and over. When meditators develop bad habits,
the bad habits may often take hold here in the
transitions between resting to healing, and rest-
ing to feeling excited and active.
Meditation is pure improvisation, with the
five pranas bouncing off each other. The five
pranas are combining, transforming into each
other, and activating your instinct to survive
and thrive. If you want to have a good time
in your meditation, and have your practice be
healthy, cultivate the attitude of delighting in
each phase of prana as it appears. Savor the
delight of the breath of life flowing through
you, be grateful for each wave, each pulsation,
each changing experience. Life is a genius at
maintaining itself.
When we meditate in a way that is in tune
with our own prana flow, we feel how our
power is flowing and where it is stuck. The
stuck sensations are uncomfortable. And if we
gently attend to them, they usually figure out
how to reestablish a healthy flow. Meditation al-
lows everything to get unstuck and circulate. By
the same token, if you meditate in a way that is
not suitable for you, you may find it frustrating
and depressing. Monks, for example, take vows
of celibacy, poverty, and obedience. So their
meditation practice needs to help them suppress
the flow of sexual desire and kill their ego. If
you are not a monk, and practice in the style of
a monk, you may just end up lonely and broke.
The great challenge of meditation is to
discern what your type is, and then meditate in
a way that supports your purpose of living. For
example, if you have a love life, or want to have
a love life, cherish every impulse of passion as it
arises in meditation, wherever it sparks in your
body. If you feel a tingle of lust, or an urge to
express emotion, or a creative urge to jump up
and rearrange the furniture, love those impulses
in themselves. Stay there in meditation, savor-
ing the impulses, for however long you intended
to meditate, ten minutes or thirty minutes or
whatever.
Think of meditation as an invitation to the
dance – the internal dance of the five pranas.
Take inspiration from prana, apana, samana,
udana, vyana, as the basic rhythm pattern of
the dance of life.
Dr. Lorin Roche has been practicing meditation since
1968, and was trained as a meditation teacher in
- He holds a PhD from the University of Califor-
nia at Irvine for his research into the inner experience
of meditation. Lorin is the author of Meditation Made
Easy and The Radiance Sutras. With his partner
Camille Maurine, he co-wrote Meditation Secrets for
Women. Lorin and Camille train meditation teachers
worldwide. Join Lorin and Camille at Esalen in Big
Sur for an ecstatic five-day meditation retreat in Febru-
ary, 2019. Visit radiancesutras.com for more informa-
tion. Always remember, Lorin says that meditation is
as natural as breathing.