Hello Everyone!
I'm back in Wisconsin and preparing enthusiastically for the yoga retreat coming up in a couple of weeks. If you don't know about it, check my website www.smilingyogi.com for information. In pulling my notes together for the retreat, I ran across a journal entry from just before I left for Montana. I thought I'd share it with you here.
From my journal: August 12, 2009
I sit here in my yoga space, settling in for my morning practices. It is August and the windows are wide and open and already the day is abuzz with traffic - ground and air, bikes, pedestrians, birds, dogs, all the sounds of a new day. Within those sounds all around them and supporting them is a spaciousness, an expansive, open aliveness. Shifting my awareness to THAT instantly awakens my senses to take in even more, subtler sounds.
The morning air is fresh and alive with the perfume of lilies and sunflowers, galardia and hosta blossoms. The lavender is lush and vibrant outside my window and the hummers frequent my little garden - best buffet in the neighborhood. I've always tried to have fresh flowers in my yoga space - especially in my studios. Flowers are a little piece of heaven. Nature's finest art work. They have a way of catching one's attention and then doing their work on the entire nervous system, soothing and relaxing it with pleasing color and texture, curling, dancing, swaying shapes and a perfume to transport the soul out of exile directly tothe here and now instantaneously.
A typical class at my studio ran 1 1/2 hours so I wanted to do everything I could to set up a space that would bring people quickly to a more present state. I hoped they could walk in the door, or even approach the building, or even remember the space and instantaneously move to a less guarded, more relaxed, open and aware state of Being. An hour and a half is not much time to undo a day's or a week's or a lifetime's accumulation of thinking and stressing about life's circumstances. I often longed to have more time to do more in-depth sessions. Now my studio is gone and my typical class length is a weekend long. Funny thing. I still long for a bigger chunk of time. My classes typically have about 20 participants. There are questions and requests enough to fill a full week - easily.
When I took my first yoga teacher training - the month-long program at Kripalu, time was my biggest challenge. I had a hard time finding out how to be in the spacious, timeless presence I needed to be in to teach, and still keep an eye on the clock so the classes would have a predictable beginning and ending. In the twenty years prior to that training, my practices and studies seemed to remove the element of time - I felt outside of time or somehow beyond it. For many years, my practice fit comfortably into a three hour block I carved for it from 5 - 8 am.
2 comments:
I am very interested in the needed duration. Herbert Benson recommends "10 to 20 minutes once or twice a day" for meditation, a standard that actually means 10 to 40 minutes a day. B. Alan Wallace says that Indian and Chinese practitioners independently of each other came to the conclusion that 24 minutes of quiet was optimal. Charles Stroebel, M.D. in "The Quieting Reflex" thought one could train oneself toward greater quiet in 6 seconds if done repeatedly. I know that some stretching may take some time but 10 minutes of day of practiced quiet will make a mental difference.
Asana alone, done with complete focus on breath and the subtleties of the posture, is a form of meditation. It brings consciousness fully into present moment awareness. Any amount of that in a day is going to make a difference. Actually, it is said that "no effort in yoga is ever lost" so any contribution you make will work for you. The Yoga Sutras tell us that Self realization is very near - how near depends on how badly we want it and if our practice is mild, medium or intense and focused.
The yoga postures strengthen and enliven the body, preparing it for higher levels of consciousness; preparing it for a sitting meditation. A sitting meditation takes it to a whole different level. How long does it take for your mind to settle into silence? If you close your eyes and you are in Samadhi, well then I guess all you need is to close your eyes as often as you like. What I have noticed in my sitting practice is that consciousness shifts and usually within the course of an hour, I notice two or three definite and drastic shifts in my consciousness. I have gotten to where I can move more deeply into Presence in a shorter time frame, and there certainly have been many times when I have entered spontaneously, but there are some shifts that seem to come only with a longer time of complete presence.
My friend and teacher Francis Lucille encourages us to make the shift often throughout the day - to keep remembering the states of expanded and enlivened consciousness and inviting them back again and again - not as a big deal but as natural and simple as breathing. That is also what the yoga sutras teach us. They say practice is simply to remember the ideal of union, of higher consciousness, of pure awareness, Presence. So even in one meditation session, it is the "coming back" that counts, not how many times you lose your attention.
It is really more about the quality of your meditation than about the length of time you sit. Because if you are sitting and thinking the whole time, about what you will fix for breakfast as soon as you are finished meditating, its possible your "meditations" are just another form of self-making. You might as well go and enjoy your breakfast. That said, an underlying part of all yoga practices, including every meditation, is to offer the fruits of your efforts back to the source. Don't get stuck measuring and comparing one meditation to the next, or your meditations to someone elses. Let your meditation "do" you. It is what it is. It takes a relaxed effort. Too efforted and it gets contracted, not enough and you just space out.
My suggestion to you Bill, is to try different lengths of time and see what happens. See if you notice any difference in the quality of your awareness, in the depth of your stillness, in the way you feel when you are not sitting. There may be times in your life when it all comes so easy to you and a little time is all you need (and probably at those times you will spontaneously take more time). Then there may be other times when you feel distracted and pulled in other directions and a longer sit is required to attain the same effect. Let your meditation be one big experiment. Approach it with the mind of a scientist and observe closely. It will guide you.
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