“Lorin Roche really knows his stuff.” Jack Kornfield, co-founder of the Insight Meditation Society and of the Spirit Rock Meditation Center.

“Lorin Roche is probably the friendliest meditation teacher in America.” James Fadiman, cofounder of the Institute of Transpersonal Psychology."

Instinctive Meditation

Meditation is a natural human experience. Your body already knows how to do it. Learning to meditate is a matter of finding out how to activate your innate abilities. This is always an adventure.

If you want to include meditation in your life, find your personal gateways. These are different for each of us. Often, stunningly different.

Instinctive Meditation is a way of accessing the wealth of knowledge of the ancient yoga meditation traditions, and discovering the practices that work for you – your body, your heart and mind, your life.

Buddha said that he gave 84,000 dharmas, for all the different kinds of people there are. The good news is there is something for everybody. The downside, if there is one, is that there are thousands of meditation techniques, and most of them will be wrong for your body type and life direction. When you practice a technique that is not right for your type, it feels like an imposition. When you discover your personal gateway, it feels like love. The goal of a teacher such as myself is to assist you in spending more time in love with life and less time struggling with techniques that are not right for you in the first place.

On this site are offerings of books, seminars, and individual coaching to help you thrive with meditation in your daily life. If you are a yoga, meditation, or tantra teacher, I offer coaching in developing your own approach to practicing and teaching yoga meditation techniques. Meditation 24-7.com is one of my other sites and has some interesting notes on the senses and magnetism.

If you feel like meditating right now, you could head over here and listen to 30-second samples of 14 different guided meditations. Or glance through The Radiance Sutras and notice what resonates with you. Keep it simple and be playful in your approach. Give yourself freedom to explore what delights you.

Your Inner Wisdom

What are the instincts? They are the wise impulses of life continuously flowing through us. In yoga physiology, the chakras are the instinctive centers of the body. The chakras are energy vortices in multiple dimensions, and they transmute and emanate the song of life as it sustains, expresses and evolves itself. These impulses appear to us as hunches, feelings, emotions, and the urge to evolve spiritually. Instinctive Meditation can be thought of as the art of riding the passions inward to touch the core of being. Your body is already shimmering with vitality, and every individual is has unique connections among the chakras and energy flows in and around the body.

Instinctive Meditation is based in the ancient tradition of yoga, and draws inspiration greatly from the Vijnana Bhairava Tantra, a text based in Kashmir Shaivism. If you are a yoga teacher, you may want to go to those pages first, or read my lineage pages.

Yoga & Meditation is as American as Apple Pie, Almost

The CDC - The Centers for Disease Control - conducted a nationwide survey and found that 7.5% of Americans have done Yoga (7.1% in the last month) and 10.2% have meditated, 7.6% in the last month. Here is a link to the research, in PDF form. The CDC was interested also in what Americans do, who do they call, if they have an ache, or headache, or feel stressed out. Half of Americans interviewed said they thought an alternative approach, such as yoga or meditation, would be interesting to try out.

A new bit of research was just published on how meditation affects cellular metabolism, and how meditating every day helps prevent cellular damage resulting from too much stress. And here is a US News article on meditation as a way to simplify your life.

Where Rock 'n Roll Comes From

Many years ago, I heard from a drummer that much of what we now know as popular music had its origins on the Silk Road, the camel caravan trail from China, through India, Persia, and Arabia, to Europe. As the caravans travelled though all the various regions, they traded rhythms and chords.

Listen to this YouTube clip of Mustt Mustt by Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan.



Nusrat was a foremost singer of Qawwali, the devotional music of the Sufis. "Often listeners, and even artists themselves, are transported to a state of wajad, a trance-like state where they feel at one with God, generally considered to be the height of spiritual ecstasy in Sufism."

The Silk Road (source: Wikipedia)

NAMA and RUPA

Nama and Rupa are Sanskrit terms for Name (nama) and Form (rupa). This is a primordial area of focus in the Upanishads. In modern terminology, we talk about resonance and the study of WAVES. Here are some interesting visualizations of what happens to matter as it is vibrated by sound.

A brief RESONANCE demonstration on YouTube, showing the way matter vibrates in the presence of sound. Interesting illustration of what mantras do to your subtle body.

Chladni Plate: Someone takes what looks like a violin bow and uses it to vibrate the edge of a metal plate with sand or sugar on it. The particles vibrate themselves into orderly patterns.


Another demonstration of Cymatics:


There are better videos out there. Just go to YouTube and type "resonance" or "cymatics" into the search engine.

One reason this phenomena is so interesting is that the shapes created on the vibrating plate resemble Tantric art – the geometric and impressionistic art that yogis have developed over the centuries to depict what they feel inside.

image courtesy of Tantra-Kundalini.com

image courtesy of http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/george/yantra.html

For thousands of years, yogis have said that each mantra has a corresponding yantra, a visual shape created by the sound. So it is very interesting to see that just by putting some powder, sand, or grains of rice on a steel plate, and then sending sound vibrations, you can generate the types of patterns seen in yoga-tantra art.

There is more about the interaction of mantras or vibrations and matter here, on this site.
And also at the Meditation 24-7 website, which is where I have been putting notes for the Wednesday night class.

Hidden Majesty of Everyday Phenomena

These high-speed photographs of milk droplets hitting coffee remind me of meditation somehow. There are these moments . . . in the midst of a breath, or watching a thought splash into awareness, or listening to a sound, when we get a glimpse of the beauty of life's processes. There is a pause in the midst of the motion. Perception opens up, and the beauty of what is always there is revealed.










Link to TECH BLOG
Found by Mark Frauenfelder at BoingBoing.net - thanks, Mark and TechBlog!

The Synapse is Holy

I love this quote from Gretel Erlich:

"An intake of breath is not just oxygen, a pulse is not just the rush of blood but also the taking in of divinity through an orifice, and as it moves through, it becomes a spark. To be inspired is to have accepted spirit in the lung and heart, to watch it circulate through miles of blood vessels and capillaries whose tiny fenestrations allow oxygen, nutrients and grace to leak into the tissues of muscle and consciousness, then be taken up again, reoxygenated, and returned.

The synapse is holy. Apse comes from apsis, whose roots mean to loop, wheel, arch, orbit, fasten, or copulate, and the apse of a church is a place of honor. The synapse is the gap where nothing happens. Bodies of thoughts swim in the synaptic lake, sliding over receptors, reaching for the ones that live on the other shore. An interval of between 0.5 and 1 millisecond transpires before an impulse makes its way across the gap . . where we pause between life and death, treading water in the oblivion of a gray sea. What is a thought before it registers memory? . . . Is it like unrequited love, or a lover who is spirit only, who has no body?”

How odd that we walk around with these bodies, live in them, die in them, make love with them, yet know almost nothing of their intimate workings, the ludicrous balancing act of homeostasis, the delicate architecture of their organs and systems, or the varying weathers of their private, internal environments. Up to this point my living and breathing had been an act of faith. I existed but I didn’t know how."

A Match to the Heart (amazon link).