Points of Entry

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

By Swami Durgananda

That energy sensation, or feeling-sense, is the subtle effect of the method and its real essence. It is the feeling-sense a technique creates—rather than the technique itself—that opens the door into the Self. For this reason, one effective way of going deeper in meditation is to keep one's awareness moving "into" the feeling-space created by the practice: into the sensation created by the mantra as its syllables drop into one's consciousness, into the sensation of the breath as it pauses between the inhalation and the exhalation, or into the vividness of the object being visualized.

As we do this, we automatically release ourselves into a subtler level of our being. This release will happen more easily if we can allow ourselves to give up any feeling of separation from the technique. Nearly always, when people have difficulties going deeper into meditation, it is because they are keeping some sort of separation between themselves and their method and between themselves and the goal. The antidote for nearly every problem that arises in meditation is to remember that the meditator, the technique of meditation, and the goal of meditation are one: that within the inner field of Awareness, everything is simply Awareness itself.

Another reason to experiment with techniques is to keep from being stuck in a particular method. Some people can take a single technique and continue with it for a lifetime, going deeper and deeper. Others, however, find that the original practice they learned stops being effective after a time. Some people stick with a practice they learned years ago, even when it no longer helps them go deeper. After a while, when the practice doesn't seem to work for them, they come to feel that they aren't good meditators, or that meditation is just too hard or boring, or even that it comes so easily they miss a feeling of growth. Often their only problem is trying to enter meditation through the wrong doorway or a door that once opened easily but is now stiff on its hinges.

Ultimately no meditation practice is going to work unless you like doing it. This piece of wisdom comes from no less an authority than Patanjali's Yoga Sutra, a text so fundamental that every yogic tradition in India makes it the basis for meditation practice. After listing a string of practices for focusing the mind, Patanjali ended his chapter on concentration by saying, "Concentrate wherever the mind finds satisfaction." How do meditators know the mind is finding satisfaction in a technique? First, they should enjoy it and be able to relax within it. It should give them a feeling of peace. Once they've become familiar with it, the practice should feel natural. If they have to work too hard at it, that may be a sign it is the wrong practice.

Meditators who have received practices through a lineage of enlightened teachers usually find that these practices are especially empowered—infused with an energy that yields relatively quick results as they work with them. Those without a lineage teacher find that the sages of meditation have offered us countless techniques—such as mantras, visualizations, practices of awareness—that open up into the Self as one explores them.

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