Love on Every Breath. Lama Palden Drolma

You may need a pillow under your bum to ensure that you are not leaning back. Many chairs are angled the exact wrong way for good posture. Once you are seated properly, relax into your body, maintaining your healthy posture. Again, relaxing may take a bit of time, but if you stay with good posture and consciously let go of tension, it will become comfortable.

      As for eye placement, in Vajrayana Buddhism, we meditate with eyes open. An exception to this is when you are doing a meditation involving lots of imagination or visualization; then it is okay to close your eyes. When your eyes are open, let go of the tendency to grab on to the visual field. This is an unconscious tendency — we can become aware of this and let it go. Instead, let your gaze be soft, and let your eyes look slightly downward, at a forty-five-degree angle. Let your eye consciousness be open, without grabbing on to anything visually. Don’t block your field of vision either. For Love on Every Breath, have your eyes open for the first and last step of resting in awareness. In the creative phase of the meditation, when you are visualizing, it is fine to close your eyes to aid concentration.

      Eventually, keeping the eyes open during the creative phase is valuable in order to be able to rest in awareness during our moment-to-moment daily experience. In this way we can mix meditation with daily life. This also helps with realization of our true nature. If all our senses are open, without any grabbing on or pushing away, we can rest in the vividness of our present experience. Eventually, we can come to realize the essential, unchanging, and self-liberating essence of all our experience. In our Mahamudra tradition, specific instructions and inquiries done in meditation help bring this to fruition.

      Activities like yoga, meditation, qigong, and tai chi can rewire our subtle body. The channels open and straighten, allowing prana to circulate more evenly and fully. However, our mind also needs to change; we need to work on disengaging from and releasing unwholesome habit patterns, or the rewiring won’t stick. You may have noticed this if you have done a lot of yoga — you can feel incredibly good after a yoga session, until your normal neurotic patterns rear their head, and if you act them out, they may affect the body. For example, when I was doing hours a day of hatha yoga in my early twenties, sometimes I would feel so light that I would eat too much after yoga. It felt like I was taking two steps forward, one step backward.

      Watching the breath also helps bring the mind to peace. Every time we relax and become present in our basic meditation practice, our prana settles down because mind and prana are strongly linked. This is one of the reasons that meditation de-stresses us. The subtle movement of prana in the body and the mind intimately affect each other. If the mind is agitated, there is corresponding agitation in the subtle body, affecting the physical body. This happens with emotions as well. An easy way to understand this is in the experience of anxiety or fear. When we are anxious, we may feel butterflies in our stomach or our heart may be racing. If we are suddenly afraid, we may get the feeling that our heart is in our throat. The latter is the prana rising up the central or side channels too quickly. Tibetan Buddhist yogic literature states, “Where mind goes, prana goes; where prana goes, mind goes.” When we actively engage with our breath with specific breathing practices, called grabbing hold of prana, both the mind and the movement of energy in the body can be directed toward awakening, toward the cultivation of love and other qualities.

      Love on Every Breath works with the breath as well as with our spiritual, mental, emotional, physical, and subtle body aspects all at once to hasten awakening. The breath is used as a tool for awakening our love and heart chakra. This is different from the way most meditators watch or follow the breath, as a way of stabilizing the mind in concentration. In this meditation, one directs the breath in and out of the heart center, bringing the mind and awareness into the heart center. The breath is employed as part of an internal transformational process.

       A Subtle Body Experience

      Transmission of awakened mind from a teacher to a student, through touch or mind-to-mind connection, can be powerful. For a student, it can be simply an “aha moment,” an energetic opening experience, or it can occur in other ways. I had a subtle body energetic experience of this in my late twenties while in the Himalayan foothills. The sixteenth Karmapa had his main monastery outside Tibet in Sikkim, a country annexed in the midseventies by India. In those days we needed a special permit to go to Sikkim, due to border issues between India and China. These permits were quite complicated to obtain, but I managed to get one in Darjeeling. I made my way, with a friend, to Gangtok, the capital of Sikkim, and the next day, in an old English jeep from the 1940s, piled high with huge sacks of cilantro and filled with people. It was 1978, and in those days, the only cars available were old jeeps that the British had left behind when they gave India its independence in 1947. We climbed into one, and off we drove to His Holiness Karmapa’s monastery. We jolted along the curvy mountain road for about an hour, until we arrived at the gates of the temple compound.

      That first trip I stayed just four days. An extraordinary thing happened on the last day. My friend had already departed, so I went to say good-bye to Karmapa on my own. When greeting or taking leave of a high lama, it’s traditional to offer a kata, a white silk scarf, which is symbolic of offering our pure heart. Early morning, kata in hand, I went to see His Holiness to give him my deep gratitude and to say good-bye. He was in his private home on the monastery grounds, sitting in a room with many windows looking out onto the evergreens and snowcapped mountains.