The Breath

Discover inner space by creating gaps in the stream of thinking. Without those gaps, your thinking becomes repetitive, uninspired, devoid of any creative spark, which is how it still is for most people on the planet. You don't need to be connected with the duration of those gaps. A few seconds is good enough. Gradually, they will lengthen by themselves, without any effort on your part. More important than their length is to bring them in frequently so that your daily activities and your stream of thinking become interspersed with space.

Someone recently showed me the annual prospectus of a large spiritual organization. When I looked through it, I was impressed by the wide choice of interesting seminars and workshops. It reminded me of a smorgasbord, one of those Scandinavian buffets where you can take your pick from a huge variety of enticing dishes. The person asked me whether I could recommend one or two courses. "I don't know," I said. "They all look so interesting. But I do know this," I added. "Be aware of your breathing as often as you are able, whenever you remember. Do that for one year, and it will be more powerfully transformative than attending all of these courses. And it's free."

Being aware of your breathing takes attention away from thinking and creates space. It is one way of generating consciousness. Although the fullness of consciousness is already there as the unmanifested, we are here to bring consciousness into this dimension.

Be aware of your breathing. Notice the sensation of the breath. Feel the air moving in and out of your body. Notice how the chest and abdomen expand and contract slightly with the in- and outbreath. One conscious breath is enough to make some space where before there was the uniterrupted succession of one thought after another.

One conscious breath (two or three would be even better), taken many times a day, is an excellent way of bringing space into your life. Even if you meditated on your breathing for two hours or more, which some people do, one breath is all you ever need to be aware of, indeed ever can be aware of. The rest is memory or anticipation, which is to say, thought.

Breathing isn't really something that you do but something that you witness as it happens. Breathing happens by itself. The intelligence within the body is doing it. All you have to do is watch it happening. There is no strain or effort involved. Also, notice the brief cessation of the breath, particularly the still point at the end of the outbreath, before you start breathing in again.

Many people's breath is unnaturally shallow. The more you are aware of the breath, the more its natural depth will reestablish itself.

Because breath has no form as such, it has since ancient times been equated with spirit - the formless one Life. "God formed man of dust from the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life and the man became a living creature." The German word for breathing - atmen - is derived from the ancient Indian (Sanskrit) word Atman, meaning the indwelling divine spirit or God within.

The fact that breath has no form is one of the reasons why breath awareness is an extremely effective way of bringing space into your life, of generating consciousness.

It is an excellent meditation object precisely because it is not an object, has no shape or form. The other reason is that breath is one of the most subtle and seemingly insignificant phenomena, the "least thing" that according to Nietzsche makes up the "best happiness." Whether or not you practice breath awareness as an actual formal meditation is up to you. Formal meditation, however, is no substitute for bringing space consciousness into everyday life.

Being aware of your breath forces you into the present moment - the key to all inner transformation. Whenever you are conscious of the breath, you are absolutely present. You may also notice that you cannot think and be aware of your breathing. Conscious breathing stops your mind. But far from being in a trance or half sleep, you are fully awake and highly alert.

You are not falling below thinking, but rising above it. And if you look more closely, you will find that those two things - coming fully into the present moment and ceasing thinking without loss of consciousness - are actually one and the same: the arising of space consciousness.

- A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose (Oprah's Book Club, Selection 61) by Eckhart Tolle

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Trust In Your "Sense of Knowing" Which Is Always With You

An internal knowing is there independent of your venturing forth - it's there even when your eyes are closed and you're sitting still. This doesn't necessarily mean you should become a couch potato. Rather, you must allow yourself to be guided by the same Source that twirls the planets around the sun, and trust that it will direct you perfectly without your having to interfere.

Experience your innate creativity while being an observer, watching in amazement as everything falls perfectly into place. Just as moving water never stagnates, you will be moved by a natural force that seeks being complete within you and without your needing to step in. You can get in touch with this knowing through the practice of meditation.

- Change Your Thoughts - Change Your Life: Living the Wisdom of the Tao by Dr. Wayne W Dyer

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How To Transcend Suffering With Meditation

There was a man who wanted to transcend his suffering so he went to a Buddhist temple to find a Master to help him. He went to the Master and asked, "Master, if I meditate four hours a day, how long will it take for me to transcend?"

The Master looked at him and said, "If you meditate four hours a day, perhaps you will transcend in ten years."

Thinking he could do better, the man then said, "Oh, Master, what if I meditate eight hours a day, how long will it take me to transcend?"

The Master looked at him and said, "If you meditate eight hours a day, perhaps you will transcend in twenty years."

"But why will it take me longer if I meditate more?" the man asked.

The Master replied, "You are not here to sacrifice your joy or your life. You are here to live, to be happy, and to love. If you can do your best in two hours of meditation, but spend eight hours instead, you will only grow tired and miss the point; you won't enjoy your life. Do your best, and perhaps you will learn no matter how long you meditate, you can live, love and be happy."

- The Four Agreements: A Practical Guide to Personal Freedom, A Toltec Wisdom Book by Don Miguel Ruiz

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The Big Squeeze

If we want to communicate and we have a strong aspiration to help others - in terms of engaging in social action, helping our family or community, or just being there for people when they need us - then sooner or later we're going to experience the big squeeze. Our ideals and the reality of what's happening don't match. We feel as if we're between the fingers of a big giant who is squeezing us. We find ourselves between a rock and a hard place.

There is often a discrepancy between our ideals and what we actually encounter. For instance, in raising children, we have a lot of good ideas, but sometimes it's challenging to put together the good ideas with how our children are, there at the breakfast table with food all over themselves. Or in meditation, have you noticed how difficult it is to feel emotions without getting totally swept away by them, or how difficult it is simply to cultivate friendliness toward yourself when you're feeling miserable or panicked or all caught up?

There's a discrepancy between our inspiration and the situation as it presents itself. It's the rub between those two things - the squeeze between reality and vision - that causes us to grow up, to wake up to be 100 percent decent, alive, and compassionate. The big squeeze is one of the most productive places on the spiritual path and in particular on this journey of awakening the heart.

- Comfortable with Uncertainty: 108 Teachings on Cultivating Fearlessness and Compassion (Shambhala Library) by Pema Chodron

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Spiritual Resurrection

Life is glorious; life is beautiful, if you will only find God beneath the debris of matter. You must not be hypnotized by this changing picture of life and death, but behold immortality. It is the most joyous thing that you can experience. God is hidden behind the moon and the sun and the stars. Your very conscience is the voice of God. And there is no other way to uncover God except by real devotion and meditation.

Every day, resurrect yourself in meditation. Compare your state before and after meditation. Meditate deeply if you would know God. Let your evil habits, indifference, and restlessness die daily.

Resurrection means relaxation, to relax awareness from your body and mind in meditation. Then you become free: your soul knows that you can live without the body though still living in the body; it is separate.

Human life may be beautiful, but it is like a bird's life in a cage. You open the cage door, but the bird does not way to fly away. It is afraid - and we, also, in meditation, say, "Will I slip into the Infinite and never come back?" We are afraid of the vast sky. We have lived identified too long with the body, and are afraid of our own infinite omnipresence, afraid to resurrect our omnipotence, our omniscience.

You do not know what joy lies beyond the screen of the subsconscious mind. If you do away with the restlessness and sensations of the body, sit quietly, and say: "In the Heaven of Silence, O God, be born within me," then on the alter of silence He will come. The joy of God is indescribable - joy that no changing dream of life and death can ever take away from you.

- Karma and Reincarnation: The Wisdom of Yogananda, Volume 2 (v. 2) by Paramhansa Yogananda

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Staying In The Middle

Openness doesn't come from resisting our fears but from getting to know them well. We can't cultivate fearlessness without compassionate inquiry into the workings of ego. So we ask ourselves, "What happens when I feel I can't handle what's going on? What are the stories I tell myself? What repels me and what attracts me? Where do I look for strength and in what do I place my trust?

The first thing that takes place in meditation is that we start to see what's happening. Even though we still run away and we still indulge, we see what we're doing clearly. We acknowledge our aversions and our cravings. We become familiar with the strategies and beliefs we use to fortify our cocoon.

With mindfulness as our method we start to get curious about what's going on. For quite a long time, we just see it clearly. To the degree that we're willing to see our indulging and our repressing clearly, they begin to wear themselves out. Wearing out is not exactly the same as going away. Instead, a wider, more generous, more enlightened perspective arises.

How we stay in the middle between indulging and repressing is by acknowledging whatever arises without judgment, letting the thoughts simply dissolve, and then going back to the openness of this very moment.

That's what we're actually doing in meditation. Up come all these thoughts, but rather than squelch them or obsess with them, we acknowledge them and let them go. Then we come back to just being here.

After a while, that's how we relate with hope and fear in our daily lives. Out of nowwhere, we stop struggling and relax. We see our story line, drop it, and come back to the freshness of the present moment.

- Comfortable with Uncertainty: 108 Teachings on Cultivating Fearlessness and Compassion (Shambhala Library) by Pema Chodron

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The Importance of Meditation

Who would not like to reprieve from the consequences of his own wrong doings? Few people, however, are willing to do what is necessary to win such a reprieve. For it is not pleading that can free us from the grinding wheel of justice. Cosmic Law is mathematical in its precision. The way to escape its decrees is to live in divine consciousness. Freedom comes not by uttering wheedling prayers, but by attuning oneself deeply with the all-loving Inner Silence.

No matter how busy we are with our work or with worldly affairs, we should strive in the inner silence to attune ourselves with God. By silent devotion we can deepen our awareness of divine love and wisdom. The Divine is above the law. In everything we do, we should feel God's all-creative Intelligence working through us. The closer we live to God, the less His law will be able to affect us.

The greatest "business" of all is to busy ourselves with God. The greatest duty of all is to place Him first in our lives. No business and no earthly duty would be possible without the intelligence man derives from Him.

Make it a point always to keep your most important of all engagements: your daily appointment wiht the Lord.

Twice daily, enter the inner silence. Worship God on the alter of the dawn. At the day's end, sit quietly in the temple of the night; let darkness conceal you from the distractions of the day.

Contemplate the monotonous recurrence of death and rebirth. While still in this body, work to destroy the seeds of your past karmas (actions). Remember, roasted seeds will not germinate. People who in deep meditation roast their karmic seeds in the fires of wisdom will never again need to reincarnate on earth.

- Karma and Reincarnation: The Wisdom of Yogananda, Volume 2 (v. 2) by Paramhansa Yogananda

The Difference Between Calm Thoughts & Neurotic Thoughts

In the practice of meditation all thoughts are the same: pious thoughts, very beautiful thoughts, religious thoughts, calm thoughts - they are still thoughts. You do not try to cultivate calm thoughts and suppress so-called neurotic thoughts. This is an interesting point.

When we speak of treading the path of the dharma, which is the fourth noble truth, it does not mean that we become religious, calm, good. Trying to be calm, trying to be good, is also an aspect of striving, of neuroticism.

Religiously inclined thoughts are the watcher, the judge, and confused, worldly thoughts are the actor, the doer. For instance if you meditate, you might experience ordinary domestic thoughts and at the same time there is a watcher saying, "You shouldn't do this, you shouldn't do that, but you should come back to meditation." These pious thoughts are still thoughts and should not be cultivated.

- Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism by Chogyam Trungpa

Change Your Perception Of Time

To reverse the aging process you need to change your perception of time because how you perceive time regulates your biological clock.

To do this, you need to risk a crucial question: What is time? In the physical world we use time to measure the flow of events in our lives. And yet we know that our experience of time is fluid.

Dreamtime, for example, is very different from waking time. When you are dreaming, many things can happen in a very short time, because in that state you have an entirely different perception of time.

In the quantum realm, time obeys a different set of rules. Cause and effect are nonlinear, and events that we would normally consider "the future" are capable of influencing events in "the past." When we glimpse the realm of spirit through meditation or an awe-inspiring experience, we enter a domain that is beyond time and space.

The experience of this is called timeless mind. Since mind and body are inseparable, a timeless mind is also an ageless body. When our mind comes to a standstill, time comes to a standstill and our biological clock stops.

One of the ways to define aging is to see it as the metabolism of time. Imagine for a moment that you could metabolize eternity or infinity instead of time. You would literally have an immortal body. The ancient seers of the Vedic tradition claimed that even occasional excursions into this timeless or eternal domain of consciousness could influence the biological clock and extend life by many years.

The human body and its biological functions respond to the experience to time. To paraphrase Einstein, when asked to explain the theory of relativity in a way that was meaningful to everyday experience of time.

To paraphrase Einstein, when asked to explain the theory of relativity in a way that was meaningful to everyday experience, he said, "If I burn myself on a hot stove, that fraction of a second seems like eternity. But if I'm with a beautiful woman, even eternity seems like one second. It's gone in a moment. It's never enough."

The experience of time is subjective. If you are always in a hurry, your biological clock speeds up. If you feel you have all the time in the world, your biological clock slows down. During meditation, when you enter into the gap between thoughts, time stops.

That also happens when you're playing a game you enjoy, when you are listening to great music, when you experience the beauty in nature, and when you fall in love. Time is subjective experience in consciousness and that subjective experience translates into a biological response in your body.

- Grow Younger, Live Longer by Deepak Chopra, M.D.

Tiger Woods Now 'Meditating Religiously' (VIDEO)

Tiger Woods updated the world on his spiritual development at yesterday's press conference in Augusta, Ga., stating that he now "meditates religiously again."

Woods claims to be going back to his roots in Buddhism, a practice that he believes will keep him "more centered, more balanced" on and off the golf course. "I need to do these things the way I used to do them," he said. "Unfortunately I got away from that."