Meditation. When I first tried it, I had no clear idea of what it was far, except that its practice was essential to spiritual power, and I wanted that. I flitted around, experimented. Tried a breath meditation for awhile, and got bored with that. I tried a prayer meditation, based on the Prayer of St. Francis of Assisi; at that time, I woke up at 3 in the morning and did a half hour, though most of it was me falling asleep. I tried doing a Seth exercise called “psychological time,” which is essentially trance meditation, but I got no clear details on how to achieve trance. Eventually I gave it up as too difficult and abstract.
I visited India after my freshman year of college, and though I received scant instruction on meditation there, I did get a flavor of a culture that was more grounded in Spirit than American culture. After that summer, I enrolled in Tom Brown’s Standard class, and part of that was learning how to move through the woods in a meditative way.
I went to Teaching Drum with some primitive skills experience, and some random ideas about meditation. I began practicing some of Tamarack’s exercises, which were intended as meditations in their own way. He called it shadowing; it essentially involved merging consciousness with another object or being, e.g. the trees moving in the wind. The basic form of meditation he taught was what he called circle attunement, a kind of sitting dynamic meditation.
It wasn’t until I discovered the Toltecs that things began to fall into place. Read the full post
