Meditation is a built-in ability. Your body already knows how to do it, as part of your survival instincts. The ability is there, in your nerves and muscles and metabolism, always ready and waiting for you to access it. There are thousands of techniques for meditating, which means there is something for everyone.
Meditation is the action of riding the instincts into your inner world. There you can rest, and at times rest from action completely. The instincts — hunting, homing, grooming, feeding, mating, exploring, resting, healing, adapting — are the wise motions of life. Meditation techniques access the instincts in infinite combinations and permutations.
The most important techniques are as simple as paying attention to your breathing. Find something interesting about your breath and hang out with it. Breath is our main food – we breathe about 22,000 times a day, and the oxygen in the air feeds the body. It's the oxygen that lets us burn the fuel to generate heat and power to move.
Meditation techniques are things people invented or discovered going on within themselves, then systematized and put into a formal system. But they emerge from an extremely informal, intimate way of being with life. The techniques the meditation traditions have so diligently collected and preserved over the millennia are there to remind you to create your own system. Always remember this. Coaches and teachers can help you to access your inner knowledge, but the basic skill is already there inside you. I advocate an instinctive, passionate, and natural approach to meditation as the best way to begin and continue.
The six books I talk about on this site - Meditation Made Easy, Breath Taking, Whole Body Meditations, Meditation Secrets for Women, Meditation 24/7, and The Radiance Sutras - are tools you can use to begin meditation, and if you already are meditating, sustain, enrich your practice.
I call the instincts "the wise motions of life," because they are deep impulses through which life is always renewing itself, evolving itself, creating its art.
