In any easy position gradually pervade an area between the armpits into great peace.
- Choose any genuinely comfortable position — not a prescribed asana, don’t struggle into Buddha’s posture. The only criterion: the body is actually relaxed, not performing relaxation. A chair is fine.
- Scan the whole body for tension. Where you find it, intensify it to a deliberate peak (strain the leg, scrunch the whole face) then suddenly release — feel the relaxation settle. The extreme creates the passage to the opposite; mid-state tension is too faint to feel or work with. Give the face special attention: it stores ~90% of the body’s tension, the rest of the body only ~10%. About five minutes.
- Once relaxed, forget the body — remembering it is itself a tension. Over-attending re-creates tension: put a hand on your pulse, watch it for five minutes, and it beats faster; a doctor’s count always runs high, a lady doctor adds roughly 10 beats a minute through your heightened alertness. The forgetting is the deeper relaxation.
- Bring total awareness to the area between the two armpits — the heart center, the chest — and feel it filled with great peace. The moment the body relaxes the peace is already there; you are not manufacturing it.
- Pitfall: this is not auto-suggestion or hypnosis. You are not creating peace by imagining it (a merely imagined peace is a hallucination reality soon shatters) — the heart is the natural source of peace; the imagining only tunes your awareness to what is already there.
- Peace-before-love, not love-before-peace. The ordinary path — seek a lover, get peace only sometimes as its by-product — leaves you dependent on the other and gives only glimpses, with deep valleys of conflict between them. Reverse it: ground in peace directly, and love arises as its shadow — non-possessive, unconditional, given with no idea of return, inexhaustible.
- Marker that it is working: the world begins to feel dreamlike — not a belief you adopt but a felt perception. You hear the children, the radio, the street quarrel, but a great distance has opened and nothing penetrates. Don’t think the world is unreal — you will suddenly feel it. That felt distance is the sign you have moved from the surface to the center.
- Practical rhythm: ~10 minutes before sleep — the world goes unreal, dreaming lessens, sleep deepens (he prescribed this for insomnia). ~10 minutes on waking, before opening the eyes — the body is already rested, the state comes easily, and the peace then radiates from your eyes through the whole day.