No meditation practices would ever work if dhyana weren’t a natural tendency of the human mind. To love, create, be kind, act selflessly, experience wonder, and feel inspired are totally human and natural. They are made possible by dhyana, the impulse to transcend.
I create the peace that surrounds me. I create the peace that surrounds me.
2500 years of Hindu Raja Yoga, and this book breaks it down into steps that are really beautiful and seemingly easy. I read it like poetry, all the words are beautiful to me. Bliss, joy, energy, love, compassion, alert, vibrance, thrive, diversity, timelessness, evolving, gratitude, grace. In just one paragraph.
I did some of the exercises, and I can see how this is powerful stuff. The poses ranged from easy to hard, and I will continue to sample one. I am a sampler, less an acolyte. Of nearly everything. Except love, I am an acolyte of love.
Some favorite visualizations:
Sit quietly with your eyes closed and take a few deep breaths. When you feel calm and centered, visualize an outline of your body. Keeping the outline in mind, start filling it in with light. An easy way to do this is to see light expanding from the center of the image, the heart, and radiating outward as a soft white glow. Another aid is to feel yourself breathing the light into the outline.
In your mind’s eye, see yourself plucking an apple from a tree. Take a bite of the apple and swallow it. Mentally follow the path of the apple as it gets digested and gives up its energy. See the energy entering a heart cell and fueling a single heartbeat. Now ask yourself: At what point did life leave the apple? There were only stages of transformation as the fruit went from the tree to your heart. At each stage, different processes took over. Yet the chain of energy is unbroken, and so is the flow of life.
I treat every day like a new world. I treat every day like a new world.
No matter what you happen to be doing or thinking, you are floating at some level of samadhi, present awareness. This isn’t something people are normally aware of, but you can experience your level of awareness with the following exercise. Make a list of three things you like, three things you like a lot, and three things you deeply love. Perhaps a TV sitcom or a peanut butter cookie is something you like, while going to the beach or playing chess is something you like a lot, and your child or the music of Bach is something you deeply love. Whatever you wrote down, you went to a different level of awareness to make your choices. You can verify this by taking each item of your list, shutting your eyes, and experiencing it inside as an image or feeling. The intensity of something you casually like will be shallow compared to the intensity of something you deeply love.
Today take a little time to inspire yourself by going back to your own touchstones, the things that have helped you to realize that there is more to life than just material experience. Whether the source is scripture, poetry, music, or a movie, the test is for you to allow yourself to enter into, say, a Mozart concerto or a ballad by Alicia Keys, and experience transcendence. Let go and be present in the notes, in the rhythms, in the harmonies. Allow someone else’s epiphany to reach out and touch you. Such experiences provide a foretaste of what unity consciousness is like all the time.
Behind every experience there is awareness, which you can locate anytime you wish. To show yourself how this works, try the following: Sit back and look around you. Focus on any object—a table lamp, a chair, a paperweight, the sky outside. Now tune it out by allowing your eyes to go into soft focus while you move your attention to the center of your chest. Now go back and forth. See the object, then go inward and tune it out. Repeat for a minute or two. The process is simple, and you might have your own way of moving your attention inward. Regardless of how you do it, what we call “tuning out” moves your attention and shifts your focus, which is the critical element in meditation. Once you feel familiar with how to turn your attention inward, you know how to transcend.
To use a traditional image from Yoga, imagine that the Absolute is sending arrows of light into the created world. Consider that the highest values in life, including love, compassion, creativity, empathy, beauty, truth, and spiritual inspiration, are what the arrows carry to our world. This is a good start for practicing contemplation. Sit quietly and let your mind go to an experience of one of those values just listed. Feel the lightness, vibrancy, joy, and fulfillment your experience contained. Let these subtle feelings expand and settle in your awareness. You are learning the truth of the Yogic saying “This isn’t knowledge you learn. This is knowledge you become.”
I experience my body as a flow of awareness. I experience my body as a flow of awareness. Your body isn’t a machine, even a miraculous machine, but a storehouse of infinite knowledge. If we look at any process in the body, from a cell dividing to reproduce itself to the immune system repelling an invader or the digestive tract extracting energy from food, a vast amount of knowledge is on display. No process is mechanical. The body’s knowledge is alive, flowing, and conscious.
The Gifts of Royal Yoga Existence becomes blissful. You experience a joyful, energetic body; a loving, compassionate heart; an alert, vibrant mind; and lightness of being. You control your mental activity. You can generate thoughts, feelings, and impulses that are evolutionary. You are the one who gives them meaning, and therefore the whole world as you perceive it has meaning. You see everyday life as a lucid dream, incredibly vivid but an illusion. You can improve the dream without getting trapped in it.
Joy becomes the only measure of success because your essential nature is joy. It is the beginning and endpoint of every journey. You understand what it means to thrive. You savor the diversity of life, which brings richness to your unfolding story. You recognize that the point of arrival is always now. You can’t move to where you are already standing—this is the experience of timelessness.
You recognize that you have no fixed identity. Your identity is unique but always evolving. It is your karmic story, but you don’t need to be bound by it. You recognize gratitude as the sanest response to existence. It is insanity to believe that existence is a problem. You recognize that existence is lavish and abundant. Grace becomes an everyday experience. It reveals itself by the perfect way that every experience fits together. Instead of brief glimpses of synchronicity, you live in total synchronicity.
THE PRACTICES OF PEACE Don’t create stress for yourself and others. Look for areas of agreement instead of areas of discord. Take responsibility for your own anger and resentment. Don’t unleash them on other people. Get out of the habit of blaming others. Be aware of your impulse to judge, criticize, and get offended. Don’t indulge in the impulse whenever possible. Distance yourself from hostile people and hostile situations.
I trust the truth to show me the way. I trust the truth to show me the way.