If you like the strategy of just focusing on your breathing, as discussed in this video, (and elsewhere on my site), you might also find The Sponge makes a great “Quick Meditation”.

Anyway, I love his presentation! 

One Moment Meditation

http://anita-lim.blogspot.co.uk/2012/05/how-to-meditate-in-moment.html

People do not take care of what they see as garbage.

They will not save a world that has no beauty left in it

People do not rush to join a losing cause.

People do not rise to greatness after being shamed.

They are not inspired bybeing told they how bad they are.

They will not love that which they are being told they have severely harmed.  To save their self esteem, they will reject that which they have wounded.

If you love this planet, show us how great it is and how we are an amazing part of it.

How have environmentalists forgotten this?

How many times have people walked into my studio after being told they ‘never will’. Yet they do. They all have this man’s indomidable spirit. I love his gentle perisistence.

This video has me crying. I’m very grateful that he’s shared this.

That kind of simple honest is essential for true genius to shine through.

From time to time, I want to share some of the quotes where Einstein has spoken my heart.  In saying these things, he seemed to know me even before I was born. Today, I’d like to delve into some of his thoughts on education.  I feel that’s a good place to start, since my life is that of an educator, in the classroom and at the keyboard.

“Most teachers waste their time by asking questions that are intended to discover what a pupil does not know, whereas the true art of questioning is to discover what the pupil does know or is capable of knowing.”

As a teacher, I couldn’t agree more! Maybe this attitude of his stems out of (or was reinforced by?) his time at the school in Aarau. Here’s what Walter Isaacson has to say about that wonderful institution that was a century ahead of its time. This quote is out of Isaacson’s book Einstein: The Life of a Genius: “[The school at Aarau] imbued a sense of taking responsibility for one’s actions rather than obedience to rules and authority … It encouraged thought experiments, exercises in visual imagination. The school was based on the methods developed by Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi in the early 1800s. In his 1801 book, How Gertrude Teaches her Children, he outlined a philosophy which encouraged children to think for themselves. He believed that they should move from observation and experimentation to a deep understanding that eschewed rote drill and memorization. It instead relied on conducting imaginative thought experiments. Even mathematics, which began by observing objects and built up to using visual imagination to devise abstract concepts.”

This reminds me of the Montessori system, another educational method that encourages our natural drive toward learning.

“It is not so very important for a person to learn facts. For that he does not really need college. He can learn them from books. The value of an education in a liberal arts college is not the learning of many facts, but the training of the mind to think something that cannot be learned from textbooks.”
Einstein wrote that in 1921, but I feel it’s even more true for the 21st Century. These days, facts are easy enough to find and accumulate, but it’s the minds that assemble them that are the creative force behind discovering and changing the world.

And a similar thought:
“The most valuable thing a teacher can impart to children is not knowledge and understanding per se but a longing for knowledge and understanding, and an appreciation for intellectual values, whether they be artistic, scientific, or moral.”

“It is the supreme art of the teacher to awaken joy in creative expression and knowledge.”
This, I strive to do every day, in teaching, in writing, in my creative arts. Some days, more successfully than others!

“To me the worst thing seems to be for a school principally to work with the methods of fear, force, and artificial authority. Such treatment destroys the sound sentiments, the sincerity, and the self-confidence of the pupil.”
Amen! I see this as true over and over again. I spend much of my teaching time undoing that very forcefulness that precedes me.

“It is in fact nothing short of a miracle that modern methods of instruction have not yet entirely strangled the holy curiosity of inquiry; for this delicate little plant, aside from stimulation, stands mainly in need of freedom; without this it goes to wrack and ruin without fail.”

“I never had the chance to teach youngsters. A pity. I would actually have liked to teach high school.”
What a wonderful High School teacher he would have made. Personally, teaching High School students has been one of the great privileges of my life. I love the energy of young people, their openness, their interest in the world. I love that they’re forward looking, that they embrace the new. Even when they are closing down, questioning the relevance of studying,
they are more open than many adults. The world is their oyster and they’re just waiting for someone to nudge them toward opening it!

And here, a man after my own heart and soul:
“Never regard your study as a duty, but as the enviable opportunity to learn the liberating beauty of the intellect for your own personal joy and for the profit of the community to which your later work will belong.”
(Kind of bypasses that familiar question from students:  “Why are we learning this stuff?”)

Once upon a time, there was a man stuck in a tar pit.  The tar was slowly dragging him under even while the tar was seeping into his pours, toxins soaking into his body.  He cried out for help.

Fortunately, a passer-by heard his pleas.  She edged up to the banks of the tar pit, reached out her hand but, from the banks, couldn’t reach him to pull him out.  At a loss, she called out to him that she would pray for him.  And she went on her way.

Another passer-by heard the man’s shouts for help.  Running up to the banks of the tar pit, she could see he was soon going to go under.  There was no way to reach him, except…  She quickly tied clothing, vines, anything she could get her hands on to create a long rope, which she tied to a tree.  Holding this rope fast, she waded into the tar pit.   As she sludged through the tar, she became soaked in it.  Her whole body, her hair, her skin, even her eye lids, drenched in this toxic muck.

Undaunted, she grabbed onto the man in the nick of time.  Together, they hauled themselves out of the pit, tumbling onto the grass.  No doubt, the toxins that had soaked into their bodies would present a problem in time, but both were safe on the shore, two lives continuing forward instead of one.

Which one had done the most good for the man?  Which one had done God’s service.

Don’t pray for me.  I believe God is wise enough and powerful enough to help me without the need for your prayers.   When you say you’ll pray for me, you’re standing at a safe distance, while you feel good about yourself for having done something.  Instead, either wade into the tar with me and help me out or be on your way.

” When I was young, I used to wonder what it would be like to travel at the speed of light … on a motorcycle.”

- Albert Einstein Character in the movie IQ

When I was  maybe 8, 9, 10 years old, I used to lie in bed and play with what it’s like to be in outer space, scooting through space and time.  Most kids had a baseball glove or a shovel in a sandbox.  My playground was the whole universe, filled with light and energy and other ways of existence.  Those adventures weren’t so much in other worlds filled with strange beasts, although those possibilities intrigue me, but more about how the very nature of existence itself changes according to how the universe unfolds.

For example, I loved to play with the thought of instant travel.  What’s that like to be able to instantly be in another place.   What would it take to do that?  I don’t mean mechanically, but more like, how does the universe have to be in order for that to be possible?

That mental game overlapped with the game of what it must feel like to be in other dimensions.  We are of course in other dimensions all the time, we just aren’t aware of it.  Could I make myself aware of those other planes of existence?  What do they feel like?

And, of course, the inevitable merge from those questions to the spiritual ones.  How must the universe be in if there is overlap between a spiritual world and this one?  How could a spiritual realm fit within a scientific model of the universe?  What would that mean for how the spiritual realm is constructed?  Could I mentally straddle those realms and feel what it is like to be in those spaces.  In doing that, could I glimpse how the universe must be constructed in order to have that interaction between spirit and matter?

Naturally, then, when I was introduced to the idea of meditation, I took to it like a dolphin being birthed into the ocean.  OMG!  Here’s where I could find more tools to explore the universe – both the inner and the outer one, because I saw no difference between the two.

With the help of yoga and meditation, I had more experiences, many of them spiritual ones.  And the more I practice yoga, meditation, learn math and continue to play with the universe in my mind, I see more and more overlap.  I can see ways that the spiritual world could work within universe being described by physicists.

Those of you who know me well know that I am now over 50, have practiced yoga for 40 years, taught it for almost 20 years and written about it passionately.  Always, I have been trying to find ways to help people build their yoga practice more easily, showing them the basic building blocks that take them where they want to go, without all the fuss of sitting in monasteries or standing on their heads for years.  In doing this, I am trying to help set people free, to discover themselves, to honour that delightful playground, that wonder of the universe that they are.  And maybe they, too, can glimpse some of the things I’ve experienced and discover their special place in an expansive universe.

If you know me well, you also know that my life path has recently steered me into more of the book publishing, less of the classroom teaching of yoga – and I’ve had to augment that with tutoring math.  I have a family to feed and bills to catch up on.  Math came knocking on my door, just as the city was closing my studio down.

So now, besides showing people the world through yoga, I tutor math.  One way or another, it is about showing people the wonders of the universe, of which they are an integral part.

Having to return to math has been a gift in disguise; “A present”, as one of my students likes to say whenever he discovers the joys of breathing more fully.  It’s brought me back to my first love – frolicking in the universal playground.

Coinciding with this is a recommitment to my writing career.  I’ve been publishing more, getting back into using fiction as a field for teaching.  But, to tell the truth, I like writing fiction because it’s an excuse to play.  Obviously, Science Fiction is an inescapable draw to me; as is historical fiction – again, playing in another world.

I’m in the middle of researching and writing a script that involves Einstein.  So I talk to him in my head a lot.   I’d say he and I discuss how the universe works, but really what happens is, during these ‘conversations’, he shows me how it works, giving me snap shots, and then he waits for me to grasp it.  It’s up to me to find ways to translate that into the math.

I’m feeling a little bit behind in doing my part, but who knows what might emerge if I just play with the numbers while keeping these snap shots in my mind.  And in the meantime, I get to travel the universe with Einstein.

This section of my blog is about that adventure.

Any of these things happen quite frequently even to experienced meditators.  Experience just teaches you to sit through them and wait them out.

Here’s my article on Meditation Hurdles and Pitfalls