Learning to Meditate from the Masters
10-day silent meditation retreat? Not for me. Travel to India for my own special mantra? Utterly unnecessary. The best teachers may not be who you think.
I fell down the online spiritual rabbit hole earlier this week. I am preparing to take a trauma-informed yoga teaching certification course, and as I researched options, I happened upon the dark side of spiritual pursuits. Another scandal involving a yoga luminary. I won’t go into details because that’s not the focus of this article.
However, upon researching the scandal, I came across a Google Doc that someone had posted on a popular yoga message board. It reads, “Your Guru Was Probably An Abuser - resource to educate about abuse in Yoga,” and it details the proven and alleged abuses perpetrated by virtually every founder of an established yoga style — hot yoga, Ashtanga, Jivamukti, Kundalini, Sivananda, Integral, Siddha yoga, and more. The spreadsheet also includes several meditation teachers.
Meditation is the most important spiritual tool
The spiritual discipline I’ve followed for 34 years has no guru. Thank God. I would not still be doing it and would not have the mostly lovely life I have without my spiritual practice. And I would not still be practicing if a guru were messing it up.
But someone did initiate this path. Miraculously, the people responsible had the humility to acknowledge that they knew but a little and that more would be revealed to them and others through meditation.
We are asked to meditate daily, ideally for 30 minutes. Thirty minutes of quiet time to connect with the still, small voice. Thirty minutes to deepen our connection to ourselves, our Higher Powers, our intuition, and our conscience.
And yet many of us, even those who have been following the spiritual path I follow for decades, refuse to meditate.
Why?
Because when we sit quietly (no guided meditations, no apps, no music, no mantras) and simply allow ourselves to be, we cannot escape who we are. Our conscience confronts us. And that can be painful.
All is within
I used to pass a yoga studio daily when I lived in Manhattan. It was on the second floor above a bodega at the corner of 3rd Avenue and either 22nd or 23rd Street. A billboard hung below one of its windows read, “All is within.”
It’s taken me over 30 years to understand what that means.
Meditation, itself, is my teacher.
Still, it helps to have guides who set great examples. Fortunately, I have many of them in my life now. When I’m at Indraloka Animal Sanctuary, sitting in a pasture surrounded by cows, I observe how they meditate. They are still, but alert. They are aware of everything going on around them, but reacting to none of it.
It’s really amazing to watch cows and sheep simply be. They stand still or lie down. Their eyes are open. Their ears flutter at sounds around them, but they don’t turn their heads. They are wonderful teachers for learning how not to react to every little disturbance.
How to start
I recognize you may not have a farm animal sanctuary right in your backyard. You may have to try a more conventional approach to meditation.
If you’re new to meditation, start with two minutes every day. Set a timer and simply sit. Close your eyes. Watch your breath. Feel where it enters your nostrils. Notice if it stops at your chest or if it travels further into your body. Just notice.
You don’t need a mindfulness app. You don’t need a 10-day retreat. You don’t need guided meditations, binaural beats, beta waves, or mantras. You do not need a guru.
You need only sit and be.
Love this, Lynn. I used to meditate at least an hour a day. When I first went to India for 6 months, I quickly learned that I had no choice but to drop into a meditative state at the drop of a hat, meaning pure awareness, beingness. There was no other way to navigate the intensity. No cushion necessary. We can drop in and as the Eternal Self anytime, any moment, for we are the Self. Haha! Cosmic joke. Until that is realized, it may be necessary to practice, as you mention!
I will also state that there are some of us who have had gurus and would not be as free, as liberated without that happening, that experience. Of course, it may or may not be necessary, depending on the destiny of the individual. I only mention this because gurus have such a negative connotation in our western culture, and I want to remind us that sometimes it happens, and sometimes it is *exactly* the thing that infuses the person with the right amount of bhakti, or jnana (wisdom), to catapult the dissolving of the identification with the ego and/or thinking mind.
Thank you, again!