think and listen deeply, and awaken greater wisdom and compassion through our meditations, which in turn improve the quality of relationships.
At the end of the book we have included a reference for resources to support your continued inquiry and learning, and to offer additional ideas and strategies for exploring the many streams of these practices. We have also provided an index of the various meditations described in this book so that you may easily find and refer to specific ones.
RELAXATION, PEAK PERFORMANCE, AND BEYOND
This book is a mental-fitness manual for everyone interested in learning methods to enhance their health and performance, master stress, and deepen their appreciation of life. It is also a handbook for those who wish to understand and master these skills in order to teach them to others or to equip themselves to make a greater contribution to the world. Whatever your motivation, you will find that the ideas and techniques in this collection have been presented with an emphasis on their practical applications in our busy, modern lives, while preserving a sense of the depth and sacredness traditionally associated with the inner arts of personal development. We suggest that you ponder these ideas with your intellect, contemplate their meaning and value in your heart, and test and confirm their profound practicality in the laboratory or the playing field of your daily life, work, and relationships.
If you are primarily interested in physical relaxation or in learning to stay centered, calm, and focused amid the chaos of daily life, you will find many of these techniques highly effective. If exploring the nature and potential of your mindbody is important to you, there are methods to ripen that understanding. If improving your mental and physical performance or building healthier and more harmonious relationships is of significance to you, there are many strategies that will help you in these arenas as well. And if you approach this inquiry with a heartfelt sense of devotion, a sincere yearning to deepen your spiritual insight and to awaken within yourself a sense of universal compassion that empowers you to be of greater service to others, many of these methods will serve as a vehicle to transform and open your heart-mind to new dimensions of wisdom, wonder, love, and inner strength.
FIELD-TESTED WISDOM AND METHODS
Over the past thirty years, we have had the rare opportunity to study and practice closely with great teachers from many of the world's religious and contemplative traditions. From these remarkable men and women we have learned thousands of effective techniques for developing the full potential of the human mindbody. In many cases these methods have been practiced, cherished, and preserved with inspiring results for millennia.
Many of these revered masters and respected researchers of the inner arts and sciences encouraged us to carry what they had taught us back into our world. We have treasured what they shared with us and with their guidance and blessings, have shared what we have learned with tens of thousands of people around the globe. Following the examples of many of our teachers, our lives have been blessed with times of travel, teaching, consulting, and service work in the world, and with times of intensive, quiet cloistered retreat. Over the years, we have each spent a total of about three years in intensive silent meditation retreats and have maintained a discipline of a daily meditation practice, both of which have deeply influenced and guided our work in the world.
This book contains a distillation of over a hundred methods that we have found personally and professionally effective. The contemporary renaissance of interest in matters of mental health and fitness, spirit, and consciousness has brought these methods of relaxation and meditation out of caves, monasteries, and remote cultures into medical centers, meeting rooms, research institutions, and the mainstream of modern life. These skillful methods have been scientifically studied and demonstrated to be highly effective for enhancing health and mental and physical performance, awakening creativity, and tapping the life- and vitality-giving forces of our lives. They are also effective antidotes to the epidemic of stress-related diseases, anxiety, hostility, loneliness, depression, dysfunctional behavior, and existential yearning that plague our complex and rapidly changing world.
Over the past three decades we have relied upon these inner arts as primary tools in our work in several fields: as mental fitness coaches for world-class and Olympic champions and corporate peak performers; researchers investigating the nature of human consciousness; clinicians teaching psychophysical self-optimization skills to adults, children, and staff in leading medical centers; organization design and creativity consultants to leaders in business and industry; graduate faculty for programs in medicine and psychology; biocybernautic instructors for a pioneering program with elite teams of US Army Special Forces troops; counselors for people facing terminal illness or grieving the loss of a loved one; and coaches and friends to many people seeking to live in a more integrated, authentic, and spirited way and to be more effective in helping others realize the same quality in their own lives.
THE SPIRIT OF THESE TEACHINGS
We hope that you will read this book in the spirit of one of our corporate clients, a woman with sincere interest but little formal knowledge of the contemplative arts. We met her in an airport one day and she said, “Hey! I read your book, and I want you to know that by reading your book I feel like I have met your teachers!” We both burst into tears. Many of these remarkable teachers, with whom we devoted years of traveling and studying, spoke in foreign languages and their translators painstakingly passed their teachings and instructions along to us. Many a late night we have sat talking with these kind and patient teachers and translators, clarifying our questions and the fine technical points of their remarkable meditation instructions. With their blessings, guidance, and encouragement we have gradually come to find ourselves often in the role of teacher and translators for those not fortunate enough to meet these great teachers in person.
One point we want to make is that we have received so much from so many incredible people, many of whom were, in a way, the last of their species on this planet because the sacred vessels of their wisdom cultures have been destroyed. They gave of their wisdom to us saying, “Please cherish these gifts. Keep the spirit of these teaching alive. Pass them on to the generations to come”—and they knew we would. Holding lineages of teachings that have been cherished and preserved for millennia, these teachers have offered a living transmission of the stream of ancient wisdom into modern times. In recent years, many of our remarkable teachers have died. We, and others as fortunate as us, are left holding the basket of their precious teachings. So for us to weave together this small basket of teachings and to be able to pass it on to you is really a great privilege. If in some way this book contributes to the awakening of the wisdom and creative compassion that our teachers so inspiringly embodied and taught, then our intentions in writing it will have been fulfilled.
CROSSING THE THRESHOLD
When we embarked on a year-long silent meditation retreat in 1988, the Venerable Gen Lamrimpa, the Tibetan lama leading the retreat, once said to us, “As you go deeper and deeper into this practice of meditation, gradually you will become aware of many dimensions of reality that you previously were unaware of.” We welcome you to this threshold, and we pray that as you take these methods, principles, and teachings to heart and apply them to your life, the horizons of your own understanding will continue to expand in an endlessly awe-inspiring way.
HOW TO GET THE MOST FROM THIS BOOK
The challenges of millennia and the inspiration of the human spirit have given rise to thousands of techniques of relaxation and meditation. Each of these methods is effective for building our positive strengths and overcoming the factors that block the flow of our life-giving energies. In this book you will find the distillation of those methods we have found to be most widely conducive for enhancing the quality of health and performance, building confidence and self-esteem, mastering distress, and awakening creativity, compassion, power, and peace of mind.
We suggest that you consider this book as an investment portfolio offering you a wide range of options. Your return will depend largely upon the sincerity and continuity of your investment of attention and aspiration. Though the methods are priceless, you must make a personal investment in them in order to discover and call forth their power and sweetness. The greater your personal investment in taking these principles to heart, the greater your return and the more you will have to offer to the world.