Instant Advanced Meditation

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

               
Tags: Questions //