Crunch Time

A talk given in Andover, Massachusetts to a group of beginner meditators. This talk is to inspire, advise, and arouse those who want to begin meditating, but may have some trouble lifting off on their own. Talking from personal experience and passing on learned advice from great Buddhist masters.

Transcript

So the questions that you're asking tonight are,

I would say,

Very typical of a group that is kind of beginning,

Right,

Starting to work on getting a practice together,

Which is kind of like the same as beginning anything new,

Right,

Or starting any new project or endeavor myself.

Like,

You know,

I just started going back to the gym regularly two weeks ago.

And,

You know,

The whole question of,

You know,

Well,

When's my time to do that?

When's my energy to do that?

How do I put that in the routine?

How to build up that kind of momentum and that dedication and make it become like a regular thing?

And then also,

How do I kind of see it out in a way that I can start getting the results for it?

So that seems to be,

I would say,

Like the general kind of theme.

And I would say maybe just a few things on all of that.

Firstly is that I would say there's no recipe,

Right?

Each one of us is very different.

We're all coming from different places.

We have different minds.

We have different lives that some people meditate when they wake up in the morning.

Some people meditate before they go to bed.

Some people have little pockets of time in between,

During breaks,

Before meetings.

They drive to work and then sit in their car for five minutes and breathe before going into work.

That,

You know,

It's really up to you to find what is your little pocket of time that makes sense.

The I don't have enough time to meditate voice that we have that goes in our heads sometimes.

I'll just call that out right now is,

You know,

Bullshit,

I guess is the word,

Right?

Is that everybody has five minutes at some point.

And if you don't wake up five minutes earlier,

You know,

Or meditate five minutes before you go to bed or sit on the toilet,

Meditate,

You know,

That you can always find five minutes where you're just sitting and not doing anything.

And if that doesn't exist somehow,

If you're like somehow this person where literally from the moment you wake up to the moment you go to bed at night,

You don't have five minutes of time,

Which again is hard to believe.

Then set your alarm for five minutes earlier or you just every night before you go to bed,

You do it.

So if it's something that's important to you,

If I,

You know,

Said,

I'm going to give you a million dollars.

If you meditate every day for the rest of the year,

You will meditate every day for the rest of this year.

You would find a way,

Right?

So things that you prioritize,

You make a space for them.

The thing about meditation,

Especially if you're just starting off,

Is that it's not yet a priority.

You definitely have a priority in terms of like my personal wellness is a priority.

I want to get better.

I want to feel better.

I heard that meditation is great and this seems like a thing that could help me,

But I haven't necessarily seen or felt or,

You know,

Gotten the results from it.

So it's not something that almost I've made like an emotional imprint with as,

Ooh,

This is something that I really need in my life every day.

And that just initial kind of oomph,

Whatever you want to call that to just kind of do it and start it.

I mean,

Sometimes that's just called discipline or willpower or making a decision or setting an alarm or a schedule.

I could say to you,

If you want,

If it would be supportive,

We can do something called the meditation challenge together.

And the meditation challenge is that we will each meditate for at least,

You can meditate as long as you want,

Of course,

But at least five minutes every day from now until next class.

Okay.

So the meditation challenge,

Right?

I do this with the kids.

Sometimes I'm going to go to schools.

I'm like,

Who wants to do the meditation?

You know,

So I'll offer that to you guys as support.

And if you want to embark on the meditation challenge together,

That we will meditate every single day of this week for five minutes,

At least if we want to do more,

No problem,

But at least five minutes,

And we'll talk about how it was next class.

If you want to take that challenge with me,

You can raise your hand and commit to the meditation challenge.

Okay.

Look around.

These are the people who are committing to the meditation.

It's everybody.

It's everybody.

Okay.

So that means if you don't come to class next week,

It means you're running away for your shames.

I'm going to call you.

Okay.

So everybody.

Okay.

So we've all taken the meditation challenge.

We're going to meditate until next week.

So right now ask yourself,

What time of the day am I going to do it?

Raise your hand if you're going to do it when you wake up.

Nobody.

Okay.

Raise your hand if you're going to find a time in the middle of the day to do it.

Raise your hand if you can do it before you go to bed.

Raise your hand if you didn't raise your hand yet.

Okay.

So everybody is going to have to think about that.

Find your time and just say every day,

And it might be differing times,

But I tell you that when you're starting off,

Especially when you're starting off to have just one time every day that you do it at the same time,

At the same place in your schedule,

It's really supportive.

When I started meditating,

I was in college and I went to Home Depot and I got a piece of carpet about this big and I put it in my bedroom in college and I got a little salt lamp and a little Buddha statue and I built myself like a little meditation corner,

Like one corner of my bedroom was my meditation spot.

And every Thursday at seven o'clock I would sit for 15 minutes.

And that was my way of starting just once a week for 15 minutes,

Nothing big.

And I had my own spot to go to to do it.

And that was so supportive.

And I even see right now I started a morning practice where every morning I do prayers in my room and kind of reflect on my day and wish people well and just generate like a positive mind first thing when I wake up.

And I have a certain spot in my house that I sit.

That's the spot that's just used for that,

That nothing else goes on there.

So it's kind of clean,

It's ready for me.

So I can like wake up in the morning and I can kind of go to that spot and I'm like starting my day there.

So it's really supportive to have a physical location in mind.

Like I said,

If you say like I want to drive to work and then I want to turn off the ignition and I want to sit in my car for five minutes and breathe,

You can do that.

I also on the SoundCloud thing,

I have a six minute meditation that I give for like schools to do with the kids,

But it's the same thing,

Right?

So even if you want,

You can play my six minute meditation.

So there you go.

You just play it and you listen and you just do it and then finished.

But yeah,

You just have to,

You have to just find your thing and make it a priority and have fun.

I think one of the problems with,

You know,

Doing something new like this is that feeling of like,

I should,

Right?

I need to,

I should,

Or I want to,

You know,

But there's this feeling like,

Like it's one more thing on my schedule,

Right?

It's one more thing I have to do.

It almost,

We make it into a burden and I see it with the gym.

I do it myself.

I like make it into a burden and then I go to the gym and it feels so good to work out.

I'm like,

What was I doing?

You know,

And only after going to the gym every day for like a week or two,

Then it starts to feel good.

You like when it gets to that time of the day.

Now I like want to go to the gym because it feels good.

I'm like,

I want that good feeling again,

Right?

But it's like at first it was kind of this almost like this mental barrier that I had to get through.

What's really important for meditation is that we enjoy it,

That it feels good,

Right?

That you sit and you,

And you see it as a break from the world,

Right?

Meditation,

It's not one more thing you have to do.

Meditation is my time to stop doing stuff,

Right?

Meditation is just taking a quiet moment with yourself to just rest and reconnect.

It's not something that you're doing.

It's the absence of packing busyness and doing into every second of your life.

Yeah,

It's just taking a little spot and saying,

Just in this little tiny spot,

I'm not going to do anything else except just be here with me.

And that's so powerful and it's so important.

And to be honest,

It's insane that it's gotten this bad,

Right?

I mean,

If you look culturally or historically,

People used to have a lot more time with like silence,

Right?

Go back like a couple hundred years,

There's no like electric lights.

You know,

People had darkness,

You just had the normal cycles of the day.

Go back what,

20 years,

We didn't have phones like this,

You know,

All of this is very new.

This,

That we're always on,

We're always accessible.

There's all this noise,

There's all this lights,

There's all of this connectivity.

This is a very,

Very new phenomenon and we're not adapted to it at all.

I mean,

You know,

Tens or hundreds of thousands of years in the evolutionary process,

The Homo sapiens,

Right?

We are not developed to be doing that all the time.

So the fact that even in the last 10 or 20 years,

It's gotten to the point that people are really saying like,

I don't have any time anymore.

It's crazy.

It's really crazy.

We used to have a lot of time.

There used to be stuff to do,

You know,

I went to South Dakota and I talked to one of the farmers there.

And I mean,

He gets up at dawn or before dawn and starts his work early,

Early,

Early in the morning.

And he goes until sunset and then there's stuff to do.

And he's really going all day long.

But then he just sits in his house.

He like lit the,

Like he had the fireplace,

He has lit the fire and he was just quiet.

And I just,

And I talked to him and he spoke so slowly and there was all of this space in between his words.

And I saw this is a man who is really busy.

He's actually physically busy all day long,

But his mind is not busy.

And when he has space,

He can just rest in that space.

We are physically busy,

But we're also mentally and emotionally busy.

Right.

We're spinning with all of this,

All these different stories and emotional things and unfinished business and plans and hopes and fears and everything we have to do and the emails and our work and our relationships and our families and finances and all of this stuff.

You know,

I did the retreat for the teachers this weekend and it takes,

You know,

About 24 hours,

Right?

We got there on Friday at five and I do my meditation session,

Like my kind of official meditation with session with them on Saturday at five that it takes 24 hours to take a human being,

Take them out of this world,

Put them in a retreat house,

Say you're not allowed to use your phone.

Yeah.

Tell them certain periods you can't talk.

You know,

We're going to all walk outside in silence together and just be in nature,

Right?

That you have to really take someone and bring them slowly step by step back to then get them to the place where they can actually sit and meditate and kind of stay in that spot for us because we've created so much momentum and movement when we sit.

That's what we're faced with.

We're faced with the movements.

We're faced with the momentums and that's this whole like,

Right?

I sit and then I have all these thoughts that are coming up.

Meditation at night is great for that reason.

I feel like it's a purifying process because all of those same thoughts and feelings are coming up all day,

But we're thinking and reacting with them.

When you at night meditate,

Everything comes up and it's kind of like that nonstick pan,

Like things just kind of come and nothing sticks and then it kind of all rests.

It's like everybody that just wanted your attention,

Remember me,

Remember me.

Oh yeah,

There's this.

Oh yeah,

There's this.

Everything comes up to say hi and you just don't touch it.

And then eventually everything's like,

Okay,

Everybody has made their presence known and now I can actually go to bed and let it all kind of lie.

Right?

In the morning when we meditate,

It's really powerful because we're just coming from the night.

We're just coming from sleep.

So the mind when we first wake up,

Depending on kind of how you wake up,

But normally the mind when you first wake up,

It's the quietest that it's going to be all day.

Yeah,

You have that really sweet pocket of time when you just wake up,

You know,

You maybe go to the bathroom or brush your teeth,

Put water in your face or shower or whatever,

But just before,

Like before you turn on the TV,

Before you check the phone,

Before you start talking to people,

They have this little pocket where you're,

You're kind of in ready position,

But it hasn't taken off yet.

And I find that that's my favorite time because it also,

It sets me up for the day.

It sets me in a direction for the day.

Also,

I practiced something last week and it was putting a hand on my heart and a hand on my belly and just sitting like that for five minutes a day,

Just to try and see what happens if I just practice this every day for five minutes and not too much happens.

You know,

I felt more connected to myself for those five minutes.

It was nice,

But it wasn't like this big groundbreaking thing.

But what I did notice was that one day I felt kind of sad and a little bit disconnected and I just out of instinct did that position.

I put a hand in my heart,

A hand in my belly,

And it was this really nice feeling of self soothing and comforting and being there for myself.

And I saw,

Oh,

Because I've been practicing this every day when I need it,

It comes in.

It's like when you train a dog,

You're supposed to take that dog into a field and give it like a bone.

And you're supposed to train a dog in a way that it's like,

How to say,

Like it's happy or there's nothing going on.

So that,

You know,

And you get it to like,

Listen to you and respond so that when you bring it home and it's in an actual situation,

You know,

The mailman comes and the dog wants to run to the mailman and you say,

No,

It knows what no means and it can stop.

Whereas if you try to train a dog when it's already reacting,

It's impossible.

You have to first train a dog in like a neutral space.

And then when there's like a tense moment,

It remembers the training that you taught it when things were neutral and safe.

Does that make sense?

Yeah.

So that's kind of similar to us is that also as you're practicing meditation at home,

When there's going to be a moment and you'll see this eventually,

Especially if you do this meditation challenge,

I tell you,

Really do it.

Just say for one week,

It's not a big deal for one week.

Just take five minutes,

Put it in your phone every day.

At this time,

The alarm goes off.

My meditation alarm.

If you just start incorporating it into your day every day,

There's going to be things that happen.

There's going to be like a situation that arises,

A feeling that arises,

Something that comes up and you're going to remember,

Oh,

Yeah,

I don't have to react to that.

Oh,

Yeah,

There is something called just being just being with my thoughts and my feelings and not letting them become me.

Not letting them control me,

Speak through me.

Yeah.

That we remember that it comes back that what you train in private is what eventually you're able to use to be in public.

You know,

All of the great singers,

There's like a new American Idol starting or it started already.

And it's like all these singers come on American Idol and they sing.

And it's like some of them are terrible and some of them are amazing.

But it's like the amazing ones.

It's like they're not amazing because they're just born.

You know,

They just came out and then one day just walked into American Idol and could say,

No,

They train.

They have voice teachers.

They listen to recordings of themselves.

They make sure their pitches right,

That they do intense technical training so that in crunch time when it matters,

They can sing because all the practice that they did.

Yeah.

And this is exactly what meditation is about is that we're practicing when we wake up,

We're practicing in these nice safe like this in this room.

We create this beautiful time and the space to practice so that in our lives,

In an emergency situation when it comes up,

When something unexpected happens,

When we start to get stressed,

When whatever our practice kicks in and we go,

Oh yeah,

I noticed that I'm getting really angry.

I'm getting really stressed.

Let me just take a breath.

Let me just take a second.

Let me step back that we remember.

We remember.

We start putting the whole structure down and that space of putting the structure down.

It's like what you were saying before.

It's like returning to almost like this.

Almost when I call it like an original space,

Right?

It's the space of just presence and just beingness,

Right?

We meditate.

It's just relaxing.

It feels comforting,

Comfortable.

It's very familiar.

It's free of all of these stories.

It's like something we remember when you went to bed as a kid and your mind was just clear,

You know.

I remember that lying in my bed on like summer nights.

I was like seven years old,

Not a care in the world.

Just had my little stuffed animals.

I felt so nice and snugly and everything was fine.

You know,

The crickets chirping outside.

It's kind of warm.

It's like the window open and it was so nice and my mind was just clear and blank and I was just present and everything was okay.

You know,

And that's that space that's always just waiting for us,

Really.

It's sitting in the background.

Yeah,

It's just it's already there.

We don't have to do anything.

That's there.

Just that relaxed,

Open beingness,

Right?

Everything that we're experiencing during the day,

That's extra.

All the thoughts,

Plans,

Stress,

Structures,

Stories,

Those constructs,

Those mental and emotional constructs.

Those are like these buildings floating in space and we're staring at the buildings.

We're staring at these structures and these stories.

But if you just remember that that's just there's space all around that,

That the thing is floating in space that you can actually just let that thing kind of float away for a little bit and just be in that space.

It's right there.

It's always accessible.

And so meditation is this process of familiarization,

Remembering the actual old Buddhist word,

You know,

Back in the time of the Buddha's word,

Sati,

Which is the word for mindfulness,

It means to remember.

It's the faculty of the mind that's used for memory.

But it's what is it remembering?

It's remembering this.

It's remembering to be here.

It's remembering to be present.

Yeah,

And that's all that this is,

Is just to remember.

Oh,

Yeah,

Things are actually okay.

Oh,

Yeah,

I can just rest.

Oh,

Yeah,

My stories are only as powerful as I allow them to be.

Oh,

Yeah,

Things only mean what I assign the meaning of them to be.

Yeah,

That our lives really only have as much power over us,

The events only have as much power over us as we allow them to have,

That we have so much more control than we think we do.

Because our life,

Our very life,

The quality of our life is the quality of the emotions that we feel.

You agree with me on that?

Yeah,

The quality of the life is if I gave you all a million dollars,

Yeah,

You'd say,

Yeah,

That makes the quality of my life go way up.

Yeah,

If I came back in a couple years,

And I'd say,

How about now,

A lot of you would say my life got much worse after that.

That was actually the worst thing you could have done.

There's a lot of millionaires out there that are miserable.

There's probably some billionaires that are miserable.

Yeah,

It's not money.

There's no thing that's the key.

It's just the quality.

There's people that have nothing and they're happy.

We're all searching for a high quality of an emotional response.

The quality of our life is the quality of the emotions that we feel.

We want to feel happy,

Want to feel peace,

Want to feel relaxed,

Want to feel purposeful,

Want to feel connected,

Want to feel loved,

Valued,

Seen,

Understood,

Heard.

All these feelings,

That's the quality of our life,

These needs or these feelings that we have.

That's the quality of our life,

It's the quality of these feelings.

Where do those feelings come from?

What's the quality of the feelings?

Where does that come from?

It comes from the stories that we tell ourselves,

The meaning that we assign to the things that have happened to us in our lives.

I could say,

Wow,

That thing was really great or I could say,

Oh,

That thing was terrible.

Is either one of those necessarily absolutely true?

I played this game in my computer called Othello when I was a kid.

Does anyone know the game Othello?

There's black and white pieces and it's like you put a black one and a white one and then you put a black one next to the white and then the white becomes black.

It kind of like absorbs it.

So it's like whatever piece goes on the end of the board,

That whole row becomes white or black accordingly.

So it's like if you watched a movie and that movie and something happens and then the hero saves the girl and it's like,

Yay,

And then you're suddenly really happy and okay,

Now it's all white,

It's good.

But then the bad guy comes and he shoots one of them and you're like,

Oh my God,

Now the movie's bad.

But then actually,

Oh,

It's just a dream and they're fine.

Oh,

Now the movie's good.

Yeah.

Is that kind of like whatever the bookend of the situation is determines if it was good or bad.

The difference between success and failures that a success stood up one more time than they fell down.

Right.

That's all it is.

You're going to stand up,

You're going to fall.

You're going to stand,

You're going to fall.

Do you end up or down?

And that determines how things were up or down.

Yeah.

So the way that we relate to the experiences of our lives,

The way the stories we tell ourselves,

The meanings that we assign to things determines the emotions that we feel about things determines the quality of our life.

So all of that stuff,

And this is like some real personal growth,

Like Tony Robbins stuff here.

So,

You know,

Yeah.

But what that comes back to,

It's really that we have control so much more control than we think we do.

Yeah.

That a lot of us feel like victims because we're so focused on life that happens to us that these things are happening to me.

And it's true.

You don't have control.

I didn't have control.

This class was canceled three weeks in a row out of my control.

Right.

But what's the meaning that I assigned to that?

What's my response to that?

Do I sit here getting all pissed off or do I just say,

Okay,

Like,

Cool.

We had a break.

I got to rest.

Awesome.

Thank you.

Snow and power outage and whatever else happened.

Tornado.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I can choose my response to that.

And really starting to look in our lives how to change my responses,

Knowing that I can change my responses to be able to change your responses.

You need to be able to take some space from a situation to see what is the habitual response that's coming up and to say,

Oh,

Is that what I want or not?

And then,

You know,

What do I actually want to say?

What do I want to feel?

What else could this mean?

Yeah.

And be able to step back and choose.

Yeah.

That's from the meditation.

That's because we're learning to sit.

We're learning to be open.

We're learning to be quiet.

We're learning to be patient.

We're learning to hold space.

We're learning not to be so reactive to everything all the time.

To believe everything we think.

I have a bumper sticker on my car.

Don't believe everything you think.

Yeah.

Your thoughts are not you.

I promise that you probably don't even agree with half the stuff you think.

It comes up in your mind.

But if you really examined your thoughts from like your own value system,

You say,

I don't actually agree with a lot of that stuff.

You know,

But in the moment,

You're like,

Yeah,

Yeah,

Yeah.

That's right.

Thought.

That person is a jerk.

Yeah,

I do hate my partner.

Yeah,

That person driving in front of me does deserve to drive off a cliff.

You know,

And if you step back,

You're like,

That's ridiculous.

I don't think any of that,

You know.

So learning to not be so controlled by the conditioning of the mind to start to become more proactive,

To become the conditioner of the mind.

That requires meditation requires space,

Changing the relationship.

So that's how this practice also is used.

Used in the daily life,

How we work the minds.

Okay.

So with that,

We're going to practice now the meditation.

So we're all going to sit in a position that feels comfortable and stable.

It's always good to like sit on something to raise your butt up a little bit.

That's why there's all these blankets up here.

So if anybody wants to grab a blanket or two,

You can stack them or fold them,

Create like a meditation cushion for yourself for those of you on the floor.

If you're sitting in a chair,

It's good to have your feet flat on the ground if you can.

This whole practice of meditation,

Of relaxing,

It's good for the mind also good for the body.

When the body is relaxed,

Has a chance to rest,

It is allowed to also then function better afterwards.

So sitting in this way that feels comfortable,

And stable for yourself.

And we're again just going to practice sitting,

Just being present.

Not trying to change,

Not trying to do this thing called meditation.

But really,

We're going to take a chance.

What happens if I just stay here?

What happens if I just hang out with my thoughts,

My feelings,

My body sensations?

So we can close our eyes,

Take some deep breaths in through the nose,

Filling the body out through the mouth.

Starting to connect back to yourself.

Reviews

Awesome talk for those just starting to practice and good reminders for those who need to remember why you started. Thank you, Seth 💚