The Meditation Minute

Looking for a way to bring your practice into your daily life? Christopher Love has one activity that anyone can do:

"The Meditation Minute is simply choosing to spend 10 breaths, or about 1 minute, in complete silence. To bring your full attention to 10 deep breaths each day is to watch your life and practice grow.

As a yoga teacher, I am forever trying not only to teach kick-asana yoga classes, but also to help others get to the ultimate lesson - their peace and calm. When we are blissed-out at the end of yoga, it is easy to think, 'Christopher is so great, he gave me an amazing practice!' And, while I appreciate such sentiments of course, I try to teach that YOU gave yourself that experience, not me.

Many people equate meditation with sitting for long periods of time, and in our busy lives this can seem daunting. I wanted to find a practice that seemed attainable, and a mere minute certainly seemed a reasonable commitment. If I can convince someone to spend 10 conscious breaths a day in silence, then not only has this person begun to implement a new habit, but he or she has also faced a more deep-seated resistance in Western culture to living outside the mind.

This point of view is the essence of yoga, that YOU are the only one deciding to pay attention or not, to think or not, to feel or go numb, to breath or not. You are the only one having your presence in the world, and no other person can touch you there. That level of personal responsibility can seem daunting at first, but as you begin to realize the choice you are making in each moment, spread across each day, and throughout your life, it can simply bring your life into focus.

As your awareness becomes more self-disciplined, you will no doubt be aware of how thoughts and emotions have been driving your experience, producing recoil or reaction to those beliefs. You will begin to notice that you stop breathing, or clamp down on your body in familiar ways to what you have come to see as a threat. Or, at other times, you seem to open and relax with what seems finally safe, loving or neutral.

Meditation is the practice of lifting one's awareness from this murmur, and finding a ground of being on which to stand that exists only for a fleeting instant, only to be replaced by the next. The abiding presence that you find awaits you, always. We only feel the absence of this presence when we disregard or ignore it again.

We can learn to live in the balance. In its many and varied forms, choosing to be entirely with oneself in a breath is to feel fulfilled more often, more cooperative with others, and more joined with a common purpose of discovering this inner truth about ourselves.

Close your eyes, and take the next 10 breaths, in peace."

Learn more about Christopher on his website or sign-up for his classes at yoga mayu on Saturdays 11:15am to 12:45pm.