I've enjoyed speaking before community groups about these self-healing potentials and look forward to more opportunities. One of the topics that frequently arises after talks concerns the practice of meditation, or one's seated practice. Seated meditation is the training ground for balancing in gravity and an important way of converting muscular energy into more beneficial healing potentials. As we are able to sit with the spine erect but relaxed, balancing on our bones rather than on our muscles, we have less need for yoga postures. But most of us require the loosening effects of resting postures in order to be comfortable in a sitting practice.
A recent conversation about seated meditation following a speech led me to quote a fundamental truth about learning this next evolutionary step, this ability to move about, balanced in gravity with an inner softness, lifted by our own skills. And, that is, "As we think, so do we become."
Replace the stories of your aches and pains with thoughts of how good you'd like to feel. To be able to sit upright, relaxing in small increments over time, learning how it feels to lean into your bones, feeling the weight of gravity lessening as you let go of holding onto it. These are valuable skills and worthwhile goals to envision.
But, mostly, at the outset, it"s about learning about your inner life. The feelings and sensations that arise while in posture, letting go of any tension as you become aware of it, just willing the muscles to relax, waiting for them to respond. Bring your mind back to your breath as you observe it wandering. Get comfortable with the long exhalation and the feeling that arises from this style of breathing; a vibration or sense of warmth, people describe it differently. It's the packing of the arteries with carbon dioxide that leads to all cells becoming more deeply enriched with oxygen. Practicing the long, comfortable exhalation is a form of respiratory therapy, very successful even with children.
After the long exhalation is accomplished, and you're able to bring gentle control to the various parts of the breathing process, the inhalation, the exhalation, and the suspension of breath before inhalation, then you are ready for meditation, or sitting practice. But, don't wait. It's fun to learn to sit comfortably on the earth, even while learning to breath comfortably.
Resting in posture, gently let the time after exhalation be extended; the belly has been gently pulled down and the last bit of carbon dioxide is exhaled, then you can experience the body relaxing deeply, as if the muscular tension is falling away as you let the weight of your body release through the bones in your buttocks, the SITS bones. By practicing constantly letting your body weight flow through you into the earth, you discover that we hold ourselves up out of gravity. Instead, a "feeling tone" develops with seated practice of letting gravity flow through us without holding onto it. The fundamentals of this skill of letting gravity flow though us are learned on the floor in the resting postures, and come to fruition over time.
Be patient and kind to yourself. That's always the path, along with a fair dose of humility. We must learn to experience our lives without so much judgment or prejudice, to think forward to how good we'd like to feel, and to practice daily if we are to reverse the momentum of degeneration.
