Sex, Drugs and Rock’n’Roll
Everyone has some secret desires they consider sinful according to some scheme of things. Something that feels like a vice. You may have had experiences being wild at concerts, or drinking and dancing all night. Times when you felt really good being bad.
Every vice has a secret to teach us. The secret is in the desire for a certain quality of experience: intensity, freedom, wildness, vivid colors, aliveness, total joy, free-flowing sexuality, innocence, a heightening of all senses, universal love, lack of inhibition. These are all good qualities. There is much to be said for each. As a matter of fact, they are much too important to be left to chance, or to imported illegal substances, or complicated arrangements of people. Using substances to experience these qualities can physically destroy you. Face up to it, drugs are obsolete.
Meditation is for passions and cravings so deep they can’t be fulfilled by ordinary experience. All of us have desires that can’t be fulfilled — we want to live forever, be perfectly thin or muscular, have unlimited money, be on vacation eternally, have all the love in the world. In meditation you ride these cravings and they take you into something, some level of life where the joy of movement is itself enough delight; where it is better to be in movement, playing with life, at peace inside yourself, than it is to have arrived at any goal.
Even the ancient word meditarai, from which meditation is derived, speaks of this connection of mindfulness, rhythm, and the harmony that heals. All this means meditation is an interior Sex, Drugs, and Rock ‘n’ Roll. The sex is the passionate current of desire. It’s subtle, but sexy. Relaxation is very sexy, and most people get turned on when they are deeply relaxed. The drugs part is the body’s own internal pharmacy as it heals itself. Dozens of scientific studies have shown dramatic drops in the stress chemicals and increases in the natural opiates during meditation. The rock n roll is the inner music, the pulsation of the heart beat and breath. The harmony can be a measure of music, a measured sound such as a mantra, or exactly the right song played at the right moment to satisfy the soul. The meditation traditions of the world have explored ways of paying attention to flow, pulsation, and inner songs so that you never tire of them, but actually get more and more interested.
Meditation is taking the same circuits you use when you are having a good time, and then underwhelming yourself. We should be bored, but we aren’t. It is a delicious underloading of the senses and something very magical happens. When you do this, when you let yourself be shaped by these moments, your whole body and heart and mind realign with life. Believe it or not, this is what the sacred traditions have been saying for thousands of years.
The ecstatic longing to be transported is the same whether we are at a rock concert, the opera, watching our favorite television show or in a totally silent meditation room. The main difference is that in meditation you follow the impulses of pleasure beyond themselves into the silence and you rest there. In meditation you learn to respond more and more to less and less, so that the more quiet the music, the more intensely you feel it. In meditation even the simple action of breathing or listening to the rhythm of the vowel sounds becomes intensely pleasurable.
Meditation is not taking something away or denying ourselves something. Meditation is adding something: the willingness to follow the music into the silence; to follow the beat into the space between beats; to follow the rhythm of breath into the great interior dance.
Honor Thy Inner Rebel
You never know where your spiritual part is hidden. Because this is meditation, and not the Army, your impulse to rebel against discipline is as important as your desire to change yourself for the better. You may have noticed in the past that when you try to get yourself to do a self-help program, you wind up tyrannizing yourself. Then you rebel against the tyranny. The rebel becomes a saboteur of your program because you left her out. The way through this is to embrace the rebel right from the start.
Welcoming the rebel may mean listening to the feeling, "I don’t want to meditate today,” and finding out what it wants. To honor such a feeling means taking it so seriously that you would be willing not to meditate, and watch TV instead, or watch the sunset. But you are also willing to enter the feeling, explore it, let it teach you. Welcome the rebellion, then listen to it. The rebel is there to make sure you do not become enslaved in an external system that takes away your inner authority, your inner freedom, or oppresses you in any way.
Meditating the rebel’s way may seem very strange. Once I was working with a schoolteacher, and she was getting restless, just a few minutes into the first session. I asked her, “What are your impulses?” She said, “I just want to be outside.” We went outside, and since we were on a mountain in northern New Mexico we could see vast horizons. She breathed a sigh of relief. It turns out that she prefers to be outside as much as possible, even in winter. She dresses warmly, and sits in the snow, and has a great time meditating. The rebel in her is her spiritual part. For another woman, her rebel insists she stay in bed and be cozy to meditate on certain days.
The rebel in you is probably more useful, smarter, and healthier than your impulse to practice meditation. Many people, when they imagine meditating, conceive of it as some sort of inner prison. Your inner rebel will immediately alert you if you start making up Odious Rules, such as, “You can’t think, you can’t feel, you can’t scratch if you itch. “ The rebel will have none of this. The way in which you rebel is your individuality.
So honor your inner rebel. As you do the meditations, be alert for the voice of skepticism in you, the voice that says, “Hey, wait a minute, this is bull!” The rebel looks out for your individuality. Invite it in, no matter how much trouble it seems.
As you read and explore meditation notice anything you hate or don’t want to do. Always take your own side. Be willing to hunt to find your own particular way.
Embrace All Parts of the Self
The greatest danger for meditators is deleting parts of the self. The parts of yourself that you snub and do not invite to the party can not give you their gifts. This is a danger in the sense that in so doing you limit your vitality and limit your range of expression. In the long run, this will mean that you either go through life as an overly peaceful meditator or you quit meditating because you have made it a kind of prison.
Think of meditation as a party you are giving for every aspect of your humanity, every aspect of the soul. Invite even the street people, the homeless, the witchy bitch, the cranky skeptic, though they seem incongruous. Maybe they stink and don’t know how to use the silverware, but feed them. When any quality is integrated, when it gets to rub shoulders with all the other parts of the self, it changes and is socialized. Each has a gift to give you.
Everyone has parts of themselves they have lost. A feeling tone you had when you were in college, maybe you were athletic or you sang in the shower a lot. The movie lover in you or the letter writer. The purpose of life is to get survival taken care of so you can get on with being as individualistic as you can get away with. Many men lose the lover in them when they hunker down to work long hours. In the process of gearing up to be successful, many people find that they lost the person inside who was capable of enjoying the success. If you continue meditating, you can be sure that the lost parts of you will come knocking at the door to be let in. They may appear as moods, images, memories or sensations in your body. Welcome them, even though you will most likely not know what they are at first.
In fairy tales, it is the unpleasant aunt that is not invited to the wedding who shifts into a malevolent witch and curses the marriage. When people go into meditation with a spiritual approach, you can almost hear the ripping sound as they split off parts of themselves to fit their picture of what a proper meditator is. It is some kind of Peter Pan syndrome, in which the Shadow is split off and then becomes Other.
In meditation, you have a few months to get used to the range of your inner experience and train yourself to accept it all or not. The problem is the habits you develop will tend to be permanent. This is what I see in my friends and in the people who come to me for coaching. The attitude they went into meditation with has become cast in concrete. At some point a necessary crisis was missed.
In everyday life, we have to edit our responses to match what is appropriate in the environment. This is healthy. Everyone has their set of emotions they allow and those they disallow, and this is called a personality. When you begin meditation you have a fresh start on life, on how you slice up the pie of your inner qualities. If you just carry over your outer-world adaptation to the inner world, you miss much of the opportunity meditation offers. You do the equivalent of taking your elementary school personality over into high school.
Anger, greed, sexuality, revenge, ambition, wild passionate adoration of anything, the desire to be drunk or Dionysian, fear, laziness — which of these do you have trouble with? Which of these do you think are not a proper part of meditation?
It sounds obvious when you put it this way — whatever you leave out can not get integrated. Sure, why not? Remember that in meditation, all your thoughts and feelings are whizzing through your body and nerves at high speed and it will take you quite a while to learn what they are. The acceptance of all parts of yourself has to translate to the level of reflex. This only comes from gradually developing trust. Trust of the space of meditation, trust of your body, trust of what the nervous system is, trust of what your brain is, trust in life itself.
Your task is to take the embracing attitude from the level of theory to the level of your bodily responses. During meditation things happen too fast for theory. You operate out of reflex. That is why I say meditation is more of a physical sport than a mental game. Or you could say it is more like a relationship with all your parts. If a child playing in the backyard turns from her little world and comes running to you with total excitement to share about a caterpillar she has been watching, you have less than a second to decide to accept her embrace even though she is muddy and you are wearing nice clothes. If you stop to think, "Hmm .... ok, this is my daughter or my niece, and she is in an explosion of enthusiasm for life and discovery that I can not ever hope to return to. Every moment of her three-year old life is a major moment. Do I let her get my clothes dirty or do I try to hold her at arms length?" She will see your hesitation or disgust or preoccupation and that is what she will get. You will miss the magic of the moment. Or you could embrace her with open arms, share in her joy, and she would run back to her play fulfilled. What moves you toward this kind of emotional suppleness with yourself and others? Is it music, theater, movies, friends, conversations? Find out and cultivate it. Go on in and make friends. Get muddy.
Exercises For Uncovering Your Personal Style
The Rhythm of Everyday Life
Let's take a minute to recognize some elements of your personal style. Just take
a conscious break in the midst of all this reading and ask yourself some
pertinent questions. We've been talking about the importance of asking and
the magic of the answers just percolating up. So now, consider the rhythm
of your everyday life and the pace you like to move at.
• Do you like to move fast, have the feeling that lots of things are happening simultaneously?
• Do you prefer a slow, orderly pace to life?
• What rhythms turn you on? Slow and sultry? Dynamic and energetic? Lyrical and soulful?
• Is your personal aesthetic minimalistic, simple, spare? Extravagant, colorful, outrageous? Somewhere in-between?
Once you ask you'll know. Now the best advice I can ever give you is to learn to meditate without cramping your own style. It may seem odd to meditate for only half a minute and then stop to check to make sure you are not making a chore out of it or, putting pressure on yourself in any way. But by doing so you will be developing ease, rhythm, and a sense of your individual style. Then you can do longer and longer meditations and feel comfortable. Any one meditation of ten or twenty minutes is composed of many minute to minute-and-a-half cycles. A lot happens in a minute.
To keep it simple, I suggest that you approach meditation with an appreciation of movement. Attention moves, whether you want it to or not, so by accepting this in advance you will not be at war with yourself.
• If you like to move fast, the best way for you to approach meditation is quickies. Quick in and out, doing each meditation for a short period of time, so it seems like a brief but satisfying pit stop in the race course of your life.
• If you like to have a leisurely pace whenever possible, set aside a whole chunk of time, and give lots of attention to the Getting In and Getting Out phases.
• If you know you love rhythm, if you love the way your body feels in the presence of drums and a band with a great beat, play music and dance to it before you meditate. It doesn’t have to be every time, but what you’ll find is the delicious, erotic energy of the rhythm permeates your meditation and touches deep into your core.
• If you crave simplicity or silence, give it to yourself. Seek out times and places of quiet, so your nerves can thrive on the sanctuary silence gives.
• If you find yourself craving rich colors and complex imagery, experiment with meditating in a Catholic church or an art museum.
Your Ruling Passions
You do not have to give up any passions to meditate; on the contrary, you celebrate them even more, follow the trail they made in your nerves and body. The peacefulness and tolerance of meditation is complemented by the richness of experience represented in wild vices.
What is this desire we all share, to move with abandonment, to numb out some pain, to be intensely stimulated? Whatever the vice, there is a legitimate calling behind it. Use meditation to explore that calling.
Consider the following questions. Ask them silently to yourself and then listen for your answers. Call up your memory. You may be moved to actually speak them out loud. Come on. You won't be arrested:
• What is your favorite vice?
• What is a vice you loved but had to give up?
• What is the best you have ever felt while doing some wild & sinful activity?
Now, feel the excitement, the relaxation, the expanded awareness, the sexual intensity, flowing through your nervous system. Allow yourself to have the fullness of that without getting into trouble. Just sitting there on your sofa or in your meditation chair.
In case you've blanked out some possible vices, here's a quick list for easy reference!!!
• If you used to smoke cigarettes.
• If you used to smoke pot.
• If you used to drink a lot at parties and dance all night.
• If you used to do cocaine or other drugs.
• If you used to eat too much.
• If you used to have lots of sex or naughty sex.
These are Dionysian forms of worship, celebrations of the passions. When you go inside and cherish the experience of wildness, it becomes an Apollonian meditation — contained and outwardly respectable, because nobody can see what you’re thinking. You don’t have to stop feeling wild inside just because you aren’t acting out anymore.
The above is an unedited version of Part Seven of Meditation Made Easy. In other words, this is the manuscript that I sent in, before the editors and copy editors worked it over. The book itself will look better.
