by William Redpath listed in energy medicine, originally published in issue 80 – Sept 2002 of Positive Health
Letting Go
When I first began breath meditations, I would follow the directions of my teachers, and they would help me to breathe in the universe and breathe it out. I could hold focus on this objective for moments at a time, but I soon became exhausted and my attention would wander. Additional data in my ‘scan’ intruded upon the stated objective and quickly overwhelmed the process. When I asked fellow breathers how they were doing, they shrugged their shoulders and reported that they were equally confounded.
I had been meditating, sort of, for years, including summers spent since childhood in a Quaker community whose Friends Meeting services featured silence. I had taken on transcendental meditation in the 1960s, and my instructors seemed hapless in their ability to help me deal with the inner process that a mantra evoked in me. I was advised to return to my sitting and hang out with what came up, and then to let it go.
Figure 1 – A representation of the energetic portrait of brain/mind/body
My system was too problematically active for this strategy. Forced to desert it when it made me ignore urgent, perhaps important information, I became discouraged. I found many others were, too. If we considered ourselves as self-scanning organisms, we had trouble discriminating what was important in the scan from what was not, and how to focus on or transmute those differences. Read the full post »