Watching-a-fountain-meditation

While I was recording my latest podcast episode, I found my attention drawn to a fountain outside my window.  A fairly large fountain, it’s water shoots several feet straight up.  It captivated me with its grace and beauty and as I was talking, I found myself being drawn into a meditative state.  That experience got spontaneously incorporated into what I was talking about and became an example of two ways of meditating — one is “contemplation” and the other is what I’ll call, for want of a better word, “diving”.

Had I wanted to stop recording, I could have used the experience of watching the fountain in a number of ways to meditate.  If I were to use it for contemplation, I would have found meaning in the way the water moved, the shapes the water takes, the whole phenomenon of the existence of the fountain.  I could have thought about how the fountain was a reflection of life or how it mirrored my emotions and inner world.  I could have found all sorts of meanings in the patterns of the water.  Contemplation involves the exploration of meaning.  Traditional contemplative practices might start with a brief reading followed by time spent exploring the meaning.  

The other type of meditation, the one which I was drawn into, doesn’t involve meaning.  Rather than thinking about the fountain and what it might symbolize and mean, I was simply watching the movement and patterns of the water.  In such a meditation,  meaning is left behind.  The object of attention is viewed without meaning.  Meaning keeps the mind actively engaged and when we let go of meaning, the mind can “detach” and go within.  This allows for a deeply restful and rejuvenating experience. 

Meditation always involves a shift in attention.  When we meditate, we use our attention in specific ways to achieve specific effects.  In this case the focus of attention was the fountain, and I could have used that focus in a number of different ways.  Another effect of watching the fountain, or anything in nature, in this way is that you take in the qualities of what you see.  Everything we see, hear, touch, taste or smell has an effect.  It’s as if our nervous system is a complex tuning fork that resonates in different ways depending on where we put our attention.  Allowing in the impressions of the patterns of nature realigns us with our own life force.  As I remember the experience with the fountain now, I can feel the energy and vitality of life as it is expressed in flowing water.

Spontaneous meditations happen all of the time.  Usually we’re in too much of a rush to take advantage of these moments.  The next time you step outside and the sound of a bird, sight of a flower or light of the moon captivates you, pause for a bit to drink in the experience.  Notice those times during the day when your attention naturally shifts in a way that is nourishing and brings peace.  It could be something as simple as a smile from a co-worker or an image on the web.  Take advantage of those shifts by slowing down a bit and giving yourself time to sink into them.    

Connecting with nature.

I’ve heard from a number of people about how much they’ve enjoyed the Nature Attunement Meditation. After hearing the meditation, freelance writer Amanda Wegner interviewed me for an article she is writing. It’s about how adults can examine their relationship with nature and reconnect with and better appreciate the great outdoors, whether it’s a national forest, city park or their own back yard.

I really enjoyed this interview and wanted to share it with you. You can read the interview below. (Excerpts from the interview will be published in the summer 2008 issue of Successful Living magazine.)

Amanda: What benefits does nature bring to our lives? Why is an appreciation (or, more basically, a recognition) of nature important?

Mary: We speak of nature as if it is something separate from ourselves. Your ask “what benefits does nature bring to our lives”, and I often find myself saying “I love to be out in nature.” It’s interesting that we speak this way when we ourselves are part of nature. The same life force that moves the planets around the sun circulates our blood through our veins, and yet because of the way we experience ourselves as separate from each other and life, we lose touch with our essential nature. When we spend time outdoors and experience the sights, smells and sounds of the natural world, we are awakened to ourselves. Nature is like a mirror in which we see our own reflection and remember who we are. Spending time in nature attunes us to our own life force and rhythms. It helps us to feel more alive.

Amanda: Obviously, some people are much more in tune with nature than others. Do you think it’s important for people to examine their attitudes toward nature? How might one go about this? What questions should they ask of themselves?

Mary: It can be valuable for people to explore their relationship with nature, as well as their attitudes. As we become more intimate with nature, we become more intimate with ourselves. I feel that as we feel our connection with the earth more strongly, we naturally take better care of the earth. There’s no difference between caring for the earth and caring for ourselves. It’s all the same thing. We’re not separate!

One way to explore ones feelings about nature is to spend time outdoors. See what happens when you are in a natural setting. Be aware of how you feel. Let yourself connect with things more than you have been. Listen carefully to the sounds, with you full attention. Notice the smells. Let yourself drink in the sights. Notice how these experiences affect you. You can also try bringing more of nature into your home. Have some plants and form a relationship with them. Find out what makes them happy and helps them to thrive.

As far as questions, you might ask yourself how important nature is to you, and why. Examine your habits about recycling, and if you garden, how you go about it. Do you recycle because it’s “in”? Do you recycle out of guilt? Or do you find your actions motivated by a sense of love for this amazing planet we live on? Watch a bee nestling into a flower and see how you feel about that experience. Observe things closely, noticing how you feel, and ask yourself if it reminds you of how you feel in other parts of your life. You may start to notice that a bird’s song is your own voice speaking its sorrows and joys.

The Nature Attunement Meditation is a great way for people to connect (or reconnect) to nature. For someone who uses meditation, what might be some other ways (if they don’t have an iPod handy) to meditate in nature?

Listen and observe carefully with your full attention. If you’ve been listening to the meditations in our podcasts or CDs, you can treat your experience in nature the same way you treat the experience in meditation. Let the sights and sounds of nature be the focus of your meditation. Don’t strain on it, but if you find yourself getting “into your head” and caught up in your thoughts, gently bring your attention back to nature. Even though all sorts of thoughts and feelings may be going on, you can “favor” the experience of nature and notice how that makes you feel. As you observe nature, let go of the tendency to label and name things, simply experience them directly. You can close your eyes and listen to the sounds of the birds or a running brook. Anything can be a focus for your meditation.

For someone who isn’t “into” meditation, what other suggestions might you offer to even the most urban people to get out and enjoy their natural environment? How can people better “tune in” to their natural surroundings?

I’ve already spoken about ways to “tune in” to natural surroundings. Even in an urban environment, you can find something natural. There’s always the sun to feel and the sky. Clouds are a great focus of meditation. Sit down on a patch of grass somewhere. Feel the grass and earth with your hands. You can also bring nature indoors. Create a natural sanctuary on a patio or balcony, or even inside your home. Plants, small trees are an easy way to start. Construct a fountain with stones you find. Listen to the water in the fountain. Visit the beach or a forest and bring some of it home with you. Grow some bulbs indoors. There is always a way to connect. And when all else fails, you always have your breath. Attending to the flow of your breath brings you in tune with the natural rhythms of life!

Discovering Love — Advanced Guided Meditation

I’m calling our latest podcast episode “advanced” because to experience the love that the meditation points to requires that your mind be settled enough to notice some subtle experiences. The meditation prompts you to become aware of tendencies to resist what is happening in your thoughts and emotions, and even further to the feeling that underlies those tendencies — a sense of things being not quite right. It’s a sense of not being alright as you are. It’s a sense of life not being alright. It’s at the core of the suffering which is part of the human condition.

Of course, we all like some feelings and experiences more than others. That’s natural. But suffering results when we feel that things should be different, that we should be different — that we should feel differently than we do. When we are able to let go of the resistance to how we feel and stop trying to make ourselves be or feel something else, then what is left is love.

I’m not talking about love in the way we usually think of it. When we say love, we are usually referring to a sentiment or feeling. The feeling of love can be mixed with affection, respect, gratitude, infatuation, passion, all sorts of things. What we usually identify as love is something we feel in response to someone or some thing. The love I am talking about is not an emotion, and it is not dependent on anything. It is the very essence of our existence and reveals itself when we let go of resistance and attempts to manipulate our experience. It is the natural state of our own awareness, of our “beingness”, which is always there in the background but is largely ignored. My hope is that with this meditation, you will be able to recognize and enjoy it.

You may need to use this meditation a number of times before this love is clearly experienced. If you are new to meditation, it might help to try the podcast episode one (Relaxation Break) or the Breath Awareness Meditation until you are able to settle down enough for this meditation.

I’d love to hear your experiences with this meditation. The feedback we’ve received here and at the meditationoasis.com website has been really helpful. And, as always, we welcome your questions.

Relax and float down stream…

We named our podcast Meditation Oasis. The name came to Richard early on. Then we spent a lot of time brainstorming to find the “best” name, but Meditation Oasis stuck. We didn’t realized that the name would have a life of its own. I recently did a search on iLike.com in order to “claim” our artist pages. Not only were we listed as Mary and Richard Maddux and Mary Maddux, but Meditation Oasis was there as well. When we started a page on MySpace a couple weeks ago, the only kind of page we could fit into was a “band” page and now we’re a band called Meditation Oasis on MySpace!

Instead of just “going with the flow”, I found myself saying hey, whoa, is this really the name we want? Let’s sit back and think this thing over. Maybe there’s a better name. It’s something about how I was raised. It’s always been a challenge for me to buy the first thing I see. I can find the perfect pair of jeans right off, but end up having to try on all the rest “just in case”. I measure my progress sometimes by my ability to go with the first thing that comes along when it feels just right. But this one really challenged me — the name our work is coming to be known by. Life once again is challenging me to walk my talk (or I should say follow my own meditations!)

“Meditation Oasis” has a life of its own. Life itself is a life of its own. It’s not mine to direct in what I may think is the “best” way. It happens. And once more, I’m learning to go with the flow.

As Lennon and McCartney once sang it, “Turn off your mind, relax and float down stream…”.

Gratitude Guided Meditation Podcast

Gratitude is the highest, most fulfilling, emotion we can feel.  Yet so often we’re focused on what we don’t have, what we want to be different, what we think is wrong rather than on what we can be grateful for. There’s nothing wrong with that — it’s human nature — it happens to all of us. Yet most of us would certainly prefer to feel grateful.

When feeling grateful is so rewarding, what can we do to feel it more often? We can’t manufacture gratitude. It comes on its own. But we can give it more opportunity to appear in our lives, simply by taking time to focus on what is good in our lives, to “count our blessings”.

I feel it’s important, however, not to get caught up in the feeling that we should be grateful. There’s nothing we should feel. Gratitude has become a hot topic among spiritual seekers and often when something is seen to be spiritual, it starts to get associated with being virtuous, or being a good person. I’m not interested in gratitude because it somehow makes one a good person, or because I feel we need to learn to feel only positive emotions. I’m interested in gratitude because it uplifts our spirits and feeds our hearts.

I make this point because when I led a gratitude meditation with my local guided meditation group, it wasn’t until I gave them permission not to feel grateful that they were able to relax and have a genuine experience of gratitude arise. As you listen to the Gratitude Guided Meditation podcast episode, be easy with it. If you don’t feel grateful at times while you are listening, let that be OK. Don’t try to make yourself feel anything. Next time you listen, the experience will be different, or you might find that feelings of gratitude surprise you later on during the day. The meditation is simply designed to give you an opportunity to feel gratitude by taking the time to focus on the things in your life you are thankful for. We’re just giving gratitude a chance to come up naturally. Chances are you will at least feel moments of gratitude during the meditation, and when you do, let yourself sink into that feeling. Notice the details of the experience of gratitude — how it feels in your body, how your energy feels. Let it permeate your whole being when it comes up.

We hope you enjoy this meditation, and would love to hear about your experience with the meditation and with gratitude in your lives.

What is my philosophy and background? Part 2 — Up close and personal.

And now for a more “up close and personal” answer to Erica’s question (on the About page of this blog)…

Erica asked about my philosophy of life, and my dilemma is that I don’t really have one in terms of having a set of fixed beliefs. At the same time, it’s fair to say that I’ve spent a good deal of my life philosophizing. After taking a vocational aptitude test in college, my advisor scratched his head and said, “this indicates that you’d do best at being an armchair philosopher”. I love to think about the nature of life and look at things from all sorts of angles. I love to question things. I’ve also had a love of asking the question “why” which doesn’t really have an answer, and I suppose much of my journey has been to give up the need to know answers and to be able to embrace lovingly what is here in this incredible play of life, with all its contradictions and paradoxes, and with all its joy and pain.

So it’s difficult to say what my philosophy is, but I can say something about what’s behind my guided meditations. Behind them is a quest, a quest for greater acceptance, peace and to be more fully alive. My guided meditations are as much for me as for those who listen to them. It’s not like have a specific philosophy to share. It’s more like I see us all on a journey together. Along the way on my journey I started meditating, then teaching meditation and eventually leading guided meditations. It’s in my nature to communicate and share what I learn and experience.

When I create a guided meditation, I close my eyes and drop into a meditative state and see what comes. I am literally meditating with you, and the meditations speak to me in the same way they speak to those of you who enjoy them. What they speak about for me is trust in the natural flow of life and relaxing into that. For want of a better way to describe it, I view life as a flow of energy, much like a river. That flow is governed by the same natural laws as those that move the river along its path. Everything that we do and experience is a part of that flow. Events are a part of that flow, as are our reactions to those events and all of the thoughts and emotions that arise within us. My path has been one of developing trust in that flow. Relaxation is a reflection of that trust.

Some of the guided meditations I lead are simply about that — about relaxing into life as it naturally unfolds. The Relaxation Break, Simply Being, Effortlessness and Letting Go are examples of that kind of meditation. When I first started leading guided meditations, I thought that was all that I would do, because that is the kind of meditation I had always taught. But things evolved and I found it was useful to sometimes direct the attention in ways that helped to create balance and enhance fulfillment in life.

So there are meditations about healing, the chakras, nature, etc. I enjoy the process of creating these new meditations, and a lot of this is happening thanks to the podcast and the requests and feedback I receive. I decided not to restrict myself to just one kind of meditation. All the other meditations, however, are based on starting with a relaxed, open state of awareness. That’s why they all start out in much the same way. Then the meditations that have a specific focus will be much more effective if one starts with that non-resistant, going with the flow, state of awareness. If we are tense and fighting with what’s happening within us (or noise or something going on around us), then all our energy goes to that and we can’t direct our attention in other ways.

As for my background, it’s been very eclectic. At first I learned and taught meditation in a style from India. I was trained in a very specific technique and the essence of that technique was effortlessness. This had a great deal of influence on me. After years on one path, however, I began to study with some other teachers and learned other practices and was exposed to a number of philosophies. I also studied and taught energy healing for a number of years and that too has shaped my meditations. I also worked as a counselor in mental health and hospice, and the insights and understanding I gained from that certainly influence the meditations I create.

I’d have to say that my guided meditations today are a synthesis of all of these different influences. Of course, this synthesis is unique because I am a unique individual just as we all are. Ultimately, everything that has happened in my life contributes to the meditations, because everything in life is a teacher.

It’s interesting that people often recognize their paths in my work. Erica asked about whether I have a background in Buddhist Vapassana meditation and I don’t, although often people have found that in my work. People have also found similarities to Christian centering meditations and other traditions. I think that’s because the same principles and concepts are arrived on many different paths.

Often as I am creating a meditation, I am surprised at what comes out. It will not be quite like anything I’ve heard before. That’s part of the fun of it, and part of the reason I don’t relate too much to tradition and what’s gone before. What’s really alive is what is fresh in this moment, in the infinite creativity of the life force as it expresses itself here and now.

What is my philosophy and background? Part 1– Keeping it universal.

“Erica” asked a the following question today on the About page of this blog.

“I am wondering if your style of meditation is rooted in any specific philosophy. I have had an interest in Buddhist Vipassana meditation (Insight Meditation) for several years. I seem to hear many of the same principles in your meditations and on your website. Could you share a little more about the origins of your meditations and life outlook? Sorry, I know it’s kind of a big question… I’m just curious.”

I’ve hesitated to write much about my background and philosophy for a number of reasons. One reason is that I’m much more interested in people formulating their own philosophies and having their own unique journeys with the meditations than I am in having people focus on mine. Another reason is that I can’t really say I have a philosophy of life. I’m definitely interested in becoming more alive and more at peace, but when I try to put that journey into words, the words can be misleading. In addition, my philosophy of life, if I have one, is constantly evolving. What I might say today is not what I might say tomorrow…

As for my background, it’s something that happened in the past. True meditation is a fresh, new experience. It is influenced by everything one has done and studied before, but it’s always an opportunity for a new discovery. If I look to the past, I may limit what can happen now and my desire is to become increasingly present to the here and now. I try not to limit myself or anyone else by the past.

I also hesitate to be really specific about my background because I want to leave the door open to anyone who may resonate with the meditations I create. In truth, my background has exposed me to many teachers and teachings, but what I have discovered is that there are common elements among different teachings and those elements that are universal seem the most useful and “true”. For me the experience of meditation is what is important, not the ideas about it and philosophies. What is fascinating to me is how different people can have such different insights and results from the meditations. What we get from meditation or a teacher is based more on our own process and intentions than it is on what is put forth by the teacher.

Erica did ask me to share something about my background and philosophy, however, and we do learn something from hearing each others’ journeys and experiences. So now that I’ve told you some of the reasons I like to avoid talking about these things, I think I’ll go ahead with Part 2 of this post and get a bit more “up close and personal”. Thanks for asking, Erica!

Nature Attunement Meditation

Why is time spent in nature so revitalizing and nourishing? Why does it make us feel so alive? Is there more to it than just taking a break and getting away from it all? My sense is that nature is like a tuning fork fork that attunes us to our life force, to our very being. Nature is like a mirror that reflects back to us the qualities that make up our bodies, minds, emotions and spirit. Depending on the kind of work we do and how we spend our time, we may become disconnected from those qualities and life can become somewhat dry and flat. Time spent in nature wakes us up, makes us feel more alive.

The Nature Attunement Meditation is meant to bring much of the benefit of time spent in nature to us wherever we may be. This meditation focuses on the earth itself, creating an experience of grounding and strengthening. Water, sun and moon light, and plants also play a part in the meditation, as we attune to the essential elements that make up our lives and imbibe the energy and life of the vegetation of the earth.

This meditation is quite different from any of the previous ones on the podcast. It was a new experience for me to create it and I really enjoyed it. It will be interesting to hear how some of you respond to it.

Aliveness Meditation

When I hear the word “aliveness”, it evokes something for me. There’s a recognition of something intangible that is always there in the background of my awareness. It’s always with us, and yet we miss it as our attention is usually focused on things and events. Aliveness is what can make life fulfilling, regardless of anything else. To be able to sense aliveness itself is a great gift.

In many ways all of our meditations are about aliveness — they’re about being more fully alive. I’m much more aware of the sense of aliveness thanks to the process of creating this meditation. I hope you enjoy this latest podcast as much as I enjoyed creating it! (Listen to the Aliveness Meditation.)

Discovering “aliveness” in the breath

When we observe the process of breathing, really observe it, even for a moment, a very profound meditation happens. I recently received a newsletter from the Advaita Fellowship (Wayne Liquorman), and am quoting from it below, as it is such a beautiful understanding of the gifts that observing the breath can bring.

“This aliveness we are talking about is worth investigating. It is here, in this moment. It is as close to you as your breath. In fact, your breath IS this Livingness. You do not have to remember to breathe. Your breath is literally breathing you. Stop reading the words on this page for a moment and investigate this phenomenon of breathing….

(If you did not stop, but simply read on to this sentence, I fully understand…you are a lot like me….however there REALLY is something to be seen in the stopping for a moment even if you are an “advanced” student and have examined your breath many times previously.)

Perhaps you were able to see the way in which your breath “just happens.” You breathe even when you forget to breathe. There is a force here that operates independent of your decisions and intentions… It is this Life that is living you even to the extent that you falsely believe yourself to be living IT.”