Медитация 22, часть 1

[Говорящий 2] (0:00 - 18:08)
Okay, meditate. Please watch your breath. Come to me, go to me.

Try to watch any tension around the corners of your mouth, forehead, especially between your eyebrows. Try to check your eyelids, the upper part of your eyelids. Do they have a slight tension?

Let them go. Watch your mind. See if there's any agitation, distraction, thinking about other things.

See if your mind is getting sleepy. If so, take action. Try to find love, sense of contentment in the place, the golden room, willingness to just be there.

Without plans, come to the blue sky. Watch the blue sky, endless light. Come down to the mountains, to the valley.

Struggle against your desire to think about other things or make plans or think about what's going on in the world. And just struggle to find a sense of contentment, willingness to stay quietly in one place, looking at the valley. Then come back to the golden room and ask your heart teacher to come sit with you quietly.

Intently meditate on your eyes, gazing on you, gazing at your eyes, and the love passing through you. If you start to wander, you might try making your eyes smaller. Then slowly come back to this room.

[Говорящий 1] (18:15 - 30:38)
Just a few practical things. Towards the end of a program like this, it's really important, if you teach a program like this also, to start getting people thinking about how they're going to keep going. So you have to think a lot about that.

And there's some practical things. And I'd like the yoga teachers to talk about this too, today and tomorrow in the class. Like, in your mind, where are you going to meditate?

In your house. That's a good exercise to do at this point. Even if you're a long-time meditator, what's your plan?

Are you going to meditate in the same spot in your house? That's a way to start the process of, how am I going to keep this going after I get out of here? So I would say, try to think of a nice place in your house, a really conducive place in your house.

If there's a quieter place, like if the front windows face the street but there's a back room that doesn't face the street, that might be good. I think, judging where there's not noise, a lot of noise coming in is good. I have a nice back room, but it gets too hot.

It's on the Southern Exposure, and then I tried meditating there. So you want a room or an area of your apartment that doesn't get too cold or too hot. I personally think it should be an area where there's not a lot of traffic.

You could put your cushion away and walk to and fro there, but there's an energy that builds up in a certain spot in your apartment or in your room or your house. So try to find a corner of the house that people aren't going to walk a lot there, and it's quieter, and the temperature there is good. I can't emphasize enough how the room should be neat.

The whole Zen thing of an empty temple with maybe one bowl, that's a good thing. That's a really good custom. If the room has clothing scattered around it or books, books are very, very distracting.

I don't know about you, but the titles of books staring at me during meditation is a bad idea. They are yelling out their names. They are reminding me of what's inside of them.

They're asking me if I don't want to open it up. So it's good to, if you do have bookshelves, cover them with a cloth. And then the colors, as I said before, in the room, especially when you meditate, there's an option of leaving your eyes open, but you bring the eyelids down like this, but you keep the head up.

There's a tendency, if you keep the eyelids down, that your head starts to go down. So keep the chin parallel to the floor, but drop the eyes and bring the eyelids down a bit. Then your eye will catch whatever movements or, what do you call it, loud patterns there are on cloths or carpets or like that.

So it's better to have a block of pure color in front of you or something like white. And it's better if nobody moves during the meditation. If you're sitting with other people and then somebody moves a hand or reaches out for something, then your eye will catch any motion at all, like a fan or a tree blowing outside.

So if you choose to keep your eyes half open, which is useful, can be useful, you can experiment with it. Normally the only time we ever close our eyes is when we sleep. So there's a, what do you call it, autonomic response of the body.

When the eyes close, the mind thinks, oh, it's time to go to sleep. Then it's very difficult for some people to meditate because the minute they close their eyes, their mind wants to go to sleep. Because the mind's been doing that for 30, 40, 50 years.

So you might want to try cracking your eyes open. Which brings us to the subject of experimentation. Like don't be afraid to experiment.

Be curious. You know, the really good yoga people I know, I think Allison's a great example. I don't know her very well, but I know that she's really curious and she tries different things.

And her class always has something new or something experimental type of thing. Or she seems to have, to play around, Anatole's like that. With his diet and with his yoga, you can see him at odd moments in the afternoon trying something new.

Just in between things, you know. And he's curious about his practice and he tries new things. So I think in your meditation, don't get stuck in a rut, you know.

Like try four different seeds. The buckwheat ones, I discovered buckwheat ones after 20 years. And then I didn't know that you could take the buckwheat out until it split open at this, what do you call it?

Velcro thing in the bottom. And you can, I like the ones that you can, it has a velcro slit and you can take buckwheat shells in and out. I like buckwheat because it forms to your butt, if you have one.

And then you can just kind of squish around and it will change. It will fit to your bottom. I have a good friend, Dieter DeVissler.

He's been meditating for 40 years. And he swears by a four by four block with no coding. I mean, just, he's sort of a hard, well.

But it works for him, you know. And other people use those wraparound ones. I think Mercedes has a good thing.

She travels with her own cushion. So if you're traveling a lot, there's a tendency to get sloppy. With your practice in general, there's a tendency to get sloppy.

When you start teaching anything, there's a tendency to get sloppy. You say, I taught a yoga class today, I don't really have to do yoga class. I don't know why that's logical, but it seems that way.

And same with meditation. So especially if you're a traveling itinerant meditation yoga teacher, it's good to have your own setup that you travel with. She has a small one, a light buckwheat one, and she travels with it.

I think Christine Walsh has a nice setup. Her knees, she doesn't like to have her knees on the floor. So she has a cushion for her bottom, and then she has two cushions, a cushion for each knee.

So she doesn't get pain in the knee as the knees come down. Swami, the lady Swami, Swaroop Anandas. Swami Prema.

She has one of those little seats, metal seats with a little back on it that you take to football games. And she's first by that, and it seems to work for her. So it's a metal, it has a cushion, and then there's a metal L-shaped thing, and then there's another cushion on that, and it supports your lower back.

And she uses that, and she's first by that. I think almost everybody will find that if you get a cushion like this, a big rectangular one that fits under your knees, a lot of the suffering sitting on the ground is at the bony point in your ankle and the bony point in your knee. So you need one cushion for under your bottom.

Because your back and your bottom, for most people, should be higher. In most traditions, in most of the scripture, they will say try to elevate the back of your butt slightly, which puts more pressure on your ankle bones and your knee bones. So then it's good to have a larger cushion under those.

And for a lot of people, that makes all the difference. They discover that whatever pain they had sitting cross-legged was just under those two points, under the ankle bones and under the knee bones. And then once they get a cushion under those, then they can sit for a long time.

I find that if that cushion is too cushy, I start having bad posture, bad posture of my back. So work on that. Don't think it's somehow less to sit in a chair, but find a good chair.

I like those old, hardwood, heavy chair. Like not an easy chair. Easy chair won't work your fall sleep.

Couches don't work your fall sleep. Don't meditate on your bed, because that's all coated in sleep vibes. So I like those old-fashioned, heavy, solid.

For some reason, if it's very solid, it seems better. Solid chair. Personally, I like either with no arms or with wide arms, so I can have lots of room for this thing going on, or room for my knees.

If I choose to sit cross-legged for some of the time, there's a preliminary that we do by tradition. And we're going to go through that in the next course. The whole thing is about the preliminaries and how to prepare your mind for a practice session and like that.

In the meantime, practically, you can just use what we've been doing. You watch your breath, and then you go to the golden rule. This is a kind of meditation called jogam.

There are three classical types of meditation. Jogam means you place the mind on a single object, and you stay there. And there's no motion.

It's just there. And that's what I'd like you to try until April. So I'd like you to try that until April.

It's good to have like a three-, four-month meditation assignment. If you switch more often than not, you don't go very deep. If you don't switch at all, you get bored.

So three-, four-months is a good time. What we're trying to achieve in this first course is jogam. So jogam is the capacity of the mind to stay on a single object, a static single object.

Jog means to set the mind. Jogam.