I’d love to hear from folks about some of the meditations that they do they may be of a more personal nature. Here are a few of mine that I use to gather energy from the world around me:
T’ai Chi is a wonderful form of moving meditation and one that I have practiced for over 45 years. It is a fantastic way to blend with the energies around you and bring them to your center.
Another is Forest Bathing (Shinrin-yoku) https://www.growwilduk.com/blog/5-simple-steps-practising-shinrin-yoku-forest-bathing
Spending quiet meditative moments surrounded by the forest, sitting under a spreading oak tree or wrapped in the boughs of a spruce can really be a luminous experience. Slip into a Shamatha space at the same time and all bets are off.
A more personal one that I practice after my yoga/exercise time in the morning I call the Planetary Beam. Stand facing North and imagine a geostationary satellite directly above you. That satellite is firing a beam of light down through you and that beam continues on right through the center of the earth and out the other side. Try to feel the movement as you rotate with our planet at around 1,000 mph.
I do quite a bit of walking meditation. Along “dream streets” with “dream cars” and “dream garbage cans,” etc. :). I try to be mindful of the changing perspectives (buildings and objects around me) with every step I take, and try to look up to see the top of things/the sky and not just plodding along with my eyes glued to the ground in front of me. I like to practice saying “release!” and letting go of thought chains and tension and bring myself fully into the present moment, and observe how, when I do this, my field of visual awareness expands to include the full extents of my peripheral vision.
Vipashyana in Shirshasana (headstand)…4 minutes. The interesting thing about that is that there seem to be much fewer distractions. Perhaps that is because the body is deeply involved in balancing.
Vipashyana in the morning before anyone else is here using one of the on-line guided meditations that are silent except for a bell every five minutes. Earbud in one ear so I can listen for the phone.
Zhiné during the day…concentrating on a space out in the room. Folks who look in just think I’m spacing out.
Here’s one that I mostly use at night in a later sleep cycle. I do this as a WILD type protocol, sometimes with truly wild results…but it also works as a nap protocol.
Luminosity Meditation
Drain all emotions into rivers that flow into a clear light sea…everything…say the words.
Feel the resulting emptiness.
Gather energy from the world around you and let it collapse inward by imagining a black hole at the
point just below your navel where the central channel meets the two side channels.
Let that energy collapse even further into an imagined singularity.
Let that singularity explode into a universe of light in the body.
Let that light dissolve your physical being and become a luminous entity.
Expand that luminosity exponentially into the underlying essence.
Vipashyana Mindset
Over the last week or so I have been trying to maintain a Vipashyana mindset throughout the day. That means as often as I can I am watching each normal movement and labeling it loosely.
“reaching for the doorknob”
“typing a post for the Nightclub”
“opening the car door”
…after each “awareness” I am bringing myself back to my breath, no matter where I am or what I am doing.
This has had a very real effect on the foundational lucidity of my dreams already.
I don’t do a lot of state checks during the day these days.
I do spend a lot of time during the day comparing moments to dream recollections but during this “walking Vipashyana” I’m more trying to remain in a hyper-aware state of mind, a state of mind that ties my “self” inseparably to my environment.
When I am feeling inseparably entangled with the world around me it feels completely non-dual. Hard to hold on to that feeling, though…so I keep working at it.
My goal is to carry that non-dual presence into the dream state to build a lucidity that is more intrinsic in nature rather than one that needs to be triggered.
Thumbs Up on forest bathing. Trees were extremely healing for me during a rough transition and helped to ‘crackk me open’ at a critical juncture. They can somehow touch deep into my heart and tears flow.
In that past life, “log-rolling” is another practice I used. This I attribute to Ken McLeod. Rather than walking somewhere, the instruction is to basically experience the world as a big log rolling in the water, and you have to keep stepping forward in order to be thrown off into the water.
My experience of it (when I even walk anymore, heh) is that the world is coming to me rather than me going into it. The intent as explained was to get us heady humans back into our body by feeling our feet. How I experienced it was first - fear! All this stuff ‘coming at me!!!’ But then I sensed a shift, and it was an opening up and ‘allowing the world in’.
Here’s something I have been working on this week during the night. It is a bit of a refined version of what I was doing before:
TRANSITION OF SELF
Let dreams release karmic traces in self liberation to achieve emptiness.
In post-dream nocturnal meditation, let the body become an energy sink allowing energy from the environment to collapse inward.
Gather that energy in the center and then let it explode as light.
Let the light dissolve the formed self into formless self (True Self) which fills the emptiness (Turiya).
Let that formless self coalesce back (Andrew’s U-turn…thank you, Andrew! ) into a new amorphous form which encompasses all states of consciousness. (Turiyatita).
Interesting to look back almost a year and see what I was in to. My nocturnal meditations have stayed pretty much on that same course.
One thing that has been central for me in these middle of the night meditations is the dissolution of the physical body. This morning I randomly opened “A Book of Three Inspirations” to this passage:
“…there is a common element shared by the illusory body, dream body and bardo body. All three of these physical bases are experienced when some or all of the coarse energies have been withdrawn from the coarse body, and thus all three arise from a more subtle physical base. Also, in all three situations the coarse sensory and conceptual consciousnesses have withdrawn into a more subtle dimension of the mind. Consequently the consciousness based on that body is somewhat subtle, as compared to ordinary waking consciousness.”
I recently started a course on Nejang, a healing yoga based on Tibetan Medicine. Works with the 5 winds in ways that energize both body and mind. Also very grounding. I find it really helps to do it before meditation practice.
