Introduction to Meditation

What does Introduction to Meditation teach?

Introduction to Meditation teaches that meditation begins by aligning attention with the breath so that prana and mind become internalized. Drawing on pratyahara and Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras, Mark Griffin explains how bellows breathing, breath awareness, and sensory withdrawal can still mental activity and open the practitioner toward concentration, samadhi, and recognition of consciousness.

The teaching begins with pratyahara, the withdrawal and internalization of the senses described in Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras. Rather than approaching meditation as an act of force or suppression, Griffin presents it as a precise redirection of attention—from external sensory engagement toward the inner dynamics of breath, life force, and consciousness. Central to this process is the relationship among breath, prana, and mind: when the breath moves, prana moves, and when prana moves, the mind moves. By calming and refining the breath—especially through diaphragmatic bellows breathing—the practitioner gains a practical means of working with the mind and begins the inward movement toward concentration, meditation, and ultimately samadhi.

From this practical foundation, Griffin expands meditation into a multidimensional account of the mind-body-being matrix, composed of the physical, subtle physical, causal, and supra-causal bodies. These encompass the physical form, the subtle energy body, the mind, and the supraconscious Self, associated in his teachings with the Blue Pearl. Consciousness moves through these increasingly subtle dimensions along the inner architecture of ida, pingala, and the central channel, or sushumna, which extends from the base of the spine to the crown of the head. As attention becomes internalized and enters the sushumna, the senses withdraw, mental activity (vrittis) slows, and awareness shifts from the physical world toward energetic, mental, and spiritual planes of experience.

A central experiential doorway in the teaching is the space between the breaths, where the breath momentarily ceases and the mind correspondingly comes to rest. By learning to recognize and remain attentive within this natural pause, the meditator encounters the mind in a still, transparent condition—like a calm lake through which the underlying field of consciousness can be perceived. Meditation is therefore presented not as the creation of an artificial state, but as a process of making the unconscious conscious through increasingly refined observation of inner experience. With sustained practice, this inward alignment deepens concentration, diminishes the externalization of the senses, and opens glimpses of the Ocean of Consciousness, marking the early movement toward samadhi and recognition of the true nature of the Self.