It’s not about what happens in your sitting, it’s about what happens from your sitting to your life. Don’t hold your practice hostage to the feeling of a clear mind.
Centering
Meditation is about finding your center. Centering has three dimensions.
- Centering your posture
- Adopt a posture that enhances communication and improves the relationship between body and mind.
- Move your torso back and forth, then side to side, feeling and finding your center. Repeat with the head.
- Chest open, shoulders relaxed and down, hands positioned such that it adds to your sense of stability.
- Natural breathing (baby breathing; inhaling into the stomach; stomach out).
- Sink/sync-in; create a felt memory of being centered.
- Centering your attention
- Your mind is constantly framing the world; you’re not looking at your mind you’re looking through your mind at the world.
- Your frame (mind and attention) both enables and limits; you’re looking beyond and by means of your frame.
- Centering attention in meditation is like stepping back to look at your sensations rather than through your sensations.
- Use the sensation of the in-out breath into your abdomen to help focus your attention.
- When your mind wanders, step back, look at what your mind is doing, label it (the process, not the content) with an “-ing” word, and gently bring your attention back to following the sensations of your breath.
- Every time this noticing occurs it is a moment of waking up—a rep—do the reps. This is meditation.
- Centering your attitude
- Do not fight or feed your monkey mind (wandering mind)—find the middle path between mind wandering, ruminating, falling asleep, etc.
- Every moment is an opportunity to befriend yourself.
Rooting
Rootedness is about finding the right kind of relaxation in meditation. An interpenetration of sensitization and stabilization so you can optimally flow in any situation—especially dialogically. It’s about finding the optimal grip between yin and yang. Sitting as still as a mountain and alert as a warrior.
- Imagine something like a balloon in the space above your head.
- Inhale and imagine the balloon expanding in all directions. Yang.
- Exhale and it gathers back together. Yin.
- Do this until you find the spot for you that is in between.
- Allow it to drain or melt to your forehead. Third eye.
- Repeat steps 4 and 5 for the throat, then the heart, solar plexus, belly, your seat, and finally let it sink into the earth below you.
- Imagine it like the roots of a tree, connecting and stabilizing you downward, but also nourishing, energizing, and sensitizing you upward so you are sitting, rooted, as still as a mountain but alert as a warrior.