Subtle Mind Practice

As many of you may be aware (because I do have a tendency to repeat myself), practices such as this one are not new to me, and it was nice to just relax, chill, and become one with everything for a bit. The other practice - loving-kindness - was about feeling a greater love, and using it to heal ourselves and others. It is the beginning of having an open heart, which is essential for reaching the deeper recesses of our minds, and achieving the flourishing we are after. The loving-kindness is an emotive practice, whereas the subtle mind could be said to be a mental practice. The art of stilling the mind, in order to be able to be absorbed by The All, is a really good practice, and I think more (Westerners) should try it. The Asian cultures of the East have had these types of practices ingrained into their culture and daily lives for so long that I am sure, it is almost automatic. We in the West, having spent much time working on the outer self, through capitalism and religious dogma, could do with learning to understand and use the inner resources we all have. In my life, I use practices such as these all the time now - I didn't so much in my teens and twenties, because I hadn't reached the pinnacle of wisdom that comes with practice, and experience. This practice allows me to remain calm in the storm that is daily living in this world (especially having teenagers in the house!); and even though I have my chronic lower back problem, the pain becomes less of a focus when practicing meditations such as this. As the recording was ending, we were asked to "come back" to our environments, returning to "this world", so to speak. Well, as I have done things like this for a long time - and again, I claim in no way to be some guru or Master - coming back to this environment, I still maintain a modicum of this calmness within me as I wrote my notes.
I wasn't bothered by it, but I find the use of the sounds of ocean waves to be a bit of a cliche'. When we were asked to take the 10 deep breaths, I was on my eighth intake when she began speaking again; I attribute this to my long-time breathing practices, because I take such deep and slow breaths when doing exercises such as these. My focal point was the energy of the breath entering my body through my nose, circulating down the back of my body, and up through the front of my body, to exit from my nose, taking away with it the "old and used" energy/carbon dioxide. About two-thirds of the way through the exercise, my dogs decided to bark like mad; it startled me, but I was able to return to the witnessing and then subtle mind fairly quickly, as I did not lend any energy to the disruption. Does that make sense? Because that's what we are learning to do with the witnessing mind - not lending any energy to the random and ceaseless flow of thoughts we are constantly bombarded with. This "not lending of energy" allows us to have plenty of energy to focus on our breathing, and leaves us calmer and more peaceful, for our delving into our inner peace.
For me to try to describe my personal unity consciousness to others who most likely don't live and think as I do, is kind of a difficult task. When I reach that wonderful place at the center of creation, I am filled with the perfect love that abides there. It has always been my opinion and practice to think of the energy that is our Universe, created all the things that it had created, because of Love. If others want to call that center of the universe God, or Goddess, or Mohammad, or Jesus, or Krishna, or Buddha, or Kwan Yin, or Chaos, that's fine. One's relationship with the Divine is, by it's very nature, meant to be unique - following someone else's Word is to miss out on the power of relating to the Divine on one's own terms. This subtle mind/unity consciousness is what I would wish all humans to reach, because I feel that is what we need to do to evolve into our next step, before we humans kill all that it pure and wholesome, and good, and alive. Namaste'.

Chris