During meditation, our inner experience will often flow continually in different flavors, from humor to sorrow, anger, fear, courage, wonder, disgust, peace, anger again, sorrow, maybe compassion, then love. The mix and sequence is totally unpredictable and depends on the way our day is going, what's happening, what we are called to express or repress.

I've spent most of my life listening to people talk about their meditative experience, and in the Western world, two-thirds of the meditators are women. In workshops, I encourage people to share their inner experience and it's common for a woman to stand up and run through seven or eight of these nine flavors of experience.

Rasa रस

The Indian dance tradition has given us a beautiful, simple map of the colors of human energy flow.

The tones of emotion are called the rasas, the tastes of life, and this is a brilliant conception. We are here to savor the essence of life, and one way life shows up is in the variety of flavors or essences that we call love, delight, erotic energy, laughter, sorrow, anger, courage, terror, disgust, wonder, and peace.

Each rasa refers to a whole world of experience and expression and the nuances are what's so entertaining. In our outer lives, we have to match our emotions and expressions to be appropriate to the outer environment. Often we have to suppress much of what we are feeling. Meditation is the place to catch up with ourselves and redeem all the rasas, let them flow and dissolve back into pure life energy.

In meditation you can play with the rasas, as they play with you. Over time, if you like, you can learn really useful and adaptive skills that allow you to navigate life's challenges.

If the rasas are colors, then you can combine them to make them brighter. In additive coloration, such as with computer monitors and phone screens, white is created by adding red, blue, and green. This is called RGB.

It's natural to feel all the rasas in meditation, and on any given day you may have a range of those that show up more often than others. Always be ready for your experience to change suddenly, for one day you'll wake up and the entire mix will be different. You are the artist of your life