Meditation is a natural and instinctive human ability, part of the survival wisdom built in to our bodies.
Meditation is innate, and you can go in through many doors:
Listening to music
Gazing at nature
Dancing
Receiving a massage
Making love
Breathing attentively
Savoring food
And hundreds of other ways.
If you take a deep breath and breathe out slowly, you begin to activate your meditation response. This can happen in seconds. Do it now. That little sense of relief is the beginning.
Our bodies have the ability to get stressed – to activate the fight or flight response. Immediately, our emergency reserves are tapped as our bodies and nerves mobilize for combat. Meditation is the opposite response, in which we enter a state of restfulness that allows the body to repair, recharge, and refresh.
There are thousands of different styles of meditation, just like there are thousands of styles of music and cooking. When you discover the style that goes with your individual nature, meditation is a joyous relief, something you look forward to each day.
Everyone already has discovered meditation on their own, in one or more of the hundreds of ways of activating it. Learning to meditate is a matter of noticing which of the doorways you already feel familiar with, and building on that knowledge.
Instinctive Meditation is a way of listening to the instincts as a guide in meditation. The word, "instincts" refers to the body's internal guidance system, refined over hundreds of millions of years. Hunting, homing, trail-making, gathering, nesting, resting, socializing, all these are primordial impulses flowing through the body at all times. When we learn to cooperate with them inwardly, meditation feels natural.
Scientific research indicates that meditation is a built-in ability of the human body, part of our instinctive survival skills. We all can do it.
We each have our own favorite ways of entering meditative states – our own unique style. We thrive in meditation when the approach we take goes with our own inclinations and instincts. Don't let anyone tell you that meditation is the realm of experts or gurus.
