What is a daily practice?
A daily practice is that which makes you thrive. It is a time to set aside to do those movement, meditation and awareness practices that tune you up to function at your best. What works is different for everyone, and it can be quite challenging to discover what it is for you.
As always, the theme is discovering what works for you. The class is a supportive environment for you to bring your desires, your cravings for respite and inner peace and access to your own energy and inspiration. We work together to help you find daily practices of movement, prayer, and meditation so that you can rejuvenate and move forward.
The psychedelic quality of normal sensory perception
We each have 21 or so distinct senses – the usual five, plus balance, and joint position, and oxygen senses, and so on. In sessions and classes, I ask you to consciously touch and activate these senses you do not habitually use. When we do this, ordinary reality takes on a shimmering, psychedelic richness.
When we pay attention to the sensory detail of being incarnate in human bodies, experience is psychedelic. The literal meaning of the word is psyche = mind, delos = visible, clear. Delos is an interesting root word, it shows up in Tuesday, divine, jovial, Jupiter, diary, journey and psychedelic. It is related to the Sanskrit deva, "shining one."
Much of what we do in class is pure experience. We spend most of our time immersed in the subtle sensory world of internal seeing, internal feeling, hearing, touching. What happens, more or less spontaneously, are cognitions of the mind made clear, the body made translucent.
Meditation is so particular to each person. In one room, a half a dozen people may be doing very different techniques, each appropriate to individual needs.
Buddha said that he gave 84,000 different meditation techniques, for all the different kinds of people there are. None of them do you any good unless you practice them, and you won't practice a meditation unless you love it. It doesn't work to just pick a technique that sounds cool and try to impose it on yourself. You won't love it unless it is your technique.
Instinctive Meditation is always about finding the technique that is right for you, the you that you are today, and the way to practice so that you thrive in your inner and your outer life.