THE FOUR FUNDAMENTAL TECHNIQUES OF MEDITATION
LESSON 1: STILLNESS
CHAPTER 1: LESSON 1: STILLNESS
There are 7 trait characteristics of all living organisms. Movement is one. Whether that movement is the internal shifting of cells and food or physical locomotion, life moves. It’s this eternal shifting that makes everything possible. The yogis called this force of unstoppable change Anitya, the law of impermanence. Just studying impermanence could lead someone to truth. Our entire nervous system has evolved to advance our ability to perceive this ever-changing world and react accordingly. The autonomic nervous system has two voices, the voice of fear and the voice of peace. To our nerves, reality is made of predators and treasures. Our senses have evolved to pull in as much information as possible to enable the greatest chance of success and survival. Movement isn’t just life. It is survival. To paralyze as much of our bodies as we can minute after minute takes second to second presence and self-control. Stillness is a sacrifice and it is by no means passive. When we arrest our movement and shut our eyes, forcing ourselves into perfect, intentional paralysis, our bodies get confused and nervous because they are being forced to do the opposite of what they have evolved to do. They are being asked to trust the predators will not pounce and the treasures can be left where they are.
The degree of negative experience that arises during stillness (mental or physical), or the difficulty or inability to be still and close the eyes, is demonstrative of unchecked stress, fear, and anxiety. Some of it is warranted and biological. Most of it is the unnecessary effect of mental misperception and imbalanced nerves. While stress, fear, and anxiety are necessary modes that ensure survival, many of us are soaking in the acidity of our stress hormones unnecessarily. Our bodies respond to our modern struggles as if they were life-threatening. Our inboxes are filled with jaws and fangs. Our bills are monsters. Traffic, domestic disputes, social mishaps are all death. We are highly adaptable creatures. Our minds specifically adjust very quickly to both adaptive and destructive circumstances and for that reason, human beings inhabit almost every type of ecosystem on earth. Stockholm syndrome is a perfect example of the danger of our adaptability. This is when a hostage develops a psychological affinity with their captor. By allying themselves with their captor they rationalize their situation to make it survivable. The same thing is happening with our nervous systems. Hyper-stressed and overworked, we have become accustomed to the torrents of cortisol pumping through our tissues. It is so common that we no longer respond to the message that our nerves are trying to communicate and assume this is what it life is. The message behind insomnia, indigestion, irritability, anxiety, distraction, and stress is to stop, sit down, breathe, and look inside. In stillness, that reality of our environment and our response to the environment rushes forward to shatter our maladaptive numbness. The shattering of the delusion that we’re actually ok can be uncomfortable at first and for that reason, many people never meditate seriously. They would rather remain numb. I’ve come to realize that many would rather suffer passively, than struggle actively. It is good to know that stillness can be a struggle.
These people walk into the forest of potential peace and the first mosquito that bites them has them running back to their car.
Besides being a barometer for our unchecked anxiety, there are only three natural reasons we wouldn’t move; because we’re asleep, we’re hiding from danger or hiding to take advantage of the situation (imagine hunting). The last two are historically stressful, high risk and reward situations and because when we meditate we aren’t sleeping, the body and mind view stillness as stressful.
Meditative stillness is a perplexing message to the body, to our minds, and to anything around us. It says, “I am not participating with my environment, my future, my past, and the world at large.” While meditative stillness is intentional the body interprets it through the historic lens of hunting or being hunted. The longer we hold stillness the more stressful it becomes because of the body’s historic relationship to it. So, to this point, stillness becomes an effort of rewiring our ancient conceptions of the world, which have always been externally focused. To consider, explore, and then believe that our internal world is as significant as the external environment, which is still perceived as being dangerous and bountiful, takes time and practice.
Stilling the body is the first step into our inner-space and it is a powerful message from the body to the mind. By being familiar with both the outer and the inner, our world that can somehow feel small and congested becomes expansive, again.
Now, what are the benefits of stillness in terms of meditation? I’ll say this many times throughout the book, “Replace all thinking with feeling.” Feeling does not refer to emotional feeling but physical sensation, the more subtle and internal the sensation the better. These subtle feelings are often always overlooked in our day to day life for higher priority tasks. The yogis believe most people live life backward and focus on the unnecessary while completely missing the most critical experiences of life. These subtle sensations are the bullseye of meditation. Our restrained mind is the bow and our focused awareness is the arrow. Stillness is advantageous for meditation because it greatly amplifies these subtle physical sensations and our sensitivity to them.
The term in Sanskrit for these subtle sensations is Sukshma. Yogis would meditate and mine their bodies for these sensations. The soothing experience of feeling your heartbeat, the belly grumble, or blood flow are the first signs of increased sensitivity. Then more ambiguous sensations arise. Like subterranean water pouring out of the earth, these subtle but euphoric sensations would ooze out from within the yogis’ bodies. Parts of their body would tingle, buzz, or seem to evaporate and dissolve into a subtle but uniform gentle pleasure. The term Sukshma is derived from the word Sukha, which means sweetness. Sukshma itself means the ethereal-intangible body but refers practically to the euphoria of the body’s more delicate functions. When the whole body was filled with these sensations yogis called it Vedana, which means “The Wisdom of the Flesh.” The body is wise enough to contain its own pleasure, again, like water in the earth. The more we can relax into our stillness the more obvious and abundant these feelings become. At that point, the agenda is to enjoy curiously, without wanting more. The more we feel the subtle movements of our stilled body the deeper into it we go; further into the forest, closer to the mountain.
Life is always moving. It is also reflective. If our environment is stressful, it makes sense that our minds and bodies would adjust to that stress by becoming stressed themselves. When the euphoric tingling of the body can be felt well, it envelops the mind and becomes a new environment. Like getting into water, Sukshma is an immersive experience that accelerates presence. The mind is now in a new dimension of the body and, relatively, existing in another world. At that point, the mind willingly stills and becomes quiet, like a wolf relaxing in its den or a baby in the rocking arms of its parent.
Our psychological vision of the world is not necessarily ours. It is shaped by our nerves, which are shaped by the environment. Our vision of life is more life’s vision of itself until we learn to manage our inner experience. When you think of someone like the Buddha, who is often an idealistic image people have for meditation, consider his moment of enlightenment wasn’t a psychological understanding, although it involved that, but at first it was a moment of profound physical euphoria that arose because he was so still and focused on the inner reality of his moving blood, beating heart and living nerves. Sukshma is more than likely the consequence of focusing the mind into the details of the body; things like subtle nerve sensations, air pressure, air temperature, and blood flowing through capillaries in the skin. However, what it actually is, is far less important than what it does for our practice. Experience overrides analysis in meditation.
The last consequence of stillness worth knowing is its relationship to the present moment. The present moment is all we know, and all we have. Whether we are distracted or not, thinking of the future or the past, meditating or living; we occupy the present moment. Anything that doesn’t share the present moment does not exist in reality. If we only think of presence in terms of time we miss the significance of the idea.
Another popular phrasing of presence actually illuminates the deeper meaning within the idea. The term is “the here and now.” This phrase breaks presence into two themes. Here refers to space. Now refers to time. Meditative presence is about being “here” at a specific location in space and mentally “now,” rather than thinking of some other time or place. The yogis understood that the reality of presence was the center of their own body. That was the most immediate experience and where life manifested as real by rendezvousing with their minds.
Yoga pushes the study of the human centerline. All of the poses orbit the bending and twisting of the spine. This overtime, helps a yogi feel what they call Sushumna, the central channel. The spine, of course, houses the spinal cord, which is the trunk of the central nervous system. This is where the reality of a billion individual cells is organized and transferred to the brain to be understood and eventually perceived. This is also how the brain can extend the will of our awareness into the body to act out our lives.
I think it would be helpful to explain the idea of presence a bit more. All things are happening now. Mars is happening now. Mount Everest is happening now. You are happening now and I am happening now, wherever we actually are. But there is so much potential distance between all things that are currently happening now that relative to us 99.99% of life isn’t happening at all.
So presence breaks down as distance increases. For example, the light bouncing off these words takes time to get to your eye, into your optic nerve, and through the brain. The light that might bounce off a tree in the distance takes even more time. The sound of birds chirping in that tree takes even more time because the sound is slower than light. Despite it only taking nanoseconds, time is still lost, which suggests things further away from us are less NOW than things closer to us. The only reason these infinitesimal details matter is to support our concept of meditating. If Samadhi only exists in the absolute present moment than we as meditators must understand what and where presence is and how to get there.
If Samadhi can only arise from the most immediate present point in the present moment then it can only manifest from the area around our centerline. I can only speak from personal experience, but my most enchanting meditative moments have occurred while I was fully absorbed in the sensations of my own inner body. The evidence is ours to collect as individuals. Then we can validate or falsify the claims of our predecessors. But the only maps we have are the guidance, theories, and philosophies of those that committed themselves to this inner world before us.
To occupy absolute presence is the journey of meditation and the game within stillness. We “move” by feeling the subtlest sensations we can along our physical centerline. Every minute of unbroken sensitivity is a mile into the forest of our practice. When that innermost physical point is felt through a non-thinking mind the unique peace of meditation arises. It will be obvious when it occurs. The yogis called this position Atha. It means a destined moment of presence. Destiny because the most important journey any human being can make is the personal journey into their personal inner world, which only exists within them. Through self-control and sensitivity, we achieve our fate and become explicitly present with the world and ourselves.
To succeed we have to overcome our biology, rewire our nerves, restrain our mind, and learn to feel the unknown. The reward is a new view of the world that can’t be shared. Those that make the journey into stillness come back from meditating empowered and bright-eyed. They seem to have more control because it took control to reach. They also come back satisfied because the personal truth we can all forget has re-fulfilled them. These consequences are not permanent because nothing is, but through consistent bouts of stillness, these bounties can be accessed over and again.
