so what can you do? Well, if you don't know what you're supposed to do, you watch. You simply watch what is going on.

When somebody plays music, you listen. You just follow those sounds, and eventually you understand the music. The point can't be explained in words because music is not words, but after listening for a while, you understand the point of it, and that point is the music itself.

In exactly the same way, you can listen to all experiences, because all experiences of any kind are vibrations coming at you. As a matter of fact, you are these vibrations, and if you really feel what is happening, the awareness you have of you and of everything else is all the same. It's a sound, a vibration, all kinds of vibrations on different bands of the spectrum. Sight vibrations, emotion vibrations, touch vibrations, sound vibrations -- all these things come together and are woven, all the senses are woven, and you are a pattern in the weaving, and that pattern is the picture of what you now feel. This is always going on, whether you pay attention to it or not.

Now instead of asking what you should do about it, you experience it, because who knows what to do about it? To know what to do about this you would have to know everything, and if you don't, then the only way to begin is to watch.

Watch what's going on. Watch not only what's going on outside, but what's going on inside. Treat your own thoughts, your own reactions, your own emotions about what's going on outside as if those inside reactions were also outside things. But you are just watching. Just follow along, and simply observe how they go.

Now, you may say that this is difficult, and that you are bored by watching what is going on. But if you sit quite still, you are simply observing what is happening: all the sounds outside, all the different shapes and lights in front of your eyes, all the feelings on your skin, inside your skin, belly rumbles, thoughts going on inside your head -- chatter, chatter, chatter. "I ought to be writing a letter to so-and-so.... I should have done this" -- all this bilge is going on, but you just watch it.

You say to yourself, "But this is boring". Now watch that too. What kind of a funny feeling is it that makes you say it's boring? Where is it? Where do you feel it? "I should be doing something else instead." What's that feeling? What part of your body is it in? Is it in your head, is it in your belly, is it in the soles of your feet? Where is it? The feeling of boredom can be very interesting if you look into it.

Simply watch everything going on without attempting to change it in any way, without judging it, without calling it good or bad. Just watch it. That is the essential process of meditation.

[nandm]

A tree is often used as an analogy for explaining the structure of yoga. I like to think of yoga as a large banyon tree. There is nothing common about this common tree of India with its exposed gnarled roots, its trunk so thick that five people holding hands will just about span it, and its snake-like branches that reach down low enough to invite climbers to reach awe-inspiring heights. And, come to think of it, yoga is like that, too. It reaches you exactly where you are, and takes you to your heights, supporting you with its trunk---a solid foundation.

[nandm]

The ancient science of yoga developed in more than one wise old civilization, but under different names, of course. Archeological discoveries have confirmed forms of yoga in ancient Chinese and Mayan cultures, as well as in India and Tibet.

Thousands of years ago, highly evolved humans in each of these civilizations created the system of yoga. Through their own personal experience of yoga this ancient science developed and eventually was passed on from master to student, from generation to generation.

Although forms of yoga have been discovered in various cultures, it was along the ancient Indus River that this body/mind/spirit science was first fully developed and preserved. Imagine an advanced culture flourishing along the banks of the Indus and Saraswati rivers: Multistory baked brick buildings abound; there is a huge public bath waterproofed with bitumen; the brick roads are laid out in geometric pattersn; and the sewage system is so advanced it rivals that of the Roman Empire. All of this, dating from somewhere between 3,000 - 1,900 BC!

Within the Rig-Veda, there are references to the Saraswati River, which is belived to have dried up around or before 1,900 BC. This means that this ancient text must have been contemporary with the Indus-Saraswati culture, where yoga first developed.

I may say that yoga developed thousands of years ago, but it could be as much as tens of thousands of years ago. No one really knows the absolute beginning of yoga, but ancient scrolls found in Tibet dating as far back as 40,000 BC describe recognizable forms of yoga.

Yoga's birth date of somewhere around 3,000 - 19,000 BC has been confirmed by references in the RIg-Veda, which is the oldest known text in any Indo-European language. Parts of it were composed in the third or even fourth millennium BC.

Books made of palm leaves were used for the writings of Inana yoga, one of the number of different yoga paths.