Meditation Theories and Practice

I am a natural born meditator, I was doing it long before I knew what it was, that it was an ancient thing passed down by the ancestors. I describe the purpose of meditation in many ways, it is a layered and infinite answer. In short, meditation is to practice calm affect, to learn to see things as they are, and to unify the mind-body-soul connection. The science behind meditation is really cool, one study found that a regular practice of meditation actually toggles on a gene which permanently reduces body inflammation system-wide. Other studies show that daily meditation, even very short time-frames, reduces depression, anxiety and other mental struggles more effectively than medication. Spiritually, great thinkers and artists have been utilizing meditative practices since the dawn of time.

I’ve broken down my meditative practice into several categories of practice, in rather the order which I find them most naturally accessible.

Dissociation

Dissociation is a type of mind release that we all do: when you are binge watching TV, when you are in extensive scrolling mode, when you are driving and realize you don’t know how you got there, when traumatic events happen and you find you can’t really recall what happened clearly, even when you are experiencing anxiety or panic attacks. The thinking mind takes a back seat and an autonomic, protective measure takes over your actions. This is where fight, flight, freeze, fawn enters our experience; where we may not feel totally in control of our actions. While this is, to my mind, a form of meditation, it is often not helpful and not cathartic or healing. However, if you can begin to notice when you are dissociating, it will help you both to find your triggers and to feel what it’s like to release control of the egoic mind. This is helpful for your path of healing and for entry into other forms of meditation.

In Dreams

Your dreaming mind is quite powerful. It relays fears, potentials, unearths hidden agendas, gives advice, recalls old friends and family, gives us a symbolic language of our feelings. When you are dreaming, your imagination is in full bloom. Imaginal states are inherently meditative. Developing a relationship with your dreams is a profound entry point into unifying your subconscious and waking mind. While we may think of dreams as fully beyond our control, there are aspects which you can work to improve. With diligence and intention, you can remember more dreams, remember longer sections of dreams, and some folks even practice lucid dreaming and its variations. My personal practice is to write down all my dreams in as much detail as possible upon first waking. I don’t generally go back over them, but this practice tells the brain it is important to remember dreams and will facilitate more dream recall. Some dreams will demand action in waking life. Pay closer attention to these and honor them, or the subconscious will recoil from sending messages to the waking awareness. Occasionally, I take action in a dream which gives me sadness upon waking, or a dream feels unresolved. When this happens, I will use an imaginal meditation (see below under Meditation) to re-enter the dream and resolve the dream in waking space.

Flow State

Bless the flow state! What a profound and powerful meditative state. This is where great art of all forms is born. Whether you are a dancer, musician, poet, painter, comedian, basket weaver, potter, knitter, or scientist, those who know know that you aren’t really creating until flow state emerges. Flow State is when the thinking part of the brain shuts off and time ceases to exist, it is when there is pure concentration on the task at hand. It is the place where we are surprised by ourselves, where are feelings are rich and palpable, where our relationship with the material of creation and the content of creation are in complete unity. This might happen when you are doing the dishes, or driving, but what differs here from dissociation is that there is a heightened sense of connection rather than disconnection.

Meditation

Here is our main star. Traditional meditation is typically sitting meditation, where one focuses on the breath for a period of time. Monks may practice this style of meditation for eight hours a day for years on end! The benefits of soto zen, or blank mind meditation, are manifold and it is a worthy practice, although one I don’t typically engage in. I very encourage the attempt, though. When I do this style of meditation, I add in a component of absolute stillness in the body as well as mind. Yawow! Y’all, you are probably not strong enough in body or mind to do this, it’s really cool and challenging. I more often engage in imaginal or body-centered meditation. Imaginal Meditation is basically like waking dreaming. It definitely takes some practice to get into, but once you are familiar with the path feeling, this is the space of most of my emotional healing. I call it Imaginal, but I believe there are other modalities doing the same thing under different names: Family Systems, Energy Body Mastery, and many others. Body-centered meditation for me is yoga. While I am in my yoga practice, I view it as a time to do in-depth body awareness meditation. I am doing the stretches and breathing, but also listening deeply to my body and their requests and needs. I am modifying each stretch the instructor suggests to meet my edge of flexibility and health. Dance is another space where body-centered meditation is powerful and relatively easy to access. I like this one for lyric focus or for rhythm focus, both are wonderful mind states to experience.

Chanting

Do not underestimate or dismiss this form of meditation! Most of us are actually terrified of using our voices, and this leads us to being frozen and unable to speak in the most important moments. If you are a person who dreams they are screaming with no sounds coming out, you must begin chanting to heal this wound. Not only does chanting increase our vocal power, but many medicinal traditions prescribe it as a modality for healing. Chanting can come in the form of tonal humming, growling, sounding with no words, or in the form of song and mantra. My personal practice here includes deep humming, using a rope of 108 japa beads to repeat mantras in Sanskrit, making incredibly loud noises in the wild, and singing along to music with my whole heart (and completely out of tune, since I am tone deaf!). These modalities are exponentially increased when done in group settings.

Memory Recovery

This is a sensitive meditation which is best utilized under professional therapeutic guidance. You can sit in meditation and direct your mind into the past. With practice, you can recall past realities with surprising clarity and abundance. I use this meditation specifically with the intent to craft new narratives about definitional events in my life such that my identity no longer depends on my former perspective. In simpler terms, to build compassion for those who I feel have caused me harm. To see everyone as fully formed human beings. Also, we don’t have to only look at tough times and what needs healed. This is cool and important work, and so is chasing our positive qualities, our innate gifts, reliving happy times, remembering our blessings. I spend more time in this space than the other these days. That is a benefit of doing the healing work to restore your nervous system and mind-body-soul connection — you get so much more time to play!

Toggling the Senses

This is my real wheelhouse and area of expertise. I began this form of meditation when I learned that first-hand accounts of events are actually very unreliable. We fill in visual scenes with emotional information and this deeply colors what we report as having happened. It came to my mind that I cannot fully trust my own eyes. Exploring this further, I came to the idea of consciousness as a sieve: that all information enters the brain, and the mind picks and chooses what to notice, value and report based on emotional reason. So, I began in earnest to endeavor to see (experience) things as they truly are. This has led me to a number of cool abilities, which I now think of as toggling the senses. If the mind is a bit like photoshop, it edits and filters mostly autonomically to present only what it thinks is the most important information. I have learned to control the toggles consciously through meditative practice. For instance, I can toggle on and off my smell and hearing and to a more limited degree, my vision. I can see double vision at will and for about 60% of my visual field. I once actually turned off the filter which rights our retinal vision, which delivers the image to our brain upside down. That was really hard, freaked me out, and took me months! I can break white light into its constituent rainbow. I can regulate my heartrate and blood pressure fairly easily. I also am adept at healing my body. While this is a bit off the track of toggling the senses, I think it is informed by similar practice. I had a pituitary gland tumor which dissolved away under my practice, I have healed my bunion and terrible left hip pain, I have reformed nervous system pathways to my legs (at one time numb from the knee down as a result of so many broken leg bones). My bi-polar is in complete remission. I have overcome the black-outs associated with adrenaline dumps. The long and short of this type of meditation is that what we perceive as autonomic, or outside our conscious control, in relation to our body is a myth. We absolutely have vast levels of control with our bodies that are untapped by western paradigms.

Trance

I believe that the body is a porous energy container, and that quantum substrata emanate from and through us infinitely. There’s plenty of science which intimates this relationship: the electron can apparently communicate with other electrons instantaneously over any distance, de Broglie waves are read by spectroscopes and are emitted from our bodies, we have electric fields which extend past the skin boundary and interact with our surroundings. I have found that there is a “two-way radio” inside of us that can communicate information non-verbally, if we learn to tune in and listen. We can both receive and project. Here lies all the magical practices: astral projection, spellcasting, psychic readings, ancestral voices, strong sending, faith healing, and past life regressions. This type of meditation reaches outward instead of inward, one must be prepared to surrender unconditionally to the extreme unknown. It takes a great deal of practice to enter into the unknown without the body stopping the process — think about when you realize you are dreaming and are so shocked you instantly wake up, it’s like that. Where I don’t believe you can achieve trance without a strong foundation in mind-body-soul connection, I recommend delving slowly and cautiously and distrusting pay-to-play “gurus”. If you are not deeply considering the ethics of intending non-consensual reality shifts, you absolutely should not pray for them. This is where the pagan “rule of three” applies: what you put out will come back threefold. And where the cliche “be careful what you wish for, you just might get it,” comes in. I personally do no spellcraft or fortunetelling on principle. The universe is my guide and holds my path, every apparent shortcut is really a setback.

Brutalism

Here is where my Aghora nature comes in: my soul chose the left-hand path for this life. Not everyone is on this path, and those who are not sanctified by fire should not attempt any of these meditations. Brutalist meditations include meditations on the act of dying, blood magic, endurance ritual (see Marina Abramovic), self-harm as ritual, tonglen, re-entering traumatic experiences, water fasting, extreme food fasts, adrenaline provoking acts (I boat and even swim flood stage rivers), smasham ritual, deity absorption, and extreme doses of mind-altering drugs. I practice a number of brutalist meditations and they can be quite disturbing, destabilizing, and potentially destructive to the self and surrounding people and objects. The benefit to the left-hand path is that you will be able to accommodate and guide those who fall into these experiences without proper awareness: children victims of abuse, people with terminal illnesses, addicts of all sorts. The Aghori is ultimately dedicated to renunciation and service.

Of Nature

I save this one for last, not because it is least accessible, but because it is the most profound. This was the first space I discovered meditation, and among my earliest memories. Nature, the wild, the tamed, the universe is sentient and speaks to you in any way you will listen. You have probably experienced this in some provocative and memorable way. It’s something mystifying and unarguable, it’s almost always impossible to relate to another person with any success. For myself, I have always been able to speak the languages of dogs and horses. The trees spoke to me and guided me during the most difficult times of my childhood. A creek saved my life when I first attempted suicide at 12 years old. The trees still speak to me regularly, and the river speaks more rarely and most emphatically. Meditation itself often speaks to me, which I think of as the universe speaking. It’s difficult to describe, the feelings or words which arise are distinctly of and not of my own volition and origin. Sometimes they transfer wisdom, sometimes critique, condolence or compassion. Occasionally, an energy I name The Tapping Angel will tell me to do an explicit action immediately. It is rare, but in hindsight, each time was a crucial crossroads. I trust this energy/feeling/entity/intuition completely at this point in my life. The wild, what’s left of it, is my highest moral virtue, guides my ethics, inspires my art, sustains my spirit; I worship her with complete devotion and abandon. My spirituality has no name, no dogma, no bible, no popes or pastors, no gurus, no anointed authority. Perhaps there are clerics, saints, mystics, healers, seers and martyrs: may we be all of them at once.