Introduction for Guru Meditation

This meditation introduces you to the Guru Meditation app and experience. A must listen!

Transcript

Welcome to our very first meditation.

As we practice,

We develop insight and compassion.

As we share,

We are each other's teachers.

Awakening our inner wisdom,

We become our own guru.

Hi there.

My name is Ravi and I'm the founder of Guru.

This introduction is going to go over everything that you need to know about this app and give you a little taste of the way we'll be practicing meditation.

It all starts with our name.

When we use the word guru,

We're not talking about some external teacher.

We're talking about our deepest wisdom.

That part of our mind,

Our heart,

And our soul that really knows what's up,

That understands our deepest desires,

And that can guide us to where we're going.

Guru,

The app,

Is about uncovering our inner guru.

And living our lives led by this deepest part of ourselves,

Present to our experience,

Instead of getting lost in the running narrative in our heads.

Why is this so important?

In the words of the immortal Ferris Bueller,

Life moves pretty fast.

If you don't stop and look around once in a while,

You could miss it.

I felt this intimately in my days playing high school football.

For my first three years on the team,

My mind obsessed on the next level of achievement.

How much playing time I was going to get,

Whether I was going to be in the starting lineup,

Whether I'd be selected captain,

And so on.

Each time I got what I wanted,

I'd be ecstatic.

But then about a week later,

That sense of intense wanting would kick right back in.

This cycle continued until the start of my senior year when I pulled my hamstring.

All of a sudden,

I couldn't even play at all.

As I watched from the sidelines early in the season,

I saw the things that I had been missing.

The friendships being formed,

The joy of wins and the pain of defeats,

And through it all,

The camaraderie of the team.

My narrative had been so loud in my head that I was missing the whole point of playing football.

To play and have fun with my friends.

When I got back on the field,

I was able to savor those last few weeks that I had to play competitive football.

So the moral of the story is to enjoy the moment,

Right?

Unfortunately,

It's not quite that easy.

Our minds,

Our behavior patterns,

That running mental monologue in our heads,

They're all sculpted by long-running narratives and deeply held beliefs about who we are and what is going to make us happy.

For me,

One of them was the status of being a starter or a captain on the team,

Just as one example.

The crazy thing is,

Some of these narratives don't even come from inside of us.

They're subconsciously inherited from the people around us and society as a whole.

If I get down to my truth,

I didn't actually care about being captain,

But it seemed like everybody else did.

So that's what I thought I wanted for myself.

If we look closely,

We see this dynamic cropping up across our lives and manifesting in a thousand different ways.

Sometimes based on our childhood or relationships,

Sometimes rooted in the dominant narratives of our communities and society.

The way our brains work is a function of how we've reacted to everything that we've been through.

These layers of mental conditioning can keep us from being truly present and really hearing our inner wisdom.

But the road to freedom is simply to start to see what is going on in our minds via meditation and contemplation,

Which is exactly what we'll do with Guru.

Because it's this totality of influences that makes us who we are,

We're going to dive into them at every level.

On Tuesdays,

We'll release a meditation that is society-focused,

Probing societal-wide issues and influences.

On Thursdays,

We'll delve into our everyday lives,

Our communities,

Relationships,

Work,

And family and friends.

On Saturdays,

We'll turn the focus inward,

Exploring our relationship to ourselves.

Each meditation will include a mindfulness practice,

Like a breath meditation,

And a guided contemplation,

Which will explore the aforementioned topics from the lens of traditional mindfulness philosophy.

Each contemplation will culminate in a journaling prompt,

And you'll get to read others' responses and share your own if you'd like.

If that sounds a bit vague,

Just do the meditations and you'll see exactly what we're talking about.

So that's basically everything that you need to know about Guru.

I was talking for a while there,

So we're going to have a shorter-than-normal meditation practice today.

Let's get started.

We'll be doing a brief mindfulness of breath practice today.

Let's begin by taking a seat,

Whether it's on a cushion on the ground or a chair.

Alternatively,

You're welcome to stand up.

From here,

Let's find a posture that will support our meditation practice today.

One of my teachers describes this posture as a posture of regalness,

Feeling like we are a queen or a king on a throne,

Allowing both a sense of longness in the spine,

Uprightness in the body,

And a sense of ease and relaxation in the posture as well.

So take a second and find this regal posture in your body.

Now,

Start to locate where you're feeling the body breathe today.

What are the physical sensations that you're feeling from the breath?

This could be the air flowing through your nostrils or the muscular expansion and relaxation of the chest or maybe the belly or anywhere else in the body.

Just locate where you're feeling the breath right now.

And having located the breath,

Our mindfulness of breath practice is simply to place our attention on these sensations of the breath,

Allowing the attention to rest in the breath.

And so we'll be practicing like this for about three minutes.

From time to time,

You'll notice that the mind's attention is wandered off,

That you're no longer resting the attention in the physical sensations of the breath.

When you notice,

You can feel good that you actually saw that that's what was happening.

And from this place of feeling good about having noticed,

Just come right back to the breath.

This is our core practice of meditation,

Beginning again each time.

So just come back to the physical sensations of the breath.

Stay with the breath.

Each time we notice the mind has wandered,

We come back.

That's all we're doing.

We're going to move on to our contemplation now,

But if you'd like to keep practicing this mindfulness of breath meditation,

You're welcome to hit pause,

And we'll be here when you get back.

So here's how contemplations work.

I'm going to give you a question or a prompt,

And all you need to do is pose this question or prompt to yourself and observe what arises,

Whether it's emotions,

Thoughts,

Or even sensations in the body.

The point is not to consciously analyze,

But rather to simply observe what comes up as you run this question or prompt through your mind.

So today's contemplation is what are you doing today,

Or what part of your life do you really want to be present for,

Even if it's challenging?

This could be a friendship,

A relationship,

An activity like eating,

Aspects of work,

Or anything else.

So again,

The prompt is what are you doing today,

Or what is a part of your life that you really want to be present for,

Even if it's challenging?

And so we'll have about a minute of silence as we contemplate this prompt.

Again,

Just like meditation,

Each time we notice that the mind's attention is elsewhere,

All we need to do is bring it right back to this contemplation.

So we're going to wrap up our contemplation here,

But as always,

You're welcome to continue contemplating,

And you'll have a chance to journal your response to this question on the next screen.

This wraps up our practice for today.

As we close,

We can take a second to feel good about the fact that we took some time to meditate today.

So really thank yourself for practicing.

This ancient practice has an overwhelmingly positive impact on our life,

And it just requires that we show up.

And so from this place of feeling good,

Thanking ourselves,

When you're ready,

You can bring some movement back into your body and open your eyes.

Thanks for joining us on this first practice and this journey of working with our minds.

Be sure to check out some of the emails that have some blog posts and just a lot more information about this app and our approach to meditation.

Once you're on the latest version of the app,

You'll have a chance to share your journal post anonymously.

And either way,

I'm looking forward to reading all of your great responses.

Thanks so much for downloading this app.

I sincerely hope it puts you in deeper touch with your inner guru and that you share that guru with the rest of us.

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