Meditation and Cannabis
Why I meditate
I have finally developed a regular meditation practice. I know meditating lowers blood pressure, reduces stress, improves sleep. That’s not why I meditate, although they’re excellent reasons for doing so. I began meditating because I realized I had become a thinking head on a stick - completely cut off from the felt presence of my body. My intense drive to be continually rushing, doing, planning, was my reality. Many people like me grow used to living in their heads. But I‘d finally begun to recognize the price I paid for this disconnect from my body.
I lived outside myself, always thinking of what others needed as if that defined me. It was the opposite of self-care, of groundedness, of being well-balanced. When you bring awareness inside the body you begin the process of refocusing from constant doing and performing to paying attention to what is happening in the present moment. Using your body as the focus helps suspend the incessant chatter in your mind.
I wanted freedom from the unconscious habitual patterns of my thinking mind that had hijacked my happiness. These conditioned patterns just kept playing out and I needed to first become aware of them in order to recognize they weren’t the truth of who I am.
Meditation is one tool in my toolbox that helps me shed these patterns and become closer to my authentic self.
As one of my teachers explained, our conditioning seems so real to us that we can’t see behind the veil to our true selves. As long as we remain unconscious of these patterns, we are unable to free ourselves:
Simply sitting in quiet on a regular basis becomes a refuge of sanity from the pressure of our habits. It provides the space for us to stop and see what we are actually experiencing.... We learn that thoughts are just thoughts, feelings just feelings, and that we don’t need to react. We are simply present. ..........
When your reality consists of mind-created ideas that limit and divide, you can’t possibly feel fully alive. Your attention is busy with the depleting task of trying to make sense of your needs and disappointments. When you rest your attention in just being aware, you’re no longer involved with the contents of your mind. This is revolutionary!
--- Gail Brenner, author of The End of Self-Help: Discovering Peace and Happiness Right at the Heart of Your Messy, Scary, Brilliant Life and Suffering is Optional.
Cannabis is one of my most brilliant meditation teachers
Another tool in my tool box is cannabis. I don’t use this tool every time I meditate, but when I do elevate, I am always amazed at how much deeper and aware my sense of feeling present in my body is; how much more connected to the natural world I feel and to the light that radiates all things and inside me as well. For someone like me, who has spent so many years cut off from awareness of the senses of my body, cannabis was the perfect teacher. Cannabis awakens the feeling sense of the body.
In addition to my Iyengar yoga practice I have become equally committed to a meditation practice known as the Realization Process.
The Realization Process is a direct path to embodied nondual awakening. It is a series of powerful but gentle, precise attunement practices for realizing your own nature as fundamental consciousness– an undivided expanse of luminous transparency, pervading your body and environment as a unity.
Pervading your body, fundamental consciousness is the basis of your sense of existing as an individual. It deepens and refines all of your human capacities: for physical sensation, emotional responsiveness, understanding, and perception. It opens you to your innate happiness. Pervading your body and environment, fundamental consciousness is the basis of an actual experience of oneness with everything around you. It enriches and refines your contact with other people and with all of nature.
- Judith Blackstone, my gifted teacher, founder of this practice and author of many books
When I began this practice, it was as difficult for me to feel physical sensations in my body as it was to touch the ground with my hands when I began my yoga practice. Just as in yoga, where blocks are used as props to help you experience what your body isn’t ready to do, cannabis has been an excellent prop in assisting me to feel physical sensations inside my body.
Cannabis wakes up the unfelt body. All those tiny physical sensations that I’m usually unaware of come more alive: the sense of vibrating, shimmering, buzzing. Waves of energies though the entire body become real to me. And just as with yoga, I don’t need my blocks or my cannabis all the time to feel my body. But both are my friends on any given day.
I first learned about embodied meditation reading a book by Will Johnson entitled, Cannabis in Spiritual Practice. Mr. Johnson has taught Buddhist meditation practices around the world. Although traditional Buddhist teachings look down on cannabis use, the author explains how using cannabis as a sacrament gets one “in touch with the lived reality of your body in this moment rather than the ideas you might have about reality in your mind.” The sacramental use of cannabis is part of a more than 3,000 year old spiritual tradition that worships the Hindu god Shiva.
“Shiva wants to wake the body up from its long slumber, viewing the awakened body as the direct doorway to the dimensions of embodied consciousness described in the Vedas. To awaken the body from its hibernation from feeling is to become ever more grounded in the sensory experience of the present moment. Thoughts jump to the future or retreat into the past, but the felt awareness of the body can only be experienced right now.” .....
This accentuation of awareness can’t be written off as just an effect of a drug, for cannabis does not in itself create sensations. It only heightens your awareness of whatever’s already there to be felt, and it’s up to you whether you want to play with this heightened awareness and let it guide you on a path of healing, opening you to a consciousness that embraces feeling presence.”
-- Will Johnson, Cannabis in Spiritual Practice.
As he says, ultimately, it’s up to you.
As I say, if not now, when?
