Meditation – Western Tantra

Meditation–Tuning

This is a meditation of the analytical type designed to modify our perception. Our perception of outer reality is largely determined by the internal state of our mind. If we find ourselves in a negative state of mind, we can use meditation to Tune our mind to a better internal state, which can improve our perception of the outside world. This positive state of mind allows us to better help those around us, improving the world for others.

Find a quiet time and place for meditation. Regret any harmful thoughts, words, and deeds you have done to others recently and resolve to do better. Imagine that the universe accepts your regrets and forgives you. Imagine feeling relief at this. Dedicate the benefits of this meditation to all who are in distress. Thank your spiritual guides for the conditions allowing you to do this meditation. Concentrate on your breath, feeling the inflow of air and the outflow of air until you feel relaxed.

Visualize a paradise of peace and beauty, a place you would like to be. Imagine it filled with happy people of all races, ages, genders, and religions, all helping one another. Imagine various animals mingling with the people, predators and prey coexisting. Imagine beautiful plants and flowers. Imagine that the weather is perfect.

You trip and fall, but someone picks you up and tends to your wounds. You become thirsty and a stranger offers you cool, clear water. You become hungry and another stranger invites you to their home for a banquet of your favorite foods and beverages. This makes you sleepy, and your host offers you a room and bed for the night. You quickly fall asleep on the comfortable bed.

You awaken refreshed and greet a perfect morning. At breakfast you ask your host for directions to the place where your most revered master teacher gives lessons. One of your host’s children walks you to the place of learning and you enter. The place is filled with other students of your religion or philosophy. They greet you as a friend and you feel their Love for you and one another. It feels like home.

The master teacher sees and greets you and seems to know you. The teacher then addresses the assembly. You have many questions about the universe and your place in it. The master answers your questions without you having to ask them. During a break, you discover all the students have the same experience. Their questions are answered. After the teaching, all the students request a blessing from the master. The master agrees but asks them for their blessing in return. You have the impression that the master regards them all as equals, not as inferior to the master.

You find a place to stay and a task to perform in this paradise. Continuing the lessons with the master, you find your mind becoming open to new information and more stable. After a long series of lessons and meditations the master invites you to a private conference. There the master questions you, and seemingly satisfied with your answers, touches you on the forehead and heart center and you enter the ecstasy of Bliss. You remain in Bliss for a time and awaken with the clear knowledge that life has meaning. You feel the unity of all things. You become Love incarnate.

Experiencing Bliss and clarity of thought, you wish to share this experience with others who still suffer. The master directs you to the council of elders who help you choose a life of service to others. You make a last round of paradise, enjoying all the features, knowing that you can return at any time. Then you return to the ordinary world and are reborn into a better life. And here you are. What will you do first?

Meditation–Reincarnation

This a hybrid meditation containing both analytical and stillness elements. The purpose of this meditation is to gain control over your focus of attention and be able to move that focus as skillfully, gracefully, and calmly as you now move your body. Currently your human body anchors your mind where your body is located. An untrained mind without the body to keep it in place can fly anywhere in the universe. With no restraint, the untrained mind can quickly become lost in unfamiliar places. The Spirit body has no mass and follows the mind’s focus of attention. To be able to choose one’s next rebirth or incarnation wisely, requires the ability to focus on the desired choice, not flit one’s attention around the universe or panic and choose rashly. This meditation helps develop control over the focus of your attention and the direction of your mind.

Find a time and place free from distractions. Look around the place you have chosen and mindfully examine all the objects in the room or area so you have a clear idea what they look like and where they are placed. Find a comfortable chair or cushion, place yourself there, and relax. Do some deep breaths as needed, focusing on the breaths. Choose an object within your field of vision. Pick a point on that object and stare at it until you can rest your attention steadily on that point. Now close your eyes while maintaining a mental image of the object and keeping you focus on the point you chose. Realize that this is your focus of attention. Continue until you can rest your attention peacefully on a point.

Keeping your eyes closed, move your focus of attention to a different object in the room or area where you are sitting. Imagine examining it and see in your mind’s eye what it looks like. Move your attention to other objects in the room. Notice that your mind can move your focus of attention independently of your eyes, even to objects behind you. Practice this until you are adept at moving your attention. Try this with your eyes open while staring at these words or straight ahead while your attention focuses on other objects around you. With eyes open or closed, imagine picking up various objects and examining them from different angles. If this is difficult, return to focusing on a point of a single object, and try this again in a different session.

If you are comfortable with moving your focus of attention and while still sitting, imagine getting up and walking outdoors. Walk around your dwelling, looking at it from different places. Then imagine walking to nearby places, looking at and touching things along the way. If this is difficult, try actually walking to nearby places while looking mindfully at things along the way. Then try to replicate that experience in your mind in your next meditation session.

If you are able to visualize walking to nearby places and examining objects in your path, try visualizing a great leap to a favorite spot farther away and enjoy being there as you normally would, doing what you normally do there. Try to spend some time in that spot, enjoying being there. Try this for other favorite spots until you are comfortable doing this and can rest in these places in your mind’s eye for an entire meditation session.

Visualize looking at the sky. Locate the moon. This can be either in daytime or the sky at night. Study its surface from your vantage point on earth. Examine its craters and surface features. Now gather yourself for a mighty leap and imagine yourself flying to the moon. It gets larger as you approach, You land feet first on the surface of the moon in a great puff of dust. Walk around examining rocks and the stars above. Turn to look at the earth, noting its beauty. Pause to enjoy the sight of the earth for a while. Notice that the lack of air has no effect on your point of focus. Take a few deep breaths of empty space. Now gather yourself for another mighty leap, focus on your point where you left, and imagine flying back to earth, its image getting larger as you approach. Land where you started and look back at the moon. If this is difficult, watch some images and videos of the Apollo missions and try again during another session.

Visualize walking back to your meditation location. Realize that if you can calmly move your focus of attention independently of your body, then you really do not need your body to travel where your Spirit wills it to go. You can go where your heart or trusted guides lead you to you next life without fear dictating your destination.

Meditation–Deep Dive

The following Deep Dive Meditation is designed to provide an understanding of the three levels of reality and how it feels to work in each realm. Repeat as needed until you understand the difference between the Material, Spiritual, and Divine realms and the power of the creative wish. Either record the meditation so you can do it with eyes closed, or imagine that your eyes are closed as you read the meditation. Here is the meditation:

Imagine yourself in the Material world as you are, sitting comfortably in your own dwelling or a quiet place you have selected. Start with your eyes open, then close them and visualize what you just saw, yourself sitting where you are.

Visualize yourself getting up and walking around this location where you are, as you sit with your eyes closed. Pick up some things in your imagination, and feel how firm and real they feel. Think, “These things are physical and real.” Wonder at how they came to exist. Visualize returning to where you are sitting.

You wish to know how physical things came to be, and feel a slight jerk. The place where you are sitting begins to move down like an elevator to another level under the physical world. Here with your mind’s eye you see crafts people designing and building all the things in the room where you were sitting. Architects drew the plans for the room. Carpenters constructed the walls, floors, and ceilings. Artists planned the floor coverings, and weavers wove them on looms. Designers sent plans to shops to build the furnishings. Painters and photographers created the room decorations. Movers on elevators took all these things from below and installed them in the room above where you were meditating. See all this in your mind’s eye.

You decide to explore this Spirit realm of mental forms where ideas are turned into real things. Here you see many beautiful works of art, functional objects, and amazing tools and machines, all with people creating them. You wonder where they get the ideas for these amazing things. You notice each of the makers has a well next to them. They often lower a bucket into their well and bring it up brimming with bright ideas, which they apply to what they are creating.

You pick one of the work stations and ask the worker if she will lower you down her well to see what is there. She agrees. You sit with your feet in her bucket and grip its rope tightly as she lowers you down her well. It is dark in the tunnel of the well, but there is bright light at the bottom which grows brighter as you are lowered. You emerge into formless light and are surrounded by it, immersing you in indescribable joy.

The light is too bright for your eyes, so you keep them closed and feel ideas bumping against you. You reach into the light with one hand. Ideas are elusive and hard to grasp. You find you must concentrate. Still your mind and focus without thought on your outstretched hand. Pause and focus for a while on your hand. Stay focused until your attention rests gently on your hand.

Finally, with a quiet mind, you manage to grasp one of the ideas with your free hand. Imagine closing you hand gently on the idea. You shout, “Bring me up!” to the owner of the well and she hauls you up the dark tunnel to the workshop of visualized forms. You both gaze at the bright idea you brought back, and she helps you craft it into a Real thing.

You thank her for your help, and she wishes you well on your return trip. You walk to the elevator that brought you to this level, and sit again in meditation. Now you wish to return to the Real world of Material form, and the elevator lifts you back to the room where you started. You realize you just made a trip from the Material world of everyday physical form down to the Spirit realm of imagination where mental ideas take form and are transformed into Real things. From there, you plumbed the well of the formless Divine realm where ideas are born, and you brought one back with you. Open your eyes and look at what you created from the bright idea you captured. What did you bring back?

Meditation–Renunciation

Imagine you are standing at the crossroads of eternity holding two flags in your hand. Behind you is the past, stretching fourteen billion years to the Big Bang. In front of you is the future, stretching at least 150 billion years, possibly forever to infinity. From where you stand in the present, pace out the duration of your life so far, on the path you are on. Use one meter or one yard to represent each year of your past life. Plant a flag representing when you were born to this life. Go back to the crossroad and pace out the distance into the future that you think you will live, again at one meter or yard for each year. Place the second flag where you think your present physical body will die.

Go back to the crossroad representing your present. This crossroad is perpendicular to your timeline. Walk along the crossroad to gain perspective on your timeline until you can see both flags, the birth flag and the death flag, without turning your head. If you are optimistic about the duration of your life, note that the distance between the flags is about the length of a football field.

Back up on the crossroad until both flags can be covered by your outstretched thumb. Try to see the Big Bang which is fourteen billion meters or yards to your left. It is so far away you cannot see it. Then try to see the future end of the universe, at least 150 billion meters or yards to your right. You cannot see that far. Compare the length of your lifetime, the distance between the two flags, to the span of time for the universe. It is insignificant.

Reflect on the percentage of time you devote to making that tiny duration between the two flags pleasant versus the time you spend preparing for eternity, the span of time to the right which may be infinite. You now see the disparity in your level of effort. You resolve to worry less about that tiny interval between the flags, your material life, and spend more time on your spiritual practice preparing for eternity. Does this make sense?

Meditation–Diversity

This is an analytical meditation to help embrace diversity. Close your eyes, take a few calming breaths, and visualize a large box of crayons with many colors (or chalks, colored pencils, or palette of paints of you prefer). Imagine pulling out the black, white, red, and yellow crayons and placing them next to your skin. Is your skin black or white or red or yellow? Certainly not!

Imagine placing each crayon in the large box against your skin until you find a match. See that it is some shade or tint of beige or brown. Set this crayon aside and visualize taking out a large blank sheet of white paper. Reflect that this is true white which is made up of all the colors combined, and if you split the colors with a prism, it forms a rainbow.

Now take the crayon that matches your skin color. Hold it up and think to yourself that this is the best color, and put all the other crayons away. With this crayon, draw a person on the blank paper. Imagine that you can draw well, and draw more people with the same crayon. Think to yourself, “I will draw the best drawing using the best crayon!” Draw the foreground and background of the picture using only the best crayon, making it the best picture.

You take this picture using only the best crayon to an art exhibit to see how others like it. Some viewers say it is a fine landscape or still life, others see animals, but most viewers say, ”It is only one uniform color. What is it supposed to be? A blank wall? What does it say?”

You decide it says there is no value in uniformity, and return to your studio to reconsider. You realize that there is no best crayon. Each crayon serves a purpose, and skillfully combining the colors creates a harmony that tells a story. You see that light falling on objects lightens colors and shadows darken colors. You see that different colors and shapes create variety that delights the eye and the heart.

You make more pictures using all the colors in the box and take your art to the gallery again. A few viewers say your art is too colorful, too primitive, discordant. But most now say they understand what you are expressing with your art. The contrast and interplay of colors speak to them. Notice that they stare at your work and understand. They see the unity in diversity. Do you?

Meditation–Acceptance

This a meditation of the analytical type designed to develop acceptance, what Buddhists call non-resistance to change. Rigid things break, flexible things endure. Solid things stay where they are, Fluid things find a way around obstacles. If we want to endure and move beyond obstacles, we must learn to go with the flow of an ever-changing reality. How do we learn to do this?

One way is to accept new things and ideas, making your life a meditation in action. Try new foods. Travel to different places. Talk with people who are not like you. Visualize these activities, then do them.

Another way is to master a sport or hobby requiring fluid movement to excel, such as surfing, skiing, skating, dance, martial arts, tennis, golf, bowling, horsemanship, sailing and such. Then practice until all actions can be performed automatically without thinking. Fluidity and non-resistance begin with attention and acceptance of what-is, ever changing reality. The rigid dancer is upset when bumped by another dancer. The fluid dancer smiles and flows into an open space.

Now try this visualization. Imagine that you are water, a small pool of clear water at a mountain spring. You sprang from the ground and entered a pool surrounded by rocks. You wish to be more than a quiet pool, so you explore the pool and find a small opening. You squeeze through the aperture and become a trickle.

You encounter a pebble on your left and flow past it on your right. There is a pebble on your right, and you flow past it on your left. You gather your waters in a rivulet and flow on.

A rock appears on your right. You splash into it and flow left around it. Rivulets join you. A larger rock is on your left and you flow right around it. You are a stream now, flowing faster, and a boulder is in your path.

You stop for a time, but are buffeted by turbulence, so you let go, split, and flow around both sides, reuniting beyond the boulder. The stream bed steepens, and you encounter many boulders, flowing around some and over others. It is exhilarating. Other streams join you, and you become a river, flowing downward.

You reach a cleft and shoot through it into a wandering canyon, slow but deep. The canyon leads to a reservoir behind a dam where you stay for a while, gathering water from pattering rains. You will not stay still. You find an opening. Down you flow with force through a turbine, spinning the blades to power a city.

Out you shoot below the dam as a river through forests. The path becomes shallow and fast with rock below until the rock ends and you leap off the edge of a waterfall into a turbulent pool below. Now you calm your waters and quietly flow through meadows and past cities.

You feel a pulse, in and out, resistance and release, crashing waves. You flow with the ebb tide into the sea. Consciousness of being expands. You feel no boundaries. You are free.

Meditation–Heart Drop

This is a meditation of the analytical type taught by one of my lamas, designed to develop inclusiveness and universal, unconditional Love. Assume a comfortable posture in a pleasant location. As with any spiritual practice, if at any time the following practice makes you feel uncomfortable, simply stop and do something else. Resume only if you feel comfortable.

Begin by dedicating your practice for the benefit of all living beings. Calm your mind with simple or nine-step Breathing Meditation.

Close your eyes and visualize yourself as a small figure, either in your present form or your hero archetype. Visualize moving into your heart center. See yourself staring at a beautiful pulsating drop, a small sphere of Love energy located in the center of your heart. Pause until this vision is stable.

Take a deep breath and enter the heart drop. Hold your breath and abide in the drop. Release your breath and dissolve into the drop. Rest and become the drop. (Repeat this entering, abiding, dissolving, and becoming at least three times until you can clearly see yourself as a beautiful sphere of pure Love energy located at your heart.)

You are a beautiful sphere of pure Love. Now see the surface of the sphere and expand it until it encompasses and encloses your entire body, bathing it in loving energy. Rest in the feeling of loving your body and every aspect of your being. (Pause)

From within your sphere of Love, visualize your immediate family, and expand the sphere of your Love to include them inside your sphere. Feel your Love for them. (Pause)

From within your sphere of Love, visualize your friends and extended family, both those who comfort you and those who sow discord, and expand the sphere of your Love to include them inside your sphere. Feel your Love for them despite their flaws. (Pause)

From within your sphere of Love, visualize your town, and expand the sphere of your Love to include its people, parks, and pets inside your sphere. Feel your Love for its diversity. (Pause)

From within your sphere of Love, visualize your state, and expand the sphere of your Love to include its mountains, valleys, waters, forests, and life sustaining fields. Feel your Love for all of it. (Pause)

From within your sphere of Love, visualize your country, and expand the sphere of your Love to include its heroes and history inside your sphere. Feel your Love for its freedom and protection. (Pause)

From within your sphere of Love, visualize our planet earth, and expand the sphere of your Love to include its creatures and plants, lands and oceans. Feel your Love for this beautiful blue marble, our home in the depths of space. (Pause)

From within your sphere of Love, visualize the sun and its orbiting worlds, and expand the sphere of your Love to include them inside your sphere. Feel your Love for its light, warmth, and invitation to explore. (Pause)

From within your sphere of Love, visualize the Milky Way galaxy, and expand the sphere of your Love to include it inside your sphere. Feel your Love for its beauty and mystery. (Pause)

From within your sphere of Love, expand the sphere of your Love to include the entire universe inside your sphere. Feel your Love for all conscious beings. (Pause)

Now expand your sphere of Love to infinity, dissolving the boundary of your Love entirely, boundless Love encompassing all creation. Imagine that this could last forever. Rest in this feeling. (Pause)

Remaining in boundless and eternal Love, slowly bring your focus of attention back from infinity and the universe (Pause), back from the Milky Way (Pause), now the sun and planets (Pause), our planet (Pause), country (Pause), your state (Pause), your town (Pause), your friends and family (Pause), and return to your body. Remain now in your body as Love with no boundary. Rest. Open your eyes. Do you feel differently? Do you think universal, unconditional, boundless, eternal Love is possible?

Meditation–Two Chains

This is a meditation of the analytical type, having a visualized structure. It is designed to rid yourself of the limiting burdens of guilt and retribution (payback or justice). A spiritual friend once explained to me why we can never be free to reach our full potential on earth and why we are doomed to forever reincarnate into suffering.

When we live on earth, we inevitably hurt others, intentionally and accidentally. We feel guilty for harm we caused, so we spend much of our time trying to atone, and we reincarnate to repair harm we caused to others in our lives. In our life on earth, we are also inevitably harmed by others, and we seek retribution for undeserved harm from others in this life, past lives, and lives to come. Inevitably we acquire nemeses, beings that retaliate for our unintended harm to them. We feel guilty for harming them and try to make amends, only to find they seek revenge, striking back, usually hurting us intentionally worse than we harmed them accidentally. We then seek justice against them, causing them intentional righteous harm for which they feel wronged and wish to retaliate.

This cycle of guilt for harm caused and retribution for harm received can continue even beyond the grave, all parties seeking atonement and revenge for eternity, never reaching heaven or heavenly states of mind. I was horrified by my friend’s view of eternal conflict, but had to admit that it is possible to become trapped this way in this life and in future lives. Even killing a nemesis only makes the trap deeper. I knew that breaking this cycle must be possible, so I developed this Two-Chains analytical meditation.

Imagine that you are an angel. In this life you wish to be free to help others and reach your full potential. In your next life you wish to be free to reach heaven. You wish to spread your wings and fly. But you see that you are chained to earth with two heavy chains and you cannot fly. You cannot lift off. You know that flying creatures cannot carry heavy burdens, they must be light. So you examine your chains and see that each link on the left is heavy guilt for wrongs done to others, and each link on the right is the wish for retribution for heavy wrongs done to you. Visualize this until the image is clear and stable. Feel the weight of the chains.

When you strike off a link on the right to retaliate for wrongs suffered, you notice that a new link appears on the left, heavy guilt for harm caused by retaliating. Whenever you remove a link of guilt from the left by trying to undo harm caused, a link appears on the right because the harmed person strikes back, adding a new link needing retribution to the right chain. You notice that the two chains are connected. Removing a link from one side merely shifts the link to the other chain, and the burden remains the same.

So you look at how the chains are attached, and you see that you are holding them in your hands. If you were to drop the chain in your right hand by letting go all wishes for righteous justice, forgiving all for harm done to you, you would still be grasping in your left hand all the heavy links of guilt for harm you caused others, and you still could not fly. If you instead forgive yourself for all harm you caused and let go the burden of atonement but still grasp in your right hand the need for retribution for harm done to you, you are still burdened and cannot fly.

The solution of course is to release both chains. Shout to yourself, “I will no longer play this game!” Simultaneously forgive yourself for harming others and forgive others for harming you. Visualize opening both hands and letting the chains fall, then spreading your wings and flying free of the burdens of life. An unchained angel. Thus freed, what can you do now?

Meditation–Breathing

Breathing meditation belongs to the stillness class of meditation. We will describe two methods of breathing meditation, simple and nine-step. The simple breathing meditation starts with finding a quiet location and a comfortable posture or place to sit with the spine fairly straight (normal curvature, not slouched). It is a good idea to set your intention by dedicating your meditation practice to the benefit of others as described in the “Meditation—Preparation” post. Then concentrate on inhaling through the nose, pause holding your breath for a few seconds, purse your lips and blow slowly through your mouth as if you are cooling soup. Breathe slowly like this while concentrating on the feel of the air entering the nose and exiting the lips. Try not to think of anything. If you find yourself thinking, switch the outgoing breath to the “shish” (Shhhh) sound you make when telling someone to be quiet, and concentrate more forcefully on the feel of air entering and exiting. You could set a timer and try to increase the duration of your breathing meditation by one minute per session until you reach the longest session that your schedule permits.

A more complex form of breathing meditation is called nine-step breathing meditation or more commonly nine-round breathing. This method requires a visualization of the inner Spirit Body (see Glossary of Terms) as described in Western Tantra, chapter 9, Tantric Sex, Spirit Body, 107-108, reprinted here:

Spirit Body: According to the spiritual literature, the Spirit Body or “diamond” body, which inhabits the physical Body, has a hollow central channel from the top of the head to the floor of the pelvis. This central channel is flanked by two thinner channels, said to convey male and female Energy to an Energy center at the navel, where male and female Energy combine to power the Spirit Body. It is sort of like matter and antimatter combining at the dilithium crystal to power a starship, although nothing we are describing is made of ordinary matter or energy. Spirit Energy is distributed within the Spirit Body through the central channel to Energy centers called chakras located on the central channel at the crown of the head, the neck, near the heart, near the navel, and near the genitals. Radiating from the chakras are secondary Energy channels called nadi, which branch out smaller and smaller to reach all parts of the physical Body, like capillaries that nourish the physical Body. The heart chakra is thought to be the principal location of our Divine center, the seat of consciousness. My spiritual tradition works mainly with five chakras. Other spiritual systems locate more chakras, some outside the Body. I do not know if this Spirit Body is an actual manifestation of something real or just a convenient way to visualize the Spirit Body in order to control it, the way the human brain projects representations of the physical Body onto the cortex of the brain.

Don’t worry that this structure of the Spirit Body is not anatomically correct in the physical medical sense, it’s a visualized Spirit Body, not a physical body. It will function as the focus of a visualized practice. First find a quiet location and comfortable posture as with any breathing meditation. Set your intention to benefit yourself and others. With the visualized anatomy of the Spirit Body clearly in mind, here is how nine-step breathing meditation is done:

Steps 1-3) First close your left nostril with your left index finger, inhale slowly and evenly, and visualize air entering your right nostril, travelling down the right channel to where it meets the left channel at the central channel about 5cm (2”) below the navel. Then block the right nostril with the right index finger, exhale slowly, and visualize the air travelling up the left channel, blowing any impurities in the side channels out the left nostril. Repeat this two more times to complete the first three steps.

Steps 4-6) Now close your right nostril with your right index finger, inhale slowly and evenly, and visualize air entering your left nostril, travelling down the left channel to where it meets the right channel at the central channel about 5cm (2”) below the navel. Then block the left nostril with the left index finger, exhale slowly, and visualize the air travelling up the right channel, blowing any impurities in the side channels out the right nostril. Repeat this two more times to complete the middle three steps.

Steps 7-9) For the final set of three steps, leave both nostrils open, inhale slowly and evenly, and visualize air entering both nostrils, travelling down both side channels to where they both meet the central channel about 5cm (2”) below the navel. Pause for a few seconds. Then exhale slowly, and visualize the air travelling up the central channel, blowing any impurities in the central channel out an opening at the top of your head, called the “crown aperture.” Yeah, I know the air is really exiting your nose, but this is a visualization, and this is how it has been done for thousands of years. Just accept it. Repeat this two more times to complete the final three steps of the nine-step breathing meditation (or nine-round breathing as it is called on most websites). Then finish with expressing gratitude to the universe for the conditions that allow you to do this meditation.

The way this nine-step meditation works is by giving the discursive “monkey mind” something to do to interrupt the endless flow of disturbing thoughts, allowing Body and Soul (see Glossary of Terms) to rest and heal. The visualizations of the inner Spirit Body plumbing and the thought required to visualize air flow passing through the channels will keep the brain busy. The visualizations are intricate enough that the brain is fully occupied with this task and must set aside any distracting fears. Without the bodily “fight or flight” hormone and muscle responses to fearful thoughts, the Body is able to relax, and the brain neurotransmitters depleted by endless circular thinking can replenish. Our conscious mind can then move its focus of attention from the Head to the Heart center, giving us a chance to find the source of healing energy.

Nine-step breathing can be used by itself to improve mental and physical health and improve concentration, the principle function of the various stillness meditations. It is also used as a preliminary practice to enhance concentration and relax body and mind in preparation for other meditation practices. If you try either of these breathing meditations, simple or nine-step, let us know your experiences and any tips to make them better.

Meditation–Preparation

Meditations of many types have been found to be beneficial to our health, but to enhance their benefit, there are practices we can perform before and after to increase the benefit and improve the odds of doing the meditations well. These are called preparatory practices.

As we said, meditation improves our health, but with Karma in mind (see Karma post), we can do more. Improving our own health and peace of mind is a good thing, but improving the world is even better. Meditation for ourselves alone could be considered selfish and might feed our Egos (see Ego post), especially if we meditate skillfully. Many meditators are proud of their lotus posture and how long they can sustain it, for example.

Can meditation improve the world? Certainly. If it puts us in a more peaceful state of mind, we will be more pleasant to be around for others: family, friends, coworkers, and people we encounter daily. This will improve their mood which will be more pleasant for their people, and so on in a “ripple effect.” Many of you have seen how anger can jump from person to person, like a virus. Love and caring works the same way. So if we make ourselves better, the world becomes better.

Intention is key in Karma (Western Tantra, 54), so to enhance our meditation, we should set our intention to help others at the beginning of any meditation session. This could be as simple as saying to yourself, “May my meditation benefit myself and others.” Or you can choose a dedication or prayer from your religion or life philosophy.

Meditations are highly susceptible to distractions as you well know. Phones can ring, children can interrupt, and bosses can say, “Get back to work!” Our own thoughts can disturb us. It is easier to meditate poorly than well. If it went well, it is a good idea to express gratitude to the universe that allowed our meditation to go well. For example, if you practice mindful driving meditation (Western Tantra, 94-95) you could end the session with the silent thought, “Thanks for letting us arrive home safely!” Even if your beliefs do not include a sentient universe or deity, it can’t hurt to be grateful. Feeling gratitude to forces beyond your control is better than congratulating yourself, which feeds the Ego, the beast we are trying to starve. What are your thoughts about preparatory and concluding practices?