Every act can be meditation

By Amrit Sadhana

(February 18, New Delhi, Sri Lanka Guardian) Usually people complain about their miseries and problems and blow them up by exaggerating. It seems that they get some kind of morbid satisfaction in imagining that they have huge problems that cannot be resolved. First they create misery in their mind and later somatise it, which means the psychological wound is translated into a physical wound. They start treating the physical ailment, completely forgetting that the origin of this illness lies in the mind.

The Tantra approach is totally life affirmative and asks people to look at the brighter side of things. There are 112 meditation techniques in the ancient treatise Vigyan Bhairav Tantra that show how to use everything in life as a step towards meditation. Every small incident can be a door to meditation.

Here is a beautiful technique: Whenever you find satisfaction, in whatever you do, actualise it.

You don’t have to wait for a Nobel Prize or for a Rolls Royce to feel satisfied. Satisfaction is the juice your heart extracts from each moment, each sensation, provided you know the art of squeezing it. Just look around and you will find that every day there are so many tiny moments of gratification: you feel thirsty and you drink a cool glass of water. Can anything match the satisfaction that is felt after the thirst is quenched? But you don’t pay attention to it because you are not present in the act of drinking water. You do it mechanically, unconsciously.

Tantra says, this small act can be turned into meditation. How? Forget the thirst, forget the water, just remain with the deep satisfaction you feel after drinking water. Be filled with it, like the sky is filled with warm sunshine in the morning. Let your inner sky be filled with the warmth of this feeling.

Pick up myriad moments you come across during the day. Have you noticed the “Ah!” that slips out of your heart when you have the first cup of hot tea or coffee after waking up in the morning? While sipping the beverage, feel the vibrations of contentment spread all over your body. This is a state of meditation.

Do you still feel that life is a misery? If you look closely you would realise that misery is your interpretation, it is not real. It is a projection of the mind clouded by negative emotions. The mind basically is negative as it pounces on a negative thought and archives it in the warehouse of the unconscious.

The Osho approach is completely attuned to Tantra. He says: “This technique gives you a positive approach, a total reversal to the ordinary mind and its process. Wherever satisfaction is found, feel it, become one with it. Don’t take it as a passing phase. The satisfaction can become a glimpse of a greater positive experience. Everything is just a window. If you identify with pain, you are looking from a window; and this window of pain and suffering opens only towards hell. If you are one with a satisfactory moment, a blissful moment, you are opening another window. The existence is the same but your windows are different”.

Satisfaction is like having a bouquet of fragrant flowers in the room. Its perfume permeates all around and within.

— Amrit Sadhana is in the management team of Osho International Meditation Resort, Pune. She facilitates meditation workshops around the country and abroad.