Meditation 102 | Where Healing And Meditation Meet (2/3)

In this 102 lecture we discuss "Where Healing and Meditation Meet" - from practical perspectives through the dynamics of the human energy field. Part of a "101" lecture series which provides a sweeping and comprehensive overview of meditative development from foundational concepts, the relationship of meditation and healing as well as advanced topics such as the samadhi states and siddhis.

Transcript

Hi,

I'm Keith with Field Dynamics.

This is another talk on the path of meditation,

This is part two,

And this is about how meditation and healing can be understood as kind of a single process or where it is that they converge in a sense and meet.

So a big realization around meditation and around life in general goes something like one reflects that they can't change external circumstance through will and choice.

You cannot control what happens outside of you.

You can have an influence on it,

But you absolutely cannot modulate it or control it.

The word control,

And it's not that we want to control something,

But we want to have the ability to go with the flow,

To sculpt the clay of life as it presents itself.

So when one has enough experience interacting with the way that the outside world is manifest and manages itself,

There can be this reflection that there is understood that one's internal state,

One's relationship to what is outside of them,

What their internal perspectives,

The way that they frame their experience is the thing that is really worth cultivating because you can develop incredible skillfulness around your internal state,

Your ability to accept,

Be with,

And find useful any and all experience.

It is this orientation that brings us into a basic engagement with how it is that meditation connects to healing work or how meditation and presence is in effect healing because the more ability you have to see,

The more clearly you can perceive your internal state,

The more you'll be able to understand where there's incongruity with what's inside and outside,

The more ability you'll have to be clear about how it is that you can orient yourself so that any experience can be taken as a process of learning,

As a circumstance which you can be grateful for,

As a circumstance which you can then essentially be at peace with.

So how to be at peace with all circumstance.

The only way is not that peace is going to be happening out there,

It's rather that peace is happening inside of you.

So this is a basic way of looking at how meditation and healing connect but there are actually more straightforward,

More essentially mechanical ways that I can explain the same point.

So we'll get to that in a moment.

Generally speaking in meditation,

The word purification is used in the yogas in particular.

Purification is a major word in the translation and the idea is that meditation and the process of the yogics,

All of the different techniques particularly from the Hatha Yoga tradition,

But all of the yogas in general is that you're purifying yourself,

You're purifying your vessel,

Your body-mind system.

That word purification has a certain image association.

Maybe this is just me but I think to purify is to refine something and it's to clear things off of it,

In a sense sometimes it's thought of as like there's a diamond encased in a lot of mud or dirt and you're kind of scrubbing away that diamond so you're bringing forward that which is already there but it requires reducing or taking off.

It has a certain kind of form of aggression.

You're going at what is unclean and you're getting rid of something.

So that's purification.

Now an inverted concept is to heal which means to make whole and in that sense we think of kind of getting bigger to make whole.

So you go from whatever part that you think you are or whatever parts that there are and those parts then expand or connect to the total.

So one goes from kind of like more to less and one goes from less to more.

That's a way that these words may land with you,

Purification and healing but they are absolutely talking about the same process.

They're talking about how it is that we come to wholeness and that is the etymology of heal or healing and that is to come to wholeness or to make whole.

So that's what we are looking to do in our spiritual practice,

In our meditation practice,

In our healing practice,

It is to come to greater wholeness so that our fragmented parts or our disconnected parts become connected to more and more of us until we recognize our connectedness,

We recognize our wholeness,

We recognize in a sense our imperfect perfection.

So purification is often related to the yogi,

Healing you might think of a symbolic or archetypal character like the shaman is thinking more about healing or using that word healing but again they're talking about the same thing,

They're talking about the same thing.

A major approach,

A major word and concept in healing work is balance.

Balance is a really really big deal.

If you're trying to go somewhere that is a slippery slope or better yet is a tightrope,

If you're trying to get there,

There is a primary quality that has to be present otherwise you cannot make it across that rope and that is balance.

So balance is this key quality that we find where we don't want to be too this way,

We don't want to be too that way,

We don't want to be too yin,

We don't want to be too yang.

And so this has been reflected in for instance some Eastern traditions,

Some of the primary sayings or linguistic orientations.

So for instance in Buddhism it's called the middle way,

Avoiding extremes,

So that middle way or the path is that middle way or in Taoism it's said that you master the art of doing non-doing.

So we get this sense of kind of taking two things that seem opposite and bringing them together which of course neutralizes it and leaves us in the middle.

So balance is a really significant concept and healing has a lot to do with balance and meditation also has a lot to do with balance because it is when one is in a balanced state,

When one is kind of has is grounded and centered then healing naturally is happening,

Healing potency is naturally much stronger and more available and also meditation,

The path of moving forward in meditative states and becoming more present also becomes more available.

So this is really,

Really important.

Now meditation traditionally gets us at asking the question what is the self,

What is the nature of the self,

What am I,

What is this,

What is reality?

These questions are being addressed traditionally in meditation.

Now meditation goes way back to,

Well we don't really know but let's just say it's more or less something that's been happening in the psyche of the human since its inception more or less and Western psychology which is really something more of about 100,

125 years old,

That investigates more of the personality,

That investigates more the underpinnings of what was your childhood and your upbringing and what are the psychodynamics within that domain.

And then if you bring in some kind of evolutionary biology you might start to think about also what is the mind doing in relationship to certain kinds of evolutionary dynamics.

But in general what we have is we have Western psychology getting us to understanding ourselves at the level of the personality and this life and meditation generally is addressing something bigger than that which is the nature of beingness itself which is well beyond the personality.

Now to answer those questions,

Either of those questions,

And both are extremely important and complementary,

What we need to do is we have to have an ability to see our patterns and we need to also be willing to ask questions in terms of being humble to make ourselves vulnerable and available and accessible to self-reflection at that depth,

At that sincere depth.

So what is the story of one's life to be able to ask yourself that question?

What are your primary behavioral patterns that are unskillful?

How is it that you act and behave in such a way that you feel is not your best and how can you then change your behaviors and change your patterns?

Now it is useful in understanding these questions to understand it at the level of the personality.

It's useful to understand it at the level of selfhood and it's extremely useful to be able to observe these patterns more clearly to have clarity of mind such that when you ask that question,

What information pings back and the ability for you to see yourself clearly is available.

So that's what meditation does and that's how it connects to healing because healing in the process of coming into wholeness is always going to be about expanding your limited sense of self into understanding your connection to the total self and the totality of being.

So we have to be able to ask ourselves really challenging questions and meditation enhances that ability to see that clearly.

Now there's a meditation that comes from the Buddhist tradition that I'll be providing an example of separately to this that you can listen to and that is a metta meditation.

Meta means generally translated as loving kindness and that meditation is basically where you kind of repeat over and over a simple mantra of may I be at ease and then extending that out to others.

May they be at ease and going from a personalized self to a larger self and what this does is it opens up the heart,

It opens up the self towards a loving kind orientation to self and other and it's a good anchoring point for alleviating one's tension,

Alleviating one's kind of judgment born of the heart.

And so that in a sense connects to this kind of questioning that we do because very often just simply reflecting on our intention of having loving kind intentions,

You know,

May I be at ease,

May others be at ease,

That naturally starts to alleviate the pressure in our heart and things where we harbor judgment,

Resentment and blame.

So that meditation is available and it's useful in and exemplifies a traditional approach where meditation and healing in a sense are connecting more obviously.

Now something that's slightly different is understanding the energy field dynamics.

So our energy field is electromagnetic in nature and electromagnetism,

Electromagnetic fields are going to have positive and negative charges and they're going to be spinning,

Right?

They're going to have rotational rates and they're going to have distribution of charge.

Now this is essentially a mechanical view and a mechanical understanding of the energy dynamics of the field,

But what it does is it's going to give us quite an insight about how healing works there.

So you have two kinds of spin.

You have a spin that moves to the periphery and then you have a spin that moves to center.

The one that spins to center is a centripetal force,

Right?

Everything is spinning to center.

This is your toroidal field as it's called.

Now generally speaking what we see is that things that are kind of falling apart or things that are kind of losing orderliness or gaining entropy is another way of saying it,

Are spinning centrifugially,

Spinning to the periphery.

But things which spin to center have this self-organizational property and so that is a negentropic property and that is a centripetal force spinning to center.

Now when you focus attention,

When your meditative process increases,

When presence keeps going up,

What happens is the field starts to spin more and more to center.

Now the longer term process of this is about the heart opening,

About coming into one's core and the heart opening and that's because your field literally is actually compressing and squeezing itself into center and you're kind of having,

In a certain sense,

You're having an electromagnetic spark or explosion in the core of your energy field and that is a mechanical way of understanding a certain kind of what's traditionally known as a kind of an awakening.

But in general,

Any of the time that your field is cohering to center,

What's happening is you're in a negentropic state,

You're in a state where self-organization is going up and you're essentially healing,

Your field is connecting to itself more effectively.

And so meditation deeply,

Deeply coheres the field,

Deeply coheres the field and focused attention in general coheres the field which is an explanation as to why so many basic phenomena happen like,

For instance,

If you simply,

If you have a,

Like a bruise and you focus your attention on the area of that bruise in the body,

What you're creating is you're creating a focused electromagnetic field,

Your attention around that area of the body and then that area is actually spinning more tightly.

And that spinning more tightly means that all of the electrical conductivity,

All the matter that is contained within that electromagnetic field is actually squeezing,

Compressing and bringing more orderliness to it.

So things like your blood pressure,

The ability for the physiological processes to be more efficient and robust are going up as a result of simply observing it.

Okay.

And so this is,

This kind of testing around this stuff has happened all over the place,

But my personal experience and opinion of this is that it's very straightforward.

When you place your attention on something,

The electromagnetic field around it compresses and that compression brings about more orderliness.

It's quite simple.

It's connected to fractality,

But that is well beyond the scope of this talk.

So to,

So I put in my notes that in a sense,

Love sucks.

Okay.

So it means that love,

Which in its deeper sense is not good or bad,

Right?

If we want to really go penetrate into a deeper meaning behind the word love,

Love as we understand it,

True love is unconditional love.

So that means that true love doesn't have a positive or a negative.

It has a neutral,

It has an unconditional component to it.

So love when one is neutral,

And we connect this to the,

Uh,

The last talk around,

Uh,

Meditation being the development of dispassionate neutral observation.

So as you continue to develop that neutrality in one's self,

That observation neutrality,

Essentially your core,

Your heart,

Um,

Is able to suck in more.

It keeps literally mechanistically,

Your electromagnetic field spins to center and your heart keeps sucking more and more of that charge in the field.

And um,

That's sucking continues that love suck really continues until,

Um,

More and more kind of,

Uh,

Peripheral things are purified or cleared out.

The system continues to get more and more organized,

And then you get kind of spontaneous,

Um,

Experiences or experiences where your energy field moves to higher levels of orderliness or frequency or coherency.

So we'll get way more into that into the next talk when we talk about samadhi,

But,

Um,

We've provided a link to a body scanning meditation and,

Um,

Body scanning,

The simple act of noticing or witnessing how it is in the mind's eye or how it is in the perception,

Um,

Through the mind that one is perceiving their body.

Um,

This is incredibly healing because of what I explained before.

And when it comes to healing work in general,

Um,

And the skills of the healer,

Um,

Being able to scan the body and being able to essentially hold points,

Spaces and fields are very,

Very important for,

Um,

Ushering forward the healing process.

So whether it's for oneself or,

Uh,

Developing the skills of working on healing other people,

Doing healing work with other people,

Um,

Body scanning and scanning in general and tracking are,

Are really,

Really core.

So we've provided a meditation that,

Um,

Exemplifies that and goes through a lot of the fundamental,

Um,

Ways that you can perceive the body based on its organizational patterns.

So that is linked as well.

And with this,

I'm going to,

Um,

Leave you with a quote again.

Um,

And this is from Krishna Murti.

Um,

He says,

Awareness is observation without choice,

Condemnation or justification.

Awareness is silent observation from which there arises understanding without the experiencer and the experienced.

In this awareness,

Which is passive,

The problem or the cause is given an opportunity to unfold itself and so give its full significance in awareness.

There is no end in view to be gained and there is no becoming the me and the mind not being given the continuity.

Thank you,

Jidoo.

And thank you to you.

The next one will be on Samadhi.

Reviews

Many pieces fall into place when I listen to this talk - and give me a deeper understanding to why my yoga and its related practices are so healing 🙏✨

Interesting how this literally explains why “love sucks” in a neutral heart state, thank you!

Very interesting! Thank you!