Preside Open 6: The "Let It Run" Drift Exercise

This is the third "Drift Exercise", designed to help you stay in meditation for longer periods of time, when your nervous chattering mind (ie the Monkey Mind), confronts you with anxiety and distracting thoughts.

"Let It Run" addresses the scenario when your anxiety and worry are overwhelming and no other calming techniques seem to be working, and what to do in meditation when that happens.

Please note: This audio is ripped from a video.

Transcript

So in this video,

I'm going to teach you drift exercise number three,

Which is called let it run.

And basically,

This is an exercise you want to do when you're in the middle of a meditation,

You're trying to drift out for longer,

And monkey mind is just inconsolable,

Right?

It's really strong and it's just barreling over you like a freight train.

So you're having a session,

Let's say it's not going well,

Your launch exercise got kind of interrupted or bungled,

And monkey mind is bringing up all these worries from your day.

You're trying to say,

Hang on a minute,

Let me get back to you,

And it's just not working,

Right?

Monkey mind is not taking no for an answer.

And you're even trying to not criticize the quality of your meditation,

But you're bungling it so badly that you can't even not criticize,

Right?

And then you say,

Oh my gosh,

I can't even not criticize,

I'm really stinking at meditation.

And it's just a downward spiral from there.

And so I don't know if this has actually happened to you yet in any of your meditation sessions.

But I've got to tell you sooner or later,

It will happen to you.

It happens to everyone.

You know,

You're just trying to have a good session and it's all just a bloody mess.

So the drift exercise here is,

Well,

You know,

What do you do in a situation like this?

And the quick answer is,

You don't resist it at all.

You just let it run.

And the idea here is it's kind of like you are a sumo wrestler,

Right?

And the idea in sumo wrestling is that there's a ring that you and your opponent are in.

And what you're trying to do is you're trying to get your opponent to fall out of the ring.

And,

You know,

When they say go and your,

You know,

400-pound opponent starts rushing at you,

You really have two options at that point.

The first is you can stiffen up and stand there and try to take the full breath of the attack head on.

And if you're going up against Monkey Mind,

You'll probably get bowled over,

Right?

And then the other way you could deal with it is,

You know,

With the sumo wrestler of Monkey Mind,

You know,

Charging at you at the last minute instead of,

You know,

Opposing it directly,

You actually just step aside and let your opponent fly right by you all the way through and simply fall out of the ring that way.

And when you just let go completely,

You're like,

You know,

None of these things are working,

None of these launch exercises,

Drift exercises,

Nothing is working.

And Monkey Mind is going nuts.

You just step aside and let it run.

And that is the essence of this technique.

And in fact,

If you get good at letting it run,

As you let it run,

You can actually relax and sit back and just watch it,

Right?

You can watch your failed meditation like it's a train wreck,

Like it's on TV or something.

And you can even make a few comments on,

You know,

What a mess,

You know,

It's kind of fun.

Oh my gosh,

Look at that car flying through the air.

This is just,

You know,

It's going to take weeks to clean this mess up.

Because remember,

On a fundamental level,

All you're really doing is sitting there,

Quote unquote,

Doing nothing,

Right?

So at the end of the day,

None of this is a big deal.

It's just a five to seven minute,

Maybe 10 minute session.

You're doing it right before bed,

You know,

You're going to go to sleep soon anyway.

So whatever,

None of this is a big deal.

It's not a high stakes game.

There's no reason to have any anxiety whatsoever.

And basically,

Another sort of imagery,

Bit of imagery you can use with this technique is,

Especially if you're a parent,

You can probably relate to this,

Is that,

You know,

When you have a bunch of little kids,

Let's say three or four year old kids,

And they're at a birthday party,

And the little kids are just running around and going,

Ah,

Right?

And you're just like,

Gosh,

There's just nothing you can do to get your kid to calm down.

And it's time to go,

You've got to go,

You're trying to get them to calm down.

And move on to the next thing.

And nothing is going to work,

Right?

You can bribe him,

You can cajole him,

You can threaten him,

You can scold him.

Nothing is working.

And you know,

Maybe it's because your,

You know,

Uncle Bobby gave him a root beer float with extra syrup and a cherry on top,

Right?

And the kid is just wired.

So it's not even his fault.

So what do you do in a case like that?

Well,

I don't know what your parenting style is.

But in my case,

You know,

In a case like that,

At a certain point,

What do you do?

You just let him run.

You know,

You just sit back and you're like,

You know,

I'm not happy about it,

But I'm not angry about it.

You just let him run.

And when you let him run,

What happens then?

Well,

Eventually,

The little guy is going to get tired and eventually come back and crawl into your lap and fall asleep.

It may take 10 minutes,

It may take an hour.

But if so,

If you leave him alone and let him run,

Eventually,

He will tire himself out.

And exactly the same thing will happen with your monkey mind as well.

Okay.

And if you've learned several techniques and exercises from the Preside Library,

Right?

So you've got two or three launch techniques and you've got two or three drift techniques.

What's going to happen when monkey mind runs itself out is that automatically,

You'll just instinctively start another exercise going.

Right.

So once monkey mind starts tiring out,

You may find yourself just totally,

Naturally,

Unconsciously and involuntarily launching into the sponge meditation again,

Or launching into the bowl meditation again,

Or imagining two birds and then shifting your center of gravity over to the second bird.

And all this will just happen on its own.

You don't need to do anything.

After you've trained for a while,

All of this will be completely second nature to you.

And obviously,

The more techniques you know and the more techniques you have in your mental library,

The better off you are because the more footholds and toe holds you're going to have to let your autopilot naturally step up and take over again.

Because sometimes,

You know,

You've had a really tough day,

You're going through a very tough time in your life,

Everything's just a big mess.

But if you take the time in meditation to just let it go and let it run itself out,

Everything will settle back in all by itself.

You don't have to force it.

In fact,

You know that if you try to force it,

It won't work.

So if you don't force it,

And you let it settle for long enough,

It will always self-correct on its own,

Give it enough time and enough patience.

And while it's doing that,

You can even watch it and you know,

Enjoy it like a movie.

Or leave it to settle on its own and go do something else and just watch it running around on its own.

So the technique here in a word is just when it's really going crazy,

Just let the monkey mind run itself out.

Just let it run.

Let it run.

Okay,

So I hope that was helpful.

And in the next video,

What I want to do is go back to the launch exercises.

And I want to dive into teaching you the second launch exercise,

Which is called the bowl meditation.

And again,

As I said before,

It's really important for you to have a number of different launch exercises to pick from every night.

Because what the monkey mind will do over time is it will,

You know,

Obviously be always trying all these different things to get you to stop meditating.

And one of the things it'll do if you don't have enough exercises learned in your mental library is it'll challenge you with boredom,

Right?

It'll say,

Oh,

Are we going to do that sponge meditation again?

Really?

It's so boring.

We've been doing that every night for the past,

You know,

Three weeks.

So it's really important for you to learn more launch exercises so that you can have variety to keep monkey mind from really getting a grip on you,

You know,

Getting its jaws locked on you and derailing your practice.

So I'm really excited to get into our second launch exercise together.

And when you're ready,

I will see you over there.

Reviews

Love the idea. Don't struggle, let it run its course.