for my meditation story,
suddenly I felt a bubble,
surfacing to cause some trouble
in my silent laboratory.
When @eco-alex came up with his idea of a meditation challenge I laughed, because he had presented me with a wonderful oxymoron. If there is anything I can do, it´s meditate. After 25 years, I´d better. But actually the real meditation is not doing, it´s being, it´s a state of mind. So all this doing thing about meditation are meditation techniques or preparations, tricks and gimmicks to put the meditator in the right mood, to facilitate meditation, to trigger meditation, to fool the mind or the ego or the tax collector.
Even the mantra is a crutch and in the end you have to throw it away, and since you have to throw it away anyway, why use it in the first place, the arrogant bastard that I am thinks.
So I hardly ever meditate with mantra, only if the monkey mind is all over the place for whatever reason, I use mantra, because thinking one thought only is always better than thinking one million thoughts, during the so-called meditation.
I learned meditation in 1992 in India, during the gruelling regime of a ten-days-vipassana-course. With zero meditation experience whatsoever, I meditated for 10 hours, or was it 11?, a day for ten days. If you want to know what pain is, just follow my example.
Some years later I changed to Zazen, no more sweeping, just sitting, spiced up with the joys of Kinhin, the Zen walking meditation. After 3 months of practise, there came the day when my teacher did not criticise my walking any longer, this guy could smell when you were thinking during walking, I had mastered the art of walking.
The same teacher also taught Zen in Motion, also known as Aikido. With its complex movements it forces you to not think, just be aware of your feet, your legs, your hips, your arms, your hands, your breath, the Ki flowing through you, and the ever faster approaching mat.
Where is there room for thoughts now?
“Master, what is the secret of your insight?“
“When I walk, I walk, when I eat, I eat and when I sleep, I sleep.“
“But master, we also do those things, but sadly, we have not reached even a glimpse of your insight.“
“This is because when you walk, you think about the food you will have soon, when you eat, you think about the places you would like to go and when you sleep, you dream of food to eat and places to go.“
Zen teaching story (spiced up a bit for effect by yours truly)
Then I spent almost ten years on staff in the biggest yoga ashram outside of India, which is of course in Germany, (Do you want the total meditation? 😆) where I became acquainted with lots of fancy meditation techniques and didn´t like any of them, so I just kept to Zazen.
I am flashing my meditation credentials here not to brag, I couldn´t care less what anybody thinks about my meditation abilities, but so you understand that I know a thing or two about meditation, so if I continue with some stuff which might seem unorthodox and/or outrageous to you, you hopefully don´t dismiss it in a heartbeat, but give it a second thought.
Basically there is no right or wrong in meditation, everybody, in the spirit of critical thinking and scientific experimenting has to figure out what works best for her him 😉.
a singing field, I´ll meet you there. - Rumi
Little did my arrogant little ego know that Alex´meditation challenge would indeed become a bit of a meditation challenge for me, since it so happened that after months of being in my cave, even managing to post one article per day for more than a month with the onset of the Steem gold rush last December, I achieved victory in the War on Family and was declared the sole heir of my stepmom by the grace of God and German law, requiring my presence in the unforgiving cold world of Bankfurt, also known as Mainhattan, in order to deal with some of the most unpleasant examples of the human species, German bankers.
All went well though, apart from some new stupid German tax regulations, but that was not the fault of the banksters, but of those other despicable group of people, politicians.
In the cold canyons of capitalism in Frankfurt
So in nine days I travelled about 1300 km, spent time with lots of people (friends and relatives), stayed in three different appartments, slept in three different beds and, most challenging, did not have much alone time, so all in all not very conducive to meditation.
That´s why I tried something different this time.
The more progressive type of meditation teacher will tell you that you can meditate in any position anywhere, anytime, but that for example meditating while lying down comes with the danger of falling asleep.
Now first of all, I see no real danger there, because a good sleep is always better than a bad meditation.
That´s why this old school meditation advice, to cut the time for meditation out of your sleep if you have problems making time for your meditation, rarely works, because most people will have a problem to have such a quality in their meditation that it could make up for the forgone sleep.
In meditation, the idea is to reach the brain wave frequency of the deep sleep state, plus an awake consciousness, so you reach Turiya, the fourth state.
I decided to do a little “scientific“ experiment of meditating lying down in bed, at least I always had my own room, so for that I was alone, after waking up and before falling asleep.
Meditating before falling asleep, lights out already, so I could fall from meditation into sleep any time, caused my sleep to be better, deeper with less dreams. Add to that the challenge of an unfamiliar environment, a factor which is causing many people to have a sleep not as rejuvenating as at home in their familiar surroundings, and I would say that this is a good practice also if you are travelling or on holidays somewhere away from home.
Another benefit of meditating yourself into sleep would be that the detrimental side effects of that unhealthy habit of watching TV right until before sleeping, or even falling asleep while watching, are mitigated, the mind is cleansed a bit by meditation.
People fill their mind with garbage, images of violence and suffering, the fucking “News“, right before sleeping and then they wonder why they don´t sleep well and have weird dreams or even nightmares.
When you meditate right after waking up while still lying in bed, you have the psychological benefits of the “snooze button effect“, meaning, instead of rushing out of bed, trying to be a valuable member of society, you choose to start the day with doing something for your own spiritual and mental well being, and that also in a very cosy way.
Now this twilight zone between sleep and waking up fully is also the time when I sometimes have my weirdest and most creative ideas and if I don´t write them down, they will quickly dissolve, never to be retrieved again, but most of the time I choose to not write them down, but treat them like a mandala instead, enjoying the moment of creation and destruction, Tandava, the Dancing Shiva.
So this week, for the challenge, I decided to not daydream or whatever one could call this state, in the morning after waking up, but to meditate.
My technique is as follows.
I go from the point slightly above the middle between the eye brows, where Indians apply the bindi, into the middle of my brain (Ajna Chakra is another name or concept for that, but I don´t want to go into chakras now) and take refuge there, floating on some lake or something. Under me is the bottom of the lake, muddy or whatever, and there tiny bubbles are trying to form, to break loose from the mud and travel to the surface, becoming fullblown thoughts upon reaching the surface of the lake. Many times, when I am awake, aware and mindful enough, I can sense this little stir, this formation, this concentration of energy, trying to form a thought, then I can withdraw energy from that process and no thought arises, I nip it in the butt (pun intended).
It is important to understand that I am not visualizing anything there, the lake the mud the bubbles are just metaphors or images so you might understand what I´m talking about, all this takes place on an energetic level beyond explanation, it has to be experienced, but I found those images useful for myself, to kind of explain to myself what´s happening there, because real meditation is happening, or not, but you can´t do it, can´t force it, that would be rather counterproductive.
So what I want to say is, what I “do“ is I am trying not to think, to extend the time between two thoughts and just be, while lying in bed. I lie in Shavasana, the corpse pose of Yoga, because this immediately triggers a relaxation response in me, and while I am such a slacker and meditate lying in bed, a nightmare for traditionalists, at least I take a formal yoga pose of which I even know the Sanskrit name. 😉
So how good am I in bed? How was my meditation in bed qualitywise?
While talking about quality in meditation is already a slippery slope, comparing leads to competition, rest assured 😇that of course the “quality“ was of course nothing compared to the quality and the experiences I made in a more formal meditation setting in ashrams, in the Samadhi Halls of great saints like Shankaracharya, Sivananda and Anandamayi Ma, or after two hours of advanced hardcore pranayama, which is good, because those things would be for nothing otherwise, there would be no reason for pilgrimage, darshan, rigorous yoga practices, etc.
Of course there is a kind of spiritual arithmetic in spirituality, the more you practice, the greater the probability that you "get" somewhere, wherever that is. This is very encouraging and reassuring for the more zealous and industrious type of aspirant and practitioner as the German.
But for the Indian aspirant, there is also the aspect of grace. Grace of God, of guru, without which no realization of the Self is possible, according to Indian thought.
While Westerners, with their sense of entitlement, despair because of their “lack of progress“, Indians take it as it comes, the cigarette vendor realizes the Self, while the monk, despite daily ardent practice, goes nowhere, and if Indians would be interested in an explanation, they would explain it with merits acquired in past lives, or lack thereof.
BUT, meditating in bed while travelling or in unfamiliar surroundings is for sure better than not meditating at all, so my little experiment was certainly worthwhile.
While I probably can never meditate enough to not go on multiple tangents in an article, that´s just the way my monkey mind works outside of meditation, it´s also the curse of having a good memory, with constantly bubbles arising from the storage mud, I frame it positively as having an associating mind 😘, I hope I could bring something new to the ecotrain meditation table with my rant.
