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.
Check out Lorin's Comics Instinct Allies booklet, here and also here. Note that you can right-click or drag and drop any of these images to your desktop, and print them. They are jpg files, around 100k, made from PDF files. These are handouts from the Instinct & Intuition class at the Continuum Studio.
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.