Meditation, both standing and sitting, is a fundamental practice in the Hunyuan Taiji system. It is also the foundation for all advanced contemplative methods taught in the Center for Sacred Sciences practitioners group. (For more information about the Center’s programs, please visit www.centerforsacredsciences.org.)
Beginning with training the attention to rest upon the breath in the belly, we collect the body’s subtle energy and store it in the middle dantian, or elixir field, behind the navel. This promotes health, mental and emotional clarity, and develops the ability to enter stillness. Next we learn to allow thoughts, perceptions, and emotions to arise and pass with open, clear awareness. This integrates the inside and outside – pure awareness and the experience of physicality – and develops the ability to abide as spaciousness. Through repeated practice we begin to gain insight into the selflessness of objects and persons, release our conditioned internal and external habitual patterns, and gain more freedom and happiness. Finally, through the mystery of grace and the compassion of our teachers, we relax completely into the nondual ground of pure awareness (without a subject or an object) and realize our unity with all existence, overcoming the delusion of separation and achieving the permanent, abiding happiness of ultimate spiritual realization.
