Meditation Made Easy by Lorin Roche

Author:Lorin Roche
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780061747557
Publisher: HarperCollins

GIVING AND RECEIVING LOVE

Attention is a many-splendored thing. In love, in business, and in meditation, you find yourself engaged with many tones of attention. Each has its own value and purpose. Each is a different way of relating to the world. You move between these modes naturally, all the time, and you always have.

When you meditate, you exercise the full range of attention. What I am calling the different tones of attention are the parts of that range, as individual colors are the parts of a rainbow.

Let's say you are out on a romantic date with a new love. You may find yourself paying attention with: appreciation, admiration, curiosity, wariness, delight, longing, and amusement. Notice that the type of attention changes slightly from moment to moment. You may look across the table at someone and find yourself switching from curiosity to delight, or from wariness to amusement.

During meditation, you may find the same kind of rapid changes going on as you pay attention to yourself.

Returning to the story above, let's say that years later, you are still in love and meet at the same restaurant to celebrate your relationship. As you look at the other, you may feel yourself moving between adoration, tenderness, amusement, respect, compassion, passion, devotion, and trust.

You may also feel yourself receiving these qualities from the other person, perhaps in a different order. Or you may feel a hankering for a type of attention you are not getting. Maybe you crave understanding and enthusiastic reassurance, and instead you are aware of receiving approval.

Attention is the very texture of a relationship. Each of the tones is a wonderful world of perception and can be explored endlessly. Part of your individual signature, your personality, is the sequence of types of attention you give other people and the speed at which you switch back and forth between them. Other people, when they think of you, think of the type of attention you give and ask for.

This is one of the ways you can learn how to pay attention to yourself in meditation. You can draw on the way you feel when you are being loved and listened to by an old friend, even one who has died or moved away. As you practice paying loving attention to all the material of the self presented to you in meditation, you are learning to love other people as well.

If you want to give love a chance to survive, know intimately the kind of attention you are good at giving, know the attention you crave to receive, and know both how to give and how to receive. Then work to extend your range of both giving and receiving.

This is where meditation comes into play. A simple way of describing meditation is: to take a bath in attention and absorb all its qualities. Even though each of us specializes in giving certain types of attention and feels a shortage of other types, somewhere in our soul we know all types. In meditation, the body

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