During the call this morning, we explored a practice called Repairing The Universe. Here’s a recording of the call (BTW, if you are using the Safari browser, you *may* have a problem with this player).
After you listen, let me know what you think/experience.
CLICK HERE for the audio (will open in a new window)
Still not sure if you want to take advantage of my Birthday/Mess Up offer?
I understand.
I’ve gotten a number of emails with questions like, “How do I use the Course?” and “How does I AM work with my existing practice?” and “I’m a brand new meditator; will I AM work for me?”
Even though I’ve answered all those emails, I thought it might be easier — and MUCH more fun — to do it live, in real-time.
So, join me for a live I AM Teleseminar, this Saturday, June 16th at 9am Pacific Time (that’s 10 MT, 11 CT, noon ET, and 1600 GMT) — check www.time.gov if you’re not sure when that is.
Then, call (319) 256-0300 and use access code 1099033# to get on the call.
On this call, I’ll not only answer all your questions, but we’ll do another one of the I AM practices… maybe one of my favorites “Re-Pairing the Universe” (the joke is that ALL of the I AM practices are my favorite!)
I need to know how many lines to reserve for the call, so if you want to join me, Click on the COMMENTS link and let me know.
And if you have a question you want to explore — about I AM, about meditation, about spiritual practice, about how long to marinate tofu, or anything else — write that in here, too.
Hoping to see you on Saturday!
I have never received so many birthday wishes, e-cards or phone calls in my life!
Thanks so much… that was REALLY fun.
MUCH to my surprise, so many people took me up on my Birthday / Mess Up special within the first 24 hours that my credit card company called me, worried that my account had been hijacked!
Luckily, I explained what was going on and they’re calmed down.
If you’re one of those people who has joined me already, and you’ve begun to explore I AM, let me know what you think.
What do you like about the I AM course? What experiences have you had with the I AM practices?
Remember “This Old House,” the first home-improvement show, with Bob Villa?
After 30 years of meditation, I noticed that I could have been the house on that show.
I had spent most of my life, from the time I was 8, treating myself like an improvement project — a self-improvement project.
And the reason was simple: If I fixed me up just right — an addition here, removing a wall there, some new paint — I’d finally be truly happy.
“Happy” was shorthand for a lot of ideas of what I thought I wanted — calm, imperturbable, wise, admired, loved-by-all, etc.
And then I realized that I only believed certain things needed fixing was because of the idea of this imagined, improved, future.
In other words, it was my lack of self-acceptance that motivated a practice that says you should accept things as they are!
Or, better, I was trying to accept things as they were… so that things would CHANGE!
Am I the only one?
Once I got hip to this twisted motivation — and it was SUBTLE — I had to stop practicing.
Of course the obsessive interest I had with the workings of the mind didn’t go away (my parents got a note from the principal of my elementary school, saying, “Please ask Steven to stop hypnotizing the 5th grade class.”). And that’s what led to I AM… but more about that later.
What would your life be like if you couldn’t conceive of yourself as an improvement project?
Coming in at #4 is this challenge to meditation:
I can’t sit still / get my body to relax
Contrary to what many people think, meditation is not about becoming a walking coma victim. It’s not about moving in slow motion, speaking in a monotone, and having no reaction if you win the lottery or lose your house.
I remember being in Central Park in New York City for the first Sunrise Meditation with the Dalai Lama. There were only about 200 of us and you could tell which lineage people came from by the way they sat. The Theravada practitioners sat very still, but had horrible posture. The Zen boys (and girls) looked like they were modeling for Buddha statues.
And then there was the Dalai Lama and the other Tibetans. After a while I stopped my practice just to watch the Dalai Lama. He shifted on his cushion. He rearranged his robes. He adjusted his glasses. He looked around the crowd. He waved to friends and sponsors. He coughed, sneezed, wheezed and, basically didn’t seem to have a big distinction between sitting and not-sitting. And the other Tibetan lamas with him were about the same.
Meditation is about that kind of naturalness. Where the word “spiritual” has no meaning because there’s no contradiction between “spiritual” and “mundane.”
It’s also about being able, whenever you want, to drop into a state that reveals clarity, insight, relaxation and compassion (among other aspects).
While sitting still can be helpful for dropping into that state, it’s not required. And, forcing yourself to sit still … well, personally, I don’t recommend going to war with any part of your experience, physical or mental.
There are a couple of IAM practices where you won’t TRY to sit still… but you probably will have a really hard time even thinking about moving! Others actually require you to move! In “Chaos Creation,” for example, it’s the subtle movements you make that actually create the profound state of quiet (of both body and mind) you sink into.
In another practice — Zooming in on Peace — you find how you don’t need to work at relaxation… it’s always present when you know where to look… and once you see it, in naturally expands.
Okay, now it’s time for me to get some sleep and prepare for tomorrow’s rowing.
BTW, the next posts will be about my Big Mess Up 
This might start sounding redundant, but, BOY! I’m so amazed at both the quantity of responses I’ve gotten to my meditation questions… and the quality of the responses. Really heartfelt, insightful, honest, beautiful replies. It’s a wonderful thing to actually ENJOY checking email
So, the #3 biggest issue people have brought up is… drum roll please…
How do I integrate meditation in my “real” life?
I have a cartoon — I think it was originally in the New Yorker about 20 years ago — it has 2 guys standing, obviously chatting, and one says to the other, “I know I can’t keep a job, and I haven’t had a relationship in years and I still live with my parents… but you should see what I’d be like if I DIDN’T meditate.”
Back in the 80’s and 90’s, a lot of Western meditation teachers, many of them lineage holders or otherwise recognized as important or accomplished in some way, mane with 20 or 30 years of practice behind them, found themselves asking questions like, “Why isn’t my meditation practice affecting the rest of my life?!”
If you look at the history of meditation, it is typically something OUTSIDE of daily life. In pretty much every contemplative tradition, there’s a long history of monasticism, of leaving the householder life.
Even as meditation became more common in the West, it’s still taught with an escapist idea: “At the very least, try to set up a special corner in your room. Make sure you can avoid any possible distraction.”
Also, meditation practices are not about daily life … in the Zendo, you may stare at a blank wall, not at your kids, your boss, or that guy in the car in front of you who signals left and STOPS… and then turns right.
The idea was not that you leave the monastery… but that you stayed in it until you reached the goal (and “the goal” is a whole other story).
It makes sense to escape and limit distractions when you’re doing concentration practice, when your practice is about the contents or objects of awareness rather than about the phenomenon of awareness/consciousness itself.
Practices from what I call “The Path of Recognition” (literally, to re-think, or to perceive differently), don’t have that same requirement. In fact, it’s kind of rare that the question of “integration” comes up from people who’ve done the Instant Advanced Meditations since part of the instruction is to do them in your daily life.
To be clear, I don’t mean *changing* how you’re doing something… like washing the dishes really slowly or “mindfully.” I mean simply in your daily life. Like noticing the color of someone’s shirt as you’re chatting with them — not a distraction, but part of the simple act of living.
One friend of mine said he did 2 of the I AM practices while driving from Tucson to Boulder to visit… he said, “I hadn’t had an experience like that since I did acid 30 years ago!”
Oh, I got an email from a reader who said, “But I already have a meditation practice.” Great, I replied. What most people discover is that the “perspective” of I AM takes any existing practice to a whole new level.
Okay, I want to write one more post (about the last “challenge”) before I fall over — I went rowing this morning at 6 am. Aside from the effects of sleep deprivation, it was my first time rowing and I think I can only find one part of my body that isn’t sore.
p.s. I added something to my “birthday countdown timer” at www.advancedmeditation.com/birthday
I said “WOW” about how many people responded to my email about why you meditate and what challenges you’ve faced.
But now I want to say THANK YOU. I am so honored to read your honest and revealing replies. I hope my answers can match what you’ve given me.
Out of the 4 or 5 biggest meditation challenges that people shared with me, here’s number 2:
Can’t focus / Can’t still my mind / Doze off / Distracting thoughts
Tell me about it! I know this one well.
When I was a “serious” practitioner, I would spend 14 hours a day, for 4-14 days just to get the mind quiet enough to even DO the actual meditation practice.
Sometimes, I was in the groove after 2 or 3 days. Other times, at the end of 2 weeks, I was still watching relationship movies in my head and trying to turn down the volume of the song Feelings!
Read the bios of meditators who went to the tops of mountains and got still minds… when they come off the mountaintop and back to the marketplace — kids, jobs, little league — they all talk about how they can’t sustain the quiet mind!
(I know that some people will read this sentence and shout, “But MY teacher…!” and, if that’s you, I’m not saying your teacher isn’t walking around Wal-Mart without a thought… what’s more important is: How are YOU doing in the “stopping thoughts” department?)
When you closely examine the teachings about concentration practices, and read the biographies of those who’ve engaged in them, you notice that to really find focus, or stop thoughts takes TIME, a lack of distraction, and a special combination of relaxation/effort. It’s incredibly difficult in our Western lives.
Concentration is like trying to tame a wild animal… or play Whack-A-Mole with your thinking.
But concentration isn’t the only way to still the mind. And the odds are really good that you’ve already experienced what I mean.
Think about your own life … can you remember a time where you got really caught up in something interesting and your mind becomes clear, quiet, focused. Where you felt a profound “oneness”… naturally?
Of course. We’ve all found that sometimes. The only glitch is that we usually don’t know how, or can’t reproduce the effect.
Well, the practices in the Instant Advanced Meditation Course seem to recreate that effect with great reliability.
For each I AM technique, you get a simple mission. For example: attending to some aspect of our experience or of how we perceive reality that we typically haven’t noticed or have tended to overlook.
And when we pay attention to that subtle aspect of reality — and it’s quite easy — the mind can become incredibly still.
But, more importantly… the idea that meditation is about quieting the mind is only one perspective.
There are entire lineages where having a still, focused mind is not the goal at all. There are other types of practices — one friend of mine, who is a lineage holder in a major meditation tradition once said to me, “Oh, I’m not built for concentration. Most people aren’t.”
And here’s the perspective from these other traditions:
Is the sky affected by the clouds? Does the ocean care about the waves?
Nope. The sky is the vastness through which clouds merely pass. The ocean is the totality of waves/stillness.
Imagine experiencing life as if you were the sky or the ocean so that when thoughts do arise, they aren’t a problem. Just clouds passing through, or waves that recede back into their original source. Imagine no longer fighting with your mind.
The implications of this are quite staggering. Like, if you’ve had issues with negative thoughts, or other difficulties that seem to arise repeatedly… maybe you could experience them like clouds passing by. And if you could do that, maybe you wouldn’t need to “work on them” or “resolve them” or “process them.” Maybe they would, really, just pass… or maybe, they would still show up, but they wouldn’t pull you off-balance. Now that’s some radical self-acceptance.
In the I AM Course, some of the practices are like the “interesting attraction,” where you easily become absorbed in a simple, fascinating mission. Others are like the sky/ocean, where you identify more as the spaciousness in which perception arises — more like the ocean than the boat getting tossed by the waves.
But here’s the funny thing that totally surprised me.
After doing the I AM practices for a while, I had the thought, “I wonder if I can do that old practice of mine?” I thought that it probably wouldn’t work very well since, in the past, I could take a week or two of practice to kind of build up some “depth.” Well, I sat down, took about two breaths… and had a deeper practice session than I had ever had, even when I was on a long retreat!
I’ve found that the I AM practices greatly enhance any other type of practice… in fact, one of the instructions in the course is how to create a “container” out of I AM and then “pour in” some other practice (if you have one).
Anyway… I’m having some computer problems that need my attention (why do I still believe these things should WORK properly?)… I’ll post the next big responses to “what are your challenges” asap. And, in the meantime, consider this: What if your mind couldn’t be a problem?
WOW!
So, I send out an email and ask “What’s the biggest challenge you have with meditation?”
HUNDREDS of readers replied (I was stunned) and, by far, the #1 answer has been:
I can’t find the time to meditate enough
There were some variations, like “I forget…” or “I get too busy…” or “I’m a working, single mom and…” But the bottom line is that the time issue is a biggie.
And, I totally understand. When I began meditating, I was told that if I didn’t do 2 hours a day, I wouldn’t get any real benefits. I know other lineages say 20 minutes, twice a day, but even that can be difficult.
At one point I tried the tapes that claim, “You just listen to the recording and it does all the work for you.” That was enticing, but the tapes lasted 30-60 minutes, too. And some of them wanted you to listen in your sleep (I tried it and woke up in a tangle of headphone cord that Houdini would have struggled with).
You know, as I’m writing this I’m remembering that the worst part about the “time issue” was how guilty I felt for not finding/making/having the time. And, ironically, one of the reasons I stopped meditating was that I didn’t like feeling guilty for not meditating!
When I started discovering the unusual practices that are in the Instant Advanced Meditation Course, I was really surprised to see how quickly they worked. Often, after only a few minutes, I was in a state that took 45-60 minutes to get to using my previous technique.
But more importantly, I didn’t need to set aside time to do them, because I found myself naturally doing them throughout the day. At first, it was just during “down time,” like while I was waiting for something, or on hold on the phone, or while taking a walk. But then I found that I could do them WHILE I was doing other things — writing, talking, eating, watching TV. Of course, anyone who knows me knows that I LOVE our hot tub… and I really love doing I AM in the hot tub
I don’t want to take too much of your time, so I’ll just say this brief thing: The reason that the I AM practices can eliminate the “time issue” is that they don’t work on the same principles as most meditation practices. They use a different way of working with the mind than anything I did for 30 years.
In fact, the specific thing that makes I AM unusual is related to the SECOND biggest challenge people brought up. And, I’ll be writing about that really soon (probably tonight).
