Skip to main content

How to Meditate - II


Instructions to meditate usually begin with the simple invitation: Take your seat. It sounds innocuous enough but it's important. I'm told of people who meditate while lying in bed or in the ad breaks, but I'm personally doubtful about how possible that is. Sitting is a key to the whole process. Get this bit right and you're well on the way to learning how to meditate. I think.


Most of the time, most days we are quite unaware of our bodies. They are just there, moving us around, providing a handy receptacle for food and drink and giving us something to park our glasses on. Our bodies do their thing automatically and we don't have to think about them at all except when they hurt or itch or make embarrassing smells or inexplicably fail to do exactly what we ask of them. It's as well that we don't notice our bodies most of the time; after all, the mark of a good servant is to be unnoticeable. During meditation, though, we are going to be completely aware of our bodies for quite a period of time, and we need to sit in a way that makes that possible. We are also going to be still for longer than the body is normally used to, so we need to be seated in way which minimises pressure points and allows us to make subtle adjustments to our posture when it might be necessary. Our bodies are -mostly - reliable servants, but for much of the day they are also cunning and at times tyrannical masters, telling us when to move or eat or fidget or scratch or sleep. The mastery the body has over us happens mostly because we are unaware that it is the body that is in control. For this period,while we are seated, we are going to take complete power over our body and the body doesn't much care for that.

Our bodies are as seamlessly part of us as our minds and spirits and so connected that what we do with our bodies will necessarily affect what we do with the other two parts of our personal trinity. Of course we acknowledge this fact whenever we kneel for prayer or stand when a visitor comes into the room. In meditation we assume our seat, telling the deepest parts of ourselves that we are here with a purpose.

The way our bodies function can't be completely explained by any doctor, no matter how big an anatomy textbook s/he may have read. They have mysterious but quite predictable patterns of energy. They have rhythms and flows and pathways and junctions and storage points for energy that may all be affected by the way we are seated. We want all this stuff to work for us in the most helpful manner, so we choose our place and manner of being seated with care. Of course, the Eastern books all recommend sitting cross legged on the floor, but unless the session is going to become merely an exercise in pain control and a short one at that, I'm going to sit on something. It's taken a while of experimenting and thinking about it but I have it sort of OK now: a way of sitting that I can maintain for sufficient time, and where I am as unencumbered internally as I might possibly be. So, take your seat. What's next? Easy. Breathe. We can all do that.

 

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Camino, by David Whyte

This poem captures it perfectly Camino. The way forward, the way between things, the way already walked before you, the path disappearing and re-appearing even as the ground gave way beneath you, the grief apparent only in the moment of forgetting, then the river, the mountain, the lifting song of the Sky Lark inviting you over the rain filled pass when your legs had given up, and after, it would be dusk and the half-lit villages in evening light; other people's homes glimpsed through lighted windows and inside, other people's lives; your own home you had left crowding your memory as you looked to see a child playing or a mother moving from one side of a room to another, your eyes wet with the keen cold wind of Navarre. But your loss brought you here to walk under one name and one name only, and to find the guise under which all loss can live; remember you were given that name every day along the way, remember you were greeted as such, and you neede

The Matter With Things. 2

  Last night I finished reading Iain McGilchrist's The Matter With Things, Our Brains, our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World , the biggest book I have ever read, in all senses of the word "biggest". Back in 2017 I wrote about books which had been important to me , and, however I would recompile that list now, The Matter With Things would go straight to the top. Really. It's that good. I've read every word: no skipping or coming to and realising that my eyes have been glazed over for the past ten minutes. It's taken me a couple of months to engage  with its 1300 or so pages of text, and, as well, there are another couple of hundred pages of  appendices and bibliography (well, OK, I haven't read the bibliography). At the end of the book proper there is an epilogue which is a "so what" chapter in which McGilchrist speculates about the implications of his hemispheric theory for the world in the immediate future. This epilogue is preceded by a

En Hakkore

In the hills up behind Ranfurly there used to be a town, Hamilton, which at one stage was home to 5,000 people. All that remains of it now is a graveyard, fenced off and baking in the lonely brown hills. Near it, in the 1930s a large Sanitorium was built for the treatment of tuberculosis and other respiratory ailments. It was a substantial complex of buildings with wards, a nurses hostel, impressive houses for the manager and superintendent and all the utility buildings needed for such a large operation. The treatment offered consisted of isolation, views and weather. Patients were exposed to the air, the tons of it which whistled past, often at great speed, the warmth of the sun and the cold. They were housed in small cubicles opening onto huge glassed verandas where they cooked in the summer and froze in the winter and often, what with the wholesome food and the exercise, got better. When advances in antibiotics rendered the Sanitorium obsolete it was turned into a Borstal and the

Turn Sideways Into The Light

David Whyte speaks in his audio series What To Remember When Waking of the myth of the Tuatha De Danann. They were a mythical race from Ireland's past who were tall, magical, mystical people devoted to beauty and artistry. When another more brutal people, the Milesians invaded Ireland the Tuatha De Danann fought them off in two battles, but were faced with a third, decisive battle against overwhelming odds. So, lined up in battle formation and facing almost certain defeat, the Tuatha De Danann turned sideways into the light and disappeared. Whyte's retelling is, to put it mildly, a gloss, but I am quite taken with the phrase and with the phenomenon it describes. Turning sideways into the light is the realisation that there are some encounters that are damaging to all involved in them: no one wins a war. Faced with such an exchange, to turn sideways into the light is to seek another, more whole form of relationship. It is to reject the ground rules of the conversation as they

Prayer as Relationship

  This is a reconstruction of the talk I gave, last night, at the 3 in 1 group at St Michael's Church, Anderson's Bay, Dunedin.  We have all had unhelpful experiences of prayer . I remember the clergy colleague who would sometimes correct the theology of my sermons 5 minutes later, when he led the intercessions; or the prayer groups when you dreaded THAT person speaking, because you knew they would speak for a quarter of an hour and list everything they knew to be wrong with the world. I've heard prayer used to share gossip, or to preach sermons, or to make announcements. I've seen prayer used to shame, or to control or to boast. In all these instances I have to ask "who, exactly is being addressed here?" and find myself asking again what, exactly, is prayer anyway?  I know what it's not. Prayer is not telling God what God should do with the universe. Neither is it barking into a silence in which nothing is ever heard. Prayer is not exercising some positio