Hi there,
It's Maggie Kelly.
I'm a meditation teacher and spiritual life coach.
I do a lot of introductions to meditations.
I meet a lot of different kinds of people and I wanted to just bring you just a quick 10-minute meditation with a little bit of commentary to help you begin your meditation practice if you're a beginner or perhaps just sort of refresh your current practice or even deepen your current practice.
Basically today I wanted to just talk about this idea of most new meditators seem to think that meditation involves not thinking when in fact meditation isn't about not thinking at all.
Meditation is about noticing our thoughts.
The idea around meditation really is to simply notice that we're thinking,
Right?
Meditation is actually being able to recognize that thoughts have actually arisen and to continually train in noticing the thoughts that do arise not to stop them from arising,
Just noticing them.
Just noticing that constant and never-ending internal chatter that just doesn't want to ever seem to leave you alone.
So we're going to try it out.
We're going to try to settle in for about 10 minutes or so just to see what that internal chatter and how often it arises.
Just to see it happen in real time.
So close your eyes and take a few deep breaths and allow yourself to settle in to wherever you're seated,
Hopefully with minimal distraction,
Right?
And start to turn your attention towards your thoughts as they arise.
Don't try to stop the thoughts or tell yourself that you shouldn't be thinking.
Instead just turn your attention toward the actual thought.
See if instead of leaning towards that tendency to evaluate the thought or judge the thought or criticize or even put any kind of label on your experience or your thought,
That instead just catch yourself before that part starts to happen.
See if you can catch yourself telling yourself some version of I'm not good enough or they don't want me around or I'm not lovable or some other thing or label that you tell yourself.
Just notice how your thoughts are like,
They're almost like a news feed,
You know,
And I think they call them crawlers at the bottom there where the news just keeps going and going and going at a certain rate of speed.
It's like information that continually moves across the screen no matter what else is going on.
Just think of your thoughts a little bit like that,
Right?
Like no matter what you're doing,
They're still going.
And we tend to want to stop those crawlers hoping that we'll find calm and peace.
But it's actually all of those attempts that we make to stop the thoughts that are actually creating an even tougher emotional tightness.
And this in turn can really help to create some of the stress you feel,
All of us feel.
We tend to think,
You know,
This is where that misperception of,
You know,
Meditation and meditation practice comes in and that thinking that,
Okay,
Meditation means I'm not supposed to think.
Well,
That's a losing battle.
You're never going to win that battle of not thinking because it's just not possible.
So the idea behind meditation is to simply become aware of the activity of your ordinary thoughts,
That activity of your mind,
And just to see if you can start to notice the activity without judging or criticizing.
Just allow it to be.
So for a moment,
You'll have some moments of silence here.
There'll be a little gap in my speaking.
Like now,
We're just going to slowly turn our attention to our thoughts instead of maybe being irritated or disturbed or carried away by them.
And instead,
Maybe we're just going to start to be amazed at how they come and go,
Kind of like that crawler,
Right?
Because it's in the noticing that we actually have an opportunity to reframe our thoughts.
If we don't notice them,
They just sort of run rampant and very seldom do we even question them.
So for a moment,
I'm going to be silent and allow you to just turn your attention to your thoughts.
It was not even one minute of silence and I can pretty much guarantee that each of us listening was able to hear our self-thinking,
Notice our thoughts.
This kind of practice is a very powerful practice because it gives us an opportunity to see how our own habitual tendencies to believe those thoughts as somehow something solid or true shapes our understanding of ourselves in the world around us.
Whether that's good or bad,
It doesn't matter.
When we practice meditation and actually become mindful of our thoughts,
It doesn't involve analyzing the thoughts.
All it is is about training ourselves to notice.
So meditating like this for 10 minutes a day,
Just 10 minutes a day,
Is a little bit of a beginning of our learning how to notice thought.
And because it's that first little step,
It's really a good idea to practice this in an environment that's relatively free of distraction.
Let's try that again for another 30 seconds to a minute.
We begin to cultivate a more alert and attentive attitude toward all of the thoughts and the speed at which they run through our mind.
That speed and that pace will undoubtedly begin to slow down just by the mere fact that we're noticing,
That we're paying attention,
That we're present.
We'll begin to see that those crawlers will get shorter and maybe they'll crawl across our mental screen at a little less of a frenetic pace.
We start to become less inclined to identify with our thoughts and start to just allow them to come and go.
And when we're able to do that,
It's the beginning of understanding that that internal chatter or crawlers are just distractions.
All of that internal dialogue is sort of like a teapot whistling on the stone that someone has forgotten.
On and on and on and on and on.
So our next steps involve noticing the thoughts and the thinking,
But then training ourselves not to buy into the internal dialogue,
Not to believe everything we think,
To perhaps question some of our thinking and some of our mental activity.
So if you can,
Over the next week or so,
Even just a few days,
For 10 minutes a day,
Even 10 minutes twice a day,
Just stop,
Set the insight timer for 10 minutes.
Allow yourself to settle into an environment free of distraction and just simply spend that time noticing.
Keep training yourself to notice.
That will serve you very,
Very well when you're not on the cushion and when you're out in the world,
Interacting with others.
It will serve to help create more presence when you are with others.
But I look forward to connecting with you again soon and we'd love to hear feedback on any or all of your practice and how it's going and what kinds of things you are noticing.
And in the meantime,
Have a beautiful,
Beautiful day and I look forward to connecting with you again soon.
