Finally a plain English introduction to the world of yogic meditation and relaxation : A simple Nuts and Bolts Guide to Meditation and Relaxation

Finally a plain English introduction to the world of yogic meditation and relaxation : A simple Nuts and Bolts Guide to Meditation and Relaxation

This booklet outlines the basics, drawn from across a number traditions. It doesn't try to say that this is the only right way as some dogmatic tomes do, rather it recommends an experiential  try it and judge for yourself approach.

Arwen Jayne is an author of fantasy/sci fi stories with a mix of the erotic and the spiritual, drawing again on a number of traditions.  Her non-traditionalist style is reflected in this non-fiction guide to meditation. The meditations are all simple and easy to do. Background information explaining yogic anatomy and terms that might be needed to help the practitioner further their interest are provided.

The booklet is well suited for those who want to know how to do meditation without the usual overload of religious doctrine.  The spiritual side is still there but it is presented as a way of using meditation.  Its your choice whether you use the meditations to simply relax and find inner peace or to start a spiritual journey to uncovering the oneness that is always present within us all.

The bliss of non-judgmental awareness

Just sitting, enjoying the inner stillness, silence and space.  Being aware of the space around me.  Being aware of the noisy chatter of self, of doubts and second guessing - not trying to interfere with it, just letting it be, without judgement.  Being really aware of the sound, sight, smell, taste and feel of all of it, not just the self  but everything as far as I can perceive with the senses - letting it just be what it is. Not judging. The peace of it.  Wow!

A vision of unfolding space, a waterlily of light

I've been feeling quite a bit tired since Thursday.  At first I thought it had just been an excessive amount of concentration while I was at an interesting workshop. By yesterday I knew I had slight flare-up of my candida problem and I had a mouth ulcer last night.  Still feeling a little run down this morning, despite the cold sore having eased, I took a moment to just become aware of my body and to see what it told me. I was immediately aware of a tension, a straining. I realized I'd been straining after some early experience with meditation on space, silence and stillness. The more I had been trying the more I had been spinning in circles, chasing my tail.

I took a moment to be aware of the straining.  Not to try to diminish it or change it or even control it. Simply to trust that within that experience was a point of stillness.  I surrendered to awareness of that, then the silence, then the emptiness.

A blue light birthed within my mind's eye, as it often does when I do work on the third eye but this was not the intense electric blue swirling vortex I've usually seen.  Rather it was a soft, vast blue, an ocean of sorts.  With that ocean there was suddenly a white light, tinged with green and yellow.  It appeared to take shape, forming petals of an unfolding flower, a luminous waterlily.  I didn't analyse it so I can't say how many petals it had but the vision was breath-taking.  I wanted to photograph or paint it. In the meantime, it seemed important so I'm blogging it and maybe later I can refer back to this when I am able to understand its symbology.

Interestingly, I had a cup of herbal tea after and reread a chapter of Healing with Form, Energy and Light by Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche. On page 9 of the paperback version he gives the colours of the five lights, according to the Bon tradition. White for space, Yellow for earth, Green for air, Red for fire and Blue for water.  Quite different from the usual colour correspondence but when I applied it to my vision it resonated for me with perhaps the blue being a primordial ocean, the white of the waterlily being an unfolding awareness of the element of space, tinged with groundedness and knowledge that it springs from.  The only thing that was missing perhaps was red which represents bliss in the Bon tradition. I imagine that if that had been in the vision it might have been like flames dancing on the tops of the petals.

I'm starting to feel better now, picking up as the day goes on but I think I'll semi-fast for the rest of the day, to clear the system.

Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche's Plain English Dzogchen: the meditation on stillness, space and silence

I've been exploring non-duality for a year or so now and during that time I've kept coming across the word Dzogchen.  I hate the use of jargon, all the religious terms that exclude those of us who seek to find our own inner peace without reliance on gurus, priests and other external experts. My intuition said that it was important to find out what this thing was but all my Google searches were just coming up with so much gobbledygook   The little I found seemed to point to it being about space and light so I started playing with that on my own.

I asked myself "What is space?"  We don't think about it much.  Usually our brain focuses on form, noise and motion. If you look at the famous Rubin's vase the brain will usually focus first on the vase before it notices the outline of the faces.

Space surrounds everything. It doesn't judge us. It can't be harmed, shaped or molded to our will. Its inside us, within the spaces between our atomic particles, between our cells and inside our body cavities. Its outside us and connects with everything in the known universe  from the room or place we are sitting now to the outer known reaches of the universe. Its essence is spaciousness, silence and stillness.  It forms the ground for all things, motion and sound.

I found that just switching my awareness to the spaces between things was quite calming so I looked at how I might incorporate the awareness into my meditation practice  I chose to do this by working with the senses and with my thoughts.  Taking internal images I visualized them being surrounded by space.  I did this with sounds and smell as well. For touch I just visualized the space surrounding and touching my skin. For me this was all powerfully awareness shifting. I've always known there were five elements in the old healing and magical systems but had never really given much thought to space.

Still frustrated about not finding what I was looking for on the web I resorted to my own library, burrowing through some books I had by Tibetan authors and found a short section in the back of Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche's "Healing with Form, Energy and Light".  This was short but refreshingly simple so I started looking for what more he might have done on the subject.  A YouTube search on his name uncovered an eight part introductory lecture called the Fivefold Teachings of Dawa Gyaltsen. Again these were easy to understand and I put them into practice right away, finding the spaciousness of mind he was talking about. It seemed to me something worth pursuing further, that if mastered it was a switch I could use quickly and easily anytime I needed without needed a long involved meditation. Just five short minutes seemed to give profound results. I went looking for more and found “Awakening the Luminous Mind: Tibetan meditation for inner peace and joy”. Its cliche to say this but this was so clear and simple I really wished someone had given it to me at birth. Life would have been so much easier. Yet despite its simplicity you don't want to rush through it. There is much in here to consider and reflect on. Concepts like the pain body, pain speech and the pain mind and how we can use spaciousness to change our relationship to them. The three things humans do when faced with a problem is denial/avoidance, resisting/trying to change it or simply allowing it. We all know the first gets us nowhere, we keep getting the same problem presented to us. Trying to change the problem saps our energy and resources (I think it was either Bob Frissell or Leonard Orr who said resistance leads to persistence). Finally we can simply choose to see the problem and say "it is what it is", allow it, then shift our awareness to the space around it. Its that shift of awareness that can change our perspective on the problem, even to the extent that with some things we suddenly see "it" wasn't the problem but instead our own image of it and reaction to it that was giving us grief. In this way we travel the path towards integration and oneness.

I particularly like the way Tenzin has given us these teachings in clear, plain English without all the usual dogma that would normally obscure it. You're not required to join a religion to practice it or spend several years learning something else before you can start using it. Like the Kabbalah the teachings of Dzogchen now seem to be being revealed to the general mass of the population, no longer hidden in secrecy and coded language.

Changing the collective mind, changing the world

The world is a mirror, a reflection if you will, of the collective mind. If you want to change the world you need to change that mind. We are all cells of that interconnected mind. Change our own thoughts and they have the potential to spread through the network of the mind like contagion.

Coming to terms with the gap between our wished for view of reality and what is

There is a simple formula for frustration.  First take the reality of a situation thing or person then try to impose on it/them what you think they could be if they reached their full potential, responded to your efforts to control or in other ways complied with what you think could be.  The resulting gap is the cause of frustration. A variety of carrot and stick approaches have been used throughout time to try and bring about change at the individual and societal level: fear, ostracism, monetary gain, social position, prestige, propaganda, conditioning. Sometimes temporary change can be brought about by these measures but remove the incentive or disincentive and what we tried to control usually reverts to its original state or else something unintended.  Its basic physics really, remove the heat from the boiling water and the steam will revert back from its gaseous state back into water.  Sometimes things don't revert exactly back to what they were but are still not what we intended.

There is a temptation to think that things, people and events are the way they are due to simple causes such as a bad upbringing, politicians succumbing to the gravy train, pollution causing global climate change.  Reality is often more complex than that. Bob Frissell in his book "Nothing in this book is true but that's exactly how things are" puts his finger on it when he says that we don't look far enough back in the causes of things. We tend to blame the latest obvious causes in a long string of causes and effects. If a child is bullied we are tempted to look to the bullies as the cause but not what made them bullies.  If we do follow the chain of causes as far back as we can go then we probably get all the way back to the first humans or maybe the ancestors of us and the chimps. So who is to blame for the deficiencies in our world? No-one or everyone?

Our power rests not in attempting to change others but in finding how we ourselves exhibit or influence the very thing we criticize,  taking responsibility for ourselves and our actions, accepting what we are and changing what we can. We can be the very break in the chain of cause and effect that we are seeking. Like it or not what we will choose to change is what will give us the biggest pay back for effort. When we see ourselves as part of a greater connected whole then the usual benefit to self gets broadened out to our extended self, the pleasure and happiness of another is our pleasure and happiness.

Oneness: is it union, merger, loss of boundary - does it really matter?

In an attempt to deepen my understanding of my own experiences of oneness I've been reading what some of the religious paths to it have to say about it. The immediate frustration I faced with attempting this was all the contradictions and of course everyone thinks they've got it right an everyone else has it wrong.

I've listened to Adyashanti and Eckhart Tolle on Youtube.  I've tried to get my head around the different Shiva Hindu sects as well as Advaita (non-dualist Hindu traditions), the gnosticism of Tau Malachi and of course Kaballah.  Conspiracy writers like David Icke and Bob Frissell also have much of worth on the topic. I've tried to compare what they say back to my own experiences derived through meditation, moment in time insights and one experiment with a legal plant substance.

For me, my own experience was a loss of the conditioned self and a loss of boundary between the rest of creation.  It was a realization that I am the limiting factor, the blockage so to speak, creating my experience of existence as a singular entity when the other reality is - vast! It was a realization that I normally experience a world limited by my five senses, my conditioned ego self and co-created by the other parts of myself (other people, animals, plants and the planet) who are just as constrained by their own senses and conditioning, by fear, anger and self doubt.

The different religious views seem to describe oneness in one of three ways:

• Loss of boundary/ Loss of distinction between subject and object.
• Merger with the all pervading consciousness (dissolving back into the source consciousness) - the idea is that our individuality was only every an illusion necessary for the divine to experience the world of matter.
• Union (as in intimate closeness) with the all pervading consciousness (this is the path followed by those who want to evolve to be like the source or cling to it like a devoted lover

Frankly, faced with this confusion of paths where I'm at for the moment is trusting that love is the key to growing and increasing the frequency of the times I experience oneness and that on a practical level I need to look at what I am doing or believing that gets in the way. Accepting some responsibility for the state of the world I experience and trying to observe it without criticizing it.  The most profound idea I've come across in the last few days is that everything and everyone in the world is the way they are because I needed them to be that way and I helped to co-create them that way. I know that before know I wouldn't have been able to accept that level of responsibility or would have even railed against it.  Once I would have said that if I hadn't directly acted upon something then "its not my fault", "I didn't do it" because I saw them as outside of my experience of reality, separate from my own thoughts and beliefs.  Now I'm not so sure - everything is so connected and I believe we are just one consciousness that for some reason has compartmentalized itself.