Points of Entry

Finding the right concentration technique for your meditation practice means opening as many doors as possible.

By Swami Durgananda

In my early years of meditation, I wasted countless hours wondering which technique to use. The teachers of my lineage offered several basic methods: repeating a mantra, focusing on the space between breaths, witnessing the thoughts. But an early mentor had told me to decide on one technique and stick with it, and I reasoned that if I had to choose one practice, it had better be the right one. So I worried. I worried about which mantra to use, about whether to meditate on the Witness—the observing awareness that remains ever-present through all the fluctuations of our moods and mental states—or follow my breath. I worried about when it was permissible to leave the technique behind and just relax. It wasn't until I stopped making techniques into icons that I began to discover how liberating it can be to work with different practices at different times.

We use techniques in meditation for a very simple reason: Most of us, at least when we begin meditation, need support for the mind. A technique provides a place for the mind to rest while it settles back down into its essential nature. That's all it is really, a kind of cushion. No technique is an end in itself, and no matter which one people use, it will eventually dissolve when their meditation deepens.

I like to think of meditation methods as portals, entry points into the spaciousness that underlies the mind. The inner spaciousness is always there, with its clarity, love, and innate goodness. It is like the sky that suddenly appears over our heads when we step out of the kitchen door after a harried morning and glance upward. The Self, like the sky, is ever present yet hidden by the ceiling and walls of our minds. In approaching the Self, it helps to have a doorway we can comfortably walk through, rather than having to break through the wall of thoughts separating us from our inner space.

Most of us already know which modes of meditation feel most natural. Some people naturally have a visual bent and respond well to practices that work with inner "sights." Others are more kinesthetic, attuned to sensations of energy. There are auditory people, whose inner world opens in response to sound, and people whose practice is kindled by an insight or a feeling.

Once we become aware of how we respond to different perceptual modes, we can often adjust a practice so it works for us. Someone who has a hard time visualizing can work with an image by "feeling" it as energy or as an inner sensation, rather than trying to see it as an object. A highly visual person might get bored with mantra repetition when he focuses on sounding the syllables, but feel the mantra's impact if he visualizes the letters on his inner screen. One person might experience great love when repeating a mantra with a devotional feeling, while a friend's meditation only takes off once she lets go of all props and meditates on pure Awareness. Each person needs to find his or her own way.

Perhaps the most important thing to remember about any practice is to keep looking for its subtle essence. Every technique has its own unique feeling, which creates an energy space inside. For example, when repeating a mantra with the breath, a person might feel a sensation of prana (vital force) moving between the throat and the heart, as well as a subtle feeling of expansion or pulsation in the heart space when the mantra syllables "strike" it. Focusing on the space between the breaths, one might begin to feel the breath moving in and out of the heart and notice a subtle expansion of the heart space. One might notice that certain parts of the inner body are activated by a particular practice; the space between the eyebrows, for example, might begin to pulsate when one imagines a flame there. Following the rhythm of the breath might make a person especially aware of the currents of energy flowing through the body.

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