Enabling A More Joyful Journey
Combining meditative practices for wise action and liberation from ego
Traversing the game-board of life can beneficially evolve from suffering to joy, dissatisfaction to delight, and ignorance to wisdom. How to clarify a path and accelerate progress?
This requires the game-board explorer to go beyond the pedagogy of established organizations that need followers for their continued existence. Peering into the origins of teachings before pedagogy was established can yield useful insights that are testable through direct experience. This does not require belief or faith. It does, however, benefit from conscious intentional action and observation of the results from that action, both short and long term.
It is through action and observing the results of action that learning takes place. Player/practitioners in the Game of Life learn to cope with the real world challenges, pitfalls, booby traps and opportunities that life presents. This learning process stimulates the development of skillful means, the ability to respond effectively in the present moment to current situational circumstances. Principles that sustain successful action can be gleaned intuitively, thereby fostering continued progress.
Consider the principle of karma, the view that consequences arise from the actions and intentions of player/practitioners who are forging their own path on the game-board of life. These life paths are formed by intentions and actions that create karmic consequences and opportunities. This principle is discernible through the direct experience of each life journey as it unfolds for each player/practitioner.
Alert player/practitioners pay attention to the process by which their life is unfolding. The principle of impermanence can be discerned as life’s unfolding takes place moment by perceptible moment. Awareness of key moments and the lessons that can be gleaned from them is enhanced by a variety of meditation techniques.
Meditative practices can begin with conscious relaxation, then progress to mindful observation of thoughts, feelings and bodily sensations. The emergence of deeper awareness can be enhanced via practices that involve concentration and focus. As these capabilities are developed, movement and visualization can be added to enable an even deeper awareness or knowing that ancient traditions consider to be a form of wisdom.
Relaxation - Consciously relaxing one’s muscles while the body is still and in a comfortable position can enable the mind to reach a state of temporary tranquility. This relaxation will usually enable a decrease in perceptible thoughts and feelings, although they are not likely to completely disappear. Some player/practitioners may be able to consciously achieve a state of fairly deep relaxation. Others may benefit from learning progressive relaxation, a remarkably effective technique that involves systematically tensing and releasing various muscle groups to attain a state of deep relaxation. Ample physiological research confirms the effectiveness of systematic tension-release of muscle groups.
Mindfulness - This form of meditation involves observing the breath as it passes through the nostrils or observing the rising and falling of the chest or abdomen during the in-out breathing process. Breath awareness can be used to cultivate a state of relaxation for many player/practitioners. Focusing on the breath enables increased noticing of thoughts, emotions and bodily sensations as they arise in awareness. If muscular tension is detected in one or more muscle groups, it can be dissolved by intentionally relaxing those muscle groups. If salient thoughts and any related feelings are detected, they may stimulate karmic insights worthy of reflective consideration. If not, they can be dissolved quickly by shifting awareness back to the breath.
Concentration/Focus - Concentration and focus practices make use of affirmation or mantra, expressed silently or aloud.
The benefit of carefully formulated affirmations is an increased focus on the player/practitioner’s behavior intended to achieve the goal(s) expressed in the affirmation. Behavioral affirmations can have powerful effects, but there is a risk that successful personal achievement can become ego food. The greater the ego, the more precipitous can be the eventual fall from pinnacles of success. Player-practitioners who cultivate personal humility and equanimity can mitigate this risk.
Mantras are usually expressed in sanskrit, which is hymanity’s first language that originated more than three thousand years ago. Sanskrit mantras have a history of being repeated over multiple millenia by millions of player/practitioners. There are popular and beneficial mantras that do not require special initiation and are worthy of exploration. Consider several by Drukmo Gyal, a Tibetan yogini, healer and mantra singer who uses pleasing instrumental accompaniment. This short musical video illustrates a soothing mantra of compassion: om mani padme hum. She has shared other mantra videos, including this short one of the Tara mantra: om tare tutare ture soha. Listening to these these and other mantras, as well as chanting along with them, will calm the player/practitioner’s busy monkey mind and enable a more alert, tranquil and perceptive awareness. Mantras can also have beneficial vibratory effects within and beyond the practioner’s physical body, especially when repeated with focus and sincere emotional intent. When the Dharma wanderer first heard Drukmo Gyal sing this short explanatory healing video, he felt his heart open and energetic chills spread through his body. He has beneficially used a longer version of this video on multiple occasions to support his own healing process as well as that of friends and family members.
Meditative Movement - Meditation is commonly understood to involve stillness and relaxation, but this is not the case for practices that involve meditative movement, such as tai chi, chi gong and varieties of yoga. These and other related practices involve intentional bodily movements, as well as the conscious movement of energy through the body. After training in a variety of yogic and meditative practices, the dharma wanderer developed a personalized approach in 1980. This method for meditative movement combines three components for powerful self management of behavior to accelerate achievement of important life goals: 1 repetitive movement, 2 deep breathing in rhythm with the movement and 3 repetition of a personally specific and carefully formulated goal oriented affirmation/mantra repeated in rhythm with the breath and movement. This practice develops intense concentration that can be applied in other real world situations, as well as in more tranquil meditative practices. Beginning, intermediate and advanced stages are explained in the free noncommercial website at ReadyForBetterMethod.com. There is a risk the positive results achieved from this practice become food for an enlarged ego. This can lead to negative karmic consequences. It is important to balance the yang-type energy developed by this method with more yin-type intuition and wisdom. This can be accomplished via a combination of meditative practices.
Combining Meditative Practices - Player/practitioners may lean toward a singular practice that favors their dominant or preferred style of learning: verbal, visual or kinesthetic [body]. The combination of verbal, visual and kinesthetic practices can enable an expanded awareness in each of these dimensions. Stillness can cultivate yin-type intuitive awareness. Mantra practices can develop concentration and focus. Movement practices can stimulate practical action. The karmic results of these practices will yield a practical wisdom that is discernible through direct experience. This practical wisdom can be characterized as an enhanced knowing of what, how and when to do when coping with the hurdles that inevitably appear on the game-board of life. This accelerates a practitioner’s journey toward liberation from ego.
As player/practitioners refine their intentions, meditative practices enable a dissolving of egoic desire, attachment, anger and ignorance. This liberates them from the karmic consequences of past harmful actions and increases their equanimity as they face with open hearts the suffering of those they care about. Wise action can arise in the present moment when opportunity presents itself as serendipity and synchronicity increase. This enables a more enjoyable journey as life continues to unfold.
🙏💕🌎
ib
ib posts in 2023: https://ibreflections.substack.com/publish/posts