The Embraceable Universe: Meditation with the Radiance Sutras
When the dog jumps up on your map, how do you hold her? What about when the cat glides onto your lap? When you are walking down the street and see a friend, how do you hug him? What if it has been a really long time and you are flooded with surprise and delight? Or if it is a “shaking-hands” kind of relationship, what is the quality of that contact? How do you hold a baby, a five-year-old child, a teenage boy? And when you are alone with your lover, how do you hold them?
Holding is sweet science. In every moment, each creature in our lives, every being, needs and deserves a different way of being held. A different nuance of holding is called for in every instant – holding tight, or touching lightly. When we are away from the people we love, we hold them in our hearts and cherish the communion. Holding is not just physical, it is mental, emotional, passionate, and sensitive.
Yoga, our favorite word, refers to physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual holding. The Sanskrit root of yoga is yum, “To join, unite, connect, to embrace, exciting, an exciter.” This makes sense because where there is union, there is an exciting embrace, a continuous continuum of communion.
Dharana, is “holding, keeping in remembrance,” and is one of the angas (limb, member, subordinate division or department) of yoga. Dharana invites us to pay attention to a thousand ways of holding – hold a post, hold your breath, hold the sound of a mantra (tool of thought) in your awareness, hold the image of a mandala (circle) or yantra (diagram) in your mind’s eye. In meditation, select an aspect of the life force, pranashakti, you love, hold it in your awareness, and then allow yourself to dissolve into it. While you are practicing meditation, the manner of holding changes as rapidly as when we are holding anything in the outer world – a continual adjustment and dance of responsiveness, changing many times per second.
Meditation is the intimacy with the energies of life. When we practice, we are in close communion with the vibrancy of pranashakti. As with any intimate relationship, we are continually called to improve our skills at noticing and responding to the ever-changing moods of our lover. In each moment, there is a particular way of embracing, cherishing, and adoring the rhythm. For example, if we are alert, each moment of breathing is an interplay of nourishing, purifying, soothing, exciting, inspiring, and informing. When we breathe in, we embrace the incoming air and may hold it for an instant at the end of the inhalation; when we breathe out we give our breath to the world. At the end of the exhalation, in that emptiness, we may experience being held by the ocean of air. An essential gift of the experience of holding is being held by something larger, embraced by the benevolent forces of creation.
Many kinds of people in the world are skilled at touching. Dancers are in touch with every part of the body as it moves. Race car drivers have incredible kinesthetic awareness of the vibration of the engines as it comes through their feet, legs, and seat, and can feel the road with their fingertips. People who love babies know how to hold them just right. Horse riders and whisperers can communicate with the animals through minute touches of their hands and legs. Musicians of all kinds know how to caress their instrument, whether they are touching strings, drums, or keyboards. Sex is an unlimited universe of touching, holding, and embracing. We all love touch, each in our own way, and touch is ecstasy.
Embracing, holding, touching – these are central skills to meditative practice. What we learn in the outer world, as we greet our friends, hang out with people we love, and interact with animals, teaches us how to be in touch with the inner world. Over the past 45 years of teaching meditation, it is always great fun to work with people who are skill dat touch because their ability to tolerate intimacy lets them become advanced meditators, right from the beginning. They may have only been meditating for a day, but when I listen to them describe their experiences with touching and being touched by the flow of prana in their bodies, it sounds like poetry, and a fresh revelation of the yoga texts. Meditation invites us to engage with the internal music of mantras, the inner massage of breathing, and the inner artwork of mandala visualizations. Paying attention in this way, we continually learn subtle nuances of what it is to hold and cherish one another.
The wrong approach to meditation can damage your capacity for intimacy. There are thousands of styles and techniques of meditation, and many of them were developed as a support for those on the path of denial and detachment. For centuries, meditation teachers have tended to be out of touch males who are desperately lonely. They set themselves up as gurus in order to have control over other people, because they know so little about a relationship built on equality. This is the Wizard of Oz complex – a lost professor who puts up a screen and creates a grandiose persona. This particular type is over-represented in the file dog meditation, and the language they use tends to be distancing, cold, and elitist.
The best meditation teachers are those who are good at intimate communion, in whatever field interests them: sex, babies, therapy, sports, music. Blind people would be great meditation teachers because of their alertness to sound and touch. So come on, all you people who are good at embracing in any realm: learn to meditate, and learn to teach meditation in a life-affirming way, and bring the warmth of your love to life to this aspect of yoga. We need you.
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.