Meditation.... for the love of it
Meditation doesn’t come easier than at the magical Ananda in India
I know I’m not alone with the following words.
Along with many, many other well intentioned people I have tried to meditate for years…..and years, only to give up after a few sessions, concluding that it is just not for me. Almost daily yoga practice helps, but as soon as I sit in meditation at the end of my practice, the panic button pings: “I cant do this…I cant do this” and my mind revs up a gear into overdrive as the most random thoughts race like the best F1 drivers around and around the Monaco track. Although guided meditation has helped a little, it only works for so long.
Yin and Yang
Also like so many of us, my life has long been lived in overdrive and I have been advised (most recently by the very wise and knowledgeable healers at Preidlhof in South Tyrol) that in Chinese medicine speak my Yang (dominant, male, doing) and Yin (recessive, female, being) energies are completely out of whack, even through the night (which would explain my ongoing disturbed sleep). I’m so busy doing the Yang from 6.30am until I hit my bed at night, there is very little left to nourish my softer, more receptive and creative Yin that should come into its own while the body rests and recharges through the night. Funnily, while other experts have alluded to this over the years, hearing it at Preidlhof, it seemed to make more sense and I started to imagine what I could do with this excess Yang energy if it was steered in the right direction!
“You can’t find it in books,” Martin Kirchler, the resident Chinese medicine expert tells me, undoubtedly reading my mind, “you have to find it in your body.”
Sally Kempton
Renowned meditation teacher and author Sally Kempton
Through lockdown I did a few online workshops with the US-based Sally Kempton, one of the great realised teachers on the meditation path and a true guide for our times. i reckoned that if anyone could help me deepen my own experience of meditation, this wise lady with her easy, practical, no nonsense style (she too is a journalist) could.
”Don’t make meditation a chore,” she tells me and that is probably the soundest advice I have yet received on the subject. I was absolutely making it a chore - yet another addition to my extensive daily ‘to-do’ list. I was trying too hard and panicking at the prospect of squeezing another 20-minute job into my already full morning routine.
Meditation for the love of it
Drawing on her 40+ years as a teacher and meditator, she tells me that her book, Meditation for the Love of It, was written out of her own experience with the very issues I am struggling with. Like a road map for the soul, the book can help us tune into our unique meditation channel and foster a path of connection with or inner creative shakti energy.
Kempton writes that, ‘the work of meditation is to coax the mind into letting go of the perceptions and ideas that keep it stuck, so it can expand and reveal itself as it really is. A vast creative awareness. Pure light and ecstasy. An ocean of peace and power. The Self.’
She suggested that I set an intention that for 40 days I will meditate for 20 minutes a day. Early morning can be best, but it can be done at any time. “Begin each practice with a few minutes of Nadi Shodhana (alternate nostril breathing), ask for grace and begin offering the mantra to the heart. Towards the end of your practice, let the mantra go and just sit. This is when the yin starts to rise.”
My lightbulb moment as to be honest I have never persevered with the practice for long enough for my yin to do anything! She also recommends other meditative practices that don’t involve sitting still such as bringing mantra into my asana practice (which I already do), incorporating 5 minutes of meditation at the end, doing japa or walking with the mantra - all are helpful and powerful.
The past few months have been extremely difficult for us all and I and while I’m not there yet (day 20 or thereabouts now) and some mornings 15 minutes is all I manage, but I am giving it my best and I know this practice is absolutely for me - and for everyone else too if they allow it.
The following quote from Burnt Orange in T.S. Elliot’s Four Quartets sums it up for me: