While I had some success with mantra-based meditation in the past, including Yogani's "Deep Meditation", it was this technique...this book... that changed everything for me. The constant rhythmic repetition of mantra that's typical of nearly every mantra meditation tradition, including "Deep Meditation" frustratingly failed to yield any serious progress.
But the spacing of the mantra used in this technique of "Samyama" just blew me away. It's the missing piece of mantra meditation, its own special holy grail. All of the frustrations and minor success I had with mantra-based meditation quickly dissolved. My life, mind, and spirit unified. Everything suddenly became mysteriously coincidental. It was as if the universe was conspiring in my favor at every turn in life.
I quit practicing "Deep Meditation" the way Yogani teaches it, and started practicing both Deep Meditation and Samyama with the instructions giving in Samyama, with the long spaces of silence between repetitions and the quiet letting go of the mantra each time. It was incomparably revolutionary. Instead of holding onto the mantra, like in DM and other mantra based instructions, I was letting go. Letting go into silence. The silence of my own being, and the source of it.
I later learned that this way that mantra is practiced in this special technique of samyama is how the Christian contemplatives practice via the technique of "Centering Prayer." I'm not sure if this is where it came from, as so much of the techniques in AYP are borrowed from various traditions, or if it was an outgrowth of Yogani's own meditative practice, but this technique is the Gold Standard of meditation.