What happens when I meditate?
I have two totally conflicting desires: I love to travel, and I love to be at home. Fortunately, meditation satisfies both.
Minds don’t wander, they journey, and the purpose of all this travel is to return home enriched. Human beings have a hunger for fresh experience. We are always exploring, this is our nature.
Travel in novel environments is food for the mind, heart, and soul. The senses are tickled alive with new impressions. We delight to see an unfamiliar palette of colors, hear enchanting sounds, smell exotic fragrances, and engage with a different culture.
Meditation, if you allow it, will rearrange your senses in the way travel does. It is an inner journey that takes you to completely surprising realms of experience. No one knows what will happen from one moment to the next. This is what it is supposed to be. As you meditate, your body’s instinctive intelligence seizes the opportunity to update your map of the world, where you have been and where you are going. One of the secrets of meditation is to allow the wild adventure to unfold.
In meditation, you are invited to perceive each breath, sensation, sound, color, and texture as new, surprising, and even shocking. It is a fresh revelation of pranashakti. This happens if you let it, if you allow naturalness to be your guide. The body, brain, and nervous system know how to rewire themselves for optimum functioning.
If you are a world traveler, you may have noticed that when you finally arrive at your destination, you might just want to let go. There you are at the beach in Costa Rica, lying on the sand, soaking up the sun, and suddenly you find yourself mulling over a problem at home or in your business. Welcome this unwelcome intrusion – it is a spontaneous meditation. It is smart of the brain to use the beauty of a different place to get perspective on your daily life. In other words, the brain wants to connect the resourcefulness of your traveler’s mind with the challenges back at home, where the need is.
When we meditate, we let this process of gaining perspective happen right here on our mat or cushion. We travel through our inner senses and visit the intimate terrain of subtle sensations, sounds, and imagery. We bring the rejuvenating elixir of this inward quest back to our relationships and work. Seasoned inner travelers know that a half-hour meditation can revolutionize our perception as much as a trip around the world.
All the world’s meditation practices are invitations to perceive the improbable magic behind the most ordinary everyday experience. The sacred purpose of travel is to wake up to what is right here. The fulfillment of our exploration – whether an inner or outer journey – is to expand our perspective on life. We develop a deeper understanding of what the world is as well as a new appreciation of home.
William Anders was one of the first three persons to have left Earth’s orbit to travel to the Moon in 1968. Upon seeing our planet from way out in space he said, “We came all this way to explore the Moon, and the most important thing is that we discovered the Earth.”
I close my eyes
… and instantly I am flying through space,
Accelerating toward the unknown.
Okay, this is normal, I say to myself,
This is just reality –
The Earth itself is moving through space
At over 60,000 miles an hour,
And our galaxy is spiraling at 1.3 million miles an hour.
That’s how fast we are moving when sitting still.
Another breath and suddenly
Thousands of shooting stars are flashing in all directions.
What is this?
Oh yeah, just the brain doing its thing – 80 billion neurons,
Each connecting with ten thousand friends, all of them chatting away in Tiny bolts of electricity, texting each other and laughing
As they build my virtual reality.
How do I get some inner peace around here?
In the next breath I am falling into darkness.
As my inner eyes adjust, I see
A world of trillions of little bits of something
Vibrating away in quiet luminosity.
Aha, this must be some kind of cellular awareness –
The human body is about 100 trillion cells, give or take a few,
All pulsating as they do their job of sustaining life.
Now I am walking along a trail in Tanzania with a Masai guide,
Swatting at pesky flies,
Drinking good coffee at a café in Copenhagen,
Meditating at midnight near the volcano in Hawaii,
Freediving off the Kohala coast.
My to-do list suddenly leaps onto my inner screen.
I am lost in a long sequence of tasks,
Intricate mental movies, scene by scene
Actions that are calling out: “Do me! Do me now!”
Next I find myself replaying a movie I saw in the theater,
Where the hero faces obstacles much more difficult than mine.
Another breath,
My entire being enters a state of awe at simply existing.
A beautiful hum fills me
With something better than silence.
Slowly I open my eyes. The world is still here.
Surprisingly, my head feels completely clear.
When I look around, everything is aglow with vitality.
The ordinary appears magical because my senses are awake.
My motor is revving, I am eager to live.
Dr. Lorin Roche began meditating in 1968 with the Vijnana Bhairava Tantra as his guide, and his translation of the text, The Radiance Sutras, is available from 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.