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.
One of the things that we're doing when we practice meditation is developing our capacity to rest with our experience.
Put another way,
We are developing our capacity to resist the temptation of impulse.
My dictionary defines impulse as the sudden,
Strong,
And unreflective urge or desire to act.
This about captures it.
The word impulse describes our powerful need to do something,
To do anything,
To push,
To pull,
To ignore our immediate experience.
From a meditative perspective,
Our immediate experience,
Whatever it may be,
Is essentially clear,
Attuned,
And responsive.
Our immediate experience then,
Should this actually be true,
Our immediate experience then is inherently all the kind of qualities we might want to have available to us.
Clarity,
For instance,
The ability to see a situation for what it is.
Our immediate experience then is all the kind of qualities we might want to have available to us as we meet and try to engage ourselves,
Our relationships,
And this world in as appropriate a way as possible.
By disrupting our relationship with immediate experience,
By encouraging us not to rest for a moment but to do all the time,
By seeking to alter what that immediate experience actually is,
Impulse also disrupts our relationship with the qualities inherent within that experience.
Again,
Those ever-so-helpful qualities of clarity,
Attunement,
And responsiveness.
By developing our capacity to rest for a moment,
By developing our capacity to resist the knee-jerk temptation of impulse,
Meditation,
The practice of bringing our attention back to this immediate moment again and again and again.
Meditation slowly and gradually heals and recovers and realigns this relationship.
It gives us an opportunity to bring these essential qualities to bear throughout our lives.
But of course formal meditation practice is something most of us are able to engage for only a small amount of time every day.
We all,
After all,
Have jobs and friends and families to attend to.
We have plants and pets and children.
Which raises the question whether there are ways we might deepen our work with meditation outside of formal practice sessions.
Are there ways we might deepen our ability to rest with experience,
Our capacity to resist knee-jerk impulsivity,
Our relationship with this moment's innate clarity,
Attunement,
And responsiveness within the flow of our everyday life?
In my experience,
The answer to all of these questions,
Fortunately,
Is yes.
With this in mind,
Maybe you'd be willing to give this a try.
The next time you're stalled in a grocery line,
An everyday occurrence that I'm sure most of us know how it goes,
We've chosen a particular cue.
That cue has stopped moving.
There's someone in front of us.
There's someone behind,
So we can't go anywhere.
Maybe we're starting to get a little hot under the collar or the clock is starting to tick a little bit more loudly for us.
Our impatience is beginning to prickle like sweat on our foreheads.
The next time this happens and you feel the impulse to do something,
To shift from one foot to the other,
To sigh a little more loudly than usual,
To reach out for one of those nearby magazines,
The next time this happens,
Stop right there and turn your attention toward the body.
Just turn your attention toward the body and feel what's going on for you.
Do this for three seconds,
Do this for five seconds,
Do this for 10 seconds.
It needn't be much to have an impact.
Just take this moment of everyday living and deepen and strengthen what you're doing within your formal meditation practice,
Which is developing your capacity to rest with what's happening,
Developing your capacity to resist the temptation to impulsively act.
Doing this so that if and when you do act,
This acting will be more closely aligned with the clarity,
The attunement and the responsiveness which is inherent in,
Which is essential to our everyday lives.
Thank you as always for listening everybody.
I'm Neil McKinley and you can learn more about me and my work at neilmckinley.
Com.
Until next time,
Take care and be well.
Let's keep doing this work together.
Let's keep bringing meditation to life.
