Meditation and Kundalini Awakening, Part Two

Sally Kempton Podcast (Part 2)

Tami Simon: You’re listening to “Insights at the Edge.” Today my guess is Sally Kempton, a meditation teacher who has immersed herself in the world of meditation for over four decades, and has earned a reputation as a highly experienced, gifted, and insightful mediation teacher.

Sally’s approach to meditation draws on her many years of training closely with Swami Muktananda, along with her deep knowledge of kundalini and subtle energies. She has maintained her initial training as a journalist throughout her life, writing and editing magazines, publishing books, and for a period of time as a regular columnist in Yoga Journal. Sounds True will be releasing Sally Kempton’s new book, Meditation for the Love of It, as well as the audio program, Beginning Meditation.

In this second part of this two-part episode with Sally Kempton, Sally and I spoke about “having a love affair” with meditation, what it means for meditation to be one’s beloved. We also discussed the stages of kundalini awakening, and how different forms of meditation practice might actually be most appropriate, according to the stages of kundalini awakening. Here’s the conclusion of my two-part conversation with Sally Kempton.

Sally, one of the central metaphors you use in Meditation for the Love of It is that of a love affair, that we could actually have a love affair with meditation. You know, I don’t think that’s the experience of most meditators. It’s a discipline, it’s something their doctor told them they should do because it will help with their stress levels, but . . . OK, so how am I going to have a love affair with meditation?

Sally Kempton: I actually think that one of the reasons why meditation is hard for people is because we think of it as a duty, or something that we do for the sake of something else. What I actually found is, first of all you do need to have some basic interest in what I guess you could call the “field of your inner awareness.” In other words, there has to be some essential curiosity as to what it is you’re going to find when you turn your attention inside.

Given that, I think the secret is just deciding that you want to be in relationship with yourself. In other words, that you want to penetrate the layers that are standing in between you and the deepest sense of who you are, whether you call it the “essence” or the “great mind.” In order to do that, in order to love it, you kind of have to decide that the journey itself has got to be a pleasure for you! You make a decision that your inner being, your inner self, is worthy of relationship in the way that someone that you’re very intimate with, someone that you love or like in your external life, is worthy of being in relationship with. Sometimes that takes a very radical reorientation of how you look at yourself, because most of us are used to looking for love, obviously, outside ourselves, and the idea that it actually is possible to find it inside is very counterintuitive to the way we [usually think].

So the way I started was by actually taking my teacher’s teaching, “God dwells within you as you,” and trying to understand what that meant, and realizing that what he meant by you was not just some kind of transcendental “me” that I was going to come in contact with when I took off all of the layers of ego, etc., but actually had to mean me! And then I had to ask myself the question, “What is ‘me’? What do we mean by ‘me’?” And then to be willing to sit with the experience of being with myself with the intention to move deeper into what that field of consciousness that I identify in various ways as “me” actually was—with the intention of understanding what in there could possibly be sacred, could possibly be worthy of love in a really functional way.

I would say the way you start is to say to yourself, “OK, I want to fall in love with meditation,” you know? “I want to fall in love with that in myself that all of the great sages have told me is beautiful, is worthy of love, so where is it? Who is it?” You see, you actually start with a form of self-inquiry, and you go into meditation asking yourself, or just asking the question “Where is love?” or “How do I come into a beautiful, playful, intimate relationship with myself?” And something inside will show you!

TS: Well, you make it sound pleasurable, joyful, but I think when most people look inside, they find a whole panoply of things, including lots of very disturbing things: our self-hatred, our sense of unworthiness, and that doesn’t exactly sound—

SK: Our fear.

TS: Yes! And that doesn’t sound so great!

SK: Yes, exactly, and I think that’s what stops people. That’s what keeps people from—

TS: Well, there’s a whole series of reasons, too. “Meditation sounds boring,” “It just sounds hard,” “My back hurts,” “It’s physically painful, plus I have to find—”

SK: “I can’t get rid of my thoughts.”

TS: Yes! [People think,] “There’s a million reasons why I hate it, and now you’re saying you can turn it into a love affair?” So I need a little bit more to understand how I’m going to do that.

SK: OK, so first of all, it’s very, very important to make your body comfortable. A lot of us are taught meditation by being given a training posture, which is usually some form of lotus, sitting cross-legged, and for most of us, that hurts. You can sit for five or ten minutes, or if you’re a hatha yogi, you can sit for half an hour, but you’re going to have experiences in your knees and your back, etc.

What I ask people to do is sit in a chair, stuff pillows behind your back so that you’re supported, so you’re actually not trying to train your body in a yogic way in meditation. This is actually quite a radical idea, because one of the traditional teachings about meditation is that you need to be in a vajra posture. So making your body comfortable, and having the intention to make your body comfortable, that it’s OK for your body to be comfortable, you’re not doing austerities—that makes a huge difference.

The other thing you need is a series of practices for dealing with all of the levels of thought that come up, from just the mental crickets sounding, the mentalogue, to the deeper issues. One of the things that I do in the book is give a series of strategies for working with the mind, because of course just getting past the thought stream is hard enough for most people.

TS: Can you summarize a couple of the core strategies?

SK: Yes. One of them is, of course, having a focused practice. I actually recommend mantra practice, some form of mantra practice, for beginning meditators for two reasons: One, it gives them an alternative thought for the mind. Two, if the mantra is empowered, if the mantra has shakti in it, then the mantra itself will—you can kind of hook your mind into it, and it will help take your mind inside.

Of course—and this is Meditation 101—part of the point of a concentrative practice or a focal practice is that you keep bringing the mind back to it, and eventually you actually train the mind to be able to follow that track. Usually I find, for most people, if you do a sort of training, meditation training, and you do it for twenty minutes a day for two or three weeks, you do actually start to cut that groove. At least you can sit down, and your attention will start to go inside.

At this point, I’ve found that it’s very important to have a practice that is kinesthetically enjoyable, which to me means—and again, this is how I work with people who are beginning the practice—an attention to the breath that’s very, very soft, that’s really more about allowing the breath, and feeling the touch of the breath, whether you’re feeling it in your nostrils, whether you’re feeling it in your throat, whether you’re feeling it in your heart or your belly. It’s a very sort of t’ai chi approach to the breath, in that when you start to feel that you’re forcing the breath, you really come back to, as much as possible, letting go and letting the breath come in on its own, and then putting a loving thought with the breath—which for a lot of people is a very simple thought, like “Let go” or “Peaceful” or “Trust,” or for some people “I am” is a beautiful practice. You let the breath come in on its own, and then you allow the exhalation to carry the word.

Generally speaking, I find if you’re working with the heart center, that after a little while—after actually even sometimes one or two sessions, but normally a week or two—of actually breathing with the tension in the heart, with a word or a sense of light, that the heart center does begin to soften and open. And you begin to have—at least this tends to happen with the students that I work with—you begin to have an experience of the kind of love field that’s present in the heart center. And as the heart opens, as the heart awakens in that way, then you begin to enjoy it. It’s about focus, a little bit of discipline, having a sense of softness, having a word that induces positive experience in you, and an attention to the heart.

And from there, then you can start to experiment in the inner body, and you can start to work with other practices, but what I’ve found is that— You know, when you’re doing a very “take no prisoners,” direct-path, self-inquiry meditation, like “Who am I?” or dissolving your identifications or your attachments, that if you’re doing it in a heart-centered kind of way, you can actually be quite radical in your deconstructing practice, because there is a sense of softheartedness that’s being engendered.

TS: I didn’t 100 percent follow you there. The deconstruction process of an inquiry is different if you’re heart centered?

SK: Yes. The way I like to teach meditation to long-term students is to get them centered in the heart in the way that we were describing, and then to ask them to do a very serious self-inquiry of “Who am I?” or “Who or what am I?” or tuning in to bare awareness or bare consciousness. In other words, to begin to get a sense of the aware-ing that’s beyond the personality. And what I’ve often found in practitioners who do this kind of what I’m calling “deconstructive process”—in other words, the neti-neti type of meditation, where you begin to look past the things you normally identify with.

TS: Neti-neti meaning “not this”?

SK: “Not this, not this,” right.

TS: Yes.

SK: The practice which shows you “I’m not my body,” “I’m not my personal history,” “I’m not my emotions.” Very often, for many practitioners, you come to a kind of a place of emptiness in that meditation, which feels bleak to many people. In other words, you deconstruct your personality a little bit, and then you’re left with, “Oh my God! Who am I?” In doing the kind of direct-path practice that tends to wake you up to the self that’s beyond your body and personality, people often have to go through an experience of emptiness or non-existence, which, to use D. L. Winnicott’s terminology, takes them back to experiences in their early childhood of feeling empty or abandoned or alone that can be quite disturbing.

What I’ve found is that if you’re centered in the heart, if you’ve really carved out a sense of the heart in yourself, you actually can come up against the experience of moving past your ordinary self-identification in a way that actually lets you go deeper, lets you let go of more in terms of the false personality, without feeling so disoriented.

TS: Mm-hmm. Good. That’s helpful. Now, in part one of this podcast, we spent quite a bit of time talking about kundalini awakening, your own experiences with it. And you mentioned that even the urge—the urge to fall in love with our own experience through meditation—is a sign that there’s some aspect of the kundalini that’s awake in us.

SK: Yes.

TS: But that kundalini awakening happens in phases or stages. I’m curious if you could say more what those stages are in light of meditation unfolding.

SK: Thank you. There’s a couple of ways to talk about it. In the Kashmir Shaiva tradition, they actually call it shakti pot, which literally means “descent of cosmic energy.” And the idea is there’s an infusion of transcendent energy that comes from the universe, and that this creates an arising of the innate kundalini energy that’s there inside you. The infusion and kindling seems to happen at several different levels, one being the kind of mild one, where you suddenly find you have an interest in meditation and the spiritual path.

Then there’s a more intense one, where you start to be aware of centers in your body. In classical kundalini awakening, the kind they talk about in the yoga books, there’s often an experience of something going on in the base of the spine. As you know, you feel an energy in the base of the spine, and you feel it rising. There’s another.

Another very classical awakening of kundalini energy is strong awakening of kundalini that takes place in the heart. It has two manifestations, which sometimes go together and sometimes are quite separate. One is the awakening of love, the awakening of soft feelings or devotional feelings, the awakening of the pleasure that we’ve been talking about. And the other manifestation is an awakening of insight. I’m sure this is your experience in your practice, that there’s a sense at a certain point in the practice that you understand certain things about the world and about the inner world, and you begin to be able to see the difference between your so-called ordinary experience and your deeper self, and teachings from the texts of every tradition start to make sense to you. You kind of get the mystical download. And it happens kind of spontaneously, right? It’s like you’re just sitting in meditation, and you suddenly get something!

It also applies to your life. You begin to have insights about your life and your path. In Sanskrit, it’s called the awakening of chit kundalini—chit meaning “consciousness”—and it happens in the heart. The awakening that sends all those phenomena occurring in the physical body, which a lot of people—for instance, in the book Kundalini Rising, the anthology that Sounds True published, there are some quite wonderful descriptions of the physical movements and the changes in breathing that happen with that level of kundalini awakening. It starts to put the body through a purification process.

The highest stage—the so-called highest stage—of kundalini awakening is where it awakens in the centers in the head, in which the experiences of union, of oneness— [It’s when] you actually recognize that there’s just one force in the universe.

So these are the three levels that the texts talk about. And practitioners, deep practitioners on the kundalini path, have described literally thousands of experiences that are the signs of awakened kundalini—which, again, many of them appear in that book—everything from you feel heat in the body, you feel tingling sensations in the body, your breath changes, your breath becomes very slow or it speeds up, you begin to experience lightness and heaviness. All of those manifestations that we experience in meditation, that I think many people experience in meditation, that are kinesthetic or pranic, as well as the experience of having your stuff come up—your buried issues, your sadness that you’ve been stuffing for your entire life, or how people sometimes come out of meditation with incredible bursts of irritability or anger or sensitivity—these are actually part of the experience of purification that goes on when the kundalini energy starts to be awakened.

In my experience, it’s one of the reasons why it’s important to have a teacher. It doesn’t have to be a guru, but it’s important to have contact with somebody who has experience with kundalini because you can get very bamboozled by these experiences. You know, you get very upset by the purificatory emotions, and you also get very allured by some of the glamorous spiritual experiences that show up, so it’s really important to have a sense of what’s happening.

The other thing that I’ve found is really key in meditation with kundalini—and indeed, in all meditation practices, and there’s a lot of talk about this in the book—is to honor your inner experience. In other words, to have an intention of really welcoming what’s going on inside you. Of course, you won’t want to welcome all of it, but if you go into meditation with this understanding that there is this intelligent force that’s awakening you, and that its intention, the intention of the energy that’s moving inside you, is loving and benign, then it actually allows you to work with some of the more surprising manifestations of kundalini in a much more even way.

TS: Now I’m curious: do you think that, depending on where somebody is in their kundalini awakening path, these four different markers that you’ve described, that they might actually benefit from meditating in a different kind of way? So there’s not like one method of meditation, depending on where you’re at. Could you talk about that?

SK: Brilliant point! Yes, I actually think it’s enormously important to have guidance in what is an appropriate form of meditation at particular stages. If you’re really following the path of looking for the signals of the shakti, looking for the signals of the energy, the energy will actually tell you. You’ll begin to have a sense of (and I know this is your experience as an experienced practitioner) “OK, right now, let me just deepen the breath” or “I need to be more grounded, so maybe I should send a laser beam of light from the base of my spine into the earth” or “The energy is trying to rise, so what do I do with that knot in my throat? Maybe what I want to do is just be present with it and make some space around it.” Actually, if you pay attention, there is a certain amount of guidance that goes on, and that will lead you.

The thing is that in order to find the guidance, in order to follow the guidance, you need to be able to discern what is the guidance of the energy, and what is just something that’s coming up in your mind. That’s why having a teacher or someone that you can ask questions of is so helpful in meditation, because an experienced teacher can really say, “OK, now that’s just an idea, this is something that you should pay attention to, and this is how to tell the difference.”

TS: Now you mentioned that you spent several decades studying with Muktananda, and in part one we talked about how he was known for the transfer of shakti pot to people all over the world. What do you think is happening? What was happening in the “transfer of shakti pot”? How does that work?

SK: I once asked him that question, and he just laughed. He never would say, so what I’m going to tell you is completely theoretical.

TS: Well, it’s a little bit more than theoretical! There you were, you were an intelligent observer on the scene for a long time!

SK: Yes. I actually began to understand it better when I myself began teaching, because what I discovered is that, when I first began seriously teaching—which was inside the tradition at the time, shortly after I became a swami, and I was in an ashram situation where it was just me—what I saw was that, when you sit in the seat of a certain lineage, there is something that moves through that’s a very, very palpable energy. It doesn’t come from inside. It’s not you. It’s not yours; it’s not personal. It’s literally a sense that some very subtle force is moving through you and into the people in the room.

The only way I can describe it is phenomenologically, so sometimes it’s a sense of—it actually feels like a kind of expansive, gaseous feeling that kind of overtakes everyone in the room. Sometimes it’s like a beam from the heart; it’s a beam that goes into someone’s heart. Sometimes it’s as if a big love field opens up in the room. Sometimes it’s as though everyone suddenly understands something together.

There’s a lot of talk now about collective intelligence. That transmission of shakti is what it really feels like to me, and what it felt like in those days with Muktananda, and what it feels like when I experience it now, is that what some people call the “field of infinite intelligence” just opens up, and everyone who’s present in the room enters into that field.

I can’t describe it in a more palpable way, because it’s such a subtle thing, but a lot of it has to do with intention. For instance, there’s a process that teachers who give shakti pot, who do this transmission, go through, where you actually pray to the lineage teachers. You ask that the energy flows. So it’s kind of a deliberate thing; you invoke it. And I think a lot of the practices that people do in the more mystical traditions—you know, using mantras or using prayer to invoke God’s energy—is part of the process that allows that transmission to happen. But then there’s the much more mysterious process, where nobody’s intending anything, nobody’s doing anything, but it just flows!

In my own case, my attention goes to a certain subtle place in my being. My attention fixes itself, so to speak, or it segues into that place, and then transmission occurs. It really has nothing to do with my personal self, or even my personal intentions, but somehow I’ve been guided in finding myself there, so that whatever those energies are that transmit experience are free to play. I think that’s how it works, you know? There are mystical forces; there are lineage energies.

TS: That’s the part I’m curious about: lineage energies, mystical forces.

SK: What the hell are they?

TS: Yes!

SK: I don’t know. You know, I’m very conscious of the way the particular energy signature of Muktananda’s lineage feels. There’s a very, very distinct energy signature there.

TS: Can you describe it?

SK: Yes. It’s very forceful. It’s extremely luscious and juicy, and it’s like it kind of expands your heart. It’s ecstatic. It creates a field in which you love everybody in the field, but it’s got a forceful quality to it. If I can use this word, it’s got a kind of masculine, forceful quality to it.

You know, when you’re sensitive to energies, then you know that Tami’s energy field is unique to Tami, my energy field is unique to me, and in a certain sense, we relate to each other energy field to energy field in ways we’re not normally conscious of. Well, spiritual energy also has a personal signature, so one of the strange—I don’t know what you’d call it, gifts or discernments, that came to me over the years was a sense of feeling into different energy fields.

For example—and again, this is just my experience—my experience of the energy around Trungpa’s centers, for instance, is it’s very deep, it’s kind of more belly based, it kind of knocks your mind out, it kind of descends very thickly, and it’s not ecstatic, at least in my experience. It’s much more oomph!

And some of the Christian energies that I’ve been around, which are also very much love energies, they’re soft and expansive, but without that forceful, we could say penetrative quality that, for example, my teacher’s energy had.

And I could also describe what I sense as my own energy.

TS: Sure.

SK: It seems to be kind of soft. It’s kind of expansive; it’s like a big field. It’s much more subtle. It’s kind of clear, and the way I experience it is that it creates a kind of big field in which the people who are inside whatever the gathering happens to be, it just kind of encompasses everybody in the gathering. And it’s clearly lineage energy. At this point, it’s not the same lineage energy as my teachers. You know, I have no idea where it comes from, although my sense is that it’s very related to the Kashmir Shaiva lineage of Abhinava Gupta.

I think that we all have—this is going to sound really wild!—I think we all have connections to spiritual lineages that come through our practice and through our development, and that at different points in our life, we become attuned to one of these lineages, and we get gifts from those lineages. I would say anyone who meditates seriously and turns into themselves is going to, sooner or later—if not sooner, then later—begin to realize that there is help coming from a subtler, higher source that they’re tuning in to when they are aligned in their practice.

TS: OK. Let’s hear more about Abhinava Gupta.

SK: OK. Abhinava Gupta was a tenth-century sage who lived in the neighborhood of Srinagar in Kashmir. He was part of a very small, kind of family-oriented group of students and teachers of what’s generally called the Kashmir Shaiva lineage. He was a heavy-duty tantric practitioner, which is to say he did a lot of ritual. You know, hard-core tantric practitioners are very much about ritual.

TS: Can you describe what kinds of rituals? Give us the feel.

SK: The tantric ritual usually starts with setting up an altar and a worship situation for a deity. You practice with the deity, your chosen deity, and you make offerings. You make food offerings. You know, the Tibetan vajrayana tradition is very much a tantric tradition in the same stream as the Himalayan tantric traditions.

So you make a lot of physical offerings, and then in the deeper practices, you make interior offerings. There’s a tradition in which you make the offerings of your prana, you make the offerings of your actions. You learn to live your life in a rather formal, ritual relationship to a higher power, to a deity who has a form, who has a face, who dresses in certain clothes. There’s a lot of visualization. The idea is that by invoking the energy of the deity, you bring it forth in your life, and then you learn to internalize it so that you bring the deity into yourself.

Abhinava Gupta was a master of that particular tantric lineage, and also the famous and notorious kala tantricism, in which they did the five Ms practice, which is the practice that includes the sexual practice in which you use so-called forbidden substances, including wine, including meat (which in those traditions was a forbidden substance), fish, something that’s identified as grain (which was probably some form of intoxicating soma substance, ganja substance), and then you engage in ritualized sexual practice in which the couple mutually brings the kundalini energy up to the crown.

He was a master of that practice, and he was also a master of the Kashmir Shaiva practice, which is not that kind of tantric practice. It’s an almost entirely interior practice, where you identify yourself with the ultimate reality, who is called Shiva, which in that sense means the “ground consciousness of the universe.”

And he was a great polymath who wrote extensively in the tradition of someone like Nagarjuna, Lao-tzu, all the great spokespeople for the nondual traditions. He was one of the great nondual teachers, and he had a practice lineage that is the lineage that my guru— My guru discovered Kashmir Shaivism long after his own enlightenment, and he got interested in it because it described the process of enlightenment. It was the only teaching that he’d ever seen in the Indian tradition that actually described the process of enlightenment as he had experienced it, which included the awakening of kundalini and the unfoldment of kundalini. So Abhinava Gupta was a master of kundalini also.

But my sense of connection to him, and I guess my sense of lineage connection to him, really came about through my study and teaching of Kashmir Shaiva philosophy, which is basically a series of practices for self-consciously and mentally, psychophysically, continually recognizing that God is manifesting as you, that the people and the circumstances around you are manifestations of God. And you study the tradition that shows, which reveals, which explains how the Great Chain of Being works, how the vastness manifests as the density that we experience, and then reverses itself and gives you the capability for experiencing the vastness inside of your physical body.

In studying that tradition, which I don’t claim to have embodied or fully realized in any way, somehow it seems to have connected me to his lineage stream, and it feels as though that’s who teaches or who transmits experience in my teaching.

TS: At the moment, what I’m filled with is a sense of awe about studying someone from ten centuries ago, reading their texts, and how that could awaken such a feeling of devotion and connection in you.

SK: It’s pretty awesome, isn’t it?

TS: It feels that way to me, yes.

SK: Yes; yes. It’s the extraordinary thing about these great lineages, that they’re so alive! If you attune yourself to them, they’re just completely alive in this moment, in this day.

TS: Now, you mentioned that you were able to begin to experience this lineage flowing through you when you became a swami. Now, you were a swami for a period of time, but you gave up your swami-ness? Can you tell me a little bit about that? Why did you stop being Swami Durgananda, and become non-swami Sally?

SK: Basically, it was because, in stepping out of the organization that I was a part of—

TS: The Siddha Yoga?

SK: Yes, the Siddha Yoga organization, part of how we did that was that I gave up holding on to that clerical identity.

TS: Why did you step out of the organization?

SK: I was just ready to follow my own path, really. At a certain point, I think, for many people, for many practitioners, you just kind of have to start coloring outside the lines. For me to be a spokesperson for a particular tradition, which is an exquisitely beautiful tradition that I deeply honor— At a certain point, you stop being able to express inside the language of a particular tradition the fullness of what you’re sensing as being born in you.

In a certain sense, it was my integral move, you know? I just felt that I needed to teach in a way that took account of contemporary psychology, of evolutionary theory, of other teachings that come through different paths. It just felt like the right thing to do was to just step outside the current of my tradition.

Also, I had begun to feel that monk’s robes were separative—in other words, that I was occupying a position. By wearing those robes, it automatically asked people to believe what I said because I was wearing the robes, and I very much wanted to teach as an ordinary person, speaking to peers and contemporaries, without that clerical separation.

And there was a personal part of it. I kind of wanted to reclaim my historical identity. In other words, my teacher identity had been as Swami Durgananda, and it became very important to me to integrate Sally Kempton into my life as a teacher, because it almost felt as though she had been compartmentalized someplace, and hadn’t quite grown up. You know, my Swami Durgananda–self was a very mature, wise grown-up, but Sally hadn’t quite caught up to her, so I actually spent a few years after leaving the sangha just helping my historical self, that part of myself, integrate with my teacher self.

TS: And how is that integration going?

SK: It seems to be complete! It seems to have happened.

TS: Now, Sally, I think something that I would call maybe a small miracle, or at least a great boon, has occurred with the publication of Meditation for the Love of It, which is that Elizabeth Gilbert, the author of Eat, Pray, Love, has offered a foreword to the book.

SK: And her terrific voice!

TS: And her terrific voice! So how did this happen?

SK: Well, Liz was actually a practitioner of the tradition that I followed for many years, and so when she started meditating, she used the book, in its first incarnation, as her meditation guide. The book, as people find when they read it, is very much an on-the-map companion to your practice. And so she had read the earlier version of it, and it had been important to her, so she very kindly agreed to introduce it. It’s very delightful to have her wonderful, down-to-earth, unique voice in the book!

TS: We started this second part of our conversation, Sally, talking about meditation as a love affair. I’m curious if you could help map out for people what to do when they’re not feeling in love with their partner, their meditation partner, their own inner beloved—meaning, you know, you talk to relationship experts, and they tell you, “Well, you get to this stalemate with your partner, and here are some suggestions—” What are suggestions for what people can do when they’re in some sort of place where they’re not particularly interested in their love partner, [namely] meditation?

SK: That is a great question! What I’ve always done, and what I suggest people do, is try a different practice. In other words, usually when you’re in a stalemate, it’s for one of two reasons: one is that a lot of difficult material is coming up, but often it’s because you’re bored or you’ve been doing the same practice for such a long time that it’s become routine, so what you need to do is find a way to take yourself out on a date, really!

One of the things I suggest in the book, which is what I did, is to start asking yourself questions, like “What do I want in meditation?” “What’s my relationship like at this point?” “Why am I feeling dissatisfied?” In other words, you have that dialogue with yourself that you might have with your partner, where you’re very straight! You’re very honest.

And then you also might want to go into meditation with a question. It’s one of the alchemical miracles of meditation that if you pose a question to yourself at the beginning of meditation, and then go into meditation and don’t think about it, that very often an insight or a shift will come through that mysterious inner process, where the question goes into the energetic vortex inside you, and there’s a shift of consciousness. So asking yourself open-ended questions like that will often make a difference.

But one of the reasons why I have so many practices in this book—and sometimes my students say, “You’re giving me so many options that I need to figure out how to make a choice!” But the reason for the options is so that you actually can say to yourself, for example, “OK, so I’m feeling dry, my heart is feeling dry, I’m feeling bored, so what do I do? Well, maybe I need to chant a little bit, or maybe I need to do some wild visualization practice, or maybe I want to do something where I invoke a higher energy and I ask for help.” In other words, you give yourself some different practices. You try them out until you find something that kindles your interest. That’s one way to do it.

Another way to do it is to do some very obvious physical things, like changing the time and place where you meditate. Going on retreat is sometimes really, really helpful in kindling your practice, especially if you’re very busy. Or going to meditate in some sacred place, so that you’re actually getting help from the atmosphere. So those are the ways that I suggest that people work with boredom and dryness and disinterest.

Another thing is that there’s also the hard-core approach, which is, “How many years do you have left in this lifetime?” If this is important to you, then you could just say to yourself, in a really serious way, “OK. What’s it going to take for me to break through here?” Usually when you ask that question seriously, you know! You know what the issue is.

In my experience, the thing that’s in the way in meditation is usually the thing that’s in the way in life. In other words, if you’re someone who has a hard time being present with yourself in meditation, you probably have a hard time being present with other people. In a certain sense, meditation can be the arena in which you actually begin to understand what your deep life-issues actually are. And then you might ask yourself, “OK, so what’s going on in my life that’s mirroring my experience in meditation?” Maybe I have to make some adjustments in the way I’m eating, in the way I’m working, in the way I’m working with my own tension.” A lot of changing your experience in meditation or becoming more open in your practice is actually being willing to do a little self-inquiry in the rest of your life as well.

The other issue, when as they say material is coming up, when difficult psychological material is coming up in meditation, I would say that it’s very important to be willing to say to yourself, “OK, I can take this much sadness arising, but right now I’m not ready to go beyond that,” and actually turn into yourself and ask for some help and support from your inner world, and then help and support from others in your life in dealing with that material. In other words, there’s certain times when meditation alone is not going to help you deal with the stuff that’s coming up in meditation. Maybe you need help from a therapist or maybe you need to confide in a friend, and if you’re lucky, you’ll have a teacher who will be able to help you calibrate it.

What makes meditation juicy and interesting is often helped by just making some adjustments in your physical, psychological life as well.

TS: So in talking about meditation as a love affair, do you think there is a connection between our love affair with meditation and our potential love affair with humans?

SK: Totally!

TS: What’s that connection?

SK: I think it depends on which direction you come from, and maybe it depends on whether you’re an introvert or an extrovert. My experience has been that, for me, in my ability to be intimate and open with other people, it was necessary first to become intimate and open with myself, but that I would never have been able to be intimate and open with myself if I hadn’t had a couple of deep experiences of intimacy with another person. So in a certain sense, recognizing that there is love and connection possible with another human being, having an experience of intimate, loving connection in some way in your ordinary life, seems to give you guidance for tuning in to it inside yourself, but it works the other way, too. The more I found that I could find that loving self inside, the more I was able to be open and vulnerable and genuinely intimate with other people.

I think that, as we were saying earlier, it’s very much a dance between the relationship with yourself and the relationship with others. And if we’re fortunate, we really do have a dance going on, so that we can become more open with ourselves, and then that inner openness allows us to be safely open with the people we’re close to in our lives.

TS: And now just one final question, Sally. You mentioned to me that you’re in your late sixties, and I’m curious: now that you’ve had a love affair with meditation for probably well over four decades, where are you now? Where is that love affair for you now?

SK: Well, it’s completely the context of my life, you know, that there’s a certain place that I got to in meditation, and that I think anyone who practices seriously gets to, where there’s a kind of field of inner experience that’s just present all the time. It colors your vision, it colors your relationships. And then there’s, for me, the sort of marriage of awareness. I call it the “marriage of awareness of love”; that is, the recognition that at the deepest level, what I am is Consciousness, is Awareness, and the recognition of or the experience of this very flowing, very juicy, very luscious love energy that’s really a part of the field of the subtle body. It’s kind of where I find myself, at this point. So it’s a marriage of awareness and embodiment, which is very strong at times and less strong at others, but which is always accessible.

TS: Beautiful! Thank you!

I’ve been speaking with Sally Kempton. She is the author of a new Sounds True book called Meditation for the Love of It: Enjoying Your Own Deepest Experience, with a foreword by Elizabeth Gilbert, the author of Eat, Pray, Love. She has also created a new, two-CD audio program with Sounds True called Beginning Meditation, geared specifically for beginners.

Sally, thank you for our two-parter! Wonderful!

SK: Thank you, Tami, for just your capacity for opening up space with people. It’s been a total delight!

TS: SoundsTrue.com. Many voices, one journey.

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