Hello,
Good day everyone.
Welcome to day one of Beginner's Mind,
Which will be a 10-day journey that I can't wait to get started with you,
Where we'll cover a lot of ground and you learn a lot and hopefully discover a lot about yourself and your relationship with yourself and how it may be a little different than you actually thought it was.
As I mentioned we're going to cover a lot of ground over the next 10 days.
The range of topics that we'll cover are all geared towards you building your own practice where you can be independent,
Meditate daily and really cultivate some peace and stability in your life.
If over the next 10 days you have anything that comes to mind or any questions or anything that's confusing or abstract to you,
Please don't hesitate to reach out.
We have a fairly large amount of people doing this course.
You can reach out to anybody in that community for kind of some peer support.
As well don't hesitate to reach out to myself.
I'm here for questions,
I'm happy to answer them and I would much rather answer questions and clarify things than have people leave this course confused and not really knowing where to go next.
Please don't hesitate to reach out.
There's no such thing as a dumb question.
So with no further ado,
Let's kick into day one's material where we'll talk about what meditation is.
A couple quick points kind of dispelling a little bit of stigma about meditation.
Meditation is not something that isolated Himalayan yogis do where they're locked in a cave and they're somehow impervious to the cold and they just sit there and do nothing.
It's also not about blanking your mind and not thinking or feeling anything.
It's not an inaccessible practice.
So when I talk about what meditation is,
I'd like to share a short story that comes from my recent past.
I was having a conversation with somebody who's actually a student of mine now and they worked with a sports team and they told me about how they were talking to the members of this team and saying,
You know,
You can't control the actions of others,
But you can control your reactions to their actions.
I smiled and I thought and I offered back that,
You know,
I would take that even a step further if I may.
Not only can you not control the actions of others,
But you can't control your reactions to their actions.
What you can control though is your reactions to your reactions.
Maybe a little abstract,
But just stay with me for a second here.
How many times have you tried to control a thought or a feeling?
If you're anything like most of us in this world,
The answer is probably a lot.
It's kind of a go-to solution for a lot of people.
But I'm betting that one or two things happened when you did that.
Either you succeeded or you didn't.
Seems obvious,
Right?
But if you succeeded,
What probably happened is you took that thought or that feeling or that emotion and you stuffed it into a little box and you put it away somewhere.
The compartmentalized it.
And I'm willing to bet that even though it felt like it was gone,
It wasn't actually gone and it probably came roaring back at some really inopportune time,
Probably way out of proportion to what it was in the first place.
And it probably made some other situation horrendously uncomfortable,
You know,
In a situation that it had no business being in.
That's most often what happens with those compartmentalized feelings.
Or you know,
Option two,
If you didn't succeed in controlling the thought or feeling,
It probably felt a little bit like trying to wrestle a pig or a wild hog that did not want to be subdued and kicking and screaming and getting worse and worse and worse.
You know,
This hog,
This thought,
This feeling just gets more and more and more pronounced and out of control until it's so bad that you don't even know how you got there.
These things happen because of the way that our brains are wired.
Because those thoughts,
Those feelings,
Those reactions are biochemical,
Neurochemical responses,
Sometimes hormonal responses to stimuli,
To input.
And we can't control that.
It's the way the brain is.
You know,
It takes the input stimulus,
Comes up with a reaction every time.
You know,
And you can't control that any more than you can control the sky being blue.
You know,
How could anybody be expected to control such an automatic thing that happens in the brain?
What we can learn to control though is our reactions to those reactions,
Like I said in the beginning.
And when we sit to meditate,
One of our first mile markers,
Lamppost,
Signpost,
Whatever you want to call it,
Is recognition that we are not our thoughts and our feelings.
And through our practice,
We start to learn to watch or observe our thoughts and feelings as an external object or phenomenon.
So even though they can feel overwhelming at times,
As we become more disciplined and as we start to recognize thought,
Feeling,
Etc,
Etc,
We start to de-link them,
So to speak,
From what we are.
They're just another external phenomenon.
And so we start to remove the control from those automatic reactions.
So what is meditation?
To sum it up,
Meditation is patient,
Repetitive training for the mind.
It allows us to,
In effect,
Start putting some space in between us and those thoughts and feelings and all those automatic reactions that we can't control.
And that starts to break that cycle of stress and suffering.
And ultimately,
It's time that we take to just sit,
Be with ourselves,
And slow things down and just be okay and at peace with whatever happens.
Enjoy your practice.
