This is a mirror site, where I tinker with layouts before posting them to my main site, which is lorinroche.com.
There are also class notes are over at Meditation 24-7, if you want to follow along.
Did you know you have a dozen or more senses?
Instinctive Meditation
Meditation is a natural human experience. Your body already knows how to do it. Learning to meditate is a matter of finding out how to activate your innate ability. This is always an adventure.If you want to include meditation in your life, find your personal gateways. These are different for each of us. Instinctive Meditation is a way of accessing the tremendous wealth of knowledge of the ancient meditation traditions, and discovering the meditation techniques that work for you – for your body, your heart, your life. There are thousands of meditation techniques, and most of them will be wrong for your body type and life direction. Buddha said that he gave 84,000 dharmas, for all the different kinds of people there are. When you practice a technique that is not right for your type, it feels like an imposition. When you discover your personal gateway, it feels like love. We offer books, seminars, and individual coaching to help you find and thrive with meditation in your daily life.
What are the instincts? They are the wise impulses of life continuously flowing through us. In yoga physiology, the chakras are the instinctive centers of the body. The chakras are energy vortices in multiple dimensions, and they transmute and emanate the song of life as it sustains, expresses and evolves itself. These impulses appear to us as hunches, feelings, emotions, and the urge to evolve spiritually. Instinctive Meditation can be thought of as the art of riding the passions inward to touch the core of being.
Where Rock 'n Roll Comes From
Many years ago, I heard from a drummer that much of what we now know as popular music had its origins on the Silk Road, the camel caravan trail from China, through India, Persia, and Arabia, to Europe. As the caravans travelled though all the various regions, they traded rhythms and chords.Listen to this YouTube clip of Mustt Mustt by Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan.
Nusrat was a foremost singer of Qawwali, the devotional music of the Sufis. "Often listeners, and even artists themselves, are transported to a state of wajad, a trance-like state where they feel at one with God, generally considered to be the height of spiritual ecstasy in Sufism."
The Silk Road (source: Wikipedia)
NAMA and RUPA
Nama and Rupa are Sanskrit terms for Name (nama) and Form (rupa). This is a primordial area of focus in the Upanishads. In modern terminology, we talk about resonance and the study of WAVES. Here are some interesting visualizations of what happens to matter as it is vibrated by sound.A brief RESONANCE demonstration on YouTube, showing the way matter vibrates in the presence of sound. Interesting illustration of what mantras do to your subtle body.
Chladni Plate: Someone takes what looks like a violin bow and uses it to vibrate the edge of a metal plate with sand or sugar on it. The particles vibrate themselves into orderly patterns.
Another demonstration of Cymatics:
There are better videos out there. Just go to YouTube and type "resonance" or "cymatics" into the search engine.
One reason this phenomena is so interesting is that the shapes created on the vibrating plate resemble Tantric art – the geometric and impressionistic art that yogis have developed over the centuries to depict what they feel inside.
image courtesy of Tantra-Kundalini.com
image courtesy of http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/george/yantra.html
For thousands of years, yogis have said that each mantra has a corresponding yantra, a visual shape created by the sound. So it is very interesting to see that just by putting some powder, sand, or grains of rice on a steel plate, and then sending sound vibrations, you can generate the types of patterns seen in yoga-tantra art.
There is more about the interaction of mantras or vibrations and matter here, on this site.
And also at the Meditation 24-7 website, which is where I have been putting notes for the Wednesday night class.
Hidden Majesty of Everyday Phenomena
These high-speed photographs of milk droplets hitting coffee remind me of meditation somehow. There are these moments . . . in the midst of a breath, or watching a thought splash into awareness, or listening to a sound, when we get a glimpse of the beauty of life's processes. There is a pause in the midst of the motion. Perception opens up, and the beauty of what is always there is revealed.
Link to TECH BLOG
Found by Mark Frauenfelder at BoingBoing.net - thanks, Mark and TechBlog!
The Synapse is Holy
I love this quote from Gretel Erlich:"An intake of breath is not just oxygen, a pulse is not just the rush of blood but also the taking in of divinity through an orifice, and as it moves through, it becomes a spark. To be inspired is to have accepted spirit in the lung and heart, to watch it circulate through miles of blood vessels and capillaries whose tiny fenestrations allow oxygen, nutrients and grace to leak into the tissues of muscle and consciousness, then be taken up again, reoxygenated, and returned.
The synapse is holy. Apse comes from apsis, whose roots mean to loop, wheel, arch, orbit, fasten, or copulate, and the apse of a church is a place of honor. The synapse is the gap where nothing happens. Bodies of thoughts swim in the synaptic lake, sliding over receptors, reaching for the ones that live on the other shore. An interval of between 0.5 and 1 millisecond transpires before an impulse makes its way across the gap . . where we pause between life and death, treading water in the oblivion of a gray sea. What is a thought before it registers memory? . . . Is it like unrequited love, or a lover who is spirit only, who has no body?”
How odd that we walk around with these bodies, live in them, die in them, make love with them, yet know almost nothing of their intimate workings, the ludicrous balancing act of homeostasis, the delicate architecture of their organs and systems, or the varying weathers of their private, internal environments. Up to this point my living and breathing had been an act of faith. I existed but I didn’t know how."
A Match to the Heart (amazon link).
Notes from May's classes are over here at the Meditation 24-7 site . . .
Meditation is Something the Body Knows How to Do
Take a look at the physiological effects of meditation, here.
Keep in mind that when you know how to meditate in a way that is instinctive and natural for you, your body has the ability then to enter a state of rest deeper than sleep. Deeper than deep sleep. The body does this in five minutes, and giving yourself twenty to thirty minutes of this is a profound gift to your body/mind being. Deep restfulness creates conditions in which natural forces can heal us on a deep level."It is interesting to wonder, how could something as simple as meditation be so beneficial? The answer is in the physiology. Meditation is something the body knows how to do, and does willingly if you set up the conditions and allow it. The body knows how to enter a profound healing state. All you have to do is pay attention in certain ways, and tolerate the intensity of what you feel as you let go of stress. Meditation is one of the few things in the self-help arena you can do that produces measurable changes. In other words, you can take a few hours of meditation training, and then go into a medical lab and meditate, and they can meaure the changes in your breathing, your blood chemistry, your brain waves, and your response to stress. And if you were sitting in a medical lab, all wired up, and they saw you enter a state of rest deeper than sleep in 5 minutes, a knowledgable researcher would look at the instruments and say, "Oh, you just started meditating. I can see it on the meters." One of the main reasons meditation is so beneficial is that it is instinctive and natural. When you meditate, you are accessing your body's own built-in ability to heal itself and tune itself for action.