Kundalini's power unfolds as we meditate. The awakened energy draws us into meditative states and begins showing us the tracks of our inner country even as it tunes the body and mind to a new level of subtlety and awareness. Over time, kundalini transforms our vision until we see the world as it really is: not hard and bumpy and irrevocably "other," but filled with a single loving energy that connects us with one another and the world.
The effects of this awakening on my life have been widespread and various. Mainly it has shifted my sense of being. Once I had seen that vastness, no matter how caught up I might get in my thoughts or emotions or agendas, a part of me would always know that I contain a reality beyond all that: that in truth, "I" am expansive Consciousness. Over the years, I have come to measure my spiritual progress by how much I am in alignment with that initial insight—by how firmly I am able to identify myself with Consciousness rather than with the person I sometimes think I am.
It has been a road with many sidetracks and hairpin turns. Yet, little by little, the alignment comes. I've been meditating daily for nearly forty years, and though it didn't happen all at once, I've come to count on entering the space of expanded Awareness for at least a while every day. Over time, meditation has chipped away at my feeling of being only this physical person, defined by my history, my looks, my intelligence, my opinions and emotions. Meditation taught me to identify—precariously at first, then more and more firmly—with that subtler part of myself, with that field of spaciousness behind thoughts, with the tender energy in my heart. With the pulsation of pure spaciousness that arises when thoughts die down. With love.
From the beginning, sitting meditation has been the most reliable way I know to touch the tenderness of pure being. I have treasured it. Of course, my love affair with meditation has been like any other unfolding relationship. It has had its ups and downs, its fertile seasons, and its apparently barren ones. Meditative states, after all, arrive spontaneously and naturally. They come in their own time and their own way, gifts of the unfolding kundalini. I have fallen spontaneously into meditation while walking, writing, or sitting in a meeting. I have also had weeks when I couldn't touch the meditation bandwidth at all. Meditation is often surprising, and certainly cannot be forced.
But neither can it be approached passively—which is the point of this book. The effort required of a meditator is quite subtle, a matter of attunement and awareness. We learn this attunement gradually, and we learn it by meditating. Fortunately, much of what we learn can be shared, and over the years as I've worked with students and taught classes and retreats in meditation, I've found that some of the attitudes and practices that have helped me have also been useful to other people. This book evolved as an offering to other committed meditators. It is a way to share certain principles and attitudes that meditation has taught me, and that seem to work not just for me but for others as well.
The most important principle to understand about meditation is this: we meditate to know ourselves. We usually think of meditation as a practice or a process, yet meditation is also a relationship. If it is a process, then it is the process of coming into loving relationship with our own Consciousness. In the Bhagavad Gita, Krishna defines meditation for his disciple Arjuna by saying, "dhyanen atmani pashyanti": "In meditation, the Self [the pure Awareness that is our essential nature] is seen."1 This sounds like a simple enough statement, but as we meditate, we come to realize that knowing the Self is far from simple. Which "self" do we encounter when we meditate? The greater Self, for sure—the atman, as the Indian sages call it, the luminous Consciousness beyond the discursive mind. Yet, we also encounter a lot of other aspects of our selves, including the parts of us that seem to hinder the experience of our essence. One of the boons of meditation, if we allow ourselves to engage in it fully, is that we not only come to see all this; we also learn how to move through it with love. In this daily act of plunging into our inner world, the separated parts of ourselves do come together. The loose ends of our personalities meld with our Awareness, and we become whole.
Of course, this level of transformation doesn't happen overnight. That is where we sometimes get confused. Most of us enter into meditation rather naively. We bring along expectations, ideas, assumptions. For instance, we sometimes imagine that successful meditation is a kind of prolonged honeymoon in which we rove through fields of bliss and float along deep lagoons of peace. If our relationship with the inner world becomes troublesome, boring, or more intimate than we bargained
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