Animal lovers who meditate, or meditators who love animals, will want to visit the website of The Trust Technique. I encountered James French’s remarkable recuperative work with traumatized animals by chance and was immediately drawn in by his frank, warm, easy-going presentation of his remarkable ideas about and experiences communicating with animals. While I didn’t avail myself of the paid portion of the website, there is a good deal of free material and instructive videos that I recommend highly.
In particular, I note it here because The Trust Technique emphasizes the need when working with animals to “bring down the thinking levels,” starting with oneself—and that meditative state he enjoins upon us is transmitted silently and without touch to his animal charges. See for yourself by watching the videos. But for now and for you reading this I particularly want to recognize and appreciate his quite direct and simple instructions for remaining in “the present moment” with one’s thinking. They are, in fact, instructions for meditation, with a persuasive emphasis on the role of the body. French tells us that there are only three necessary choices to make to remain fully in the present moment (because the body is always in the present moment): to stay still; to hear what one is hearing; and to touch what one is touching.
It’s the third of these that has become an important component of my own meditation, which is after all non-doctrinal and absorbs helpful practice where it can. How simple it seems to remain fully aware of what one is touching, of the act of touching and of the sense of touch. Yet I do find that with the bodily stillness I have always practised, and with the attentive listening I have always given the Tibetan bowls or other monastic music, this addition of aware touching to my practice is deeply beneficial. I enter a meditative state quickly, and when it dissipates into thought, consciousness of my touching helps quickly to draw me back in. This impact of French’s Trust Technique on my own meditation has been forceful enough to make me write this eccentric entry, the first perhaps not about a specific meditation experience.
11 April, 2024.