Meditation Secrets Revealed

Two Monks

Click to hear the a short story of two monks, and what they can teach us

about letting go of past burdens….

I began my journey in yoga over ten years ago and as I reflect back on the path that I have taken I can see that it is not one but many. Few people who become interested in yoga, or any other spiritual tradition follow one path strictly, the majority of people that I meet have dabbled in this and that and naturally have combined elements of multiple traditions to suite themselves. I too have dabbled in many traditions and there together these paint a picture. Imagine if you will a tree with a solid trunk and three large large branches. The branches constitute three distinct schools of thought in yoga that have evolved out of the Vedic literature and Samkhya philosophy of India. They are Bhakti Yoga, Karma Yoga, and Raja Yoga.

My path has been to combine the three of these together into my daily life and by weaving them together with the goal of involution. It is the process of looking inward to find the understanding to internal problems and wisdom of the outside world. While it may seem counter intuitive to look inside for outside understanding let us consider the fact that the world does not exist without our minds to interpret what our senses are taking in. Therefore it is reasonable to presume that as we involve and develop our understanding of ourselves, the mind – the focus of our study changes and with it all reality. This is the simply yet powerful truth behind all spiritual practices – look within!

My practice is also founded on four guiding principals they are: simplicity, patience, love, and contentment. These four principals while difficulty to embody, form the core teachings of yoga philosophy and the three schools of thought outlined above.

Bhakti Yoga – the yoga of devotion and self surrender. This is said to be the simplest and easiest path because we are not asked to do anything but give up all control. All doer-ship is released until our life becomes the silent mantra to a higher power, “I am your tool, through me your work will be done”.

Karma Yoga – is the yoga of action, in this practice we practice non-attachment with every deed, word, and thought.

Raja Yoga – also called Ashtanga yoga is the synthesis of the above two and focuses on controlling the mind in order to bring it into stillness.

These three are designed for different people, different personalities. My journey has been to combine them together and practice continuous self-dissolve through giving up all of my actions to a higher power. When something happens, I practice non-attachment. After every action I say – “my work it is complete.” Whatever happens, however people react, their reactions will not have an effect on me. I am still, I am complete, and my actions are complete. The only way I am able to do this is because I have decided that in order to follow this path I must be 100 percent invested in whatever I do. I stay completely present and invested. Once my work is done, I step back from it and observe it as if it is whole and perfectly complete. Not mine anymore, I have given it up to the universes to do with as is needed. Finally, through the practice of Hatha yoga I practice cleansing the body and preparing to withdraw the senses. Following this, I observe the breath – the fundamental principal and living force within all of us. It is the main sources of prana that we take into the body and pranayama or breath control is practiced to take in more prana and direct it into the higher energy centers within the body. Meditation begins to unravel the mind, one moment at a time. Revealing the judgments, flaws, patterns, and streams of thought within. This is no simple task, by simply sitting back and observing the mind we are able to delve deep into the nature of the mind unlocking our true potential and spiritual beings.

Majestic. This is the only way to describe the feeling that one gets when in deep meditation. Time stops being perceived as a fluid stream of past present and future, rather it begins to slow down and break into sperate moments of now, not now. The river of streaming thoughts slows, halts, and begins to reflect the true nature of our being – full of stillness and completely whole in its infinite beauty. Like a dazzling diamond that has been taken for a series of scattered lights. Awareness, empty of mind it stands alone in this brilliant light. This awareness is pure consciousness revealed to stand apart from the mind, normally entangled within the realm of thinking. By halting the tumultuous wheel of thoughts we see through it and beyond it – into the depth and mystery that is unexplainable.

An inspiring story and a good lesson on thinking outside the box. A passage from The Element by Ken Robinson

“One of the results of seeing our lives as leaner and unidirectional is that it leads to a culture of segregating people by age. We send the very young to nursery schools and kindergartens as a group. We educate teenagers in batches. We move the elderly into retirement homes. There are some good reasons for all of this. After all, As Gail Sheehy noted decades ago, there are predictable passages in our lives, and it makes some sense to create environments where people can experience those passages in an optimal way.

However, there are also good reasons to challenge the routines of what really amounts to age discrimination. An inspiring example is a unique education program in the Jenks school district of Tulsa, Oklahoma. The state of Oklahoma has a nationally acclaimed early-years reading program, providing reading classes for three-to five-year olds throughout the state. The Jenks district offers a unique version of the program. This came about when the owner of another institution in Jenks – one across the street from one of the elementary schools – approached the superintendent of schools. He’d heard about the reading program and wondered if his institution could offer some help.

The other institution is the Grace Living Center, a retirement home.

Over the next few months, the district established a preschool and kindergarten classroom in the very heart of Grace Living Center. Surrounded by clear glass walls(with a gap at the top to allow the sounds of children to filter out), the classroom sits in the foyer of the main building. The children and their teachers go to school there every day as thought it were any other classroom. Because it’s in the foyer, the residents walk past it at least three times a day to get to their meals.

As soon as the class opened, many of the residents stopped to look through the glass walls at what was going on. The teachers told them that the children were learning to read. One by one, several residents asked if they could help. The teachers were glad to have the assistance, and they quickly set up a program called Book Buddies. The program pairs a member of the retirement home with one of the children. The adults listen to the children read, and they read to them.

The program has had some remarkable results. One is that the majority of the children at the Grace Living Center are outperforming other children in the district on the state’s standardized reading tests. More than 70 percent are leaving the program at age five reading at third-grade level or higher. But the children are learning much more than how to read. As they sit with their book buddies, the kids have rich conversations with the adults about a wide variety of subjects, and especially about the elders’ memories of their childhoods growing up in Oklahoma. The children ask things about how big iPods were when the adults were growing up, and the adults explain that their lives really weren’t like the lives that kids have now. This leads to stories about how they lived and played seventy, eighty, or even ninety years ago. The children are getting a wonderfully textured social history of their hometowns from people who have seen the town evolve over the decades. Parents are so pleased with this extracurricular benefit that a lottery is now required because the demand for sixty available desks is so strong.

Something else has been going on at the Grace Living Center though: medication levels are plummeting. Many of the residents on the program have stopped or cut back on their drugs.

Why is this happening? Because the adult participants in the program have come back to life. Instead of whiling away their days waiting for the inevitable, they have a reason to get up in the morning and a renewed excitement about what the day might bring. Because they are reconnecting with their creative energies, they are literally living longer.

There’s something else the children learn. Every now and then, the teachers have to tell them that one of their book buddies won’t be coming any more’ that this person has passed. So the children come to appreciate at a tender age that life has its rhythms and cycles, and that even the people they become close to are part of that cycle.

In a way, the Grace Living Center has restored an ancient, traditional relationship between the generations. The Book Buddies program shows in a simple yet profound way the enrichment possible when generations come together. It shows too that elderly can revive long-lost energies if the circumstances are right and the inspiration is there.”

Open yourself to wisdom, then you can embody it completely.
Open yourself to insight, then you can use it completely.
Open yourself to loss, then you can accept it completely.
Open yourself and trust you natural responses; then everything will fall into place.

From Stephen Mitchell’s Tao Te Ching

Some see a cup and say it is half full, others say it is half empty yet both are based on mood, perception, and memory. The Taoist master is in a state that is removed from such judgments. Staying removed he/she is able to be completely present and give 100 percent, untouched by the dualities of life.

When people see some things as beautiful, other things become ugly.

When people see some things as good, other things become bad.

Being and non-being create each other.

Difficult and easy support each other.

Long and short define each other.

High and low depend on each other.

Before and after follow each other.

Therefore the Master acts without doing anything and teaches without saying anything.

Things arise and she lets them come; things disappear and she lets them go.

She has but doesn’t possess, acts but doesn’t expect.

When her work is done, she forgets it.

This is why it lasts forever.

From the Tao Te Ching Translated by Stephen Mitchel