A Trust Fall

A talk on trust in meditation, given to a live audience in Massachusetts. This talk focuses on the simplicity of meditation, the beingness of meditation being already central to our experience of life. We always just over this middle place and miss the basic essence of being, which itself is meditation. We just need to trust and let go to find peace.

Transcript

Okay.

I think your comment just gave this talk the push it needed,

So thank you.

Just tied it all together.

So what I want to talk about that ties all of the kind of thoughts and questions you have into one is the state of being.

Beingness.

Beingness.

That when we meditate we have I would say a wrong understanding mostly.

I would say this is not just a Western thing.

I see it also people in the East when they go out and practice there.

That when we think about focusing,

When we think about meditating we bring our neurosis into the process.

We bring our unsatisfactory mind into the process.

We bring our ignorance into the process.

And the very reason that we're wanting to meditate to begin with is because we feel like we need a break.

We need to release and relax and find peace and freedom and balance and whatever you want to call it.

So we have kind of a clear goal but then our approach,

Our way of trying to get there is by almost like battling ourselves on the cushion or on the chair.

It's that we're sitting here and it's like we're trying to get somewhere that we're not.

We're trying to focus on the breath.

We're trying to do something.

We try to do something because when we do quote unquote nothing that's what I do all day long.

All day long I'm doing nothing.

So now's my time to try to do something for my mind.

So I would actually say that it's completely opposite.

That all day long you're doing something.

All day long we're busying ourselves.

We're in situations that are stressful.

People around us there's stuff going on.

We're in our own minds and our own habitual energies our behaviors.

We're always doing something.

We're thinking,

We're reacting,

We're perceiving,

We're always kind of spinning.

And when you sit down to meditate when you sit in a room like this this is actually your time just to stop.

Just to rest and to allow yourself just to be here.

And that's actually what walking meditation is for instance.

It's just feeling your body.

It's just you're just walking and you're just feeling your feet.

You're feeling your body.

There's nothing complicated about it.

It's the simplest thing in the world.

It's like a baby.

You're just feeling your body.

But it's also really profound because of its simplicity.

Because of the easiness of it.

Because if I said to you just sit here and feel your body for the next hour a lot of you would freak out.

Right?

You'd get bored or you'd go off into fantasies or you'd fall asleep and then you'd say,

Oh I forgot I was supposed to just feel my body.

That meditation is so simple.

It's the simplest thing in the world because that state of being is already this.

It's here.

It's like the center of all of your experience is beingness.

We're human beings.

We are beings.

Right?

We are in a state of being.

But that middle spot,

That easy spot,

That simple thing,

That resting state,

That default state is completely overlooked.

And we're just jumping back and forth over it.

Yeah?

We're in this space.

The mind is like a room.

Yeah?

And it's this empty room.

It's inherently empty.

There's nothing in it.

But then we fill it with thoughts.

Right?

And we fill it with feelings and stories.

And then we try to push those feelings and thoughts out.

Right?

But then that's still us in the room trying to do something.

Get rid of the thoughts.

Or trying to do this.

Or trying to focus on that.

Or,

You know,

We're so active and busy that we bring that busyness into the meditation.

We bring the struggle of trying to find peace,

Trying to find happiness,

Trying to do something with this if-then mind.

Right?

If I could do this,

Then I can get mind into the meditation.

And it causes a mess.

And that's actually why it takes us,

When we sit down to meditate something like 28 minutes or 30 minutes or whatever,

To meditate.

To meditate is because it takes us a while to kind of just give up.

To surrender.

Just to realize like all that push and pull.

It's not doing anything.

And then you can actually start meditating.

Because you let go of trying to meditate.

Because what you're trying to do,

It's a concept.

When I'm trying to meditate,

I'm taking a conceptualization of this thing that I want to achieve and I want to reach.

And I'm working in this kind of fractured mindset where I'm here and I have a framework that I'm trying to force everything into.

This framework of peace and relaxation and stillness.

And I'm forcing everything that's not working,

That's popping out.

I'm like,

No,

Get back in there.

Don't think of that.

No,

Wake up.

No,

What are you doing?

You know.

And I'm trying to force it in here and eventually it becomes exhausting.

So I give up and I put down that framework.

And then what happens?

Suddenly the mind is unified.

Then I'm just here.

Right?

That we see sometimes that when we're meditating,

We're again,

We're using the same mechanisms that cause problems in our daily life into the meditation.

One of my teachers,

Acham Brahman,

He says,

You know,

In Buddhism,

The first teaching the Buddha ever gave was the Four Noble Truths.

Yeah.

So he said the first noble truth is the truth of suffering,

That there is suffering.

Life is,

It's imbued into this place.

And so this incarnation,

There is suffering everywhere.

It's true.

Yeah.

But there's then the second noble truth is that there's like a way out of,

Or the suffering has an origin,

Right?

There's a beginning.

There's a reason that we have that suffering.

Yeah.

And then the third noble truth is that,

Well,

There's also an end to that suffering.

There's a way to be free,

To be peaceful,

To be balanced,

To be done with all that.

And then there's a path towards that.

Right?

So there's suffering,

There's an origin,

There's an end,

And there's a path.

Those are the Four Noble Truths.

So my teacher,

Acham Brahman,

Said,

Listen,

When you're meditating,

You're going for that third truth,

Right?

We're going for the end of suffering.

We're going for peace,

Right?

This good feeling,

Relaxation,

Freedom,

Whatever you want to call it,

Balance.

The way to get there is the fourth noble truth,

Right?

There's this path to get there.

But when we meditate,

He said,

We're often doing first noble truth meditation,

Is that we're bringing the suffering into the meditation.

We're bringing the mechanisms that create stress and anxiety and worthless feelings and failure feelings and not good enough and overwhelmness and force.

We're bringing that into the meditation,

And we're trying to get peace through the same wrong methods that we use all day long.

And so meditation,

It's really this process of more so than looking at meditation as calming or stilling your mind,

I would say it's much more realistic to talk about meditation as the process of understanding your mind.

Because in this one Buddhist text by Buddhaghosa,

This monk,

And it's called The Path of Purification of the Suryamagga,

It's this really thick,

Very,

Very detailed book about like the little moments of mind and how mind works and how all these things are connected.

And it's this kind of scholarly Buddhist texts that monks study and try to understand how consciousness works.

And it's this crazy kind of compendium of stuff.

And if you get too deep into that stuff,

You go crazy.

But one of the things he'd said is that,

Let's say that you are a person,

You are seeking rest.

You want rest,

You want relaxation.

Yeah,

And he said like,

Say that you see a man and that man is running,

He's running down the street.

And that man wants relaxation,

Seeks relaxation.

When that man drops into his body and feels his body,

Suddenly he'll realize,

Oh,

I'm running,

And he'll slow to a walk.

And then when he feels himself walking,

He'll come to a stop.

And when he comes to that stop,

He'll slowly sit down.

And when he feels himself sitting,

Then he'll slowly lie down.

That if he wants to rest,

If we want to rest,

And we sit in meditation,

We notice that we're running,

Our mind is running,

We'll go,

Oh,

And we'll kind of slowly slow down the mind.

And then the mind will start walking,

Meandering around.

And then we'll realize,

Oh,

Yeah,

I want to rest.

And then it'll drop again.

And then we'll be sitting,

Right?

And we get to that space where it's like that blackness,

Right?

You're just kind of here.

There's nothing much going on.

And then you're like,

Oh,

And then you drop again.

And it's almost this process of again and again and again bringing the sati,

The mindfulness,

The remembrance of what we're doing that you again and again remember,

Oh,

I'm trying to relax.

Oh,

I'm trying to let go.

Oh,

I'm heading towards peace.

And meditation,

It's a process of again and again seeing it,

Remembering what you're supposed to be doing,

What this is about for you,

And then letting go of the things that are keeping you from being there,

Including trying to get there.

Because it's a letting go process,

That the mind becomes peaceful when we let go.

Yeah,

The more that you can let go,

The more the mind is peaceful.

The problem again is that it takes some time.

So we'll sit here and I say to you,

I'll let go.

And you go,

Okay,

And you let go.

And then you start thinking about the snowstorm.

You start thinking about your groceries or this fight you had with somebody today,

Your big trip that you have planned or that your mind starts going somewhere.

You pull your mind back,

Oh,

Wait,

I'm supposed to be here.

And then you say,

Well,

That letting go thing doesn't work.

I guess I should be doing something.

Yeah,

That we're not patient,

That we don't have the wisdom to understand that it's a time process,

That if you could just let go and you just keep letting go and you sit here for five minutes,

10 minutes,

An hour,

Two hours,

10 hours a week.

If you just kept sitting here and just kept letting go,

Letting go,

Letting go,

Whatever came up,

Just let go.

Don't think there's anything to do.

Just keep letting it go,

Letting it go.

You'll just drop deeper and deeper and deeper into it.

Yeah,

You'll just sink deep into it because it's just that state of being that's already there.

Some of the Buddhist schools,

They call it like the ground of being as if like that's already the ground of our experience is just this awareness,

This beingness.

We're just here and everything else,

It's built up on top of it.

And it's a trust exercise.

It's like a trust fall.

That's a good name for this talk tonight.

It's a trust fall.

That meditation,

It's like a trust fall that you let go and you trust.

You have to trust that you'll be caught,

That you let go and you trust that that's the way you have to go.

And that's honestly all that it is.

I'm a really good meditator,

Not because I've meditated for hundreds and hundreds of hours.

That is why.

But all that those hundreds of hours have taught me is that when I let go,

I get there.

That's all that that time has taught me.

Yeah,

It's I'm a stubborn,

You know,

Difficult person.

And it took me probably like thousands,

A thousand hours,

Thousands of hours of meditating to realize,

Okay,

It's actually have to just let go and stop.

And I had to make that experience again and again and again and again that I trust that I know no matter how bad my mind is,

No matter what I've been doing and what I come into this room with,

As I sit down and my mind is going a million miles an hour,

As bad as it is,

I still know that all I have to do is nothing.

You know,

And this is kind of what you were mentioning that,

You know,

We try to focus on the breath or we try to push the mind or bring the mind to one place,

But then there's also this other awareness that's around us.

And then sometimes we're there and then sometimes we bounce back into this.

But then we're like,

Oh,

No,

I want to be here.

But there's still that.

And then there's a noise.

We go to that noise and that we're kind of being drawn through our senses and our awarenesses.

Right.

And that actually we should open up to all the awarenesses.

And yeah,

That's the point is that as soon as you sit down to meditate,

Actually,

So Jack Kornfield,

This great Buddhist teacher in the West,

One of the first Western centers in the world.

Well,

In the West,

One of the first Buddhist centers in the West is in Barre,

Massachusetts,

Insight Meditation Society.

And it started by Jack Kornfield,

Joseph Goldstein,

Sharon Salzberg.

So these are some of the names of the Western Buddhist kind of forefathers for me anyway.

But so Jack Kornfield,

He talks about this a lot.

And he said that,

You know,

Over the years they've come in and they teach Theravada.

So,

You know,

Meditation that's,

You know,

More from like the Buddhist scriptures and more like Thailand and Burma.

And they teach Mahayana,

Which is more like Zen and Korean and Chinese and Japanese.

And they teach Vajrayana like the Tibetans.

And they do all these different techniques and traditions.

They work on things.

And he said over time what he's really found is that for the Western mind,

The best technique is one called open awareness.

Is that you literally sit here and you open up your awareness and you just allow everything to be there.

Because we are such control freaks.

We are so stressed.

We're always trying to control and do something and trying to fix and change.

You know,

If you go to India,

You go to Burma,

You go to these other countries in East Asia,

Those people,

They're not trying to do anything.

They're just hanging out.

You go to India,

People literally stand there for 10 hours.

They'll just stand there on the side of the road.

That's their day.

They'll just stand there.

And they'll get chai and they'll stand there for a while.

That there's a different mindset.

That people are okay just kind of being where they are.

So when you go to those countries,

They need to hear teachings that are more about like structure and discipline and energy and get your butt and meditate and do and do and do.

That each tradition came out of the need of the culture that it came from.

You know,

The Tibetans,

It's this land.

It's snow and sky and rock and ice and there's nothing there.

So they need like deities and they need rituals and noises and things to bring the community to that Buddhism and the techniques from Tibetan Buddhism,

They look that way because that's what's needed there.

If you go to China,

You know,

A couple hundred years ago,

It's a bunch of peasants and farmers,

Right?

So they needed the academic texts.

They needed the discipline side of it.

They needed all these amazing,

They have millions of books written about emptiness,

Right?

It's this paradox.

What are you going to write about?

There's nothing there,

But they just write it and write it and write it.

Because they need that.

They need stimulation of the mind.

Yet each culture needs something else.

Our,

The American culture,

What we need is to relax.

We need to let go.

We need to open up.

Yeah,

And we take a lot of the traditions and the teachings from other cultures,

We try them and a lot of Westerners,

We practice meditation,

We burn out.

It's insane.

So many Westerners,

They become stressed by meditating because it's not working.

Yeah,

It's insane.

Yeah,

Because we're taking these teachings from these teachings,

You know,

From the East where they had to tell people,

You know,

Focus,

Push,

Do,

Do.

They had to get them moving,

Motivated,

Use your mind more actively.

But we,

I mean,

Since kindergarten,

We've been trained to use our minds actively,

More so now.

Kindergarten now,

They're already like,

They took out the painting sets a couple years ago.

Now,

Kindergarteners,

They're,

I know parents that are given their kids medication already in,

You know,

First grade to get them the focus and go.

Our culture is so intent and intense about being productive and efficient and using your mind and being structured and,

You know,

Being proactive and doing things,

Always doing things.

Success is defined by doing that when we sit down to meditate,

We've been so deeply programmed and ingrained and conditioned to think we always have to be doing something that we sit to meditate and we plop that right on it,

Too.

And then we hear all these teachings from the East,

You need to try harder,

You need to sit longer,

You need to focus more.

And we're like,

Okay,

I need to focus more,

You know,

And we're hurting ourselves,

Right?

We're going in the complete other direction,

Right?

We're stressing ourselves out.

I know people that have gone on retreat and they've literally caused themselves brain damage.

Yeah,

That they could not,

That they've,

Their brain fried from forcing themselves for hours and hours and hours and hours that they came back and they couldn't hold their attention anywhere.

They created almost like a post-traumatic stress from forcing themselves to focus for so long that their mind just couldn't handle it anymore.

And it's like it refused to focus on anything.

Yeah,

It's crazy things that happens.

So this is all this big,

It's a misunderstanding in sense of we're listening to teachings,

We're listening to reading books,

We're taking all this information about what we're supposed to be doing.

And we're forgetting that our own experience is supposed to be showing us the way forward.

You know,

If you want to get relaxed and peaceful,

Then why aren't we just sitting here and relaxing?

Yeah,

What's the big deal?

What's the big deal?

What are we doing?

If you want to just relax,

Just relax.

Sit here and relax.

Have a snooze.

Alright,

I have a mic call on snooze over here in the corner.

It'll be fine.

Yeah.

Because sometimes we need that too.

And let's be honest,

You know,

We're sitting in this room for what,

Like an hour and a half or so,

Not even.

We're sitting in this room for an hour.

You know,

I've lived in a monastery for eight years.

Okay.

And during that time,

I did retreats.

I did retreat for three months where I sat alone in the room in silence.

Yeah,

If you're in the room alone,

After about a month,

Your meditation starts getting good.

It starts getting good after a month of silence alone in a room.

It takes a little while for all that stuff to kind of catch up with you,

For you to slow down enough.

Yeah,

We're kidding ourselves to think that these little droplets of time that we're sitting in this room together is going to really bring us there.

Yeah,

We get little tastes of it.

We keep it fresh.

Again,

My teacher,

Ashram Brahmi,

Said,

It's like when you're practicing in your daily life,

You're keeping the water warm.

But when you go on retreat,

You bring the water to boil.

And you need the water to boil to cook stuff in it.

So what we're doing now is we're just kind of keeping ourselves sane,

I would say.

That we're just taking time to allow the mind to unwind,

To open up.

Right,

The reason that we're getting reactive is because we're dropping into our reptilian brain.

It's because the reptilian brain,

It has to do with survival,

This feeling of survival mechanisms.

Right,

So when people are stressed,

They drop into the reptilian brain.

You forget everything else you know.

Look at people on like Black Friday,

Like fighting each other for the doll and stuff,

You know.

We drop into a reptilian fight or flight mindset that only reacts for survival.

And a lot of people in this culture,

They're stuck in their reptilian brain.

Yeah,

They can't get out of it.

They're stuck there,

The root chakra,

The reptilian brain.

They're stuck in that place,

So they're just stuck in reacting,

Trying to get resources,

Trying to get stuff for themselves,

Wanting food,

Water,

Sex,

Place to sleep,

Material things.

And they're stuck in that.

And that's called a low vibration in the spiritual communities.

And it brings other people in,

Right.

If there's only a certain amount of,

You know,

How many,

I don't know,

Let's say there's like seven of us in this room.

Let's say that there's seven apples on the ground,

We're all starving.

And one person goes down and they pick up an armful of apples.

Yeah.

There's a person that's in survival mode.

And instead of saying,

Hey look,

I know I'm hungry,

But look,

There's seven of us and seven apples,

We each get one apple finished.

Yeah.

They're in that mode,

So they bend down and they pick up an armful.

They have now four apples.

So suddenly there's six of us and three apples.

Now everyone's,

Although we were all the civilized good people,

Now we all drop into our survival mode.

Like,

Well crap,

I have to react quick or else I'm going to starve.

Or you want to get the apple that that guy took,

But he's in his fight or flight mode,

So to get that you're going to have to fight with him.

So it's easy to bring each other down into that place.

It's easy to resonate with other people.

Yeah.

And then you have to slowly learn to get out of the reptilian brain.

Tony Robbins talks about just changing your body,

Like jump,

Stretch,

Deep breaths,

Like shake out,

Do something to change your physiology,

To change it up.

But also,

You know,

You get then to the mammalian brain,

Which is more about relationships,

Social things,

Right?

This is when we start to see each other.

We have emotional relationships,

Context,

We understand compassion,

Empathy.

That stuff starts coming from the mammalian brain.

Yeah.

That nature somehow realized,

Oh,

When we work together,

When we have bonds with each other,

We're stronger as a species.

So nature kind of gave us this thing where,

Oh,

We bond,

We connect and stuff.

Yeah.

And then there's also the human brain,

Which is like another part on top of that,

Which,

You know,

We kind of have.

I think dolphins and whales have like a fourth part of their brain because they have like sonar.

So I think they're smarter than us actually.

But we won't,

You know,

Don't tell anyone else that.

But we have a part of our brain that's more like homo sapien that we have.

We're like aware that we're aware.

You know,

If you see a dog,

A dog has a mammalian brain,

So it knows how to bond.

It can kind of feel things,

But it's very much just in the moment.

It doesn't really know how to reflect that.

Well,

It can't abstract.

Think about things.

You see how dogs walk.

They don't get that their leash can't go around a pole.

You have to walk the leash around it for them.

Like they don't grasp what's going on very well.

So we have another level of mind that we can use part of our brain,

You know,

And this allows us to reflect on our brains,

Reflect on our thinking.

And this is also what gives us that space.

We talk about being reactive versus responsive.

When we're getting reactive is because we've dropped into the into the reptilian brain.

We dropped in the survival fight or flight.

And if you feel that you're reacting,

It means that you're feeling threatened.

And if you're in a room full of stressed out people that are like,

Then it's like,

Yeah,

You're going to feel threatened.

Like,

You know,

And you need to fight for your space,

Fight for your sanity,

But you're dropping them into the fray with them.

So it's just important to just remember that and say,

Look,

Exactly how can I navigate?

How can I come into the situation acknowledging that everybody else is freaking out?

Everyone else is feels threatened by something in the world around them,

Whether it's politics or food or their families or just their own mental formations driving them crazy.

You know,

How can I relate and respond to people?

How can I keep myself in a place that I don't drop in there with them?

And actually,

Meditation does that,

Because when you meditate,

The mind it unwinds things open up,

Right?

That any tension starts to relax.

Herb Benson,

Harvard psychologist,

He studied people that meditated and he found that there's something called the relaxation response that where the average person drops in the fight or flight when they get stressed.

A meditator feels that they're getting stressed.

They feel themselves tensing up.

They feel the physiological symptoms of stress,

And they can relax.

They can release them because they make that experience in meditation again and again and again.

What it means to let go,

What it means to relax,

What it means to just be here.

You know,

What it means to take a step back.

So meditators,

The more that you practice meditation,

It's like we're training that space.

You're training the space of letting go.

You're training peacefulness.

You're training openness.

Yeah,

You're training observation so that in your daily life,

When you go back out and things are happening,

You have a little bit more of a distance.

And also,

If we do react sometimes,

I react sometimes too.

I feel like I react consciously.

I know in some moments it's better just to react than to try to be like the meditator monk and talk things out.

Sometimes I feel like I just need to say something or let something out.

So it's also important not to judge ourselves.

Yeah,

And I just want to say that for everybody because when we label ourselves as spiritual,

It also often becomes easy to judge ourselves when we're not being spiritual.

And it's also important just to remember the human side of us,

That we are humans.

Yeah,

And positive psychology,

It talks about like acknowledging your humanness.

Yeah,

That we are all humans and just always allowing that.

So for the meditation,

Again,

So we're human,

But we're also beings.

So when we sit down to meditate,

Close our eyes,

We're going to just be here and we're going to be here with what?

We're going to be here with our humanness.

So you're going to sit here with this human body that maybe has some weird pains in it and stuff,

Right?

Or it's hot or it's cold or it's uncomfortable,

Wants to move.

You're going to be here with other humans in the room that are maybe breathing,

Coughing,

Shuffling,

Whatever.

Humans that are going to come in,

Especially in this place,

Upstairs,

Walk around maybe and do stuff and talk.

Yeah,

Then you're going to be with your humanness,

Your feelings,

The humanness chattering away in the mind.

That all of the humanness is what the beingness sees,

Because the beingness is just there.

It's just the mind is just awareness and cognition.

It's just kind of there.

It's just perceiving.

Yeah,

But the humanness is what we perceive.

Our problem comes when we over identify with that humanness,

When we take ourselves too personally,

Right?

Why do we think that our pain is us?

Why is the body us?

Why is that feeling us?

Why is that thinking us?

I think by now we've all made experiences in meditation where we've been sitting here and we don't feel the body anymore.

We've made experiences.

We're sitting here and we don't have thoughts,

Even if it's just a short period.

I hope all of you have made that experience anyway.

Yeah,

We've all made those experiences so we know,

Look,

If thoughts were that integral to me,

If thoughts were me,

If they were elemental and set,

If thoughts were me,

They should always be there.

The fact that thoughts are gone,

The fact that when I'm meditating my body disappears,

It's like,

Oh,

Maybe this body is not it.

Maybe I'm more than this body or this body is like a layer that I can shed,

You know?

This sweatshirt is not me.

How do I know it's not me?

Because I can take it off.

Yeah,

I can be me without the sweatshirt on.

So how do I know this body is not me?

Well,

I can actually meditate and I can leave this body.

How do I know those thoughts aren't me?

Well,

I can meditate and those thoughts are gone.

Yeah,

What about the feelings and emotions?

Well,

I can meditate and actually I don't have any like emotional things going on either.

That when you meditate,

You start to make this experience of different layers of you shedding,

Shedding,

Shedding,

Shedding down to this beingness.

Yeah,

And then actually there's even more to be said once you get to that beingness,

But I'll leave it there for now just because that gets really like specific.

But just to know that you can just shed down to that beingness at least.

Yeah,

If not further,

Because that beingness,

Once you get to that,

There's different parts of that beingness that also start coming off.

Right.

This is when you start working with the mind itself,

That the mind starts refining and clarifying and purifying,

That the grosser aspects of the mind start dropping off as well.

Yeah,

So it's this process of purification,

Of getting more subtle,

Subtlety,

And it goes right into the heart of beingness,

Just being.

And again,

It takes time,

It takes patience,

It takes trust.

Right,

Buddhism,

It's not a faith-based religion.

There's nothing in Buddhism that they said like this is how it is and you have to believe that and you'll never know if that's true or not until you die.

But believe it because I told you so or somebody told me that it's true,

So you have to believe this dogmatic thing.

Yeah,

Buddhism doesn't talk like this.

Buddhism says everything that's in Buddhism,

It's experiential.

And instead of faith,

Blind faith,

We have trust.

That it says,

Hey,

Try it out.

Right,

We're all sitting here in meditation.

We had to at one point say I'm going to try this out.

I'm going to try it out.

Have a little trust,

Have a little faith.

I'm going to try it out and see.

And we made an experience that was good,

So we did a little more meditation.

And we go,

Ooh,

This is really good,

So we do a little more.

Yeah,

So we start to trust.

Okay,

I'm trusting.

So far,

Good experience.

Let's keep going.

Right,

So it's experiential.

So really just use the time that you're here.

Almost like surrender,

Use your meditation as an act of devotion.

Just surrender it,

Trust.

Just say,

You know what,

Like,

I believe that there is something called peace.

I believe there is something called enlightenment or this path or the Buddha or the Dalai Lama or whatever.

I think that this is legit,

That there is a way here to find actual peace,

Happiness,

Wisdom,

Understanding,

Clarity,

All of this.

I think it is to be found here.

Let me just surrender to it.

And I don't mean go shave your head and put on the robe and go to the monastery,

Surrender to it.

I mean right here in this moment,

Surrender.

Then let go.

And your ego is going to keep saying,

But,

But,

But,

You know,

But I should do something.

But I had this up.

But Seth said once,

But I read something,

You know.

But I know you're supposed to,

You know,

The ego is going to keep trying to,

But,

But,

But,

Try to keep getting its claws in there.

Thinking there's something to do.

But if I don't do anything,

You know,

Then there will be nothing.

I have to do something.

So we have to really trust.

And every time the ego,

Every time that part of us that wants to grab it,

That wants to hold it,

To control it,

Do something.

We have to just keep watching that and again just keep surrendering.

Just trust.

Trust,

Trust,

Trust.

Trust is like throwing a rock into the lake and it just,

Just sinks right to the bottom.

Yeah.

It's just smooth.

Nothing,

Nothing attaches to it.

There's nothing to do.

Just trust.

Connect to that.

Tune your,

Tune your heart radio to the station of just trusting and just relaxing,

Surrendering,

Letting go.

Allowing.

Yeah.

Allow it to go wherever it needs to go.

Don't be in control anymore.

Reviews

Loved this Really good encouragement. I played it while I was doing an art practice. Truth is truth 🙏

I really enjoyed this meditation very relaxing with no expectation I will do it again thankyou

Another solid one Seth. Thank you. Great comparative trip around the world. Andere Laender, andere Sitten. Pun intended.

I really enjoyed this teaching and learned a lot that I will take with me.