31-Day Meditation Challenge: Day 2

Welcome! This is the second lesson to a 31-Day Meditation Challenge recently recorded in July of 2020 entitled "Seek and Find Within." The audio recording is divided into an opening discourse and a guided meditation. This lesson introduces the importance of not moving and sitting up while in practice.

Enjoy!

Transcript

All right,

Good evening everyone.

Good to see you all.

Day two of 31 days.

The momentum is just getting started,

But it's so nice to see you all joining.

Okay,

So what we're gonna get into today is the actual first lesson,

And I just wanted to take a second to break down how these next 30 days are going to play out.

We're gonna essentially learn 10 lessons over the course of this month,

But each lesson is gonna be spread over three days just to give you the opportunity to integrate both the sort of like physical component,

The technique,

And the philosophical component,

Right?

Like what the technique represents to you as an individual,

But also to like yoga and meditation as a community and as a tradition.

The three days are pretty much giving you the time to confront lessons and experiences and memories and thoughts that I could never have access to and would only by chance or luck speak to.

And so these three days are gonna give you the opportunity to interact with those sort of like deeply personal nuances,

And in that recover gems and insights that only you could possibly recognize and learn from.

And the philosophy that integrates this into sort of like one word is the Satguru.

Sat is truth and guru is teacher,

You know,

More sort of romantically the remover of darkness or ignorance.

That Satguru is your little Jiminy Cricket on your shoulder.

It's your conscience,

And you know while you sit in your stillness and in your silence you're ultimately sort of interacting with this conscience or the voice of consciousness.

And so that's really the point of extending each lesson for three days.

And so the first lesson we're gonna get into is stillness,

Physical stillness and strong posture.

And we sort of touched that yesterday,

But I just wanted to take a second now to discuss like why exactly stillness and posture have,

You know,

Such a powerful impact on the mental experience of this practice.

And so the first thing is that we are trying to extend an exceptional degree of control,

Right,

Nirod,

That's that word,

Or self-restraint,

Into the mind purely.

We're trying to exercise a unique autonomy of our thought process in that flood of consciousness.

And so before we can actually do that it proves to be helpful to see if we can actually control our bodies.

Can we control our limbs and our fingers and our lips and our torsos and our hips?

The body at least,

You know,

Muscularly and anatomically is deeply loyal to our whims and wishes.

The only reason you moved is because you made the body move.

Your hand isn't gonna sort of reach up and scratch your face on its own.

And so we can use this as a leverage point to see how much control we actually have or how much control we don't have.

And so this is one idea.

And then the posture is going to provoke stress.

It's going to provoke anxiety and impatience because our posturing is triggering the sympathetic nervous system.

I always sort of like to look into nature to understand the reasons behind these techniques.

When we sit up and broaden our shoulders and straighten our arms and shut our jaw,

We're essentially priming ourselves.

Even though there's no threat or competitor in front of us,

We're priming our bodies to confront a hypothetical or imagined threat or competitor.

And so if you think about a little bullfrog bloating up to scare off,

You know,

Another,

You know,

Giant bullfrog invading its territory,

This is essentially what we're doing and how we're stimulating our bodies when we practice.

And the point is critical.

The reason is we must befriend that part of our nervous system,

The sympathetic nervous system that informs our bodies on when to be scared,

On when to reject our moments,

On when to be timid.

The more we expose ourselves to this signaling,

This biological signaling,

The more adapted we become to it.

And it's become more and more and more adapted to these signals.

And you experience this within your practices like impatience,

Boredom,

Confusion,

Maybe sort of like very normal worrying about the future,

Like circumstances that are happening.

But as we become more adapted to these physical signals that alter the way our brain thinks,

They sort of mean us into like negativity,

We start to open the space for a truly divine idea.

And that is that all of life,

All circumstances,

As horrendous as they may be or they may appear to be,

All circumstances are divine.

And this is,

You know,

An ancient and distinct state of mind.

But it is central to the mentality of a meditator and to a yogic meditator specifically.

Everything is divine.

And when we see things as less than divine,

Less than supremely good,

A meditator would put the onus on themselves.

That it's not the situation that is wrong or imbalanced or unjust.

It is me misperceiving it.

I'm not seeing far enough down the line.

I'm not looking deeply enough into it to recognize its divinity.

And so that's a sort of far-out idea.

It's a far-out ethos to really embody into the software of our psyche.

But the first step is learning to interact with the physiology.

Let me learn to feel the signals of my sympathetic nervous system,

Right?

And learn to trust that.

Learn to trust the itch.

Learn to trust the discomfort.

Learn to trust the impatience.

And from there we can slowly build,

If we choose to adopt this ethos of life being supremely and unquestionably good.

And the Sanskrit word for that sort of supreme goodness is advaita.

It's non-duality.

Good and bad breaks down and what remains is blissfulness or goodness.

Cool.

So all of these sort of romantic complex ideas are introduced into our being as like living organisms through being perfectly still for 20 minutes and then holding a strong posture.

And so with that let's just get right into it.

This is day one of stillness,

Day two of the challenge.

Okay.

And so more critical than anything I have to say,

Any of the ideas that I'm using to bolster your willingness to practice are the techniques.

So let's build our posture.

First technique.

Whether you're sitting down on the floor,

Sitting on a cushion,

Sitting in a chair or on the couch,

Tilt your hips forward and feel as you adjust your hips,

Right?

Your tailbone lifts up away from the floor,

Away from the cushion,

Away from the chair,

Away from the couch.

As you tilt your hips forward,

Your spine lengthens vertically.

And as your spine lengthens vertically,

Your chest opens forward.

Shut your jaw,

Press your tongue into the back of your two front teeth.

And as you put a little more pressure onto the back of your two front teeth,

You should find that you can relax your face.

Now let's just take a second to play with this posturing.

Let your hips roll backwards.

Roll onto the tailbone and what you should feel is that the spine starts to curve and the chest hollows.

And again,

Pull the hips forward,

The spine lengthens,

The chest broadens.

Okay,

The next detail is often the most aggravating because it seems erroneous.

Rest your wrists on your knees.

If you're sitting on a chair or on the couch,

Rest your palms on your knees.

And then from there,

Straighten your arms as much as possible so there's zero bend in the elbows.

And then rotate your palms up into the sky.

And notice your immediate response to the straightening of your arms mentally.

The thought is,

Why?

Why do I have to do this?

It's uncomfortable.

It's unnatural.

It's awkward.

That is your sympathetic nervous system being triggered because you're posturing the way a bullfrog postures and inflates its body to confront a predator or to confront a competitor.

And so your sympathetic nervous system affects your mind and determines the quality of thoughts you think,

Your inspiration or your rejection.

So again,

Straighten those arms.

Notice resistance to that instruction.

This is what we're trying to overcome.

All things are divine.

Spread your fingers wide,

Feel the skin of your palms stretching,

And then bring a random finger to each thumb.

As you bring that random finger to each thumb,

Just imagine you have a little grain of sand between your finger and your thumb,

And press that imagined grain of sand very gently.

And so for the next minute,

Maintain the length of your spine,

Maintain the straightening of the arms,

Maintain a shut jaw,

Breathe through the nose.

And for the next minute,

Experiment to sit in a way that provokes within you more confidence,

More power,

More strength.

Once you adjust yourself to project these qualities into yourself,

Hold stillness.

Lock on to this shape.

One minute here.

Thank you.

One of the definitions we discussed yesterday about meditation is that it is self-restraint.

The Sanskrit word was nirod.

We're all processing ourselves,

Considering ourselves,

Judging ourselves.

And a critical dimension of judgment is how much control do I have over my own being?

Can I restrain my impulses,

My instinctual urges?

The truth is,

When we have more control over ourselves as human beings,

We feel more free.

We feel empowered.

Self-control leads to the experience of personal liberation.

When we submit to our habits,

Impulsive,

Unconscious habits,

We are enslaved by them,

Depressed by them.

And so meditation is an exercise,

A scenario in this self-restraint.

Again,

Nirod.

Resisting movement is an exceptional exercise in self-control because movement is ancient.

Movement is one of the defining traits of all living organisms.

To impose our authority into that dimension of what we are suggests we're doing something powerful.

And so while the body is maintained and managed,

Strong posture,

Endurance stillness,

The mental experience,

And the inner sensations,

They're still volatile.

And so what I'd like you to consider and remind yourself for the next 15 minutes,

Is that all sensations,

All thoughts are good.

Boredom is fine.

Impatience is fine.

Anxiety is fine.

Worrying is fine.

It does not have to disrupt you.

Pressure in the hips,

In the back,

An itch on your face,

All of it is okay.

So this is the game.

Let's all take a deep breath in.

Breathing through the nose,

A slow exhale.

One more time,

A bit more slowly.

Deep breath in,

Nothing moves.

And a slow exhale.

So your breath is always there to soothe you.

You're on your own for a little while.

Perfect self-restraint in a road.

Remain still,

Keep your posture,

Consider that all things are at least okay.

Let's all take a deep breath in.

Breathing through the nose,

A slow exhale.

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Reviews

This is so lovely and soothing ❤️❤️❤️
Thank you

I am really enjoying these practices. I have been meditating for a while but there is always room to learn more and grow. Thank you. ☮️💖🙏