I am just starting to meet Ganga White, a pioneering force of the American yoga scene in the 60s. I am drawn towards him for his earnest curiosity. He has a special style of learning: focused, open and present. He asks lots of questions and digs in without abandon while simultaneously able to generously share his findings.

Ganga has just released a new book, Yoga Beyond Belief: Insights to Awaken and Deepen Your Practice. Below is an excerpt from Chapter 9: Meditation is Your Life. After reading, you might check out this clip of J. Krishnamurti, one of Ganga's teachers.

Your entire life is a meditation. All other specific forms of meditation technique are secondary. By integrating qualities of attention, awareness, caring, and insight into all arenas of living, we reach the deeper core and more essential meaning of mediation. This is an important contextual perspective to elucidate before proceeding farther in an inquiry into specific meditation techniques. Rather than simply asking how to meditate, it is better to explore first the essence of what meditation is.

What is meditation? Meditation practice is often described as the most essential and special aspect of yoga necessary to provide meaning and direction for ordinary life. We are often promised endless benefits from practicing meditation - from relief of tension and anxiety to much loftier goals including freedom, the ending of suffering, and enlightenment. But promising such lofty goals in describing meditation practices also gives them great weight and can make meditation one more source of pressure or conflict in our lives. We may worry about learning how to meditate and finding the right meditation technique among the myriad of approaches. We can be troubled about whether we are meditating properly or for enough time, and whether we can control our minds. All these conscious and unconscious pressures can make meditation, which we have sought for peace, harmony, and wisdom, another burden we carry.

As soon as we ask how to meditate, we are thrown into a field of techniques and practices. Instead of limiting our discussion of meditation to descriptions of specific practices, I would like to point out two broad, general approaches to meditation. The first approach defines meditation in terms of specific practices, techniques, and more structured characterizations. This prescriptive approach tends to be mechanistic and arbitrary. Literally, thousands of formal meditation practices - including repetition of mantra, prayers, or affirmations; gazing at candle flames, mandala drawings, or photographs of teachers or divinities; watching the breath, and many more - promise specific results. The majority of these formal practices can be characterized as mind control systems - learning and developing the ability to control your mind and thoughts, though the practice of a technique. Such meditation practices can be useful and beneficial, but the deeper meaning of meditation also implies a state of seeing and being and not merely a controlled doing - not another formal discipline. Our lives today have enough psychological difficulty and internal struggle and we certainly do not need to add more. How can we escape mental pressure through yet another form of effort and control?

Fortunately, meditation can also involve spontaneous awakenings of perception, artistry, and insight that inspire a very natural flow and state of being that pervades our entire life. It does not necessarily require years of practice, effort, and mind control. This second broad approach of meditation is more mysterious and indefinable; it sees the essence of meditation to lie beyond form and mechanical practice. This approach to meditation involves a living, evolving energy of perception that has a beginning, but no end, and no specific formal practice.

This "formless form" is without limitation and can take place any time, any place, and encompasses meditation as a quality of insight and awareness that, when awakened, can move through and integrate all parts of life. It is not desirable to give detailed description of formless meditation because to do so makes it into another techniques. It is better to point toward this possibility and not give it too much definition. We begin to see all things in life as part of meditation. But this does not imply living in a controlled, stiff, self-conscious, nonspontaneous manner - it is quite the contrary. The formless can work through the form, but the structured can never become the formless. Understanding this broad dimension beyond form and technique is the most important foundation of vital and dynamic meditation - the meditation that is your life.

Note: The above excerpt was typed in by hand, and may contain errors not in the original text.