1. Your Body Loves to Meditate

Meditation is a completely natural and instinctive capacity of the human body and everyone can do it.

Physiologically, meditation is the mirror opposite of the stress response and a way to quickly recover from exhaustion. When a person begins to meditate, within a couple of minutes the entire body shifts into what is called parasympathetic activation. Breathing slows, brain waves change toward relaxed alertness, blood flow becomes stable, muscular tension decreases, and stress hormones are washed out of the bloodstream. Even beginning meditators who practice simple techniques enter a state of restfulness deeper than sleep in about three minutes.

It makes sense that nature would equip us with a powerful way of recovering from stress by paying attention to our breathing. Both stress and meditation are aspects of our survival instincts that help us adapt to environmental challenges.

2. Be Intimate With Yourself

Meditation is a skill set to dare to be with what you love, to being in love with life.

Meditation can be a profound support for intimacy with yourself, with life, and with the cosmos. Instinctive Meditation is a Path of Intimacy. We cultivate loving awareness in our inner and outer worlds – a wide-open embrace of all of who we are.

The purpose of meditation is to prepare us for life because it gives us back a higher quality of living. The challenge of meditation is always finding what works for you. Your particular you – your preferences. Thus, we each have to find our individual way of being in meditation.

3. Celebrate Your Senses

Meditation is a love relationship between your body and infinity, and it's sensual. Human beings have more than a dozen senses, and they are all essential aspects of a healthy approach to meditation.

When we welcome a breath, we engage our senses of touch, hearing, balance, smell, and taste. When we meditate on the chakras, we use our senses of inner touch, inner vision, and motion. When we meditate on a mantra, we use our inner hearing and touch and vision. Other senses come and go to add texture.

Senses bring us into the present moment. It is only in the present moment that we can truly receive life’s gifts.

4. Trust Your Instincts

Honor your instincts – the self-healing, self-evolving, innate impulses of life that guide us to what we need for healthy balance. Through our instincts, we know our relationship to the earth and to the universe.

All the instincts have their place in meditative experience: homing, bonding, mating, nesting, hunting, gathering, exploring, migrating, and so on. The instincts of biology correlate loosely with the chakra system of yoga. All the urges are honored as part of the energy flow of the body.

5. Get Into Rhythm and Flow

Meditation is paying tender attention to the rhythms of life. Breathing is a rhythm, the heart is a rhythm, and life’s energies continually circulate through our bodies. This tender attention can be called mindfulness, heartfulness, or sense-full-ness, for we attend with our whole being: heart, mind, and senses.

Multiple worlds of rhythm pulsate in and around us continually –  within our bodies, in the larger field of Nature, and in the social contexts we inhabit. In Instinctive Meditation, we explore the art of surrendering to the many rhythms at play in the moment. We learn to recognize, appreciate, and flow with this dance of energy that we are. We learn to structure a meditation practice so that it feels spontaneous and natural.

6. Elemental Adaptability – Earth, Air, Water, Fire, Space

The elements or tattvas are the field in which the senses and instincts play. Each element – earth, air, water, fire, space – feeds us, delights us, sustains us, purifies us, and inspires us. This is the Tattva Mandala.
In meditation, we receive from the elements, these primordial qualities of life that teach us about what we need for healthy balance and joyous intimacy with the natural world.

7. Embracing Desire

The senses, instincts and elements play through our bodies in impulses we call Desires. Skill in meditation includes accepting the gift and revelation of desire and emotion, and the ability to ride the motion into essence. This is the Kama Mandala, the rich mosaic of desiring energy-impulses continually streaming through the body.

8. The Dance of Emotion

To meditate effortlessly one needs to learn how to dance with the full spectrum of emotions that make up a large part of everyone’s meditative experience moment-by-moment. This is one of the biggest challenges meditators face. For full vitality, mental and physical and spiritual health, it is essential to learn how to engage with the wild and peaceful motions of emotions. Discover the secret gifts within emotion.

9. Wild Serenity

The Dance of Opposites Leading to Inner Union. Go deeper into wholeness by joining the full dance of energy that is you - earthy and cosmic, wild and serene. Learn how to welcome the entire mandala of energies. Practice the high art of riding your energies into creativity and freedom.

10. Bringing Meditation to the World

Integrating the inner practice of meditation with your heartful engagement with others. Claim your direct experience in meditation and embody your natural essence in all the circumstances of your life.