day 96: Meditation, a beginning or a continuing

Meditation, a beginning.

For centuries people have used “meditation” to come to a quieter place inside, to renew themselves, to practice and enjoy the pure experience of being present.

For probably as long as there has been people, people have sat down and stopped and watched the stars, or a faraway river (or a near one), or just let their minds drift in a sort of a reverie. Or they let and nudge their minds toward quietness. Or towards “the present.”

Meditation is a way of actively making the decision to do little, to do less, to stop the rushing and bustle of the everyday life. And inside, meditation can be very full, a time to follow the breathing, or sense our bodies, or both. A time to visualize a lotus, or imagine sending love to everyone in the world, or to pray for the well being of some other person, a person we deeply care about, or people we don’t even know.

Prayer, mediation, contemplation, reverie, chilling, all are terms that surely could be defined and distinguished one from the other. Not necessary here. This isn’t a scholarly treatise, this is a field map to being present, to being happy, to living a more full, rich and useful life.

Meditation is a path for everyone to explore, and for many, a daily excuse to be quiet, or opportunity to go deeper inside, or a lifesaver from the pressures and hurries of the “outside” world.

Whatever mediation turns out to be for you, even an activity you don’t especially care to pursue, give yourself, today at least, a chance or two to take it for a test drive.


Sit with your eyes closed in a comfortably upright position. Arch and round a bit to find a good upright. Have your belly soft and a little forward, your back slightly arched.

Breathe.

When thoughts come, attempt to watch them as What Is.

If you begin to have reactions to the thoughts, feel how that stirs up the works, and come back to simply following your breathing. Maybe add on sensing your body. Maybe not.

93: Upload your life: arch and round and twist with awareness, then do the Thich Nhat Hahn Meditation

Mind and body and learning: rounding and arching in sitting, with a twist.

Sit in a chair or on a log, or bench, near the front so both feet can be on the ground, and your back is not leaning on anything.

Interlace your hands and put them behind your head, and in this position, do the arching and rounding we have described several times. Do this for a bunch of pleasant and aware and waking and learning times.

Sometimes have your eyes going the way your head is going. Sometimes the opposite.

Go slowly.

Know how you are breathing.

Feel really good.

Rest.


Now try this, when you round, bring your elbows forward, as if they want to touch or straddle your knees. When you arch, widen your elbows out, and one time twist to the right and up with your right elbow, following it with your eyes. Then bring elbows forward, come down, round, and breathe out. Then go to the left, breathe out again (you figure that one out), push your belly out, and lift your left elbow up and backwards, feeling your whole back involved.

Do this a number of times.

Go slowly.

Feel the whole shifting that is going on in your spine.

Enjoy this.

For the rest of the day, simple be present to breathing and to being in your body. You might want to try a famous Thich Nhat Hahn meditation: breathing in, I sense my body; breathing out I smile.

This is a good one, and today, and do sense your spine when you sense your body.

73; Breathing and life and now

Breathing in, breathing out

Life is simple, and can be extremely complex. There are all sorts of people around us, sometimes, and they have all sorts of things they want of us, or ideas they have about us, or missions they want to accomplish.

We can have a score of projects we are either engaged in and hoping to be setting in motion.

We can have demands and responsibilities in our life, families and jobs and commitments to various organizations. We can have various circles of friends, each requiring its own set of rules and maintenance actions.

And that’s all good.

All food for waking up, IF the waking up is seen as something that is a full time activity, not something just for sitting on the pillow or the chair and doing our MEDITATION.

We can meditate ten hours a day, and if in the eleventh we can’t remember ourselves while we are eating our oatmeal or steak or talking to our friend, then the meditation is not broad enough.

All of life is a meditation, which is to say, all of life is a chance to live in the present.

Can you feel the Now of you, Now?

Can you add on your breathing as you read this?

Can you take as your aim today to follow your breathing as you go about everything?

Do this as a chance not to be good, but to be calm and happy as an ongoing state in anything and everything you do.

It seems “hard,” and it is, and so what? Have some fun waking up to your breathing from now until you go into sleep tonight and maybe even in your sleep, be aware of your breathing.

Pleasurably aware.

Good.

Meaning of Life in Three Layers

Marlie's daughter Sari


today's essay at Wake Up Feldenkrais.blogspot.com

Waking Up Twice in the Morning

STARTING THE DAY
We wake up and then we have another wonderful chance: to wake up.

What does that mean?

To be aware.

What does that mean?

To know where we are, what is the shape of us, what is the movement of us, what is the breathing of us, what is the comfort and discomfort of us, what it feels like to be us. Right now.

Recall the Gurdjieff morning meditation: right leg, right arm, left arm, left leg. First up, then down. Add on hearing. Then add on light.

And my Feldie meditation:

Find our relationship to gravity in the five lines (spine, arms and legs).

Add on breathing and our relationship to air and the heart lung area of ourselves.

Add on hearing and / or light coming in our eyes to be aware of the relationship of our upper story (head) to ongoing life.

Add on an awareness of our awareness.

If we want to make it even better, move slightly in some slow and enjoyable and highly aware way that involves our pelvis, our spine and our head and pay attention to breathing, gravity and the five lines and light as we move.

And then feel the pleasure of being alive and the joy of having awareness.

That's a lot.

Yeah, that's why it's called Waking up.

5 lines, 5 foci: a Meditation to bring peace and smarts

5 LINES, 5 FOCUS: A SIMPLE MEDITATION

Sit in a comfortable way, in a chair with some firmness to it, or a log, or a stool, and sit to the forward edge.

1. Begin to follow your breathing and count to ten, one count for each breath. If your attention wanders start over and one and keep counting your breaths. If you reach ten, start over at one.

2. As you do this sense your five lines. (To sense means to pay attention to the inner feeling of ourselves, the shape and length and warmth and relationship to the rest of us. For example: sense your right hand, would mean to put awareness on the inside of your right hand. To switch to sensing your left hand, you put attention in the left hand.) The five lines are our two arms and our two legs and our spine/ head/ pelvis. Now the meditation is up to two sets of awareness: sensing our five lines and counting our breathing from one to ten.

3. Now add on a slight shifting of your spine, like this: as you breathe in, let your belly come forward, fill it with air, and let your head and chest come up just a little as you rock a bit forward on your pelvis. Don't panic if this isn't immediately obvious, just play around, with getting a little arch in your back, a little air in your belly and a little tilt up in your rear end and a slight raising of the sternum and chin. Just a little . And keep counting the breathing and sensing the five lines.

Three is a split movement, because on breathing out, you slump a little forward, rock back a bit on your pelvis, let your chin come down, and your belly come back as your back comes back. You let your air out and fold and curve forward. So, each in and out breath find you in a different shape as you massage your spine and ease and clarify your mind.

4. Now, getting a bit more fancy, as you breathe in and raise your chin a bit and arch your back and let your belly come forward, let your eyes open.

And as you fold and slump forward, and let your back round and your head and pelvis come toward each other in the front, let your eyes close. And keep up awareness of the five lines and the counting of your breathing.

5). Now, for the final touch: as you breathe in and arch and lift your head a bit and open your eyes, let your hands open just a bit.

And as you fold in and breathe out and bring your belly softly back and your back to the back and your chin down, and front of your pelvis rotating toward your face, let your hands close a little.

So you are

Counting your breathing to ten.

Sensing your arms and legs and spine.

Arching and folding with the breath.

Opening and closing your eyes with the breath.

Opening and closing your hands with the breath.

---

This is a lot.
It won't come instantly, but the benefits in stress reduction and increasing of focus and attention with be huge.

How much to do this?
Five minutes to twenty. Whatever you enjoy.
How often: once to three or four times a day if you do it in little doses.

Enjoy.

Waking in the Night

ON WAKING UP IN THE MIDDLE OF THE NIGHT
This isn’t about “waking up” in the hotsie totsie Enlightenment way. That would be nice, but for now, I’d like to explore a little this habit of mine of waking after a few hours sleep. Usually four hours or so, and then I’m in the nice warm bed, and I’m not particularly sleepy and I don’t feel like getting up.

This used to bother me. I wanted something to “do,” to entertain myself until I fell back to sleep and I happen to live with someone who is not fond of lights in the middle of the night, so that means “No” to the obvious way of enjoying some warm and cozy hours in bed: reading.

No reading. Ohmygod: What to do?

Well, to tell you the truth, that is one reason I became a Feldenkrais Practitioner. There are so many varieties of slow and gentle and enjoyable movement combinations that I was sure I’d find a bunch that would be useful to the warm and cozy hours of the night.

And they were. And they are.

I mentioned this to my trainer, Dennis Leri, how I enjoyed the movements when I woke at night, and he talked of some anthropologist who realized that no one had studied peoples’ sleep patterns much and decided to do so. This anthropologist discovered that in most cultures, especially those without the lure of the electric light to keep us up to all hours, waking in the middle of the night was the norm.

And people stoked the fire,
or checked on the children and the animals,
or composed songs and poems,
or had visions,
or went out to watch the stars,
or meditated,
or prayed,
or made love,
or had time for those quiet conversations you can’t get around to in a busy day full of work and children and interruptions.

Well, the same partner who doesn’t like lights, isn’t into this “norm” of waking mid way through the night, so I’m on my own.

I have found these hours extremely enjoyable. And then there is this one surefire way that I can ruin them for myself: to worry about getting back to sleep, and thus to get into “trying” to get back to sleep, a hellish state of being, and one guaranteed to prevent me or anyone from sleeping.

A second, and slightly lesser way to ruin the peaceful night time warm cozy hours, is this: to obsess with something I “should” or “need to” get done the next day. This can be a bit of a drag, but if I slow, and allow this quiet dark time to be one in which I can visualize and give thought experiments to different options, ah, that’s nice.

And finally, besides Feldenkrais and thought experiments, there’s the sweetest alternative of all: doing "nothing." (See earlire essay on the doing part of "doing nothing.")

So, in this "nothing," I'm involved in: Following my breathing. Sensing myself, seeing if I can sense down to the cell level. Enjoying being exactly where and how and who I am.

This is sweet and ironically, so peaceful, that it often brings a sleep that I no longer care about.