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 Open and aware – our feminine side
A client of mine, after learning to meditate, suddenly remembered for the first time how she loved sitting on top of the shed on the farm where she lived as a child. She could sit there for hours, just watching everything. And it was when she learned to meditate that she realised that it was the same experience she had had on top of the shed. When children are in this state they are very still, totally open and receptive, very concentrated and you can see how comfortable they are in their bodies. This is the natural state of our minds and bodies – resting in the senses, receptive and aware, just taking in everything around us. Being still and open is a blissful state in which we feel completely at peace with ourselves and the world. Our feminine and masculine sides When we learn to think, the price is that we lose contact with this state, in fact, it is often actively discouraged. I can remember being told off as a child for daydreaming when I became completely absorbed in something. My parents were always telling me I’d lose my head if it wasn’t screwed on! This is because we can’t think and be in touch with our bodies and our senses at the same time. Thinking is represented as the masculine state in the tradition. It is active, focused and directed. You have goals and move towards them – doing, not being. Meditation provides the means to consciously reintegrate the ability to become absorbed, still, open and receptive, while maintaining the skills of thinking. We learn to think and to focus at school, but the other side of our minds and our nature is just left to chance. Many people don’t know that this can be trained too, and that these two abilities, to be able to focus and to be open to everything are actually two different forms of concentration. Having eyes in the back of your head He accessed his peripheral concentration, and consciously brought this into the game – a skill which is a natural part of their culture. In meditation you learn how to train both these kinds of concentration. As far as I know, meditation is the only discipline which trains awareness as well as focusing. Both of these kinds of concentration are based on the way our brains and senses work. With our eyes for example, we have focused vision and peripheral vision. This ability applies to all our senses, so that we can focus on detail when we choose, or open up to the big picture and be receptive to the input of our surroundings. Men are naturally focused and women are naturally open to the periphery Men often wonder at the mysterious ability women have to “intuitively” know what someone else is feeling, to find things which have completely disappeared, and to do a number of things at once and not seem to be focused on any one of them. The research shows that women are much more “sensitive” in the sense that they are much more attuned and open to the overall input of their senses. This is where their “sixth sense” comes from. This ability of the senses to open to the periphery is called awareness in meditation. It is the process of being aware of what your senses are registering without thinking about it. It’s a quality of open awareness – of just watching – right around – without focusing on anything in particular, and it can be trained, just as focused concentration is trained.
Both female and male You are focusing on a meditation object so that you mind can become still and your body can relax – exactly like training a puppy to sit still, you are giving your mind somewhere to sit. But of course it wanders off, and so you open up to see what you are thinking about so you can bring it back. Both sides are as important as each other – they need each other and cannot exist without each other. Believing that you should never think when you meditate (keeping the “thought police” on active duty), is just as one-sided as believing you would lose your head if it wasn’t screwed on when you become absorbed and still. Therefore, when you have been well trained in meditation, you are training both sides of your mind, both sides of your brain and both sides of your senses. You are focusing, and then when your mind goes off to something else, you open your awareness, move to the periphery, and find out where it has gone. Focusing and awareness, then, are the two kinds of concentration which are natural to our brains and senses. They are our male and female sides – being tunnel-visioned and directed, and being completely open and receptive. They both have their power, they both need each other, and in meditation you learn to train both. Related pages
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meditation courses
Do you remember times as a child when you were watching something, or just listening, completely absorbed, and were quite happy to be still? You were meditating – it is something we could all do naturally and easily as children; we just didn’t know what we were doing.
