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KAREEN'S YOGA by Kareen Zebroff
I am idly dragging my bare feet through the sand, not thinking, just being. The golden beach is endless and there is no one else in sight. Stretching away from me towards the horizon, until it becomes one with it, heaves the calm ocean. I have escaped.
As I amble along, I revel in a precious feeling of solitude, of lack of responsibility, of temporary freedom. My wondering eyes take in the fiery beauty of nature around me. Smaragdine grasses waving from the dunes, spotless seagulls teaching their babies to dive for clams, “heaven’s ebon vault,” and the shining copper disk of the setting sun turning a herd of fluffy clouds into flaming Chinese lanterns.
I want to be a part of all this splendour, to enter into it, to become one with it. Turning towards the sea, I advise myself to consciously feel every sensation and to allow nature to give of itself to me. The sand running between my toes, smooth and soft; the gentle breeze cooling me and caressing me like a lover; a conch shell inviting me to pick it up, its pink inside smooth as polished alabaster. I feel it, weigh it, inspect it, sniff its salty odour and listen to the sea within. The primordial hiss of waves spending themselves on wet sand enters my ear, my mind, my being. I yearn to be enfolded into this ocean of eternity, this everlasting music, this healing message given me by a loving mother.
Languorous and accepting, I enter the water to become a part of the sea, to “be” the sea, to return to the innocence and safety and nurturing fluids of nature’s womb. I start a lazy breaststroke. Seen from the beach, I become smaller and smaller as I float off towards that line where heaven and Earth meet; where all is brilliant light, purity and serenity; where the sun is getting ready to be baptized once again. Drifting away on the shimmering highway of its reflected glory, I welcome the feeling of oneness that slowly melds me from entity into molecule, from atom into ether - an indistinguishable part of the light, the energy, the truth and the knowledge of God’s universe.
By now you will probably have realized, that I am not at the beach in person, but rather that I am practising my own form of meditation at home. So many people have written me about being desirous of, but ambivalent and fearful about meditating that I wanted to show them an easy, personalized contemplative visualization anyone can do.
Meditation is merely the third and final step of a benign technique that helps to create a situation of stillness within you, the better for you to be able to yoke together body, mind and spirit. Not to be entirely thoughtless - an impossibility - but to learn to focus and calm down the madly uncontrolled and mostly repetitive thousands of thoughts we have per day.
The first step towards this ultimate goal is concentration - a turning inward of one’s attention, a practising. Immersing oneself in the moment. Focusing on the conch shell with all one’s being for example and thinking of all its various aspects, but no other thing.
The second step towards emptying the mind is contemplation - the seeing of a thing, person or situation in your mind’s eye and examining it thoroughly from all possible angles, until that vaunted stillness sets in.
Eventually, says eminent yogini Marcia Moore, the regular practice of concentration and contemplation will become the meditation that is the means to quieting the mind and stilling all its noisy buzz and confusion.
To understand the yogic approach to meditation, we must first comprehend one extremely important distinction between Eastern and Western points of view, however. To the Western psychologist, consciousness is a function of the mind. The subconscious, the ego and the superego are all considered to be primarily mental processes.
For the Eastern thinker, the situation is reversed. He sees the mind as a small island within the vast, shoreless sea of universal consciousness. A North American professor once remarked that the mind was like the mortar holding the bricks of the building together. Whereupon the Hindu teacher replied, “but I thought it held them apart.”
Patanjali, the father of yoga, defines yogic meditation as “the suspension of the modifications of the mind-stuff.” And, we Westerners do have an inordinate amount of mind-stuff, don’t we? It ripples the surface of our minds and distorts what’s on them.
Instead, says Marcia, meditation must become a mirror, able to register light from beyond itself, just as the ocean does in my story. The clearer the mirror, the less of it you see and the more it becomes a transmitting lens.
Our higher purpose then, is to focus and reflect mental energy rather than to fabricate thought.
Kareen Zebroff’s classic, revised book, The ABC of Yoga (Foulsham
title: A Gentle Introduction to Yoga), as well as her Yoga-Over-40
video, may be ordered from her website www.kareenzebroff.com
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