Seriousness: Practice Morsels

This talk explores the theme of seriousness in meditation practice. It highlights that while seriousness is sometimes necessary in life, a lighter, more joyful attitude can be more effective—especially in practices like loving-kindness (metta) meditation, where playfulness can help soften the heart.

It can serve well to find and maintain a healthy balance with seriousness, particularly in mindfulness of breathing. Too much seriousness can lead to tension and over-effort, while too little can result in drowsiness, distraction, or lack of discipline. The key is finding the right amount of seriousness to stay committed and present without becoming rigid or overly striving.

Transcript

Seriousness.

So of course we know sometimes in life seriousness is called for and sometimes it's not.

Sometimes light-hearted joyful approach is better.

Sometimes straight-laced gung-ho no joking around is the best way to do it.

So when it comes to the world of meditation maybe a more light-hearted approach and not so serious approach might be for loosening up around say Metta loving-kindness meditation where yeah maybe a little bit more fun,

Playfulness,

Joyfulness kind of helps soften the heart.

But when it comes to maybe like Anapanasati how much seriousness is needed you know how much mindfulness of breathing when we do mindfulness of breathing how much seriousness is needed basically meaning like how much commitment and to the object is helpful and we don't need to go too much because I feel that probably might correlate with effort get too serious then I get too tight too striving but without enough taking the meditation seriously then it could be too loose either falling asleep drowsiness or of course the mind wandering off or even the discipline to restrain restlessness and remorse or deal with that hindrance but where's the great way to do seriousness to take yourself serious enough and take the meditation serious enough to really help support dialing in and kind of almost committing what one set out to do set out to do in the first place and dial in stick with the meditation

Reviews

I think seriousness can be combined with flexibility, not too much of any of those 🙏🏻