Simon Vigneault's Blog

Meditation

I have benefited from others sharing effective meditation methods, which I have been studying since childhood, starting with a teacher who was a master martial artist and yogi (the late Amin Nasr/Sensei Yula), then later though my continuing studies of texts and with teachers stemming from both eastern and western traditions.
I will share different methods of meditation here, which reflect a distillation of my own studies and practice.

You may also be interested in my more philosophical treatment of Zen in an essay on this site, Felt Sense and Nonsense: Zen and ‘zen’: https://theinfinitelivingroom.com/2018/02/06/felt-sense-and-nonsense-zen-and-zen/

Mindfulness of the body

Being mindful of the body, turning attention to a part/an aspect of the body, or to the body as a whole, is a very reliable, tried and true way of developing meditation – indeed, it is often traditionally taught as the solid foundation of meditation, something you can endlessly develop further and can always come back to, rely on. Just bringing the mind gently but firmly back to the object of concentration – your breath, the feeling of your feet on the ground, or your behind on the seat – can interrupt anxious thought chains, bring you back to your senses, to the present. This can be a formal practice of sitting on a cushion or in a chair, with back relaxed but straight, or it can be while going about your life. For example, directing attention to your feet contacting the ground and to your hands as you wash the dishes, immediately changes that action, brings you into its live, sensory reality. This can mean that your train of thoughts becomes an informative, flexible flow, rather than a train you can’t seem to get off of, and that you get in sync with your body and its senses. This is also something people may be naturally developing, due to physical work or playing an instrument, which requires attentive bodily/sensory awareness. This practice is to take that kind of awareness into any aspect of life, to develop it into an always-useful tool for living.

Breathing and the Well

‘The Well’ (as I like to call it) is horizontally slightly in front of the backbone (inside the body) and vertically slightly below the height of your belly button. When you find the location of it and concentrate on it, it has a very obvious and particular effect – grounding, rooting, energizing. It is also called the (body’s) centre of gravity, the lower ‘dantien’ (Chinese) and the ‘hara’ (Japanese). I am particularly attracted to and familiar with the Chinese (Taoist) theory and practice around it.

This meditation is to sit comfortably with back reasonably straight (on a chair or cushion, whatever is preferred), and to do deep, slow, rhythmic breathing, not so deep that one becomes overly tense, while steadily and calmly focusing on the Well. Whatever thoughts or sensory experiences come up, one simply keeps focusing on both the deep, relaxed rhythmic breathing, and on the Well. Do this for roughly twenty minutes sessions (it’s better to keep it a regular time period for the first while), once or twice per day. You can end up incorporating this focus into everything (which my first teacher recommended to me) – sitting, walking, any kind of moving, lying down. In traditional Chinese gong fu, they are always bringing the attention back to it.

This is integral to many meditation traditions  – Taoist martial and meditation arts, Indian yoga, Chan/Zen Buddhism (which historically has a close relation with the Shaolin Temple via Bodhidharma/Dámó), Tibetan Buddhism, certain Christian monastic traditions, and, some scholars claim, in the ancient Celtic training of bards.

Note: It might seem that smoking is problematic for this kind of breath-oriented meditation. Actually it is not an obstacle; it would be a pity if a person who smokes to whatever extent felt barred from this kind of practice, thinking that first they must quit before engaging in this healthy practice – I have found that people can feel that way. However, I know for a fact that they needn’t feel that way. For example, some of the greatest martial artists/qigong masters smoke (smoking is still very common in Chinese-speaking countries). It’s unhealthy for sure, but we are talking about a possible, quite different and powerful level of health that is accessible to virtually everyone, regardless of their good or bad habits in terms of indulgences. If it helps to think of it as ‘cheating’, then do that!  Incorporating practices like these can be a great ally in your life and you don’t have to wait or adjust your sense of what is healthy and virtuous before beginning.

On the other hand, anyone, smoker or not, may find, even if they are experienced in this meditation, that at first there is resistance, awkwardness, for the first little while. What happens with calm persistence though (again, smoker or not), is that the body changes, establishes a rhythm with the breath, and becomes charged with oxygen (the blood actually becomes beautifully more bright and clear red). This is because you are doing deep breathing without heavy exercise, which induces deep and rapid breathing to replenish energy, whereas here you are adding a surplus to your system, A positive feedback loop gets set up, such that it becomes more and more pleasant and relaxing, where focus on the Well greatly facilitates this – in fact, that focus can naturally lead to slow, deep breathing.

The Waterwheel

This is a Taoist-inspired, ancient meditation method (often called ‘the micro-cosmic orbit’, but it has several names, and I prefer this one). First do the Well meditation for a few minutes. At a point where you have just done an out breath, on your next in breath, bring the attention to the lower back of the head as you are slowly breathing in. Then: as you are breathing out again, focus on the top of the head; then upon breathing in, focus on the cleft of the upper lip; then, focusing on the Well again, do one out breath, one in breath, and another final out breath (so it’s a beat of three at the Well, which is emphasized over the other stations of the waterwheel); continue again to lower back of head with in breath, etcetera, continuing the waterwheel cycle. Do this, as per with the well meditation, for say around ten to twenty minutes. It’s good to finish with a minute or so of just Well meditation.

There is very effective variation of this that I have learned (I just call it “Two points”), which particularly can be used once you are beginning to experience the sensation of energy flowing up the back and down the front and in the Well. That is simply to focus on both the cleft of the upper lip and the lower back of the head at the same time – to a degree, especially the cleft of the upper lip – and to use simultaneous focus on these two points to encourage the continuous flow of energy around the circuit, around the waterwheel. When you get that sense of flow from focus on those two points, include the Well, still focusing on the two upper points, which tend to automatically encourage the flow up the back and down the front, in a loop – the Well is the central, grounded anchor. I have found (and others too) that the polarity of focusing on those two points just happens to be effective in practice to encourage the flow. Once you get the hang of this method, you can make it your main way of initiating the Waterwheel, whereby the Well becomes your anchor and relaxed, deep breathing will naturally result just from the grounded energy flow alone.

Distilling Presence

It’s good to do body mindfulness and/or Well meditation, or the waterwheel, for a while first, though not strictly necessary. At a certain point, observe how your experience is always changing. ‘Notice yourself noticing’ your experience—bodily sensations, breathing, emotions, the environment, where you are at in whatever situations in your life, reflections on the past, thinking/feeling about what’s to come—reflect on how you are aware of your experience moment by moment. It is good to periodically go back to just straightforwardly doing the rhythmic breathing and focusing on the Well or heart. You may find that doing this takes the sting out of thought tangents/emotions, that it emphasizes your basic presence, over the content of that presence, whatever that may be, good, bad, or in between–we can also come to experience that the contents of our presence (including the objects of the world around us) are not apart from and in fact must also be of the nature of that living presence; they become, for us, enlivened with that presence, which at the same time is also our presence, our being, which they already are.

An added element is to notice that your sense of being a self/persona, caught up in circumstances, and also the very activity of engaging in this meditation, is itself ‘thought’, that follows strong themes, but is always in motion, morphing, moment by moment—your basic presence, together with the basic ability to be aware, take precedence over ‘being a person’ who over time has built up likes and dislikes, hopes, fears, preferences, biases, ambitions, resentments, loves etc. This is not to say that we see them as unreal or “just mind”, but that the presence/presencing/being that they (already) are becomes uncovered. It’s a way of distilling presence/awareness and making it a calm, spacious constant–this can become a new basis for being a self, a person, like finding a reliable ‘true north’ to steer by (your own deepest presence-intelligence, shared by everyone and everything, which no tradition or personage is the gatekeeper of). It does work well to first get into the energized calm state that deep, relaxed rhythmic breathing and focus on the Well/heart/waterwheel encourages, and to then do this kind of clever, more philosophical or Zen-like ‘distilling of presence’ (and to go back and forth between these modes), but it is also possible to plunge right into it (you may simply find you have a knack for it, and also you can get better at it with practice of course, so that what is at first awkward and laborious becomes easy and quick). Again, it is healthy and grounding to finish with brief meditation on the Well.

For a more in depth treatment of this topic, see this essay post on this site: https://theinfinitelivingroom.com/2017/01/11/felt-sense-and-nonsense-zen-and-zen/

Compassionate Resonance

Begin with the Well, and move on after a while to the heart as focus, using the breathing as above. Bring to mind someone you sincerely love, for whom you have deep love and respect, whom you want to be safe, happy, and protected from harm. Get into that emotional atmosphere of affection and loving intent, keeping up breathing and focus on the heart. Begin to extend your focus to include other loved ones, friends, acquaintances. Then also people you don’t particularly care for–but keep the familiarity, the connection to that original easy feeling of honest affection, and try to include these others in it as well. Keep expanding to focus wider and wider, city, country, world. It is interesting to try and reach down into the earth, to include the earth in this meditation. Finish with focus on the Well.

Ingrasp

‘Ingrasp’ is a word I came up with (inspired by the word ‘yi’ (intention/intent) as it is used in Chinese qigong and martial arts theory) as a way of making clear a certain faculty we all have: the ability to localize attention at a given point, to keep bringing the attention/the mind back to that place, to ‘hold’ it there–to ingrasp that location; it is an inward act, yet it is also a kind of grasping/holding (more ‘holding’ really, but ‘ingrasp’ sounds cooler to me). So in the above meditations on centres or parts/aspects of the body, this faculty of ingrasp is being used.  A traditional meditation rule of thumb is that the energy goes where the mind/intent goes–energy follows ingrasp. If the mind is scattered, the energy will be scattered and diffuse; if the mind is calm and focused, the energy will be gathered and potent, health-promoting. Conscious rhythmic breathing is a very reliable aid in this.

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