Uncovering Tranquility with Meditation

The word yoga refers to a centred, integrated state of balance and harmony that is a platform for skilfulness and efficiency.

We might call this the medi-state.

Yoga also refers to the practice principles that can help cultivate this state.

As the defining texts of the yoga tradition make clear, yoga practice is really everything we do. It is a full time endeavour. The Yoga Sūtra describes yoga practice as an effort to foster steadiness, an effort that is long-term, uninterrupted, wholehearted and attended to with genuine presence and dedication, then it can become well rooted. (YS1.13-14) One thing this description tells us is that yoga practice is not really about techniques, rather it is everything we do, all the time.

We can know whether we are established in yoga by how we respond to the different situations life brings us. In the Yoga Sūtra, Patañjali gives an always and everywhere prescription of how to behave in four types of situation. When we’re in a good space, be open and friendly. When we meet suffering, be compassionate. When we see great, meritorious things, let it inspire us and fill us with joy. When we see terrible things, let it not rob us of our centre, but let us be steady and equanimous. As well as a prescription for how to practice, this is also a description of a person established in yoga. If we always and everywhere, spontaneously and reliably meet those four type of situations in those four ways, then we are likely estbalished in yoga. We are able to act from the medi-state: from a clear, steadily establised centre, a state of balance and harmony, in which we effortlessly express the wisdom of our consciences, unimpeded by conditioned ideas, and in which our actions are in rhythm with existence.

If we are not responding spontaneously in these ways, the yoga teachings suggest that we are making our lives more complicated than they could be, and that we are being dominated by our conditionings and subconcious patterns. In order to help us clarify the lenses of our awareness and come to greater integration, we can take recourse to regular meditation practice.

Yogic meditation begins by turning our attention towards an object of support – an ālambana – around which we can gather all the powers of our awareness.

One way we might think of this object is as being a bit like a tuning fork for all the instruments in an orchesra to tune to. When they are all tuned in to the same key, they can play a beautiful movement. If though they are all tuned to different keys, however virtuoso the different instrumentalists, they will not access the same potential as the unified orchestra’s symphony, so much greater than the sum of its parts.

Similarly, when we take time to tune all the powerful instruments of our conscious awareness, to bring into balance, integration and harmony all our different intelligences, sense and action capacities, we can come into greater at-one-ment, and so experience more of the wholeness of who we are. Also, when we take this time to tune in, we can then go out into the world from a place of greater balance and integration and so act and respond to life with greater skilfulness and efficiency.

Sometimes people think that in order to be able to meditate, we must first be able to access a calm, quiet mind. It is not quite like this. In the state of meditative absorption, we will taste moments of calm and serenity. And meditation practice may infuse our life with greater calm and equipoise. However, we can start wherever we are.

When we turn towards the object of support – the ālambana – we give the powers of our awareness something to focus on, to gather around, to orient towards. This point of orientation then serves to invite all the powers of our awareness to come into a more integrated, balanced and steady state.

There are many possible techniques and many objects that we might focus on. A good example is the movements of life force in and out of our body through the agency of the breath. As long as we are alive, this is always available.

If we take the easy, natural movement of the breath moving in and out of the body as our object of support, we turn our attention towards it, observing and allowing ourselves to notice, witness and experience. As we continue like this it is possible that the object falls away. We are no longer witnessing the object, but experiencing our pure witnessing consciousness. However, it is highly likely that our awareness does not always settle so easily on the object of support. Rather, we notice that thoughts come and go, carrying our awareness hither and thither. We may see that our attention is not so clear, or steadily focused, but is flitting around apparently all over the place. With practice though, we may notice that it is not quite ‘all over the place’, but that our awareness tends to flit around a fairly complex network of habitual spaces, fears and anxieties, fantasies and desires, the to do lists, reminiscences, regret, nostalgia, hunger, thirst and other bodily proclivities and so on.

Sometimes when people encounter the commotion of their awareness, what people sometimes refer to as the ‘monkey mind’, in the sense of awareness that jumps from tree to tree, towards what it feels inclined to, away from what it feels averse to, they think, ‘wah! I cannot meditate!’ My mind won’t settle, I’m unable to silence the mind’. Or even a relatively experienced meditator may think, ‘wah! That wasn’t a very good meditation today, my mind was all over the place, I didn’t experience peace at all…’ However, such experiences are actually very valuable as they reveal the jumpy, unsettled state of our awareness. Once we notice this, once our practice reveals this to us, we are actually more clued in to the reality of our scattered, disintegrated state and so are empowered to do something about it.

In the context of a meditation practice, we are empowered to patiently, good humouredly, and perhaps again and again, keep inviting our awareness to come back to the object of support, in this instance the experience of the breath. As we make this effort, we are using the object of support to help us concentrate. Still, even though we were ‘supposed to be concentrating’ we may notice that our awareness has gone off somewhere else! But we notice, and we are empowered, we can do someting about it. Again, patiently, persistently, we orient back towards the object of focus. The object then serves to help us enter a more concentrated state. Eventually, if a concentrated state is sustained, then may arise or emerge a meditative state of flowing, concentrated awareness. Still here, our awareness may well bubble up and flit out to something at the surface level of our awareness or towards something that emerges from the quiet deep. Again, we notice, we are empowered, and once again, we can invite our awareness back to the object of focus. And again, once focus is sustained, we can move from a concentrated state to a state of meditative, flowing awareness. In turn, if this is sustained, we may become absorbed, no longer concentrating, but concentrated, no longer actively inviting meditation, but experiencing the medi-state of integrated awareness in which is revealed, in which we taste/glimpse/experience the consciousness that underlies and enables all our seeing and experiencing.

The process of how this meditative process works is distilled quite wonderfully in the Yoga Sūtra.

Yogic meditation works with and harnesses our innate tendency to curiosity. We focus on a thing. We inquire into it. As we focus on it, with an attitude of curiosity and inquiry, we notice more. The object, as it were, opens up to us. This then further kindles our curiosity, such that we can enter a realm of subtler experience and perception. Subtler qualities of the object are revealed to us. For example, if we are focusing on the breath, we may notice subtler and subtler qualities or properties of the phenomenon of the body breathing, qualities so subtle that we would not be able to notice with our instrumental powers of awareness turned out towards the changing world.

When this subtle inquiry is sustained, we can become absorbed in it. The moment then becomes its own fullness. We are content. In such moments, we are fully present, there is no space for wanting to be elsewhere, or which could allow regret later. No, if only for a moment, we are fully here. And this brings with it a quality of blissfulness, a blissfulness that does not depend on the particular object. Rather, we experience this blissfulness as an emergent property of our concentrated awareness. Such experiences then start to reform our understanding of ourselves and our very sense of self. We recognise that the ‘address’ of this wholeness or blissfulness is not somewhere outside, but is within us.

As we practice yoga and repeatedly invite this process, we come more and more to recognise this innate wholeness. We attune more and more to that undying, eternal essence that underlies all our experience. Gradually then, this works to free us from the confusion and delusion of identifying with our tenuous bodily vehicle and clinging to our allegiances and preferences in an attempt to bolster our fragile sense of self, as we recognise more and more that really our Self is the great underlying support, the mighty ālambana of the underlying consciousness from which and within which all experience comes and is known.