Meditation is a Vital Part of Yoga: Why and How it has Taken Me Years to Appreciate This

I've been meditating for many years as part of my overall yoga practice. But for much of that time, meditation has felt more like something I was supposed to do as a seeker of truth and spiritual fullness than something that actually brought me closer to those vaunted qualities. 

Fortunately, my meditation experience has changed for the better. It's now a practice I look forward to each day, or at least most days. Meditation has become a way to feel more in touch with myself and, sometimes, more connected to a greater whole. 

I wanted to write about how and why this positive shift in my meditation experience has occurred. 

My Early Overemphasis on Restraining My Mind

When I was introduced to meditation, at the beginning of a yoga class two decades ago, the teacher spoke about the "monkey mind," our human tendency to jump from one thought to another as a way of preparing ourselves to meet whatever needs and challenges might arise in our lives. In meditation, we tried to still the monkey mind, to find a calm inner center. One way to do this was to focus on the breath. If we breathed deeply, slowly, and smoothly, and tuned into the breath's steady rhythm, we could discover moments of stillness. Our thoughts would invariably come back to distract us from our still state, the teacher gently elaborated, but when they did, we should let them be, without judgment, and refocus on the breath. 

The teacher’s instruction made sense, but I suspect I overinterpreted the idea about quieting the mind to mean a kind of vigilant control. I wasn't consciously judging myself for having a monkey mind, but I was trying, perhaps even straining, to tame the monkey, to domesticate my mind and stop it from jumping. I wasn't sensing the breath as much as using it as a tool to force stillness. In effect, I was concentrating with my mind on repatterning my mind. 

Perhaps this view of meditation as a restraining practice was why I rarely meditated outside of a yoga class. My classes back then were 90 minutes long, and we generally meditated in the beginning for just a few minutes to help us shake off the busyness of the workday (most of my classes were in the early evening) and settle into the quiet centeredness of our yoga practice. As a transition to the main course of the class, the yoga of poses, meditation seemed like a reasonable thing to do. But, however reasonable meditation appeared, it still felt like a mental exercise that had little connection to my feelings. 

Overcorrecting with a Stream-of-Consciousness Freedom 

Five or six years into yoga, I had a teacher who spoke of meditation less as a concentration of attention and more as an open attentional field. From this point of view, meditation was intended to welcome into our consciousness whatever thoughts, feelings, memories, or images arose. I remember that the teacher shared with us Rumi's well-known poem "The Guest House" to symbolize the practice of letting in with grace all the inner visitors that knocked on the doors of our awareness. The opening lines of the poem went this way:

"This being human is a guest house.
Every morning a new arrival.
A joy, a depression, a meanness,
some momentary awareness comes
as an unexpected visitor.
Welcome and entertain them all!"

The idea behind this approach to meditation was that by opening the doors of our awareness to a wider range of sensations, emotions, and thoughts than we generally allowed, we would move toward a more spacious view of ourselves. We would have a chance to surface vulnerabilities and admit longings that in our regular life we might have denied or hidden. 

We also would experience meditation as a kind of microcosm of the fleeting, impermanent nature of life. As new and different thoughts and feelings came to lodge briefly in our guest house and then check out, we could sense a larger truth: The identities, roles, activities, and forms of security we've built up in our lives were in flux. Open-field meditation was intended to enlarge our self-awareness, but it was also meant to heighten our humility as we faced the inherent changes in life that we might have preferred to be fixed and solid. 

A third reason for practicing mindfulness meditation was that as we experienced the ceaselessly changing nature of reality, we would loosen the grip of rigid self-definitions, tightly narrow identities, and tribe-like communities and sense our essential oneness with all others across time, space, and place, and feel a rising compassion for all who are in need. As the noted Buddhist psychiatrist Mark Epstein wrote:

"With continual, mindful attention to the ever-changing flux and flow of experience, the mind/body that we naturally see as 'me' and 'mine' begins to lose its solidity. Those addictive thoughts that reinforce our sense of separateness—of judgment, criticism, and clinging—of 'I like this' or 'I don't like that'—are seen as temporary, porous, and incidental rather than necessarily 'right' or 'correct.' The sense that we are each isolated in our own minds and bodies, fundamentally cut off from each other and from the world in which we are embedded, starts to give way and a greater sense of interconnectedness emerges. Compassion arises for those—including oneself—who are hampered by a more primitive, and self-centered, way of thinking..." (Mark Epstein, The Zen of Therapy: Uncovering a Hidden Kindness in Life, p. 42). 

This kind of open-field meditation sounded wonderful to me, and I embraced it energetically. The only thing is, I seemed to have forgotten that some restraint was still necessary to move into this meditative flow. Gradually I came to see that if I didn't set boundaries to my free-ranging thoughts, I'd end up tying myself in knots with various problems and worries, fantasizing about one desirous state or another, or simply planning out the rest of my day. It was one thing to allow my thoughts to arise. It was another to get stuck in my thoughts. Getting stuck did not serve me. Nor did it help me relate well to the people I cared about or contribute to a greater good. 

The restraint needed in open-awareness meditation was to hold my attention steady enough so that it could take in naturally emerging thoughts, sensations, emotions, and memories without being hijacked by them. 

Engaging My Body

What enabled me to find a supportive balance between freedom and restraint was to more fully inhabit my body when meditating. I had first interpreted a meditative balance to be mainly about my mind. And it was true that my mind helped me orient toward the qualities of spaciousness, impermanence, and interconnectedness described earlier. 

But my mind could not foster these qualities on its own. It needed to partner with my body. If I wanted to practice a dynamic balance between freedom and restraint, I needed to intentionally engage with my breath, posture, facial expression, and hands. 

I remember developing some sense of embodiment in meditation through self-study but then getting an extra boost of understanding from a seminal book on meditation for a Western and secular audience, Jon Kabat Zinn's Wherever You Go, There You Are: Mindfulness Meditation in Everyday Life. The chapter entitled "Dignity" especially resonated. Kabat-Zinn wrote:

"When describing the sitting posture, the word that feels the most appropriate to me is 'dignity.'

“Sitting down to meditate, the posture we assume speaks to us. It makes its own statement. You might say the posture itself is the meditation. If we slump, it reflects low energy, passivity, a lack of clarity. If we sit ramrod straight, we are tense, making too much of an effort, trying too hard. When I use the word 'dignity' in teaching situations, as in 'Let's sit in a way that embodies dignity,' everybody immediately adjusts their posture to sit up straighter. But they don't stiffen. Faces relax; shoulders drop; head, neck, and back come into easy alignment. The spine rises out of the pelvis with energy...Everybody seems to instantly know that inner feeling of dignity and how to embrace and embody it" (p. 109). 

What Kabat-Zinn seemed to be saying was that the kind of embodiment I had associated with yoga poses--the idea that moving and holding ourselves in particular postures was a way of cultivating and expressing deeply human qualities--also applied to sitting meditation. How I sat mattered, just as how I did a yoga pose mattered, not because there was an external standard of proficiency to meet but because sitting with intention, or doing a yoga pose with intention, might allow for my whole being, not just my mind, to fill with the universal blessings of dignity, oneness, and compassion. 

Learning More about Embodiment

I warmed to Kabat-Zinn's idea that there was a natural harmony to sitting. But for me at least, finding harmony wasn't as intuitively obvious as he seemed to suggest. My intuitive efforts lacked subtlety. 

For example, I could sit up straight, but without a more nuanced appreciation of the natural curves of my spine and how to lengthen my spine while honoring those curves, sitting up tall was not especially freeing or steadying for me. I didn't even realize when I first began to more consciously sit straight that I tended to pull my shoulders back too tightly, thrust my chest forward, and jut my chin out. I didn't think I was enforcing a ramrod-straight posture because my chest seemed to round open, and, as I held my head up high, I sensed a backward-facing curve in my neck. But the kind of roundness and curves I experienced were unknowingly exaggerated. I didn't naturally come into a harmoniously aligned and dignified posture. 

Similarly, when I would settle into the stillness of meditation by focusing on my breath, I didn't realize that there was much more to sense and to potentially focus on than the ebb and flow of my inhalation and exhalation. For example, I hadn't sensed the texture of my breath, such as the tickling sensation as my breath brushed against my inner nostrils or the breezy uplift as my breath swirled at the tip of my nose. Nor would it have dawned on me to savor the stillness of the pause between my exhalation and inhalation, to feel my breath all the way down to the floor of my pelvis, or to enjoy the floating and dipping of my sacrum as my breath rose and fell. Breathing was a wondrous process. But it took me quite a while to appreciate that wonder and to integrate it into my meditation practice.  

Further, I didn't realize how changing the postures of my hands, shifting, for example, from a Lotus mudra to a prayer posture, would affect my receptivity to the kind of essential oneness that Mark Epstein was describing in the quotation offered earlier. As I learned more about the language of the hands, I could speak this language to enhance my meditation sessions. 

Clearly, the body was an intimate partner with the mind in sitting meditation. But I needed quite a few years to deepen my knowledge of and experience with my body before I sensed its intrinsic harmony and how this could find expression in meditation.  

Appreciating Guided Meditation in a Caring Community

For the past four and a half years, I’ve been a member of a marvelous community of yoga practitioners who come together twice a week in a program led by my longtime teacher, Leslie Ellis. I’ve mentioned this program often in my essays on yoga and life because it has added so much to my practice and to my sense of interconnectedness with fellow seekers on the path that yoga offers. 

One day each week in our program is devoted to yoga asana, the yoga of postures. The second day is for guided meditation and our connecting circle, which is a time to hold space for each other’s soulful stirrings, joys, and concerns in relation to the same theme that our collective meditation centers on.

The guided meditations usually feel peaceful and gently liberating to me, which is one of the reasons I’ve come to appreciate meditation more in recent years. Now when I think of meditation, I feel less alone in its pursuit. It’s still mainly a solo practice, but no longer exclusively so. The guided meditations I experience in my community have imbued my practice with a heightened sense of belonging to a larger and loving whole.

To give a taste of what these meditations consist of, I’d like to share a part of one of Leslie’s meditations, based on notes I took as I listened to the meditation a second time in a recording:

Sit a little deeper into your seat.
Let your face soften, releasing any tension in your jaw. 

Bring attention to your tongue. 
Let your tongue rest in your mouth. 
Let the base of your tongue broaden. 
Feel a softening down through your throat. 

 Let the softness trickle down all the way to your heart. 
And imagine there in your heart a light. 
Maybe a little glow, a pinprick of light, or a glimmer of the sun. 

See the light in your mind’s eye in your heart center. 
Feel the rhythm of your breath.
Simply notice the inhalation and exhalation. 

Imagine your breath as a bellows in your heart nurturing a flame.
And let your breath gently nurture that flame, letting it glow. 

See the flame of your heart getting bigger and bigger taking up more and more space and expanding to fill your upper body.
Let the light grow and permeate every cell. 

Start to move the light out through your skin and sense it circling and expanding around you.  Imagine that circle starting to touch the circle of all those in our circle here.
Imagine we are becoming one big light, with every part of that light infinitely important as part of the whole. 

Imagine the light spreading out to encompass the world and beyond. 

Now feel again your body and the light spreading out within you. 

And then let the light condense, so that all the light goes back to that very little point of light inside, remembering your part in it all. 

Leslie Ellis, HeartSong Yoga, Wellness, and Coaching

Guided meditations like this come to me like an evocative song. They resonate, bringing me closer to my own experience and feelings while at the same time transporting me to a more universal and interconnected place. I can feel more deeply myself and more closely held by the bonds of humanity. 

Meditation certainly still can be challenging for me. I sometimes feel that I’m working too hard to be better at not needing to be better, and striving too vigorously to let go of my striving self. But as I’ve learned to strike a more fruitful balance between restraint and freedom, to bring my body and breath more fully into my practice, and to reap the benefits of guided group meditation, my outlook toward meditation has brightened. Most days, meditation is an enrichment.