Learning to Love all that we are through Meditation.
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[00:00:00] Hello, and welcome back to this episode of the Gentle Revolution podcast. My name is Mark Perser. I will be your host, your guide, your perhaps your facilitator in some way, shape or form. The Gentle Revolution podcast is ultimately. about promoting yoga. It's about promoting meditation as a means for cultural change, cultural evolution.
The little play on words there is the gentler evolution, where we don't have to perhaps run so hard into the edges and cause so much chaos before we learn. Meditation, in my experience, enables us to learn more gently. Learn through wisdom, through self reflection, through understanding that being right is not the be all and end all.
The question that underpinned this episode popped out in a recent [00:01:00] conversation where It was suggested that meditation won't make you whole, but what will, but what meditation will do is teach us to love the ugly bits, teach us to make the parts of us that perhaps we're not so fond of, make them acceptable, come to love all of who we are.
Meditation will bring us to the realisation that we are always, we always were whole. There was nothing else that we needed. Meditation is about acceptance, accepting all of who we are. It's a radical love affair with all of us and indeed all of life as it exists, not necessarily as we wish it to be.
Meditation is about coming into presence, being in this moment and accepting this reality, whatever it is. All the [00:02:00] pretty bits, all the ugly bits, all the things that we love and perhaps a lot of the things that we would love to change, we accept them for what they are. And indeed, we can seek to create change, but we do it from this space of acceptance.
We do it from a space of acknowledging that it's not all going to perhaps necessarily work out as we want it to. And that perhaps there is a greater force at play, whatever that might look like. So this podcast, as always, is Presented via the support of the Yogic Meditation Institute. The Yogic Meditation Institute is an educational body of which I am a core facilitator that runs teacher training programs of various designations around meditation.
Breathwork, Yoga Nidra, Tantra, Kriya Yoga, Hatha Yoga. We run courses, teacher [00:03:00] trainings throughout the year. We do have coming up in July, if you're interested, a program of Kundalini Tantra, which is an exposition of Yoga Tantra, looking at Kriya Yoga and Breathwork to bring us into an experience of divine love.
In fact, with reality as it exists. If you're interested to know more about any of those courses, please do check out bambooyogabharan. com or yogicmeditation. net. I do have a free Introduction to Breathwork course available on the yogicmeditation. net platform. You'll find the links attached to our bio.
So, welcome to today's podcast, where we explore one of my favorite practices, which is a technique known as antamona. It's a yogic meditation technique, anta meaning inner, mona being silence. So it's often known as inner silence meditation. Some of my students, , call it anti mona, , [00:04:00] antamona ultimately,
Teaches us to become more compassionate to who we are, to learn to love who we are.
Antamona is a technique that comes from the tantric yoga tradition. And so tantra, or specifically here is what we call non dual tantra, seeks to explore. Duality, and duality in this instance is explored through the idea of there being an observer and an object, something that is being observed. So with antamolna practice, we learn to observe firstly senses, so we'll come to observe sound, touch, perhaps taste.
You can practice antamolna through just looking at things. So all of the senses we learn to observe. Observe the senses with a particular quality which we call the witness. So the witness consciousness teaches us to observe these things, [00:05:00] hear the sounds, feel the feelings, whatever they are, without reacting.
Just hear the sound for what it is. Feel the feelings for what it is. And explore that space between the sounds. Explore that space between the sensations. Connect with the silence. So in the Sankhya tradition, they talk about Purusha and Prakriti. Purusha is consciousness, it's the primordial consciousness, and Prakriti is the manifest universe.
In Tantra, they talk about Shiva and Shakti, essentially meaning the same thing, but Shiva and Shakti are given identities. And Shiva is often depicted as The God sitting on the mountain highl in Tibet and Shiva sits there and, and looks at Shiva's favorite thing, which is Shakti life. But Shakti is Rete.
It is in fact Shiva's consort, Shiva's love. [00:06:00] Shiva loves nothing more than to sit there and just listen to the world's consciousness, wants to observe. But from this perspective, it's not interfering. It's just hearing the sounds, it's just feeling the feelings. So I often introduce that metaphor into my meditation practice when I teach to give people this idea of just observing, sitting there like Lord Shiva on top of Mount Kailash and just listening to the world around you.
Listen to the sounds and importantly acknowledge that there is silence between those sounds. And feeling into that silence, becoming comfortable within that silence. We can hear the sounds, but we can experience the silence. Silence is Shiva. Silence is the primordial experience. So, becoming comfortable [00:07:00] within that silence, and being able to identify within that silence.
As I mentioned before, non dual Tantra explores this idea of duality, so observer, observed, Shiva and Shakti, Purusha and Prakriti, so the observer of the sound and then the sound itself, ultimately coming to a realization that it is in fact all one, that there is no separation between the observer and the observed.
Shiva and Shakti are in fact one. That's the journey, and it can take some time to get there. The technique, and thankfully for us, we have really clearly explained techniques where we can break it down step by step, and this is in fact one of the definitive elements of tantric meditation. It breaks it down in a way that it's fairly accessible, clearly understood by most of us living in the world today.
Tantric meditation is very much designed for householders, for people living in the [00:08:00] world today. So, we begin through the practice of just listening, observing, feeling the feelings, and then we move that same perspective towards observation of thoughts in the same way that we would listen to sounds with the disposition of the witness just listening without reacting in any particular way.
We learn to observe the stream of thoughts, which is, for most of us, fairly consistent. However, we're looking to cultivate this softer relationship with our thoughts, coming to understand that our thoughts are not the things that define who we are. And that can be a huge revelation for some people. We're so consumed with thinking.
In fact, our opinions about things often define who we are. And you don't have to look too far in the world today to see people who are really consumed with their opinions about politics, [00:09:00] religion, social justice, the environment. Whatever it is, people have really, really strong opinions about things.
About morality. About gender identity, sexuality. These are the things that can define us. However, they are not the things that define us. They are opinions that we have around things. And one of the things I really, one of the experiences that I often encourage people to explore through this practice is once you're comfortable with observing thoughts and you've set up that disposition of being able to watch in a non reactive way, go into some of the more sticky points.
Go in and perhaps explore some of your more heartfelt opinions, some of the things that you find yourself pushing for, and just question, question a little bit. Why you feel like that. And indeed, even if you don't question, [00:10:00] just feel into a bit of spaciousness around it. This is not about not having opinions.
We need to have opinions. We need to have passion. We need to be prepared to fight for our causes, for our opinions, for justice. What we're seeking to do within this practice is step back from the torture that many of us experience through being attached to those opinions. Acknowledging that for most of us, over time, a lot of those opinions can change.
And that causing conflict with people around those opinions is not perhaps the most healthy thing for us to do. That there are greater connections. Look, take a step into the social media space, jump onto Facebook or Twitter and explore some of the more controversial forums there and you'll see people becoming really nasty.[00:11:00]
Really really nasty in those spaces, seeking to hurt other people and just so passionately wanting to push their opinions forward as though those opinions are the most important things. I'll bet that in many of those cases, those people have so much in common that if you put them together away from social media and you ask them, what's really important to you?
Wellbeing, health, freedom, family, their environment. These are things that most human beings can connect to as truth. However, we just have different ways perhaps of identifying that and explaining that and deciding, well, what does freedom look like? What does the truth look like? What does justice look like?
What does fairness look like? What does equality look like? And so different people express this in different ways, but we step back and again, social [00:12:00] media is the great human experiment where we. We look into that space and we say things that don't necessarily reflect the best of us. So back to the practice, what we're seeking to do is to learn ways which we can become less conflicted through this attachment to opinion.
Many of us are traumatized through these opinions and through our experiences. Again, Antar Mouna more generally, what we're talking about here is mindfulness meditation. Perhaps I should have introduced that earlier. Antar Mouna is essentially a mindfulness practice. It is known by psychologists as open monitoring meditation.
Ultimately, we're learning to monitor the world through this disposition of the witness, through being able to observe the sense inputs in a more regulated way. And circling back to [00:13:00] trauma, what we're learning to do over time is apply this disposition of the witness. There's a quality of equanimity that's spoken about, vairagya is the Sanskrit term, where we can feel those feelings, see those things, however perhaps aggravating they might be, and not get inflamed by it.
Be able to have the experience, have that conversation, that difficult conversation without becoming enraged through it or depressed or whatever it is, what strong emotions are being invoked there. What can happen, and I would suggest if this is pertaining to yourself or someone you know, or if you're a teacher looking to work with this practice, if you're going to go too deeply into the trauma space, be very mindful and perhaps seek guidance from a qualified professional.
And what can be done over time, once we've [00:14:00] learnt how to establish this disposition of the witness, Shiva Consciousness as it's sometimes called, we can go into the darkness, go and intentionally find some aspects of our psyche that we are. Not so comfortable with. Carl Jung spoke about the shadow, going into the shadow.
And this is where the, the work for most of us needs to be done. Going in there and over time with great care and true compassion, go in there and acknowledge what those things are. Seek to reset the relationship with the shadow. And this does take time, but it is a profound experience where we can learn over time to truly come to love all that we are.
The darkness, the goodness, the light, the shadow, [00:15:00] all of it. We see that it is, in fact, all of our truth. Totality. And, through this practice, through this understanding, it is not through suppressing our shadow that we can step into the light. It is through the exploration of the shadow that we can shine the light into the shadow, quite intentionally, quite specifically, through this incredible tool of antahamana meditation.
So I'll leave it there. I hope this has been useful. If you are interested to know more about Anoura meditation, I do have some meditations available. Probably SoundCloud would be the best place to look that up. Look for Yogi meditation on SoundCloud and Anoura meditation there. Otherwise, reach out. I'm happy to discuss and, to share the practices with you.
[00:16:00] Hurry.
