Separate tension from force. Developing strength does not imply generating tension. If we lift a heavy box without having strength, if we are stressed by a situation, or if we spend the whole day in front of the computer without moving with our head sunk between our shoulders, it is likely that we generate tension and therefore wear at a muscular level, but also at an energetic level. We accumulate fatigue.

When we practice, the idea is to accumulate strength, not fatigue. Collect practice after practice a little more body awareness, breathing capacity, muscle strength, joint flexibility, ability to focus, communication with our body. We could say that the combination of all of these in the right proportions results in strength.

If the joints are stiff, the muscles are tense and we breathe badly, we need a much greater effort to do anything. That's why when I think of strength I like to imagine not only the development of muscles, but a combination of resources that work intelligently, a sum that results in strength.

And what I find even more interesting is that, if we take strength in this integrated way, we can think of it not only as muscular, but also as a capacity for focus, or emotional support, or tenacity. And, depending on what we want to underpin, the rest becomes available. For example, if we are in fact looking to develop more muscular strength, our breathing, capacity of focus, emotional energy, joint flexibility will be fundamental tools to go where we want to go. Bring strength and sensitivity closer together, not further apart.

Have you registered which part of your body has more strength? Would you say that your emotional structure is strong without detracting from your sensitivity? And your thinking? How do all these variables interact in you? Let's practice! To perceive ourselves, to support what is necessary, to think of strength as the development of our potential.

Training meditation is, to a large extent, training concentration. A simple meditation exercise is to imagine a geometric figure and try to keep that image present without getting distracted.

In very brief moments we will inevitably get distracted. The distractions that arise will be of one of these three types: physical, emotional, or mental.

A physical distraction can be, for example, that the knees start to hurt, the back gets tired, or the neck bothers us. Physical sensations that take the focus of attention that we were trying to maintain on a certain thought and bring it towards the body.

An emotional distraction is a little more subtle. For example, we may feel anxiety or boredom. Perhaps a feeling of sadness surfaces. Or if we had a bad day and we are in a bad mood, it becomes difficult to direct attention towards the object of concentration.

Mental distractions are thoughts. We remember something, we start thinking about something else. We make associations. We direct attention to memories of the past or projections of the future.

To reduce these distractions and advance in meditation training, all these aspects (physical, emotional and mental) have to be worked on. Performing a comprehensive work of the individual is crucial if we want to obtain true results with this technique.

We have multiple intelligences: bodily, emotional, intellectual... and they are like gears in the same machine.

There are two main approaches throughout history to develop the capacities considered higher. One is perfectly in line with the Judeo-Christian cultural heritage: abolish the body, deny it, withdraw attention and importance from it, so that other intelligences can emerge. The other proposes to develop the body (that gear) as a way to achieve overall harmony.

Among the supramental capacities that have been pursued at different times is meditation. Today there are many systems that propose to develop this aptitude. In many cases they go straight to the point, proposing the permanence in immobility with the legs crossed for hours. Have you already tried it? Have you tried to remain motionless for several minutes? From a fly to sleeping legs, at the beginning everything disperses you.

If you are not strong, with a resistant biological structure, meditating is very difficult. In fact, one of the obstacles to meditation cited by a well-known sage who lived in the third century B.C.E., Patanjali, is illness, the incidence of which is minimized if there is care for the body.

If instead of trying the farthest thing, meditation, and crashing against the closest thing, the body, we start by paying attention to the closest thing and try to feel what is happening inside, for example listening to the heartbeat, this changes the equation and the corporal universe becomes an ally to improve concentration, an indispensable previous step for meditation, which consists in stopping to think.

You have traveled the path that leads from worm to man, and many things in you continue to be worm. Once you were monkeys, and now also man is more monkey than any monkey. And the wisest of you is only a split being, a hybrid of plant and ghost. But do I command you to become ghosts or plants? wrote Nietzsche in his Thus Spake Zarathustra. This hybrid of plant and ghost, a split being, is the human being disconnected from his bodily, sensory heritage, the spiritualist in search of elevation? However, prior to this vision is that other one that sees no opposition between body and soul, does not seek to dissect what would not survive separately. If I fall to the ground I get up with the help of the ground, is the phrase of shakta tradition that sums up this view.