Meditation in Stillness, Meditation in Movement - Introduction

By Stephen Cheney

MEDITATION

Meditation involves the emptying of the mind of the daily happenings or stresses of life and the substitution in the mind of some form or other that represents Oneness and Calmness. It uses various techniques such as breathing and focus to form a oneness of the self with the oneness of the universe.

The purpose of meditation is to use it in daily life to:

• Achieve a calmness in the body married to a readiness for action
• Achieve a calmness in the mind married to enablement of clear thinking
• Achieve a calmness in the soul married to the feelings in the body. 
• To extend Being into other realms of understanding and awareness out to the boundaries of perception to truly know and blend with your environment.
• Meditation is a healing process to the fractures of living, and the expanding of health. A wonderment.

Meditation is normally taught and practiced by sitting quietly and focusing on one point. However, the mind is programmed to roam its external and internal environment. Confusion thrives in complexity where numerous items vie for the mind’s attention. Clarity lies in simplicity and oneness.

Less is more, more assisting in choice making and calmness. Science strives, in the manner of Albert Einstein’s, and earlier William of Ockham’s, thinking, to strip out unnecessary and superficial assumptions and clutter. Continually adding on corrections to make a theory valid is a suspect practice, such as found in a current favourite line of thinking in continually adding on Universes (Multiverses), which can never be proven, to explain the existence of quantum probabilities. Oneness, and the promotion of it, easily leads to a personal sense of truth and a spirituality. Religion, institutionalising that, does however tend to add on complexity and numerous restrictions on natural behaviour. Who rules makes more rules.

Meditation is being achieved mainly by way of two alternate paths: Stillness as in Yoga, or Movement as in martial movements (or dance for instance). Contemplating a still pond or moving as if sailing on a running stream. Both ways utilise a focus on using controlled Breathing in a balanced structured body to calm and clear the mind.

When you meditate using stillness or using motion: do not ask your mind what it THINKS about it; instead ask your emotions what they FEEL about it. Meditation is after all an experience of reality, not a thought in a dream.

The Aim of Still Meditation is to know Oneself, the Mind within. A blending of All into yourself. You reach Inward.

The Aim of Moving Meditation is to know the Variegated World of which your body is a part. A blending of yourself into the outside All. Your reach Outward.

Using both, the two worlds of Oneness and Variegatedness can then be most easily blended.

The history of science is rich in example of the fruitfulness of bringing two sets of techniques, two sets of ideas, developed in separate contexts for the pursuit of new truth, into touch with one another. — Julius Robert Oppenheimer (1904 – 1967) American theoretical physicist and professor of physics.

You sit your mind in the Tanden point, in the Hara (belly) your centre of body mass, and from there it rules and rides the body. In still meditation the mind sits and rules from there. In the arts of moving meditation, such as Tai Chi, martial arts or dance, the mind (not the brain) sits there and moves the body from there. It rides on the pelvis or hips. Wherever your hips go that is your location, as that is the centre of your mass, the limbs are only attachments shifting weight, anchoring or levering against floors, walls, attackers or partners.

It is like riding an elephant. An elephant is not a hunk of force. It is Power and Grace combined. An Elephant when still is balanced on the Earth, and when moving glides forward also in balance. When in Asia it is said: “You are as graceful as an elephant” it means that you are very graceful. It is a compliment, not an insult. You ride on top of your hips as if you are riding and commanding an elephant.

Tanden in Japanese, Tan Tien in Chinese (Field of Tan; Tan: the Philosopher’s Stone of immortality), is the centre-of-mass point in the body, just below the naval (about thumb knuckle to thumb tip length) and inside the centre of the body, not on the outside skin. When you wish to move, move your hips first, then the rest of you. It is the fastest way to get your body out of harm’s way from a strike. The shoulders should rest on the hips and turn or move with the hips in unison. The head on top of the shoulders should also be in alignment with the Tanden below, an upright head. These three masses help to control where you are and where you are going.

Next Chapter: Stillness

(Image: Samurai Meditation - Mariusz Szmerdt)

[The views expressed in this publication are solely those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of Dissecting Society™ . © 2007-2019 Author(s) ALL RIGHTS RESERVED]