Meditation Without Mysticism: Notes from a Teacher Training in India

In 2019 I completed a meditation teacher training course in India, at the Sarvaguna academy in Goa. Our teachers were Dr. Keshava and Praveen Reddy. When I got back, I wrote five short posts while the material was still fresh: what meditation is, how to prepare for it, how to sit, and how yoga explains the workings of the mind. Here I have pulled them together into one piece, cut the repetition, and added what I have learned from years of teaching since.

Meditation itself was nothing new to me. I have practiced it in one form or another for a long time, because neither serious yoga nor the traditional martial arts can do without it. I had also read plenty of books on its benefits. One that stuck with me is “Altered Traits” by Daniel Goleman and Richard Davidson: the authors collected studies that measure the effects of practice not in glowing adjectives but in markers of the brain and body. Still, the course gave me something books don’t: a coherent system for explaining meditation to other people.

What Is Meditation, in Plain Words

The course manual defines it roughly like this: meditation is a specific technique that quiets the mind and turns attention inward. It is not thinking things over, not dozing, and not daydreaming. During practice your awareness is clear and focused, while the body is as relaxed as it can be.

For most of the day our attention points outward: at a task, a person, a screen. Yet nobody teaches us how to turn it inward, toward sensations, the breath and the flow of our own thoughts. Not at school, not at university, not at work. The result is an odd imbalance: we use this instrument all the time and barely know how to control it.

Why Meditate

The first thing practice gives you is release. In the early stages you relax the body, but you do it consciously, without drifting off to sleep. That lets you notice and let go of the tension that builds up in the muscles over the years.

This shows most clearly with stress. Sometimes mental fatigue turns into physical fatigue: you feel sluggish and apathetic, your back or neck aches for no obvious reason. A pill often does little here, because the load comes from the head, not from the joint. Meditation does not replace a doctor, but it gives you a way to work with the source itself.

For people who work with their minds, practice has one more benefit: it frees up resources. After a few minutes of quiet, fresh ideas come more easily and intuition is easier to hear.

I also like a bit of linguistics we heard on the course: the words “meditation” and “medicine” are related. Both go back to Latin verbs sharing an ancient root connected with care and due measure.

Why You Can’t Just Switch Thoughts Off

A common beginner’s mistake is to think meditating means sitting with an empty head. Try it, and within ten seconds you will be thinking about your shopping list. The mind is like a computer with no off button. So the task is framed differently: not to chase thoughts away, but to give attention a single point to rest on.

When the mind gently holds one object, the processes that generate stress settle down: replaying worries, planning, solving imaginary problems. The anchor can be a sound or an image, external or internal: repeating a mantra, a candle flame, the feeling of the breath. There are dozens of methods. Just as many trails lead to a mountain summit, there are many ways to reach the meditative state. The goal is the same: inner quiet, collectedness, and that special state most simply called happiness.

Seen through a physicist’s eyes, a human being is an inertial system. Losing weight or building muscle takes months of routine and training. Habits of thinking and perception are no different: they don’t change overnight, so they have to be trained. Eastern traditions offer a helpful shift here: value the path itself, not only the result. If you learn to enjoy the process, you feel good all the time, not just in the brief moments when a goal is reached.

There is good news too. Relaxing the body and calming the mind come fairly quickly, and over time they kick in more and more easily. For many people that alone is enough.

What Meditation Is Not

The course spent a good deal of time separating meditation from things that resemble it.

First, it is not reflection. Thinking through ideas and concepts is useful, but meditation has no conclusions and no weighing of pros and cons. The practitioner drops below the level of concepts.

Second, it is not hypnosis or autosuggestion. Repeating an intention such as “I want to achieve this” can be useful at times, but it is a different tool. In meditation you don’t program the mind or give it orders. You observe it and let it come to rest. I would even call meditation anti-hypnosis: a state free from implanted suggestions and outside influence.

Third, it is not a religion. Practice does not ask you to change your faith or culture, and there is nothing alien about it. It is an investigation of yourself, and in essence it is closer to the scientific method than to ritual.

That gives us a training program. For meditation to work, you need to learn how to:

• relax the body;
• sit comfortably and still;
• make the breath smooth and quiet;
• calmly watch what goes on in your head;
• notice helpful thoughts and cultivate them;
• stay calm whatever the circumstances.

Preparation Matters More Than the Meditation

Our teacher liked to say: “Preparation is more important than actual meditation.” If you have prepared well, meditation simply happens. He had another comparison too: meditation is like a rocket launch, where all the real work is done on the ground long before liftoff.

Place and Time

Pick a quiet, clean corner away from your desk, the kitchen, the TV and your phone. The best time is early morning: get up an hour before everyone else in the house, and nobody will disturb you while your head is still fresh. Of course, that means going to bed earlier and skipping heavy late dinners. It helps to give practice a fixed slot in your daily routine. Habit is more reliable than willpower and saves you from the endless “I’ll start tomorrow.”

Body and Breath

Before you sit down, prepare the body: use the bathroom, take a shower or at least wash your face. Then do a little hatha yoga or a warm-up. You will be sitting still for a long time, so stretch your back and legs beforehand. Running and aerobics are not a good fit here: they drain the energy you need for practice.

Next come breathing exercises, pranayama. Then sit and link the breath with the So-Ham mantra: silently “So” on the inhale, “Ham” on the exhale. The mind stays calm and turned inward. Coming out of meditation also takes care: first bring your attention back to the body and breath, then open your eyes.

The Four Instincts

A separate chapter of the manual deals with four basic instincts: food, sleep, sex and self-preservation. A practitioner does not suppress them but learns to take them into account.

Food should be fresh, simple and natural. The way you eat matters too: don’t eat while irritated or argue at the table, chew thoroughly and taste your food, don’t eat until you feel heavy. Our teacher called a cheerful mood at meals one of the secrets of good health. Have your last meal at least four hours before sleep or meditation. Cut out alcohol.

Sleep follows the golden mean: too little is harmful, and so is too much. Many practitioners find that regular meditation lets them recover on less sleep. Self-preservation needs no explanation, and neither does sex: everything in moderation. Sadly, the manual says nothing more on that subject.

How to Sit for Meditation

The course formula is simple: straighten the spine, watch the breath, calm and gather the mind. These three steps gradually move attention from the outer, physical level to a subtler, inner one. After that, meditation happens by itself.

A meditation posture should be stable, upright, relaxed and comfortable. If your legs go numb, your back aches and you want to fidget, nothing will come of it. Many people believe you have to meditate in full lotus. You don’t. Three conditions are enough: head, neck and torso in one line, the spine perpendicular to the floor, and low, diaphragmatic breathing.

From a biomechanical point of view, the goal is to stack the spine so that the fewest possible muscles hold the posture. The body is in balance, and that balance is maintained by the deep postural muscles that control the position of the vertebrae relative to each other. It sounds easy, but learning to sit upright and relaxed at the same time takes years. In fact, all the asana work in hatha yoga leads to exactly this kind of alignment, which matters for meditation and for health in general. In qigong the same job is done by standing like a post, Zhan Zhuang: a vertical line without excess tension.

Every muscle not involved in holding the posture should let go: face, eyes, shoulders, arms, legs, belly. The face is a good place to start, and the face relaxes through the eyes. Lower the eyelids softly, without squeezing. Rest your hands on your knees with the thumb and index finger joined in chin mudra or jnana mudra.

Which Asana to Choose

• Sukhasana, the easy cross-legged seat. A folded blanket under the pelvis makes it easier to straighten the spine and to sit on the floor for a long time.
• Swastikasana is more stable but needs well-opened hip joints so the knees can drop closer to the floor.
• Vajrasana, sitting on the heels, is very comfortable if your ankles are flexible enough.
• Siddhasana suits people with years of practice behind them and gives a very secure base.

The main thing in every option is the same: a straight back. Knees set wide give stability. Only the deep muscles along the spine are working. The breath is soft, low and small in amplitude, with just the diaphragm moving. The accessory breathing muscles rest, which is the difference from pranayama, where they are exactly what we train. The body is relaxed, its oxygen demand drops, and it shifts into a mode of conservation and recovery. That is the state meditation grows out of.

How Yoga Describes the Mind

The last part of the course was the most interesting for me, as a physicist and someone with a background in the tech business. The manual opens with a strong claim: the mind is the best tool we have, but a disorganized mind scatters its energy and gets in the way of our goals. Yoga describes the mind as a system of four functional units: manas, chitta, ahamkara and buddhi. Once you see how they connect, it becomes clear what exactly we are training in meditation. Indian thinkers laid out this model thousands of years ago, and it is remarkably similar to computer architecture.

Manas: Input and Output

Manas is the lower level of the mind, the link to the outside world. The five senses are connected to it: hearing, touch, sight, taste and smell. It also runs the five organs of action: speech, hands, feet, and the reproductive and excretory organs. Manas can doubt and ask questions.

In a computer, this is the input/output controller: it receives signals from a camera or scanner, does some preprocessing, and sends an image to the monitor. The capacity to doubt resembles the interrupt system, where an urgent request pauses the current job. The manual compares manas to a foreman in a factory: not the owner, but the one who watches the process and gives the workers their tasks.

A foreman carries out orders well. But if the boss, buddhi, is clouded and makes no decisions, manas starts listening to the noise, chatter and desires rising up from chitta.

Chitta: Memory

Chitta is the storehouse of impressions and experience. It holds countless hidden traces of the past. They can be useful, but without oversight from above they act directly on manas and push their desires out into the world, including unconscious ones. The best way to work with chitta is observation: watch how thoughts, emotions and images surface from somewhere and go back there. That “somewhere” is chitta. No wonder Patanjali defines yoga as “yogas chitta vritti nirodhah,” the stilling of the fluctuations of chitta.

The computer analogy is especially apt here. Computer memory is hierarchical: data is copied from a slow disk into RAM, and from there into the processor’s multilevel cache. A sync failure at any level and the system starts behaving strangely. And the von Neumann architecture, on which most computers are built, keeps instructions and data in the same memory, where they look identical. Apply that to chitta, and it turns out that alongside impressions it also stores instructions: behavior patterns and ready-made reactions to different situations, formed by experience. With access to the processor, those programs can be rewritten. Chitta also has deeper layers, the subconscious and the unconscious, and they too can be worked with and cleared of clutter.

Ahamkara: the Ego

Ahamkara is the sense of “I am,” what lets us set ourselves apart from others. This function has a flip side: it is also a source of pain and alienation. When buddhi is clouded, ahamkara pulls hidden emotions out of chitta and makes manas respond to its whims, colored by the “personal.”

Interestingly, the ego’s profile is stored in chitta as well. What we like and dislike is basically a few bits of information, and they can be changed. Sometimes circumstances do it for us: someone who eats nothing but pineapples happily wolfs down bread with cured pork fat on a hike when supplies run out. Or a smoker sure he can’t live without a cigarette ends up somewhere with no tobacco and gets along fine. Or you can switch on buddhi and change yourself. That is harder, but possible.

One of the most effective tricks against compulsive desires, like midnight raids on the fridge, is to tell yourself not “I want” but “it wants.” This is the first step toward no longer identifying with ahamkara. A Ukrainian song captures it well: the narrator complains that late at night “a chunk of parasite” pushes him to take the first sip and then gambles his property away at the casino.

Buddhi: the Central Processor

Buddhi is the highest level of the mind, the gateway to inner wisdom. The root of the word is linked to awakening. This part of the mind makes decisions, assesses soberly and judges fairly. If buddhi is clouded, manas takes orders from chitta, where all our habits, good and bad, are stored along with every stereotype colored by the ego. A clear buddhi can always find a sensible way out, provided manas agrees to follow it. So the practitioner’s main work is clearing buddhi.

In the computer model, buddhi is the processor together with the operating system. A person is born like a new computer with no software. Then programs get installed, some useful and some not, documents, photos, music and movies get loaded, and viruses come along for the ride. Over time resources fill up, unneeded processes run in the background, and the main task runs slowly and with errors.

A Free Antivirus for the Mind

Understanding what the mind is made of and how its parts affect each other opens the way to a different way of thinking: more productive, gentler and brighter. The most accessible tool on that path is meditation. Our teacher joked that it is free antivirus software for the brain: a lifetime license with daily updates.

I explain where to start in practice on the meditation practice page. Below is a recording of an online meditation class I taught on Zoom in the spring of 2020 (in Russian).

Audio & subtitles: EN · BG · RU (⚙ in the player)

More about my teachers and my path in practice is on the about the author page.

I cover breathing techniques, preparing the body and meditation in detail, with photos and video lessons, in my book “Yoga vs Qigong: Basic Techniques”

Anatoly YasinskyPhysicist (MIPT), qigong instructor, yoga therapist. 25 years of practice, Yoga Journal contributor.About the author →