The Subtle Mind

This is Part 1 of 2 for this Blog. Please be sure to read about Sensei Charles in my next post.....

Meditation can help lower stress levels, thus help improve the quality of life and health. Previously, I wrote about a "Loving Kindness" meditative exercise and today I am writing about the "Subtle Mind" exercise.

The Loving-Kindness meditation practice gradually diminishes self-centeredness, and opens our heart to others, priming our mind for further development, while the Subtle Mind meditation is a basic daily practice that can progress one to the three levels of the subtle mind, which are:

1) The witnessing mind
2) Calm abiding, and
3) Unity consciousness

The subtle mind evolves over time and gives one a stable mind, less reactivity, greater patience and inner calm. The breath is used to obtain a subtle mind, and is used for two reasons: There is direct relationship between the breath and the mind. A peaceful breathing pattern will lead to a peaceful mind. Still the breath and the mind is stilled. Second, the breath is always with us.

Using the breath, one can learn how to tame and stabilize the mind by developing a witnessing consciousness. As witnessing consciousness replaces grasping and clinging, we progressively experience calm abiding and that eventually evolves into unity consciousness.

As you practice the subtle mind meditation, you will feel such a sense of comfort and peace, that you may not want to come back to the present. This is a technique that I was very happy to learn and one that I will utilize any time, especially in times of stress and anxiety. I feel blessed that I know of this technique because there is a limited culturally learned understanding of our body that is linked to our narrow outer view of our mental and spiritual aspects of our biological body. Most people in the United States are currently in that paradigm.

Science, aka: "traditional medicine," arrives at its understandings by reducing the body to its most physical elements. Traditional medicine has the physical facts of our biology mapped out quite well. But there is a connection of spiritual wellness to mental and physical wellness when we stop looking at the body in segments, such as the cardiologist, the gastroenterologist, the gynecologist, or the oncologist would. The profound mystery of life is encoded into our physical nature. (Dacher, E 2006).

Our biology is no longer a problem to be solved but rather a mystery to be lived and explored first-hand. It is in this way that we discover the higher levels of our biology - the mind/body and the spiritual body.