Supplemental Practices
Physical Play
The Awakening is a deeply physical approach to meditation practice. Body dances with its imaginary friend the vertical axis. Sensations are welcomed to come palpably alive and then are softened through a met gesture of relaxation. Breath becomes liberated from its imprisonment in frozen flesh.
To support the profound healing of body that The Awakening initiates, it’s helpful to bring a strong physical practice in to your daily life in addition to the primary practice of sitting and standing meditation. Swimming, yoga, chi kung, aerobics, weight training, Five Tibetan Rites, spontaneous motion, walking your dog, ecstatic dance: all of these dramatically support the body’s exploration of the koans while in sitting posture. Is there a preferred form of exercise that best supports The Awakening? Yes. It’s the one that you enjoy and feel the most drawn to.
Students of The Awakening are also encouraged to explore the wide offerings of the world of Somatics. Rolfing® Structural Integration powerfully supports your discovery of the secret door. The many forms of breathwork all help to dissolve restrictions to breath’s passage through your body. Practices like Somatic Experiencing or Hakomi help resolve emotional residue that’s gotten lodged in bodily tissue.
Gazing Raptly
Couples in bonded relationship are also encouraged to explore the interactive practice of Gazing Raptly from the Sufi and Tantric traditions. Couples sit down together, look into each other’s eyes, hold each other’s gaze, relax . . . , and simply surrender to the parade of sensations and perceptions that spontaneously begins to occur.
While even a few minutes of this kind of intimate contact can refresh and heal, couples are also encouraged to explore the practice for longer periods of time. Minutes turn easily in to hours. Over time, your conventional sense of self—with its created notion of feeling separate from everything it perceives to exist outside of its residency in the body—starts dissolving, revealing the mystery that’s been hidden underneath all this time.
This is the primary practice that the Sufi poet and mystic Rumi explored with his beloved friend Shams during their intensive retreats together. The practice has perhaps been most graphically presented in images of the quintessential Hindu lovers, Radha and Krishna, bonded together as one through the shared connection of their gaze.
While you don’t need entheogenic substances to explore the practice of Gazing Raptly, it can be explosively amplified through the addition of cannabis, MDMA, or LSD. After ingesting an entheogenic substance, you and your partner may want to sit comfortably at opposite ends of a sofa facing each other and just keep surrendering to the practice for hours on end. What occurs is potently transformational beyond anything I’ve ever known.
The basic manual for this practice is the hardbound Rumi, Gazing at the Beloved by Will Johnson (Inner Traditions, 2003) which has been re-released in paperback as The Spiritual Practices of Rumi (Inner Traditions, 2007). The book is also available in a French translation as Rumi, union des regards, fusion des âmes (Editions du Gange, 2005).
The supplemental manual for this practice is Rumi’s Four Essential Practices by Will Johnson (Inner Traditions, 2010), which includes a section on gazing raptly along with eating lightly, breathing deeply, and moving freely.
if you want to know God,
then turn your face toward your friend
and don’t look away
in the valley of your friend’s face
there is a well
go to that valley
and fall into that well
o my god!
what is this union of eye to eye?
—Jalaluddin Rumi
The Kasina Meditation
During the time of the Buddha, small colored geometrical shapes called Kasinas were used as objects of meditation for developing strong concentration and one-pointedness of mind. The meditator would simply sit and gaze at the kasina for long periods of time and watch as his or her mind would begin to dissolve and undergo alteration. While the use of kasinas has long gone out of fashion, gazing at a powerful, colored shape continues to generate a strong effect on the mind of the meditator, and I have created a number of multicoloured kasinas that I encourage people to use during meditation.
As you sit with the kasina, the colors and shapes will start to morph and merge in an at-times dazzling optical display. This shifting quality will start to happen within the first minute of meditating. When you’re finished with a session of kasina gazing (and the practice can go on for anywhere from a few minutes to an hour or more), shut your eyes immediately, and concentrate on the afterimage of the kasina that will appear behind your closed eyes. This image will have the same basic shape of the kasina, but the colors will be the opposite, complimentary colors from the kasina that you were gazing at.
To get started with kasina practice, I encourage you to go to my Store and purchase The Kasina Meditation, a pdf file with a brief text about the history of kasina use and instructions on how to meditate with a kasina. You may alternately choose to purchase Hollow Bamboo Dharma: Foundations of Practice that includes The Kasina Meditation as one of the many meditational practices. Included in The Kasina Meditation are seven of the most popular kasinas that you can print on a high quality colour printer for your personal use. Kasinas are also available through my Store as 20" x 20" canvas transfers mounted on stretcher bars that you can hang on your wall. Larger kasinas up to 48" x 48" are available on request for meditation halls and yoga studios. As art objects three kasinas of different colors, hung adjacently in a row with no space between them, create a very powerful and beautiful focal point for a living room space. I have been particularly drawn to this form of meditation as it combines my two primary fields of interest: the gazing practices of Rumi and Shams and the meditation practices of the Buddhists.
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