Meditation ...
For a Westerner it is very hard to experience meditation.
Nothing in our upbringing teaches us this.
For most of us, meditation has to be worked on for years before we can one day live a few moments of this eternal and all-embracing peace.
Contrary to what we may read in advertisements, meditation is not experienced in a few hours.
To meditate, we must discipline our body, our mind and our energies into certain particular states.
We must manage to make our nature understand that prolonged stillness is the source of deep action and real benefits.
This total stillness must be physical as well as mental, but for the beginner there are unavoidable stages to go through.
The body will make itself felt during this stillness it refuses: itching, pins and needles and pains (sometimes unbearable) will appear.
We must practise with humility and let the body accept the "burning".
This first stage is nonetheless very pleasant and above all encouraging, because the body very quickly realises that there is well-being in it and begins to calm down.
Once the body is a little calmer, the reign of the nerves very soon appears. The order between nerves and body is not necessarily this one: the nerves may show up before the body, or nerves and body may show up at the same time. In short, the level of the nerves shows itself at some point. These famous nerves stop us walking along a beam 3 metres up, whereas the same beam laid on the ground poses no problem.
They will lead us into an inner tension that grows in proportion to the length of the practice, and will make the practice so uncomfortable that we stop.
We will have to work and experiment in order to go beyond the grip and reign of our nerves. Then energy appears, and with it a whole series of events: breathing that is almost inaudible or even stopped, an extraordinary fluidity of the body, an unsuspected feeling of lightness and "speed", a sublime silence...
"Whoever enters this dual silence of Shakti is like the mustard seed between the millstones that crush it to make oil. Afterwards, a slow process of purification will still be needed. This purification is more or less conscious." Lizelle Reymond
We will then have to master our energies, so that they become a vehicle.
If they are weak we will fall asleep; if too strong we will fume on the spot, claiming that Yoga "is a discipline for women, and we men need things to move...", without seeing that it is only a lack of mastery that stops us going further, and that it is easy to find every excuse to move and so stop practising.
Despite all these stages, we must not lose sight of the fact that the experience sought is meditation. In all the techniques carried out along our life path, we must be reaching towards the search for light, and not just keep checking whether the accelerator cable is tight enough, but not too tight (...). The aim is to try at every moment to put it into first gear and drive off with the vehicle, with more or less success at the beginning.
A little like the take-off of a wild goose, heavy and chaotic in its first moments, giving no hint that it will become light, airborne, divine.
Denis Billo