Into the Sunscape
Imbolc + The Practice of Meditation
Hello My Dears ~
The Wheel of the Year is spinning indeed. I have been thinking of you all with such appreciation and looking forward to sharing another beautiful space of contemplation with you. After the mid-winter holidays and the last full moon, I found myself floating to the surface of what felt like so much depth. After almost three months of gazing down into the oceanic currents of change, assessing and integrating my own personal expansion as well as our collective evolution, it has been incredibly relaxing to turn onto my back and face the sun, so to speak.
⌲ New Podcast Episode:
and I just released another conversation via her Substack. Calling all Soul Fam to the living room for this one. If you’re new to True Nature, you can find our other double dive conversations on Esther’s Inner Dive Podcast: Episodes 6 and 9.
⌲ Aquarius New Moon + The Year of the Dragon: I want to give a shout out to the New Moon in Aquarius, still washing over us from yesterday afternoon, February 9th. This lunation coincides with the Chinese Lunar New Year, bringing us out of the Water Rabbit Year and into the Year of the Wood Dragon. I have seen a lot of excitement brewing over this new lunar year, and rightly so - words like growth, innovation, prosperity, and creativity surround this elemental embodiment. It seems fitting to me that we are moving into a dragon year, after so much transformation and evolution. Auspiciousness!
Imbolc + The Practice of Meditation
Earlier this week we passed through the Imbolc portal - the halfway point between the Winter Solstice and the Spring Equinox. For us in the Northern Hemisphere, Imbolc is the return of the light.
Intellectually I have known for a while that we are closing-in on this point of seasonal shift, but it has only been in the past week that I have felt the tangible increase in light. I notice a wakeful quality and a sense of emerging - not the usual rising from sleep wakefulness, but a gradual coming-to-the-senses kind of awareness; the kind of lucidity that dawns when I realize that I have been dreaming.
And we have been, dreaming.
Deep in the bear cave of the past quarter year, we have been moving through the time of release, dreams, stars, and the vast expanse of all possibility. We have cast our minds far into the shimmering matrix of Indra’s Net. Our dreams have evolved and we have become different.
It’s impossible to dream and stay the same.
Our time of quiescence is drawing to a close.
Like the trees, soon our sap will rise. And with it, our lives will unfurl out into the sunscape of this cycle renewed.
Imbolc is special to me because it is marks my decision to meditate every day. This year is my third anniversary. In one thousand and ninety-five days, I have missed less than ten - and each of those days was a reminder of why I choose this practice.
I started meditating when I was eighteen, and spent a good portion of my early twenties living and practicing within the Buddhist communities of Northern India. I learned from masters of different traditions - Theravaden śamatha and vipassana, Japanese zazen, and Tibetan vajrayana. While I received so much valuable guidance and gained lots of experience in India - it took me almost fifteen years to develop a truly consistent practice. Even though I was devoted to meditation, I saw it more as a something to accomplish. This perspective infused effort into my practice. Effort can feel wonderful when we have the impression that we are gaining ground in the direction that we wish to move in - but with meditation, effort runs crosscurrent to its essence.
I have met a lot of people over the years who tell me that they would like to meditate, but they feel discouraged or put-off by their own attempts. I can relate. Meditation can seem hard when we are approaching it like it is a task to tick off our list, or even as a skill to master. A common remark I have heard is “I’m just not good at meditating.”
It makes sense that we have cultural concepts of meditation as something challenging. The perennial scene of an ancient yogi in a solitary cave, spending day-in and day-out in deep samadhi, connotes a high level of dedication and seems to imply a certain amount of effort. For anyone who has entered a meditation session with the notion of accomplishing “something” - such as a quieted mind or a deep state of absorption - effort and strain can arise as very real internal experiences. The funny thing about meditation, is that the essence of the practice is a relaxing back into our natural state. Meditation is not really about learning to do anything new, but learning to recognize and amplify what we already have and are. Any kind of attempt to create, conjure, or attain induces a state of tension within our mind-body, and actually creates its own obstacle to overcome. Beautifully paradoxical, the meditative state opens in the absence of effort, because we are already inherently connected to it.
By virtue of being creative consciousness embodied, we are already one with the state of being meditation seeks to reveal.
The Tibetan word for meditation is གོམ་པ (gom-pa)- meaning “cultivating,” “getting used to,” or “nurturing the experience of,” among a tapestry of related concepts. While this does seem to imply that there is something for us to do, this “something” is innate to who we are, and the “doing” is not an action in the usual sense of the word. The kind of cultivation གོམ་པ connotes is familiarity with our own natural patterns of alignment; the sensate experience of our basic, vibrational state of well-being.
What does it physically feel like when I am not thinking anything to contradict my inherent well-being?
Meditation offers us the space to practice this recognition, where we can nurture the experience of our most basic state of being. It is a remembering and a homecoming on all levels of who we are.
As babies we become aware that we have fingers and toes, as children and teenagers we become aware of our breathing, of our ability to dream, our emotions, and the infinity of concepts that undergird our ordinary experience of reality. Our awareness expands within our bodies, within the mental-emotional level of our personality, and out through the aperture of our senses into the world beyond.
Meditation is a conscious continuation of this process - the expansion of our awareness through our inherent ability to guide our focus. Rather than looking outward into the world, or inward into our thinking minds and emotions - meditation is a relaxing into our core self. In letting go of any outward directed focus, we find the center of our body-mind-life continuum, and allow our awareness to open from that point. We find the calm, settled, soothing, good feeling vibration of who we are, and let that expand of its own accord.
Through meditation, our perception naturally expands - and this wider view reveals aspects of our experience that were previously hidden or obscured. Our larger multidimensional body comes into sensate view. The scope of our focus widens enough that we can directly perceive ourselves on the level of consciousness. We have access to our insight and inspiration - and the full, unimpeded flow of our vital force.
When I sit down to meditate, I put aside an average of thirty to forty minutes, but even fifteen is enough. My goal isn’t to see how long I sit unmoving, but to allow myself an ample window of time within which I can fully relax into my core self. I know the kind of relaxation I am seeking, because I have spent plenty of hours doing otherwise; “meditating,” where I look immobile on the outside, but in my mind, emotions, and physical body I am agitated and in discomfort. In a traditional śamata (concentration) or vipassana (insight) meditation retreat, it is common to be instructed to sit unmoving, no matter what arises within the body or mind. It is true that many find value in this scenario - but for me, this seems like the hard way around. The easiest access point I have found into the meditative state comes through a state of simple relaxation. A state of deliberate satisfaction and ease where my mind is alert and calm, and all the channels in my body feel tangibly open to the flow of the life-force. When I place my focus on opening and relaxing, continually returning to the soothing sensation of the life-force flowing through my physical body - my thinking mind naturally quiets. I don’t have to make it happen. As my mental focus settles, I naturally release any thought patterns that are causing interference on the level of my vital force. As my vital force enjoys unimpeded flow, my body shifts back into its natural patterns of alignment, my electrical system enters coherence, my hormonal cascade regulates for repair, rejuvenation, and thriving, my genes up-regulate for the production of high-quality proteins - in short, as soon my mind settles and my natural vibrational state comes online, I am giving myself a dose of the best medicine the present moment can offer me.
When my mind settles, it doesn’t mean that it is blank. Awareness is present - an entire field of knowing and insight. When my discursive, meandering thoughts are absent, then there is plenty of space for the thoughts of my Deeper Self, my larger consciousness, to flow in.
In the older days, yogis and yoginis would visit remote mountain caves, or quiet forest glens, beside peaceful waters, within still, vast expanses in order to practice their meditation. Most of my early meditation experience took place within temple walls surrounded by the raucous din of North Indian towns. At all hours of the day and night there would be some kind of cacophony. These days, I love using my noise cancelling headphones. I consider them to be my portable cave. My twenty-year-old self would undoubtedly think I was cheating - but I love using headphones for the physical demarkation they offer my senses. Now we are meditating. My younger self also eschewed guided meditations or meditation sound tracks, but I find that depending on my current state of mind before I sit down - an object of focus besides my breathing or the ambient noise of the room I am in, can be really helpful. I love white and brown noise tracks, fan sounds, and rushing water - all of these “boring” uninterrupted sounds provide an excellent focus point to begin the process of relaxation. Another favorite entry point for me is to focus on the sensation of wholeness, the physical feeling of already having what I am seeking. This particular focus immediately induces physical relaxation, and as I focus on how good it feels to relax and already be connected - my mind settles, and the meditative state opens widely.
I choose to meditate every day because the results are so tangible. Victor started joining me daily two years ago, and it is the way we prefer to start our day (after coffee/hot drink time). I have found meditation to be so soothing that it is something I genuinely look forward to. It is also a beloved tool I have at my disposal for when I get outta wack and need to find my center. The fact that I have been meditating almost daily for three years might seem impressive, but I consider it to be more essential than showering or brushing my teeth…maybe second only to sleep and nourishing myself. The fact is, I meditate every day because it helps me find my center and hold the tone - the vibrational atmosphere I desire to radiate.
I would love to hear what you think about meditation - whether you have a practice, what your favorite methods/techniques are, or whether you are curious about beginning ❀
Really found this post helpful. Basically I’m hearing - trust yourself - love the idea of a commitment to this and this article helped me feel it is attainable.