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| Body-Based Meditation | ||
| As I said at the start of this 'Meditation' section, I classify my meditation as body-based. By this I mean that my home-base, the point that I come back to and from which I venture out from, is the feelings and felt-sense of my own body.
My faith is in my awareness, as I also stated at the start; but for this to be real, to be useful, to generate understanding, wisdom and genuine kindness to both myself and others, it needs to be solidly grounded, and this means to me that it needs to be body-based. | ||
| A Typical Body-Based Meditation Sitting | ||
| I lay out a typical start to a meditation sitting, which is body-based. I may skim through this routine in a few seconds, or it may turn out to be the whole sitting itself of anything up to one hour. I don't know in advance how it will turn out. The only prediction I can make is that on my experience of body-sense, heightened by this routine, will be based my exploration of my own awareness; and if I stumble or have a hard time in that, then I can and will always return to this routine and its generated sense of bodily presence. | ||
| Taoist Meditation | ||
| Taoism means many things to many people. Here I mention some of the Taoist ideas that appeal to me, and which are part of a body-based meditation style. | ||
| The Breath, the Yin-Yang Cycle, and the Ba Gua | ||
| I discuss the attitudes one can have to the breath in meditation, and how I sometimes use the Taoist concept of the yin-yang cycle to enhance my breath experience. I use the ba gua, or the eight trigrams of the I Ching, to portray this cycle. | ||
| Touching the Body with the Breath | ||
| This essay continues my project to explain and make precise my own meditation - both what it is, and why I do it. The language I use is again inspired by the philosophy of Gene Gendlin. However, if you don't know what that is, there are only one or two paragraphs in this essay (towards the beginning) that you will find difficult, or incomprehensible even, and which you can just gloss over. If you are interested in Gene's philosophy, he has recently written two papers which summarize much of it: Implicit Functioning (as a Word 2003 doc, or as a PDF) and First and Third Person Processes (as a Word 2003 doc, or as a PDF). | ||
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