Welcome back and welcome to your first debrief.
So the exercise you just experienced is something called a launch exercise,
Which is an exercise designed to take you from the busy brain of regular life.
You know,
Sometimes we call it work head or office head.
And to move you from that very thinking intensive mode,
Which has an irresistible momentum all its own.
So to move from that very gently and quickly into a very basic mode of meditation,
Which is a state of non-thinking or where the volume of the thinking chattering mind is just gently turned lower.
It's kind of like as if you were a surfer who for whatever reason just cannot get to the part of the water where you want to be.
And so what you end up doing is you get a toe in by a guy on a jet ski into your target surf zone and basically from there you are on your own.
And hopefully you felt a little bit of this with this first launch exercise.
You were calm and relaxed and when you were presiding,
You may have had a subtle feeling of almost drifting along and you may have found it to be relaxing and amazing or you may have found it to be disorienting and uncomfortable,
Depending on your personality and life experiences.
And a major point I want to share with you in this debrief is that that subtle drifting feeling is the basic building block of all meditation practice.
The art and technique of getting yourself to that general state where the thinking mind is relaxed and you're just resting or drifting on the,
Well let's just call it the non-thinking mind for now,
Okay?
That is the practice of meditation.
And if you did not like it,
Well,
I mean this is what we're going to be doing together in this community,
Diving deeper and deeper together over the course of many,
Many videos.
So just FYI.
And if you did like it,
What you will learn at Preside Meditation is a whole host of techniques to launch yourself into this drifting over longer and longer periods effortlessly to dive deeper and deeper over time.
And so in the exercise just now,
While you were presiding over your mind,
Where we were like,
You know,
Don't touch it,
But don't walk away from it either.
At that point,
You may have started drifting a little.
And the critical thing is normally it's not going to last for more than half a minute or a minute,
Especially when you're just starting out as a beginning meditator.
It won't last more than a little while before your thinking,
Chattering mind picks up steam again and grabs you by the throat and starts to run away with you again with this anxiety or that drama or this other interesting insight.
And I think most of you will get what I'm talking about.
And you've probably even experienced it firsthand,
Even in the exercise just now.
So in the Preside library of techniques,
We have a second kind of exercise,
Which we'll teach you,
Which we call a drift exercise,
Which is a technique designed to help you calm your chattering mind in the middle of an ongoing,
Already launched meditation.
So you can drift along in meditation for longer periods of time and increase your meditative range.
Now,
This is really important because the longer you can drift,
The deeper you'll be able to go into meditation and the more intensive your experience will be.
And as you build a skill and this foundation of regular practice,
The more clarity,
The more relaxed peace of mind,
Free from worry and free from fear and anxiety you'll be able to experience.
Now in addition to this,
I want to add that as your quote unquote meditation muscle gets stronger,
You'll also be able to launch into meditative states even when you're quote unquote not meditating.
So even in the middle of the day at work,
In the middle of a meeting,
You'll learn how to invisibly and imperceptibly shift your center of gravity over to the drifting state and still be able to be fully productive and functional at work.
And the only difference is that you'll be more immune to frustration,
Slower to anger,
Quicker to forgive and your creativity will flow.
And we will teach you how to do this as well.
Now I realize that depending on the kind of job you have,
These may or may not actually be desirable qualities.
And if that is the case,
It can actually be a very powerful contrast for you to experience between how you feel in your job and how you feel in your meditation so that you can feel the specific differences and perhaps find a creative way to integrate them or even make changes to your life to be more to your liking.
Because the thing that meditation brings above all is clarity.
Clarity of mind,
Clarity of heart,
Clarity of vision so that you can see what is actually there versus what you worry or fear might be there.
And so you can make clear-eyed choices to make your life happier and more contented and free from anxiety and unnecessary suffering.
Okay,
So that's the end of the debrief.
And now in the next video,
I'd like to get into just a little bit of background theory on what we will call the monkey mind,
Which is your chattering,
Thinking,
100 mile an hour racing mind and get into how it works,
Why it is so hard to calm down and why it is hardwired to do everything in its power to get you to stop meditating.
And understanding this is absolutely critical to you as a meditator,
Regardless of whatever meditation technique you end up using to at least give you a baseline general sense for what you are up against when you try to sit down and meditate.
If you've ever thought to yourself,
Oh,
I could never meditate,
My mind just chatters too much,
Then this is the video for you.
I highly recommend it,
And I will see you over there next.
