Why We Meditate

1. Dropping: The Gateway to Mindfulness and Stress Relief

"Drop, rest, and relax."

Breaking the thought cycle. Dropping is a powerful technique to interrupt the constant stream of thoughts and worries that plague our minds. It involves three simultaneous actions: raising your arms and letting your hands drop onto your thighs, exhaling a loud breath, and shifting your awareness from thinking to bodily sensations. This practice helps ground us in the present moment, providing a much-needed respite from mental chatter.

Practical application. To enhance the effectiveness of dropping, try using mantras like "So what! Who cares? No big deal" or "Whatever happens, happens. Whatever doesn't happen, doesn't happen." These phrases remind us to loosen our grip on anxieties and over-concern. Practice dropping for short periods, about five minutes at a time, repeating the process as needed throughout the day.

2. Belly-Breathing: Grounding Speedy Energy for Inner Balance

"Respecting my body's speed limit, I reached my office almost at the same time as before."

Understanding energy imbalance. Modern life often pushes us beyond our natural speed limits, leading to stress and disconnection. Belly-breathing helps recalibrate our energy, bringing it down from the upper body (where it accumulates during stress) to its natural home below the navel.

The practice. Begin by placing your hands on your lower belly and breathing deeply from your abdomen. Allow your belly and hands to rise and fall with each breath. Introduce short pauses when the breath is fully inside and outside. This practice helps settle your body and awareness, promoting a sense of calm and groundedness. Regular practice can lead to better energy management and reduced stress in daily life.

3. Handshake Practice: Befriending Your Beautiful Monsters

"Beautiful monsters are patterns of reaction that are slightly or greatly distorted."

Embracing our challenges. Beautiful monsters are our emotional patterns and issues that make life difficult. Instead of resisting or hating them, the handshake practice teaches us to meet them with friendliness and acceptance. This approach allows for deep healing and transformation.

The four steps:

1. Meeting: Open awareness to moods, feelings, and emotions without judgment
2. Being: Stay present with raw feelings without suppressing, avoiding, or fixing
3. Waiting: Practice patience, allowing emotions to unfold naturally
4. Communicating: When ready, engage in gentle dialogue with your emotions

Remember, handshake practice is not about indulging or antidoting, but about creating a loving, accepting relationship with all aspects of our emotional world.

4. Essence Love: Reconnecting with Your Intrinsic Well-Being

"Essence love is subtle, not loud or dramatic. It's like a quiet whisper in the background of our feeling world, softly saying, 'I'm okay. I don't know why, but I'm okay.'"

Understanding essence love. Essence love is our innate sense of well-being and okayness, often obscured by stress, self-judgment, and emotional blockages. It differs from self-love or conditional love, existing as a directionless field of unconditional well-being within our feeling world.

Practices to reconnect:

• Noticing: Alternating attention between objects and space in a room
• Reflection on craving: Contemplating the futility of constant external seeking
• Trigger methods: Using music, breathing, or gentle movement to activate essence love
• Natural method: Directly experiencing well-being through mindfulness

By reconnecting with essence love, we can heal the sense of inner hollowness and develop healthier relationships with ourselves and others.

5. Cultivating Love and Compassion: From Self to All Beings

"Deeper compassion involves a willingness to be uncomfortable, a willingness to suffer, in order to benefit others."

Expanding our circle of care. True compassion goes beyond feeling for those close to us; it extends to neutral beings and even those we find difficult. This expansion requires courage and practice but leads to a more fulfilling and interconnected life.

Mind-training practices:

1. Equalizing self and other: Recognizing our fundamental similarity in wanting happiness and avoiding suffering
2. Exchanging self and other: Imagining ourselves in others' situations to develop empathy
3. Cherishing others more than oneself: Contemplating the greater importance of others' happiness

These practices, rooted in essence love, help us develop unbiased altruism and genuine compassion for all beings.

6. Settling the Mind: Developing Clarity and Focus

"Short moments, many times."

Balancing relaxation and alertness. Settling the mind practice aims to cultivate a state of being calm and clear, relaxed and alert simultaneously. This balance is crucial for developing mental stability and insight.

Key practices:

• Mindfulness of body, sensations, and thoughts
• Settling with an object (like the breath)
• Settling without an object (resting in nowness)

Tips for practice:

• Start with short, high-quality sessions (3-5 minutes)
• Find balance between tightness and looseness
• Address agitation and dullness with specific remedies (e.g., lowering gaze for agitation, brightening lights for dullness)

Regular practice leads to increased mental pliability and the ability to maintain focus amidst distractions.

7. Insight Practice: Understanding the Four I's for Liberation

"The mere I is a way of being we can come back to, to find sanity, release tension, and connect with openness."

The four I's:

1. Mere I: The healthy, light way of relating to self
2. Reified I: The overly concrete, rigid sense of self
3. Needy I: The self-cherishing, ego-driven aspect
4. Social I: Our existence in others' perceptions

Developing insight. By understanding these aspects of self, we can learn to relate to our experiences more lightly and flexibly. Insight practice involves contemplating impermanence, interconnectedness, and multiplicity to counteract our tendencies towards fixation and reification.

Practice: Begin with grounding exercises, then try to identify which "I" is operating in the moment. Work on coming back to the mere I, using understanding and letting go. When stuck, use handshake practice to work with resistant emotions or thoughts.

8. Integrating Practices: A Toolbox for Life's Challenges

"Our vision with this book is to help create healthy people, in every sense: grounded, warmhearted, clear-minded people, who have the energy and natural inclination to help others."

A comprehensive approach. The practices outlined in this book form a toolbox for dealing with life's challenges. By integrating dropping, belly-breathing, handshake, essence love, compassion cultivation, mind-settling, and insight practices, we can develop a grounded body, open heart, and clear mind.

Practical implementation:

• Dedicate daily time to practice (start with 10-20 minutes)
• Use specific practices for particular challenges (e.g., dropping for tension, handshake for emotional blockages)
• Remember that experiences fluctuate; focus on consistent practice rather than judging outcomes
• Gradually increase practice time and depth as you become more familiar with the techniques

By consistently applying these tools, we can become more resilient, compassionate, and clear-minded individuals, better equipped to navigate life's complexities and help others along the way.

Last updated: August 23, 2024