John Selby - Expand This Moment: Focused Meditations to Quiet Your Mind, Brighten Your Mood, and Set Yourself Free

Copyright 2011 by John Selby

All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced in whole or in part, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, or other without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review.

The material in this book is intended for education. It is not meant to take the place of diagnosis and treatment by a qualified medical practitioner or therapist. No expressed or implied guarantee as to the effects of the use of the recommendations can be given nor liability taken.

Text design and typography by Tona Pearce Myers

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Selby, John, date.
Expand this moment : focused meditations to quiet your mind, brighten your mood & set yourself free / John Selby with Birgitta Steiner.
p. cm.
ISBN 978-1-57731-970-2 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Meditation. I. Steiner, Birgitta. II. Title.
BL627.S456 2011
204'.35dc22 2011000449

First printing, April 2011
ISBN 978-1-57731-970-2
Printed in Canada on 100% postconsumer-waste recycled paper

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

LAO-TZU

I ts hard to believe that Ive turned sixty-four and am only just now fulfilling a challenge given to me way back when I was twenty-four. The challenge from the philosopher and meditation expert Alan Watts was to study the worlds meditation traditions as a psychologist from the inside out; identify the underlying psychological process common to all those traditions; and then go out and teach this process to any who might want to learn it.

I was in grad school at Berkeley in the early 1970s when I received this challenge. I assumed I could fulfill the research project as part of my doctoral thesis, never suspecting that my life would get caught up for decades in what proved to be a seemingly endless quest. Throughout the rest of the seventies, then the eighties, and into the nineties, the search continued to unfold like a psychological and spiritual detective plot, loaded with half-hidden clues and convoluted insights, many dead-end detours, and dozens of invaluable encounters with remarkable men and women.

At first I thought the challenge would be an intellectual academic adventure. But I discovered step-by-step that I was looking for meaningful answers in all the wrong places. In fact my eventual discovery of the twelve Focus Phrases that make up the heart of what Im going to teach you in this book did not come to me through scientific research and logical deduction. Instead the breakthrough came as an unexpected realization that aimed my focus beyond my personal ego and academic perspectives toward a much broader, more universal understanding.

To be honest, that realization emerged only when I finally broke down altogether on all fronts, hit bottom emotionally and intellectually, and surrendered. The words of the spiritual teacher Krishnamurti, whom I knew from my very early years, state lucidly how my insights came: The mind must be empty, in order to see clearly.

My breakdown happened one night without warning, as I returned home from an unsuccessful trip to raise money to keep a floundering online therapy project afloat. Reaching my quiet country home in Kauai, Hawaii, I simply fell apart emotionally and mentally, overwhelmed with a sense of total confusion and despair. I went physically limp and almost blind as my inner consciousness dimmed and then went out altogether.

A visiting friend with medical knowledge was afraid Id suffered a stroke or had a brain tumor. But as I dropped down into blackness, my wife luckily didnt freak out and throw me in the hospital. Somehow we both knew that something deeper was happening, a weird new flow that must be surrendered to.

For hours I experienced mostly blackness, no sensation, no thoughts, nothing. I was simply there, on my back in bed, knocked flat. Then, in the midst of that nothingness, I suddenly started to experience my own spark of consciousness naturally reemerging, expanding all on its own without my ego in any way instigating or directing the expansion. Without me doing anything at all, I began to passively experience a point of awareness inside my nose, and then a sudden sensation of air rushing through my nostrils.

Ah life!

And then blankness again.

During the next hour or two I went through this core process several times, suddenly rising up into the experience of the air flowing in and out of my nose, then dropping into blackness again. At some point I found my awareness maintaining itself rather than dropping away. Then, in a second expansion, my bubble of awareness grew to include both the sensation of breath in my nose, and the sensations generated by the muscular contractions and expansions of breathing in my chest and my belly.

For a while, my awareness collapsed into nothingness again and then effortlessly began to move through the same progression of expansion. This perceptual ebb and flow continued in the same basic progression until, at some point, an even more remarkable inner experience came to me. I became suddenly aware of my whole physical body all at once, here in the eternal now.

These intense perceptual and emotional experiences marked the organic origins of the first part of the meditation process Im going to teach you. Of course, being aware of ones breathing is certainly not a new meditation discovery. Breath awareness has been, from the beginning, the foundation of most meditation methods throughout the world. What was unique for me was the direct inner experience showing me exactly how consciousness naturally expands.