Hey everybody,
Welcome to Bringing Meditation to Life,
A podcast in which we immerse ourselves in the intersection of meditation and everyday life,
In which we look at the ways meditation illuminates and deepens our experience of daily living and the ways life itself does the same for our practice.
I'm your host,
Neil McKinlay.
Welcome everybody.
As the preceding introduction hopefully made clear,
This is Bringing Meditation to Life and I am Neil McKinlay.
And given that this is the first episode in this podcast,
I thought it might be appropriate to take a little bit of time,
Give you a sense both of myself and my vision,
My inspiration for this series.
I've been meditating my entire adult life.
This started as a relatively curious pursuit in my teens and my early 20s.
And it has been through the last 25 years or so,
Something that I give more serious tension in my life,
Something that I give more focused,
Sustained attention in my life.
Through much of this entire span,
I have been interested in the ways that the teachings and practices of meditation intersect with the stuff of everyday living.
Been interested in the ways that the meditative experience of stability,
For instance,
Affects how I shop for groceries and the ways that grocery shopping enriches and deepens my understanding of my sense of my appreciation for meditative stability.
This interest may have arisen out of the fact that I first learned how to meditate as a competitive swimmer.
So the practice and everyday living have always been intimately linked for me.
This interest might have been supported by the fact that much of my meditative training has occurred within what is often called a householder tradition,
A meditative tradition in which everyday tasks such as maintaining a home and holding a job are considered part and parcel of one's spiritual path.
Whatever the case,
My interest in the intersection of meditation and everyday life most certainly came to a fore while doing what was called a city retreat with the well-known Buddhist teacher Pema Shodron.
Using recorded talks and assigned readings and discussion groups and daily practice and occasional practice intensives,
Over the course of eight or ten weeks,
This program encouraged me to practice and study in a relatively deep way while simultaneously attending to and being immersed in all the usual stuff of my everyday life.
I still went to work,
I still saw my friends,
I still prepared meals every day.
Among other things,
This program,
This experience,
Showed me that the practice of meditation and ordinary in-the-world tasks such as cleaning a sink full of dirty dishes need not be as separate,
Need not be as isolated from one another as I had typically assumed.
This was revelatory for me and the impacts of this revelation continue to this day.
They're part of the reason I am speaking to you now,
Part of the reason I am recording this podcast.
For this is really the intention behind bringing meditation to life,
To loosen,
To perforate any notions we might have about the separation of meditation and everyday living between meditation and what I earlier called the householder life,
And to take a look at some of the ways these two are more or less constantly enriching and illuminating one another.
Though I am a teacher of meditation,
My aim here is not really to teach.
I don't consider myself offering anything prescriptive or definitive here.
My aim instead lay more in the realm of sharing,
As if I were opening my meditator's notebook to all of you and saying,
Hey,
This is how it is for me,
Or hey,
This is what I'm noticing now,
Or hey,
This is what I'm thinking about today.
My aim here lay more in the realm of opening my meditator's notebook with all of you and then allowing ample room for you to connect with and reflect upon your own experience of this rich intersection.
To this end,
To ensure we all will have such room for connection and reflection in what are probably already full and busy lives,
I expect most of these podcasts will be relatively short in length,
Perhaps five or sometimes ten minutes in duration.
They'll be more like snapshots than full-length motion pictures,
Momentary glimpses shared between meditators,
Glimpses that we can then carry with us as we drive to work and play with our kids and check,
Clean out the storm drains,
And even as we practice and study.
Glimpses that might encourage all of us to more fully embrace our meditative paths as our lives and our lives as our meditative journeys.
So welcome everybody.
Once again,
This is Bringing Meditation to Life and I'm your host,
Neil McKinlay.
Thank you for listening.
If you're curious,
You can learn more about myself and my work at my website,
Neilmckinlay.
Com.
In the meantime,
Please take care and be well.
Let's keep doing this work together.
Let's keep bringing meditation to life.
