Merge with the essence of life through meditation.
I love sex. I love food. I love sleeping. I love music. I love dancing. I love parties. I love dreaming, chocolate, movies, and walking the dogs. I love travel, seeing new places, and then returning home.
We all have our favorite everyday motions that are deeply satisfying. These are also doorways into meditation. When we give in to the inward motion of love, and rest in the pure deliciousness of it, we enter a meditative state.
Our bodies are built for love. Meditation is a way of cultivating our love—savoring, giving in, and being intimate with life. Rejoicing in the flow of breath, listening to the inner music called mantra, delighting in the dance of energies in our bodies and chakras—these techniques are ways of making love with the energies of life. This is enriching on every level of body, heart, mind, and spirit. The essence of meditation is simple: select some aspect of life’s self-renewing rhythm that you are attracted to and dive in. Allow yourself to be intrigued and accept everything that you experience as part of your conversation with life. Let meditation be the most natural thing in the world.
The urge to merge, to melt into love with the essence of life, is one of a human being’s strongest urges. It’s unstoppable. All the techniques of meditation, the thousands of different approaches, emerge from this primal yearning to be in an intimate loving relationship with the life force. In yoga, we call the life force pranashakti, (prana = the breath of life, respiration, spirit, vitality, + Shakti or ?akti = power, ability, strength, might, effort, energy, capability.) Meditation is a way of allowing our bodies to be in love with pranashakti and be loved in return. This love is the primordial attraction of the individual being toward the universal energies that sustain and nourish us, and this is the power source, the engine of our evolution. When we awaken to the realization that meditation is resting in the current of what we love, then the whole world opens up. Deep practice and deep rejuvenation become possible.
If you are not in a consistent meditation practice that excites and soothes you, it may be because you are going about it in a way that is against your nature, what is called pratiloma—“against the grain, contrary to the natural order, adverse, hostile, unpleasant.” It is easy to fall into what for you is pratiloma, because most meditation techniques were evolved to suit the needs of male monks, Buddhist or Hindu, in the past. Monks generally take vows of celibacy, poverty, and obedience; their meditation practices often involve detaching from desire and attempting to kill the desire for sex. Monks aren’t supposed to jump up from their meditation and have sex. For a recluse, practicing detachment is dharma; it leads to freedom. But as Krishna says in the Bhagavad-Gita, “The dharma of another brings danger.”
Whatever style of life you have chosen you can tune your meditation practice so that it energizes you for whatever activities you will do for the rest of the day. If you are not a monk living in a religious order, then you may want meditation to support and inspire a great sex life, a dynamic work life, and the freedom to express your individuality. Anuloma—“with the hair or grain, in a natural direction,” during meditation practice is to celebrate every desire in every part of your body. On the lover’s path, you want your meditation to inspire you and fill you with vital energy so that you want to ravish, or be ravished by, your lover, then go live life to the fullest. An anuloma practice feels like a relief, a vacation, and you look forward to the next time you get to treat yourself to meditation.
When I interview people who are lit up from inside with joy from their life and their meditation practice, this is how they speak:
I love meditating in the morning with my husband, it is wonderful. Every moment is different. Sometimes we make passionate love after meditating, sometimes we kiss and run out the door.
I love having the time to catch up with myself, sort out all my thoughts, be with all my feelings. During meditation my mind is so busy usually, but afterwards I feel so clear, and this clarity carries through the day.
Meditation for me feels like a party, to which all my chakras are invited, and I am there serving drinks and appetizers while they chat away to each other and occasionally get into arguments about who is most important.
I love taking the dogs for a long walk in the morning, and afterwards I sit and meditate, and attempt to breathe each breath with as much gusto and enthusiasm as the dogs do as they inhale every smell.
When I meditate, I feel at home in myself, more than at any other time in my life. And at the same time there is a sense of freshness, I am continually discovering new levels to who I am. It’s like travel. Sitting in one spot and traveling the universe.
People who thrive in meditation year after year, say things like this and discover new combinations continually. It’s very personal. An anuloma practice creates a sense of novelty, delight and adventure.
Take a Walk
The next time you take a walk or have some time to yourself, give yourself the gift of wondering, “What do I love so much that I want to melt into it, merge with it, be suffused with it? What aspect of pranashakti, of life’s undulating energies, am I in love with?” In so doing, you are recalibrating your compass, your internal guidance system, orienting toward what helps you to partake in the richness of life.
Love calls our attention and engages us. Life is a mysterious, self-renewing process. The techniques of meditation are ways of allowing the ecstasy of pranashakti, the life-force at play, to renew our bodies and souls. Ask your body to teach you and to take you on adventures into intimacy with your own essence.
Dr. Lorin Roche is the author of The Radiance Sutras, a fresh version of the Vijnana Bhairava Tantra, a classic yoga text describing 112 doorways into meditation. With his dancer wife Camille Maurine, he is co-author of Meditation Secrets for Women. Lorin has been teaching meditation for over 40 years and has a PhD from the University of California for his research into the language of meditative experience. He works with individuals to fine-tune their meditation practice to fit their unique inner nature and outer life, for health and happiness. Visit lorinroche.com or email lorin@lorinroche.com
Dr. Lorin Roche began practicing with the Vijnana Bhairava Tantra in 1968 as part of scientific research on the physiology of meditation. He has a PhD from the University of California at Irvine, where his research focused on the language meditators generate to describe their inner experiences. He is the author of The Radiance Sutras and Meditation Made Easy. With his wife, Camille Maurine, he wrote Meditation Secrets for Women. A teacher of meditation for 46 years, Lorin’s approach centers on how to customize the practices to suit one’s individual nature. Lorin leads the Radiance Sutras Meditation Teacher Training, a 200 hour certification program registered with Yoga Alliance. Lorin teaches regularly at the Esalen Institute and around the world.