It was the first thing you ever did on your own. It will be the last thing you ever do. You instinctively do it deeply when you begin a big project, and when you finally finish a big project. It’s what naturally happens when someone asks you a deep or challenging question. It is your first automatic reaction to an unexpected surprise.
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It is something you do best with your eyes closed and brain turned off for eight hours, silently preparing for another 16 hours of eyes opened and brain turned on...when you probably don’t do it so well. You usually take it for granted, only becoming aware of it when it isn’t working.
It is your most intimate connection with plants, exchanging vital substances that each of you requires in order to stay live. It is an integral part of the process of getting nutrients to and removing wastes from every cell in your body.
It is what allows a veteran singer to be heard in the back row of a concert hall with no microphone. It can make flutes simulate floating butterflies or soaring birds. It makes saxophones purr like big cats, which in turn makes slow dancers move as one.
It is how you complete your orgasm. With some training, you can use it to send your sexual energy to other than the usual places. In creation stories it is what God uses to jumpstart the whole world.
The Taoists call it chi, the Hindus and Buddhists prana, and the Sufis nafs. In the West our word spirit comes from the Latin spirare, literally ‘to breathe.’ Breathing is the foundation of life and is what beginning mediation students are taught to focus on, simply because it is so immediately noticed.
It is our most fundamental rhythm, affecting our emotional mood. We really feel its movement when we are frightened. It can change its pattern or tempo in a variety of ways, thereby allowing us the opportunity to get accustomed to change. This is a good thing, because change is the only constant in life, right?
It is when we are sitting still in meditation that we become most aware of our breath, which continues to move. This gives us a direct experience of stillness (sitting) and movement (breathing) and their intimate connection. It is like the inner edge of a wheel rotating around the stationary axle, or the strongest winds of a hurricane that swirl around the calm eye of the storm.
It is good to experience pairs of opposites right next to each other. This is one of the most immediate ways to meet our true Self, and to see the natural architecture of all life. Meditations that teach us to sit still and focus on breathing give us that chance. It is this paradox of coincidental stillness and movement that gives us direct experience being and becoming at the same time, that is, the present moment.
The past is what has happened and is no longer associated with movement. The future is what is anticipated, a fixed point ahead of us that is also unrelated to movement. Movement only has to do with whatever is present right now. It is a complete illusion to think that movement flows in from the future and is then added to the past.
In meditation we are in that pivotal position, that gap-space between past and future. But this place really has nothing to do with "between" past and future. Rather, the present moment is a mysterious non-time and non-place, so subtle and powerful that great meditation teachers have likened it to the enlightened state. And here it sits in the world of linear time that appears to run from past to future...very strange paradox.
Sitting still in meditation is one of the simplest and most immediate ways to gain direct experience of this paradox. When we begin to fundamentally understand paradox, our life attitude, our worldview, becomes more sophisticated, less sophomoric.
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It is something you do best with your eyes closed and brain turned off for eight hours, silently preparing for another 16 hours of eyes opened and brain turned on...when you probably don’t do it so well. You usually take it for granted, only becoming aware of it when it isn’t working.
It is what allows a veteran singer to be heard in the back row of a concert hall with no microphone. It can make flutes simulate floating butterflies or soaring birds. It makes saxophones purr like big cats, which in turn makes slow dancers move as one.
It is how you complete your orgasm. With some training, you can use it to send your sexual energy to other than the usual places. In creation stories it is what God uses to jumpstart the whole world.
The Taoists call it chi, the Hindus and Buddhists prana, and the Sufis nafs. In the West our word spirit comes from the Latin spirare, literally ‘to breathe.’ Breathing is the foundation of life and is what beginning mediation students are taught to focus on, simply because it is so immediately noticed.
It is our most fundamental rhythm, affecting our emotional mood. We really feel its movement when we are frightened. It can change its pattern or tempo in a variety of ways, thereby allowing us the opportunity to get accustomed to change. This is a good thing, because change is the only constant in life, right?
It is when we are sitting still in meditation that we become most aware of our breath, which continues to move. This gives us a direct experience of stillness (sitting) and movement (breathing) and their intimate connection. It is like the inner edge of a wheel rotating around the stationary axle, or the strongest winds of a hurricane that swirl around the calm eye of the storm.
It is good to experience pairs of opposites right next to each other. This is one of the most immediate ways to meet our true Self, and to see the natural architecture of all life. Meditations that teach us to sit still and focus on breathing give us that chance. It is this paradox of coincidental stillness and movement that gives us direct experience being and becoming at the same time, that is, the present moment.
The past is what has happened and is no longer associated with movement. The future is what is anticipated, a fixed point ahead of us that is also unrelated to movement. Movement only has to do with whatever is present right now. It is a complete illusion to think that movement flows in from the future and is then added to the past.
In meditation we are in that pivotal position, that gap-space between past and future. But this place really has nothing to do with "between" past and future. Rather, the present moment is a mysterious non-time and non-place, so subtle and powerful that great meditation teachers have likened it to the enlightened state. And here it sits in the world of linear time that appears to run from past to future...very strange paradox.
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