Meditation Is a Fine Art
Meditation is a fine art and should be approached in the same way the fine arts are approached. That’s the way we teach meditation at Himalayan Academy, as a fine art. The artist-teachers are not running after the students. You don’t learn a fine art that way. You go to your teacher because you want to learn. You might go a long distance. You want to learn, and so you study. He gives you something to work on. You go away and you work on it, and you come back having perfected it. That’s how we expect Academy students to progress along the path. Something has to happen on the inside, and it usually does.
Controlling the breath is the same as controlling awareness. They go hand in hand. During meditation, the breath, the heartbeat, metabolism—it all slows down, just like in sleep. You know, deep meditation and deep sleep are extremely similar. Therefore, the practice of prāṇāyāma and regulation of the breath, the prāṇas, the currents of the body, should really be mastered first. In the very same way, the dancer doesn’t just start out dancing. He starts out exercising first. He may exercise strenuously for a year before he begins to really dance. The pianist doesn’t sit down at the piano and start with a concert. He starts with the scales and with the chords. He starts by limbering his fingers, by perfecting his rhythm and posture. Meditation has to be taught like one of the fine arts. It’s only the finely refined person who can really learn to meditate. Not everyone who wants to meditate can learn to meditate. Not everyone who wants to learn to dance or to play the piano can learn how to really, really do it. We need this preparation of the physical body so that the physical and emotional bodies behave themselves while you are in a deep state of meditation.
Your breath will slow down until you almost seem to stop breathing. Sometimes you do, and you’re breathing with an inner breath. You have to educate yourself to that so it doesn’t make you fearful and bring you out of meditation with a jerk and a gasp, which can then inhibit you. You can get fearful in meditation. So, good basics must be learned for one to become a deep meditator. You can spend hours or years working with the breath. Find a good teacher first, one who keeps it simple and gentle. You don’t need to strain. Start simply by slowing the breath down. Breathe by moving the diaphragm instead of the chest. This is how children breathe, you know. So, be a child. If you learn to control the breath, you can be master of your awareness.
The sense of bhakti yoga, a sense of devotion, is extremely important on the path. Unless we have a great bhakti, a great devotion, we can easily be shaken from the spiritual path. It’s the fuel that keeps us motivated. If we prepare our room before meditation by lighting an oil lamp or candle, a stick of incense, or only setting out a few fresh flowers, it puts us in a state of readiness; and for any serious thing that we do, we must prepare. If you’re going to cook a fine meal for a special guest, you take a bath first. You prepare yourself; you get ready. You get mentally, emotionally and physically ready. Meditation is the same thing. Physical preparations have their effect on the mind and emotions, too, turning awareness within and creating a mood and environment where there are fewer distractions. If you would prepare for meditation as exactly and precisely as you prepare yourself in the external world to go to work every day, your meditations would be much improved.