Meditation has many definitions. It may be called focusing, stilling the mind, experiencing the mind in its raw state, being at one with ourselves, being closer to our centre, or being present in the moment.
As teachers trying to convey to others what meditation is, the most important thing is to hold our own understanding of "the sense of being" in meditation. In order to convey meditation, we must embody it in ourselves (ie the focus, the still mind, being in the present moment). Embodying the process of meditation is the duty of the teacher. What we give as techniques is peripheral. Techniques create a structure in the moment, but what students really get from us is a sense of who we are and how we hold ourselves. A lot of what we teach isn't said. It is in the relationship with our yoga, with our own meditation and with our students. What we need to develop is what we convey to others.
There are many ways of understanding what meditation is. According to Patanjali, it is Self-knowledge, becoming grounded in the Self through the disentanglement of chitta from the sense objects. Then as we become less caught up in the senses, less distracted by the outer life, we are able to disentangle from outer events and experience the mind as it is. We can experience the chitta free from a diminished and contracted state and experience a higher and fuller state of ourselves. So yoga defines meditation as an unbroken flow of the awareness. Tantra defines meditation as a process of activation of energy through movement, breath and sound in order to awaken the deeper forces which, as they become integrated, support a broader sense of who we are. Mantra sadhana is a process of feeling the deeper unconscious with different forms of vibration.
There are two levels of meditation teaching that we need to develop. The first is to really learn it thoroughly ourselves so that we embody it and live the process in an authentic way. The second is to develop knowledge of the process and to deepen our understanding.
The most important thing for us as teachers is to practise meditation diligently and to try to look at our own lives and to see how we can increase our awareness more in a stable, joyful and practical way. That is the critical thing in teaching. So I want to ask you as teachers "How do we feel you are going with your own practices are you finding joy and changes in your lives through your practice? If you are finding that is happening then you can convey that and people will feel it. So for us as teachers the most important thing is living our lives in a way that is authentic and in tune with our karma, our own needs and capacities, and embodying more and more our understanding of meditation. And then in the teaching itself we use a systematic approach to give out this information.
As teachers, it is very important to understand what we are teaching. In-depth study is required and for this the Yoga Studies programs being developed by the Academy serve and important role.
Let us look at the definition of meditation from Patanjali as yogaschitta vritti nirodhah, "yoga is the cessation of the fluctuations of the chitta." Because the chitta is disentangled from the senses it thereby rests within itself: Tada drastuh svarupe avasthanam, "and then the seer is established back in his or her own true nature." These sutras state that when yoga is achieved the semi-conscious hypnotism of life has been stopped through the development of consciousness. We no longer believe that we are limited, contracted forms and we open up to greater possibilities of who we are. So as the chitta becomes developed our own capacity as teachers to hold the knowledge, to remember the knowledge (not just intellectual theory, although that is useful) but the capacity to remember "yoga" in each moment is also developed.
As part of the attainment of yoga the development of memory (smriti) is essential and a great asset for a teacher. The smriti that Patanjali talks about is the integration of the chitta so that it can hold a vast array of experience and a vast sense of self at one moment. This is achieved through meditation.
Every morning when we wake up, we remember who we are. And what tends to happen is that old patterns of energy, seemingly with their own life, take over. These unconscious patterns of energy begin to move, or drive us through the day. If this occurs we can find ourselves going into certain automatic processes. In between these unconscious drives we have periods when we wake up and remember who we are and what we have to do. Then we slip back into old, automatic, unconscious patterns. As meditation teachers we have to develop a tissue memory of what meditation is like and hold that in every moment. Meditation should be so memorised in us that there is not a moment when we are not in meditation, not a moment when we do not remember to meditate. For example, are you meditating now? You are now in a state of more conscious awareness of the process of waking up. This occurs when you read or study articles on meditation, or by listening to a lecture on meditation or awareness, or by engaging a relationship with a facilitator and a teaching that holds your mind into a a more conscious pattern. And this allows you to experience again the deep joy that comes from being in a sattwic environment with sattwic people with a sattwic relationship and sattwic thoughts and satsang. So the aim is that we have to embody the memory to continuously hold meditation in every moment.
When we sit for meditation we disengage from the outer world and go back into ourselves. As we continue all the thinking starts to calm down and all those emotional entanglements start to go away (over time) and then we feel ourselves back in this beautiful inner space. And when we come back from that 'beingness' into existence, we re-engage the pattern of our personality. While we are meditating we move into a different sense of who we are. And when we come back into our bodies, we re-emerge into the world, and we take on the personality 'shape', this egoic shape which contains learned patterns which are in the nervous system. These are patterns of behaviour, patterns of thinking and ideas about who we are and what we can achieve and what we cannot achieve. So as meditation teachers we try to be fully conscious in each moment of both the negative pattern, the diminished personality pattern, the fears, the worries and the concerns, and of that higher part of ourselves at the same time. And we carry those things together. In the higher part is the stillness and in the lower part is the turbulence. These should come together and relate. The memory, the capacity to remember to do that, is what we as teachers need to do. If we get a thought that the real meditation is beyond us, we can hold that thought and also remember that it is not true, and we bring those two thoughts into relationship. Relationship here is the relationship of you with your Self, with that part of you that remembers that you are not that diminished, contracted state, but that you are the higher awareness. It is consciousness in relationship with mind.
Meditation therefore is mind management. It is us remembering who we are and then coming into relationship with the mind and its activities and finding a way to manage and integrate the mind. We start with the systematic teaching of relationship with the body, 'I' in relationship with the gross body, 'I' coming into relationship with the breath, moving into relationship with stillness. It is all about a relationship between ourselves as awakened consciousness and the hypnotic process of the mind which continually tells us things that we believe. So meditation is the de-conditioning of old belief patterns and the re-awakening of the true sense of Self. We have all had this experience. We just need to remember it and stabilise it and this is the development of 'smriti.'
Patanjali says 'regular practice' (abhyasa) and 'non-attachment' (vairagya) are necessary for meditation. Part of the issue is the development of a technique and part of it is the capacity to bring the technique back into the life so that your lifestyle supports and reflects your inner work. That is where the difficulty starts to come in. Living in the city we find ourselves assaulted daily by this difficulty. It is so hard to stay balanced in that environment. The capacity for distraction is endless. And we have endless desires which keep us fascinated by these distractions , which keep us engaged in the distractions, and which have their own tamasic gravity which prevents us from going within ourselves.
The endless process of desire is the fundamental force that maintains us in existence. There is an unbroken desire which keeps us alive. This is called the will or desire to live. Meditation ultimately tackles this endless process of desire and finally takes us to the point where we have to examine our will to live and the process of death, or letting go. As teachers we have to develop the various techniques, then establish the technique in our memories so that it is fundamental to our structure and we embody it fully. Then we bring it out into our lives so that we begin to change our lives in a way that encourages the disentanglement of the attention from the desires back to the Self. Then we need to really examine who we are, and what death really means. Once we can do this we can convey a sense of certainty and power in the face of the difficulties of life. This process takes place in stages.
The desires and distractions will always be there, but the consciousness has to come back to letting go of the urgency, the compulsion, to act out the desires. Until that time the meditation cannot build in intensity. We cannot build and hold the inner charge because the energy keeps going back out into its smaller form through the sensory channels. We get tired, worn out, confused. The more we can hold the memory of the practice, the more we can hold the capacity to pull the mind back from the endless sensory input, the more meditation we will achieve. At the same time, there is the path of Tantra, which says, "Jump in and go for it." As teachers we need to develop a sense of how to convey this fundamentally complex yet simple paradox to students in a way that is meaningful. As teachers the more that we can develop our own inner strength, the more impact we will have on students. The more sense of clarity we have with ourselves and our own meditative process, the more we will feel that there is a beautiful connection between us and our students where something meaningful is developing.
Then there are techniques. Most people need relaxation, so they learn techniques such as yoga nidra, pranayama or the So Ham mantra. But this is not meditation. What is required is that we support our students in developing a meditative lifestyle. This is where the technique of antar mouna comes in. We teach our students to be the witness and to hang on to this ability. As teachers, when we sit to teach we hook into the channel, we open up and we get the flow and it is easy to teach. When we are teaching we are hooked into the higher mystery. There is an alignment between us and the subtle energies within us, caused by the attitude we carry and by the relationship between us and our students. The students can also pull it out of us and make us get our act together!
One of the problems we can have as teachers is that when we teach we have a great experience and when we go back into our life we can lose it. This process is a natural learning curve which is not a straight line, but rather an oscillation. We need to know that this is the case, that we need to both understand this oscillation process and develop the capacity to follow the pattern of oscillation. In the oscillation process, we get lost and then have to pull ourselves back. In order to achieve this we need to also assess how much our lifestyle helps or hinders the process. How do diet, exercise, work, relationships play a part in pulling us out of our inner process and how we can get back to it. We need to understand our own patterns and this comes back to swadhyaya (self study). We must know ourselves, our own patterns and our tendencies, as practitioners and as teachers. Then we can tackle the issues.
In teaching meditation, we find that as people advance they can take on more rigorous practice. They have to be instructed in what to expect the patterns of their own minds, the oscillations, how to hold themselves in the process. One of the most fundamental things we need to teach students is grounding. There is a group of techniques which are extremely useful in cementing all of these topics we have mentioned. These are grounding, alignment and pulsing.
Grounding means to be firm and stable in the face of life and in facing our own mind. It allows us to hold a number of different things simultaneously. The best place to be grounded is in the body although we can also ground ourselves in the breath or the mind. It is especially for students to be grounded in the body. Grounding in remembering the body is one of the most basic and important things that will help people to go deeper. What can happen in meditation is that people can get to a certain point and then lose their confidence or freak out. They can get into a state of sleep or become blank (an unconsciousness mechanism to avoid looking at what they need to look at) or they feel a fear arise which happens when they lose the ground.
Grounding is a process which both allows us to maintain one-pointedness and also memory of what we are doing. It also conveys a sense of strength which gives us the capacity for confidence to go forward into our own mental processes so as to uproot the deeper issues, both positive and negative. Grounding gives us the capacity to come back to witnessing. There is a certain point at which we are willing to go into our 'stuff' and a point at which we are not. How do we facilitate, as meditation teachers, the encouraging of people not just to want to have nice experiences in meditation, but to start to use meditation to actually do solid work on themselves?
In trying to get meditation practice going with students, we first teach them to relax. Relaxation means that we learn to trust life, to know that there is nothing to worry about, and this conviction does not come easily. We and our students need to be able to be the witness who can accept everything that happens and to trust ourselves. The essence of meditation is to find a deep joy in being and to let go of the spasms of the mind, the contractions of the ego and open up to the broader vista of who we really are. Grounding is an essential component in all of this. Without grounding, as soon as energies start to change, there is no stability within ourselves to rest on, and we will feel that it is better to rest in the old pattern than in the new one we are trying to create. Rather than trusting that the new pattern we are trying to create is valuable, we can go back to the old pattern because we know it and we remember ('the devil you know'). By coming back into the base of the body, the pelvic floor, or the bones (the ground of consciousness), or the breath, we can develop a habit of grounding ourselves. People can then trust in the process and we can then do the next stage of meditation training, to teach people to face their issues.
To be able to face our issues, two things are important.
1. One is the capacity to use energy in the form of movement, breath and sound. These techniques allow us to manipulate the body/mind so we have the capacity to change how we feel.
2. The second is the development of the capacity of consciousness to be able to penetrate into matter, into the energetic field, into energy, to feel and to know what is going on at the deeper and more subtle levels of being.
This relationship between consciousness and energy is a very important thing for yoga teachers to experience. We need to understand how consciousness and energy relate, how they interplay. Energy is the vehicle for consciousness. It carries consciousness. Take the breath, for example. If you move the breath up and down, the consciousness can travel more easily. Energy is informing our consciousness. It gives consciousness information all the time. Energy is constantly bringing up information for us to process. The more we develop the capacity for recognition through the development of the witness and increase our capacity to experience subtlety, the more we can know what is going on within ourselves. And the more we can make the changes we need to adjust and regulate ourselves.
In meditation we find that we come up against blocks, certain patterns or energy that have a life of their own or about which we have gone into denial. That is where a teacher or therapist or some relationship with the community or people is an essential prerequisite to meditation. Meditation in this day and age is not just sitting alone and going inside. Meditation is the use of awareness in the day to day existence in relationship with life. Very few people can cut off. Very few people can do Patanjali's yoga. We can't go into Samadhi. Before we can practice higher yoga in an authentic way we need to get information back to our consciousness about what we need to deal with and then we need to find a kind of determination to go into the 'stuff.' We have to jump into it.
So in anta mouna, there are stages. We firstly witness our sensory information, then the spontaneous thoughts and then the conscious creation of thoughts. But to do work we need to go deep inside ourselves and really explore life. Not in a half-hearted or timid way, but with gusto and zest. How juicy are these thoughts that we are examining? How far into our process do we go when we create thoughts? We have to work through our stuff one way or another.
The capacity to use our minds constructively to create things becomes the next stage we get to, after endless sitting with thoughts, desires, and emotions. We can only rise above that when we make a conscious decision (based on grounding and relaxation and the other skills we gather up in the basic introductory processes) that we will go in and tackle the mind in a way that is skilful, loving, relational and respectful. Stage three is for that. In stage three we create a thought, any thought, uncensored. Whatever our issue is, go into it fully. This is the real Tantra. If we don't tackle it in meditation, we will have to live it. We will have to go through it in the outer life because it will drive us unconsciously. It will still be there, not gone away. It is active and it will drive us. So bring it up. Alcohol, drinking, smoking, doing anything visualise it, see ourselves doing it, make ourselves sick on it. Bring the craving, the desire, up. Sexuality whatever our trip is. And then we throw it out.
Swamiji tells the story of his desire for mangoes which he saw as an attachment. He went into meditation and visualised himself eating baskets and baskets of mangoes until he was sick of them. Then he stopped desiring mangoes. There is also the story of the guru who had an operation for cancer without any anaesthetic. His muscles remained completely relaxed throughout because he visualised his disciples massaging his feet and therefore he did not feel any pain.
As meditation stabilises we begin then to watch our lives more. How do these things come back in? How do they drive us, the desire for attention, the desire to be important, the desire to be loved, the need to use the libido, the need for creativity, the need for purpose How do these things drive us? How do we get our fulfilment and where do we lack it? What emotions are coming up and what issues at work, with people, with anger, with fear and frustration? And our self-esteem, our lack of self-esteem and our arrogance We need to bring them up and work on them. And we watch how they are in our lives and how more conscious we are of those things. How much more are we integrating them so that our lives are working at a level that is lifting us out of the lower chakras and into the heart? We are bringing Mooladha up into the heart and bringing Sahasrara down into the heart. That is what individuality is. In the lower chakras is the dark force of the animal psyche! The dark unconscious energies of the mind are driving us all in one form or another. Freud and Jung were right about certain things. This is also where the Kali is, the kundalini, the shakti, the power. The vast power of who we truly are is locked into the darker recesses of the unconscious. So in meditation we open up to that, to being with ourselves in these levels. So meditation is not just a passive sitting in a peaceful state. It is about being with yourself as a full, totally self possessed being, owning all of our energy, all of our darkness and our light. Stage three is preparation for stage four of antar mouna.
In stage four we deal with the capacity to grapple with unconscious forces as they arise in the moment in reaction to life. In stage three, we are creating our stuff. In stage four, it is coming up and taking over us and we will be overwhelmed by it until our sense of Self as the witness becomes vitalised, strong, consolidated, grounded, alive and pulsating. Until our sense of Self has become established and is stronger, the mind will have a greater capacity to overwhelm us.
So stage three is the practice which leads into stage four. Often in stage three if some issue comes up spontaneously, we can move into stage four if we are prepared to do that. When the powerful negative or positive thought comes up we are ready to grab it and wrestle it and then throw it out. So if anger or disappointment comes up and we start to feel that ache, and the critic comes up, we watch that contracted energetic pattern (thought) and we really go into it and go right into the process. Then we throw it out. This is the stage where we develop the confidence to really be with our issues. There can be exaggerated ways of dealing with these issues (yelling, screaming, feeling the emotions) and there can be soft ways of dealing with them, too (lovingly, embracingly). But the critical element is having the confidence to be with our own mental stuff. Until that happens the repressive instinct takes over, pushes the stuff away, and we go into contractions, into grabbing onto old ways of being. Attachment takes over and we push away the thoughts. As soon as we relax and get the confidence, we can say, "No, let's go for it," and dive in.
As teachers we need to have that confidence in ourselves in order to convey it to students. The techniques are the bread and butter of a meditation teacher, but the main thing we do is convey a way of being and help people to have the confidence to be with themselves. This is critical. At that point, we are really starting to teach meditation. We are starting to get people to really be in relationship with themselves. They are no longer just trying to create pleasant states all the time, to relax and feel good. They can say to themselves, "I am developing a meditative maturity now and to get satisfaction I need to have a more adult attitude with myself, my mind, my process and my practice. I need to be able to say that it is time to do something about this let's work on this one now." If we can get one, two or three things done in life, that is pretty good.
Most people are afraid to go deep into their own minds. This is because we are not trained or encouraged to do so by our society. The mind is still a mystery to most of us. And it is wise to use caution in proceeding into these areas. There are some issues which are overwhelming, which may (or appear to) threaten to swamp us. These are the big core issues which take lifetimes to learn how to manage and deal with. In the early days these core issues can destabilise us. They can create depression, a constant sense of not being good enough, a sense that we will never be able to achieve anything, a constant fear, anxiety and insecurity, and so on. These lie in the deeper unconscious waiting for something to trigger it to explode and rob us of our power and our consciousness.
Meditation is where we develop the capacity for subtle awareness, so that in our daily lives when core issues, or powerful negative emotions arise we can see them for what they are and develop a calm, confidence in dealing with them. So we go back to meditation and work on them again and again, and then we go back into life. In the "outer life" we have a chance to deal with the issue and then go back into meditation to look at how we managed and how we can improve ourselves in this situation around certain issues. This is a pulsation between the inner and outer world that we work on. Stage four is for big things, for the big unconscious tone that we carry around with us.
Whenever we get ourselves into the meditation process and we feel ungrounded or we are facing some major issue in our lives, and that 'big thing' is coming up, we can always come back to the breath, come back to grounding. We teach this beautiful relationship between utilisation of self-regulation with the capacity for deeper self insight. The techniques become the tools which are memorised and available more and more often outside of the formal practice. So we are just sitting and suddenly we just breathe, or think 'Guru' or mantra.
Mantra is the most powerful tool we have to influence the unconscious to awaken the positive dormant powers and to stir the ocean and bring up the dark forces. They are dark because they are unconscious, because they are not integrated. If you have your mantra available to you, it is the greatest gift possible. So understand what you are doing when you give a mantra to a student. If you give So Ham or Aum you should understand what you are doing. I can't say just how much respect I have for the mantra traditions and their power to act on the mind, to bring about the awakening of the psychic personality, the deeper understanding, the freedom from the contracted state and from the egoic condition.
As teachers we can help people to become more 'embodied,' to go deeply into the subtle experiences of the body, into the spinal chord, into the chakras, into the tissues. As teachers we can convey confidence, a sense of the 'okayness' of things so that if difficult issues arise for students, we feel that we can manage it. There is nothing we can't manage as teachers if we just relax and trust. It may be that we recognise that an area is arising for a student that is outside our own capacity or expertise and we simply refer that student on to the correct person to deal with the issue.
In teaching meditation the relationship between ourselves and our students is critical. It is a wonderfully sacred, beautiful opportunity to grow. It is more about us learning than giving. It is where we learn the most. There is a beautiful tension, a polarity, between teacher and students that allows the flow of experience to arise. As teachers, we have to find the way to get back into our own bodies and find a way to help others to get back into their own bodies. For some people, this is easy, for others it takes longer and for others again it may take a long time. Just being with people and conveying the essence is the job of the teacher to hold the light of meditation in consciousness, to be the light. The more dedication in the holding of this light that we have, the more we can have the wonderful joy and privilege of being involved in the process of change and growth.
As teachers we may find students who have really big or overwhelming issues. We can suggest to people to go back to the breath, to their bodies, or to leave the issue for a time. We can listen to students and let them know that they have been heard. We also need to feel confident sometimes to refer students on to counselling with an appropriate agency. We need to let students know that the aim of the practice is to bring up these things, but in a way that is safe, grounded and supported. We and they should take time, not rush. Let things come up gradually. If necessary go back to stage two and just let things come and go if it comes up in a flood. At the same time go back to the breath, use humour therapy or have a brief period where you as a teacher allow your students people to talk at the end of the class so that they can express how it is for them. In this way they know they are not the only ones having difficulties. It is a good idea for yoga teachers to learn counselling skills.
So to summarise, we develop ourselves as people who meditate, we make the sankalpa, we develop the memory in the tissues to remember what is meditation, we remain aware of the oscillation from higher to lower states, we develop the capacity to hold and embody this experience for our students and to understand that the most important skills that a student can learn are grounding and the capacity to hold the duality in one moment. We teach our students to trust in the process and we teach them a process such as antar mouna to help them to face their issues. We teach them in a way whereby they can feel safe and supported. We recognise that the relationship between ourselves and our students is the key to teaching meditation.
© 2001 Swami Shankardev All Rights Reserved
The author can be contacted by email or visit his web site http://www.bigshakti.com/
Last updated 07/02/05