MEDITATION SECRETS FOR WOMEN
Discovering Your Passion, Pleasure, and Inner Peace
by Camille Maurine & Lorin Roche, Ph.D.
Come Home to Yourself
The sensuous ebb and flow of
the breath,
The warmth of the sun on the skin,
The touch of light on the eyelids, like a kiss,
The soothing sound of leaves rustling in the breeze,
The satisfying release of bodyweight into the support of
the Earth –
Nothing in particular to do or be,
Just savoring the texture of life in this moment...
Relaxing, melting, softening into lusciousness.
Sinking down, letting go, deeper, deeper…
Breath spreading, massaging everywhere inside, a gentle
caress…Ah…
Muscles release, a sigh of relief, all the way to the
bones.
Here, now, the movement of life, touching me,
Healing me, revealing its simple truth –
I am immersed in the embrace of life.
Yes, I hear the Yes.
And my response, Yes.
I am this movement.
I am home.
This is meditation – luxuriating in the sensory
world, resting in the simplicity of your own being,
enjoying yourself shamelessly.
“What?” you ask, “But I thought you had
to sit in silence to meditate. I thought you had to detach,
override desire, empty the mind?” Our answer, from
more than 50 years of experience between us, is a
resounding NO.
Nature designed us to blossom in the bodily state of
pleasure. When we give over to this basic need, every cell,
every fiber of body and soul, gets to receive and come
alive. Something way down inside is met and satisfied, that
primitive place "underneath" our everyday human
personality. Touched and fed with pleasure something
awakens, like an animal purring into health and power, or a
tender plant blossoming into glorious vibrant color.
This simple pleasure of being completely at home in the
body puts us in rapport with the ongoing rhythms of nature.
It is a tangible sense of ourselves as an organism within
the larger natural environment – connected,
contained, safe. As we relax in enjoyment within ourselves
we feel free to release, deep inside, into a condition of
easy flow. The pulsings of breath and blood slow into a
soothing dance. Our senses dilate; we feel closer to the
processes of life.
This openness to the touch of life is at once deeply
healing and nutritive. The body opens up to receive, and we
are informed – in-formed – by the vast, fecund,
life-giving natural world. And we know:
Life is here. I am here. I am alive.
Your meditation time is the perfect place to cultivate this
primary connection. It may seem like an indulgence, a
luxury. But it is actually a vital necessity. For women to
be healthy in meditation, it must be based in this primary
sense of pleasure. No denial of the body, of the instincts,
of emotion, it should be a deeply intimate relationship
with yourself, with breath, with life. Deep pleasure is
like a stem leading down into your feminine roots,
connecting you to the rich, fertile ground of being, and
drawing life force back up so that your individual essence
can bloom. With pleasure at its foundation, your meditation
is a coming to your senses, a coming home.
Meditation is time carved out for yourself – sacred
space – to feel that underlying “Yes”
from life, the affirmation of your being. In this spacious
welcoming, you may feel the “Yes” of your own
response to life welling up from the depths – not
from discipline, but from pleasure; not from demand, but
from love.
An Invitation
What woman
doesn’t yearn for time for herself, without having to
be anything for anyone else? To rest, to restore, to settle
in. To catch up with all the thoughts that fly in and out
all day. To sort out her feelings from the tangle of
everyone else’s. To be in touch with herself, her
body, her rhythm. To clarify her own sense of things. To
get back to her essence…
We hear this all the time from the women we work with. But
when we mention meditation, resistance rears its head:
“I want to meditate, but I just don’t have the
time. I can’t sit still, forget about cross-legged
– it hurts my knees. Cleanse my mind of thoughts? Are
you kidding? Be calm and love everybody? Get real. I
can’t stop the whirring in my head. I don’t
have the discipline. Meditation’s supposed to be good
for you, right? But it sounds so dry and boring. I would
never want to deny so much of myself.”
What if we told you that there really are
no odious rules to follow – that meditation is just
being yourself? What if we told you that you don’t
have to change yourself in any way to reap the benefits of
meditation?
Well, that’s what this book is all about.
The marvelous truth is that you already know how to
meditate. We’re just here to give you permission to
do it – and to do it in your own unique way. If you
set up favorable conditions, meditation happens
spontaneously. This book is about how to set up those
conditions for yourself. Meditation is a rest deeper than
sleep, and is refreshing and rejuvenating. It’s good
for your health, enables you to better deal with stress,
and helps you live in harmony with your world. Hundreds of
scientific studies map out these beneficial effects. But
you’ll receive these benefits most fully if you
figure out a female way that works for your individual life
and not against it.
There is one sobering but ultimately liberating truth that
you need to understand right off the bat. The ancient
meditation techniques were not designed for women’s
bodies and psyches. For years Lorin and I have asked,
“What is a female-savvy approach to meditation? Why
do some women thrive in meditation while others languish or
quit?”
In listening to women talk about their meditation
experience, there is something we have both consistently
heard and seen. Women are natural meditators. Given the
chance, they will settle into deep meditation and stay
there for quite awhile, even if they have never meditated
before. Lorin has discovered that many people spontaneously
invent meditation techniques and practice them for years
with very good results – often unwittingly recreating
those in the classic texts. Likewise, many women have come
to work with me because they want to explore in an embodied
mode through subtle sensing and movement. As we stretch
their understanding of what meditation can be, they enter
profound and transforming states of awareness.
Bottom line: women need a different kind of meditation
approach. Every woman needs a handful of techniques, not
just one. The old rigid time frames, rules about
immobility, and devices for blocking feeling deny a woman
her basic rights to crave, taste, and experience life as
she truly does. Women live right inside the natural rhythms
of life – an emotional and physical connection that
must be honored and satisfied.
In Meditation Secrets for
Women, we invite you
to use meditation as a way to connect with that natural
rhythm, not contort it, to embrace yourself and all of your
experiences, whatever mood you’re in, without having
to deny or push away what’s really going on.
Meditation should be joyful, sensuous, engaged, alive. It
should be rooted in pleasure.
The Secrets are so simple that they could easily be
overlooked. Why is the value of deep pleasure for women
such a secret? It is a state so natural and fundamental, so
life-affirming, that you would think we would all celebrate
it, almost take it for granted, accept it as second nature,
or in fact, as the first nature it really is. Many of us
find it difficult to allow ourselves to dwell in that most
basic and nurturing of states. As if we need permission! As
if the world will fall apart if we let go, or we will be
stoned to death or burned at the stake if we give in to our
natural sensuality. When we relax into ourselves with
pleasure, we eventually encounter deep-seated cultural
taboos against sensuality, against loving our bodies,
against resting in our feminine selves. There is a hidden
judgment that this is hedonistic, selfish, base, naughty,
shallow, frivolous, or sinful. (Care to supply your own
adjectives?) So when you meditate, you will probably have
to face those taboos – all the control structures
that you’ve been taught as a woman. All your
judgments and criticisms about yourself are sure to surface
too. The beautiful thing about meditation is that it gives
you the chance to rest in your own nature and learn to
celebrate it.
Enter Secrets
as you might a doorway into a
world you’ve always longed for and suspected was
there all along. And please, please come as you are.
Don’t feel you have to change or
“improve” yourself – you don’t have
to be reverent, you don’t have to be serious. Come
any way you are at the moment: curious, laughing, tired,
rebellious, loving, grumpy, nervous, playful, buzzing with
energy or sleepy. Come on in. Step into this wide-open
embrace. Welcome all of who you are, from the small to the
vast, the tender to the wise, the mundane to the divine.
You'll find that meditation nourishes your heart, and like
a visit to an inner therapist, a quick vacation, an
emotional tune-up, or a magic healing treatment, you'll
emerge more whole and real and empowered to be your best
self.
Copyright 2001 by Camille Maurine and Lorin Roche,
Ph.D.
HarperSanFrancisco,
2001. ISBN: 0062516973.
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