Med­i­ta­tion is all about life.

Many peo­ple think med­i­ta­tion is about achiev­ing men­tal silence, and total peace. And then they frus­trate the hell out of them­selves when they sit, as the “voices in their heads” never shut up.

Here’s how I define meditation:

Sit­ting down on the front seat of a roller-coaster, arms up, no seat-belt. And find­ing your bal­ance so you don’t fall out.

Here are things you have to get over

Get over: Sit­ting only when you want to (when “things” are right)

Many are the excuses for not sit­ting. No time, no moti­va­tion, not lik­ing the pos­ture, not lik­ing the men­tal chat­ter, and my all-time favourite, “What’s the point?”

Why bother? They’re still the same…

The thing to under­stand is that med­i­ta­tion is has two prongs.

First, it’s to get us to pay atten­tion to what is going on in our body, and more impor­tantly, what is going on in our minds.

Sec­ond, it’s the only way to learn to be fully present off the cush­ion.

Pay­ing attention

Mostly we’re so lost in the chat­ter going on in our heads that we miss real liv­ing. The chat­ter, as we’ve men­tioned (espe­cially in the last few arti­cles,) is our ego-voice(s)—which is/are crit­i­cal, neg­a­tive, and blaming.

If we start to pay atten­tion to the voice itself, as opposed to uncrit­i­cally buy­ing into the con­tent, we can ease our­selves back from hook­ing our­selves into react­ing to what the voice is saying.

Pay­ing atten­tion is sim­ply say­ing (to our­selves): “Think­ing! Crit­i­ciz­ing! Blam­ing!” as opposed to head­ing down one or all of these paths by fol­low­ing the story. If we fol­low along blindly, attempt­ing to build evi­dence, we get a whole load of what we do not want.

This is a med­i­ta­tion tech­nique called “naming.”

Body-wise, it’s “Cramp in left foot!,” not “I can’t do this.” In other words, it’s learn­ing to “sit” in our dis­com­fort with­out judg­ing it or try­ing to run away.

To go back to the roller-coaster anal­ogy, once the ride starts, there is no exit. You can either whine and puke, or be present for the ride. Or, I guess there is an exit, but it’s per­ma­nent: you can jump off at the top and die.

Being Present Off the Cushion

The Bud­dha sug­gested med­i­ta­tion as a micro­cosm of liv­ing. You learn all you need to know for actu­ally liv­ing life by “just sitting.”

This is the point of sit­ting. A prac­tice that only pro­vided 20 min­utes a day of pres­ence would be quite lame. The cush­ion pro­vides the dis­ci­plined explo­ration of what true pres­ence, in the world, is all about.

I had a a mini-meltdown yes­ter­day, and did all the things that are designed to make it worse. I started off by mak­ing myself sad. Then, I item­ized some things I “should” be sad about. Then, I blamed them all on Dar. Then, I told her I was blam­ing her.

As is typ­i­cal of Dar, she chose not to bite on this, while admit­ting the attrac­tion she has to want­ing to make me happy. Know­ing she can’t make me any­thing, she chooses to watch me process my stuff.

By the time I got back home, I’d built up quite a head of resent­ment, anger, and sad­ness. I looked at my cush­ion, swore at it, and stomped off to my bed (a perk of being self-employed, work­ing out of the house, and hav­ing the morn­ing off.)

I climbed into bed, pulled up the cov­ers, and let the voice run. Imme­di­ately, “he” started rhyming off all the rea­sons and jus­ti­fi­ca­tions for me to run away, jump out of the roller-coaster, etc. Ego-voice, 101.

Here’s the inter­est­ing part

At that pre­cise moment, a “calm voice” (still me, of course) offered me a choice. It did it by ask­ing, “Why are you choos­ing to blame and make your­self mis­er­able?” (Ques­tions I ask my clients all the time!) I rec­og­nized that I had just slipped into lying-down med­i­ta­tion.

This is what my prac­tice of sit­ting, and my prac­tice of pres­ence has “done for me.” I saw, clearly, a choice to stop what I was doing, and choose some­thing else.

Because every­thing you feel, think, and believe is sim­ply what you are choos­ing. It’s not real, true, or even very inter­est­ing. You can stop, any time, by stopping.

So, I thought about my choice to make myself mis­er­able, and after think­ing, “You are choos­ing to make your­self mis­er­able,” I started to let go. By the time I picked Dar up, I was 95% done with it. I said to her, “I apol­o­gise for dump­ing my stuff on you, try­ing to blame you for my stuff.” She invited me to tell her more.

This is why I sit.

Get Over: think­ing that there is a cure for obsess­ing, blam­ing, mess­ing with yourself

No cure. The last few arti­cles make this point. Remem­ber the chart? The ego-voice is end­lessly nat­ter­ing. No choice there. If you bite on the nat­ter­ing, you get caught in over-thinking, and you end up try­ing harder, while cas­ti­gat­ing yourself.

Or, with every breath, you can choose the “path less trav­eled,” and you can dive back into your Shadow side, and learn some­thing new about your­self.

But here’s the kicker

This process goes on and on, until you die. No cure. Just aware­ness. This means that the fork in the road end­lessly appears—will I bitch, moan, com­plain, and blame, or will I see the game, ease back from it, and go deeper into myself?

This is what hap­pens on the cush­ion. There’s no sense of per­pet­ual silence. There’s agi­ta­tion, or pain, or emo­tion, and then a choice. Will I name it and let it go, or buy in and chase it? Chas­ing it leads to more and more mis­ery, and there­fore it’s odd we con­tin­u­ally choose it.

Choos­ing to name and breathe seems to cre­ate a space, and in that space is silence (the Bud­dhist “empti­ness,”) where what­ever we were think­ing about kind of deflates, or is seen to be a pass­ing phe­nom­e­non. It just drops away.

Like the roller-coaster. At the top of a drop, it’s all, “Oh. My. God! I’m going to die!” And then you fall, and imme­di­ately are into some­thing else, like a turn, or an “up,” and the past scare is also gone (as you busily work on the next one.)

Med­i­ta­tion does not change this. It allows you to stop grip­ping the safety bar, and to just go along for the ride, the heart pound­ing, up and down, scary ride.

Get over: putting other things first

“I’ll get around to it” is death on wheels. There’s always going to be some­thing your ego-voice can make more impor­tant, and likely it will be some­thing in the “ideal” part of the chart. In other words, your cul­ture deter­mines what will be thrust forward—money, job, career, kids, spouse, whatever—this is will be pushed out as need­ing to be “han­dled first.”

Noth­ing, absolutely noth­ing, how­ever, is more impor­tant that you tak­ing your­self seri­ously enough to get to know who and how you are. Nothing.

This week, think about all the excuses you are cre­at­ing not to dig deeply into your­self. Think about who you are blam­ing, for what, and let it all go. Notice what you are doing to buy into the cul­tural ideal, to stay stuck in victim-stance.

So, smile, sit your ass down, shut up and look.

What you find might just be the bestest roller-coaster ever!

QiGong Secrets – Week 6 — Ben­e­fits of QiGong

Many of the approaches to QiGong in the west have placed a greater empha­sis on the form of QiGong. Although I do plan to con­tinue to spend time on my form as I prac­tice QiGong, I am extremely grate­ful for the reminder in the QiGong Secrets Home Study Pro­gram that the energy and the mind are the aspects of QiGong that make it such a pow­er­ful tool. My QiGong prac­tice has changed dra­mat­i­cally since start­ing this course—and we have only learned two sim­ple patterns.

The learn­ing in week 6 con­tin­ues with cre­at­ing a high level QiGong prac­tice. As I wrote last week, sim­ply stand­ing and breath­ing with a quiet mind will make a difference—however, cre­at­ing a high level QiGong prac­tice will increase that ben­e­fit sig­nif­i­cantly. The form of the move­ment is sec­ondary. The focus of this week’s learn­ing is tak­ing time at the end of a QiGong prac­tice to allow your energy to flow and do its thing. Like water will always flow to the low­est point, your chi will nat­u­rally flow to an area of weak­ness or deficiency.

This week, I thought I would write about some of the ben­e­fits of start­ing a QiGong prac­tice. The five main rea­sons for prac­tis­ing QiGong are health and vital­ity, longevity, inter­nal force, mind expan­sion and spir­i­tual cultivation. 

Health, vital­ity, and longevity – these are the main rea­sons for prac­tic­ing QiGong. Who doesn’t want to live a longer, healthy life with lots of energy? Ben­e­fits include low­er­ing blood pres­sure, increas­ing immune response, increas­ing res­pi­ra­tory capac­ity, increas­ing joint flex­i­bil­ity, improv­ing pos­ture and struc­tural prob­lems with the back and spine, and pro­mot­ing deeper relax­ation. All that sim­ply by com­plet­ing a few sim­ple move­ments for about 15 min­utes a day.

Inter­nal Force – this sim­ply means hav­ing energy to keep you going all day. Stress is a big fac­tor in our lives that reg­u­larly depletes our energy. QiGong helps to clear any emo­tional tur­moil, relieves stress, and reduces anx­i­ety. Tak­ing a short break from work and per­form­ing a few sim­ple QiGong moves and breath­ing will pro­vide energy in a very short time. 

Mind Expan­sion and Spir­i­tual Cul­ti­va­tion — When you prac­tice high-level Qigong you are also prac­tic­ing Zen med­i­ta­tion. This helps to improve mem­ory, cre­ativ­ity, intel­li­gence, con­scious­ness and artic­u­late thought. In a spir­i­tual sense, QiGong helps you to get in touch with who you really are. Who is there when all that mind chat­ter or ‘mon­key mind’ goes away?

I encour­age you to think about start­ing a QiGong prac­tice. Take a look at the QiGong Secrets Home Study pro­gram. The ben­e­fits are tremen­dous. Any­one can do QiGong. There are very sim­ple vari­a­tions to almost all move­ment so they can be done while sit­ting. All move­ments are done in a relaxed and gen­tle man­ner. We rec­om­mend a 70% rule. This means you com­plete each of the moves to 70% of your abil­ity. If a pat­tern requires you to turn to the left and then to the right, the 70% rule means that you fig­ure out how much of the move you can do com­fort­ably. Then when you are com­plet­ing the pat­tern, you stop turn­ing when you have reached 70% of your weak­est side. In QiGong, you never push past a com­fort level.

Finally, here is a link to a fun video. Dr. Love raps “This is why I do QiGong” It is worth a watch. 

Here are a cou­ple of lines worth not­ing from the rap video.

I’m strong because I do QiGong. You’re weak because you do not breathe.”

When you do your breath­ing, your chi starts to flow.
Cul­ti­vate your chi, and your energy grows.