Continuing Education Credits for Instinctive Meditation & Wild Serenity

Course Rationale

Buddha said that he gave 84,000 dharmas, for all the different kinds of people there are. That’s quite a typology. The good news is there is something for everybody. The downside is that most meditation techniques will be wrong for your body type, emotional nature, and life direction. When you practice a technique that is not right for your type, it feels like an imposition, and can be harmful. When you discover your personal gateway, it feels like love. The goal of training such as we offer 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.

What You Will Learn

If you are in the medical, teaching or helping professions, this is an opportunity to develop a meditation practice that is rejuvenating to you personally; to watch teachers interacting with and supervising students as they explore and discover what works, and to witness the diversity of meditative experience that occurs in even a small group of people. Also, in any group, there are usually some who are in recovery from doing the wrong meditative practices and internalizing a tyrannical perfectionistic spiritual ideal, so you can observe this meditation-specific recover process.

Main Points to Be Covered

Recent research by the CDC (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) indicates that meditation is a widely accepted method of complementary medicine, with 7.6% of the United States population, or 23 million people, having made use of meditation in 2002. (In same time frame, 11.6% of the population or 34 million made use of deep breathing exercises, 5.1% or 15 million practiced yoga, and 5% or 15 million received a massage.)

Physiological research conducted at Harvard Medical School over the past 40 years, and replicated elsewhere, has found that meditation produces a condition of rest much deeper than deep sleep. During sleep, oxygen consumption gradually decreases by about eight percent over a period of four hours. During meditation, the decrease is about eighteen percent and occurs in three to five minutes. This potent rest has measurable health benefits – stronger, more measurable and more replicable than the effects of most drugs – and has proven clinically useful in treating addiction, angina, anxiety, asthma, back pain, chronic fatigue, depression, diabetes, headaches, hypertension, insomnia, palpitations, menopause symptoms, and TMJ pain. Meditation is widely accepted as a treatment modality in both physical medicine, psychotherapy, and addiction treatment. Note also that meditation is the 11th step of all 12 step programs.

Instinctive Meditation is based on an appreciation of meditation as a human instinct. The state we call “meditation” is natural and part of the body’s innate survival skills. Meditation often happens spontaneously, and techniques can be used. There are thousands of different meditation techniques. Most of them will not work well for any one individual, and the self-perceived failure rate is extremely high. We find that each person needs to develop several techniques they feel safe and at home with, that fit their individual sensory style, religion, emotional nature and body type.

There are two great challenges that perplex most people who attempt to meditate: finding the right meditation for your type, and learning how to handle the process of stress-release that occurs as a result of effective meditation. To be healthy in meditation and to not be simply practicing repression, meditators need to learn to embrace all emotions, all sensations, all energies, and accept continuous change.

When people experience deep meditation even for a few minutes, they often begin to release stress by shaking, crying, laughing, shuddering, or simply reviewing what is bothering them as a mental movie. Meditative experience generally consists of rapid alternation of deep relaxation and unstressing, then back to relaxation, with a cycle lasting one to three minutes. This workshop is an opportunity to observe how this process occurs in yourself and in others. During the workshop, we do a variety of one-minute, three-minute, five-minute, and twenty-minute meditations and then discuss experiences.

A meditation technique is actually a pattern for paying attention to one or more of the senses: the classic five, plus balance (the vestibular sense), temperature, oxygen sensing, joint sensing and half a dozen other somatosensing modalities. Each individual has a signature style for attending to these sensory inputs during meditation. The more this style is honored (by the teacher and student) the more effective the meditation is. This workshop is an opportunity to watch this kind of matching – of individuality and meditation technique – in action.

We do not use a typology to assign meditation practices; rather, in the workshop, we use each student’s expression through spoken language and spontaneous gestures as clues to their personal gateways into meditation. Our observation is that the meditation is in the body; the body is continually generating meditation techniques as needed, and these come and go in a second or two. Developing an individual meditation practice is a matter of noticing these spontaneous techniques and engaging with them more deeply.

Recommended reading

Meditation 24/7 (Andrews McMeel 2004) and either Meditation Made Easy (HarperOne, 1998) or Meditation Secrets for Women (HarperOne, 2001).

Psychologists who have meditators in their private practice may want to read about the dangers and counter-indications of meditation at
http://lorinroche.com/page8/page8.html.
Or just go to the main site and click on the Dangers heading.

Bodyworkers seeking to use meditation in their practice may want to read Whole Body Meditations (Rodale, 2002) to understand the taboos against pleasure, rest, and somatic sensing that can block meditation

CDC research on CAM (Complementary and Alternative Medicine). PDF.