Meditation & Reflection: Thoughts following a 10 minute sit

July 6

"Ten minutes feel like s a loooong time right now." My timer went off and this was somehow surprising, that ten minutes was over so fast!
During my "one, now" mantra, which I have used for 13 years, I always get monkey chatter creeping in and today the chatter was limited to just a few issues rather than the huge array of things that come up generally. Possibly due to my fatigue.
This exercise of meditation showed me that one of the benefits I was receiving was a real opportunity to check in. Meditation may be seen as "checking out" since the outside world does, hopefully, get turned down or off, but I found that I was in fact taking inventory of my energy without the forethought or plan to do so.
One thing in particular that was different about this meditation was that I was not trying to plan anything. I could easily get myself back on track by following my "one, now" breathing rhythm after little moments of reflection upon the day.
A very nice break.
As I slipped deeper into the day’s second meditation lead by Dr Pflueger, my left leg slipped deeper into pain, pins, numbness and the right leg began to follow. Deeper, deeper we went...until the pain was so much that I had to pick up my leg from half lotus to let the blood back in. I broke the surface from deeper meditation.
Within the contrast of pain and the bliss upon re-entering the outside world, I heard, “Walking on sunshine,” as I floated down the sidewalk.
(Dr. Pflueger received his doctorate and master’s degrees in religious studies from the University of California at Santa Barbara. He holds a bachelor’s degree in anthropology from the University of Washington, where he was elected to Phi Beta Kappa and graduated magna cum laude. He has taught at the University of Wisconsin, California Polytechnic State University, and California State University-Long Beach. He specializes in South Asian religion, classical yoga philosophy, Indian philosophy, and classical Sanskrit. He has 27 articles on Hindu and Buddhist topics in the Oxford Dictionary of World Religions, (Oxford, 1997). Also from Oxford, he published a chapter in The Innate Capacity (1998), “Discriminating the Innate Capacity: Salvation Mysticism in Classical Samkhya-Yoga.” Other publications include The Bhagavad Gita for Contemporary American Religion (Macmillan, 2000) and in 2003 from Routledge Curzon (London) a chapter, “Dueling with Dualism: Revisioning the Paradox of Purusha and Prakiti, in Yoga: The Indian Tradition.” More recent publications include “Person, Purity, and Power in the Yogasūtra,” for Essays on the Theory and Practice of Yoga, Knut Jacobson, Ed. (Brill 2005), and a forthcoming article, “Ishvara,” for The Encyclopedia of Religion (Macmillan). In the summer of 2007, Dr. Pflueger was chosen to participate in the Freeman Foundation Summer Institute on Japan, for intensive study of Japanese language and culture at Tokai University in Honolulu, Hawaii. Dr. Pflueger is presently focusing on a research project titled The 1000 Names of the All-pervasive God Vishnu. He is a member of the American Academy of Religion, Phi Kappa Phi, and Phi Beta Kappa, and serves as faculty advisor for Truman State University’s Art of Living (yoga) Club and the DEPTHS Club. An intense, knowledgeable instructor. Intimidating to the likes of me.)