Supportive Simple Steps To Live In Trust Meditation

Tony Samara, world-renowned spiritual teacher, delivers an insightful talk on how to invite meditation into your life. Mind games are often seen as normal. However, Tony explains that it is up to each of us to choose our path and frame of mind. We don't have to battle with unpleasant and confusing thoughts, instead we can undergo a paradigm shift, with a new focus on how to be receptive and open to stillness and wisdom. This can be done in several simple steps, as Tony explains in the following podcast.

Transcript

We begin with a new transmission.

It's so wonderful to be able to be part of a conscious and supportive community or attitude,

Mindset during these times.

And I myself am grateful that there are so many people out there that are willing to put aside some of their time to be present to the transmission,

To be present to themselves,

Wisdom within themselves.

This is what the transmission means,

That you're giving yourself some time,

Some very important time you've decided to put aside this time to really be present to the inner wisdom and the natural understanding of what it means to be present here in this moment and part of the miracle of life.

It's so important just because when I look around me I notice that so many people are caught in activity,

In activity that is somehow driven by this aspect of ourselves,

The reactive aspect of ourselves that has to get things done,

Not that there is anything wrong in doing things,

Of course it's part of life,

But there is this obsessive compulsive sort of addiction to activity that the mind sees as just part of what it means to be alive,

It's just normal.

And when I look around me I see this as quite a paradigm,

It's not just a Western paradigm but it's quite a paradigm within just the activities of every,

Every person that I've met,

No matter which culture,

No matter which country,

No matter which part of the world they come from,

There is this sort of paradigm that it's not okay to be receptive and open and come back to the inner stillness that allows for wisdom.

Inner stillness doesn't mean that you come back to not being active,

But rather means to come back to an activity that is based upon clarity and focus.

So it's not that you're sort of lost in the millions of thoughts that the mind thinks about throughout a week,

Throughout your week,

But rather that you're so focused that you are clear as to how to come back to this connection to inner wisdom that allows for clarity and focus and clarity in activity.

So it doesn't mean that you're not doing anything,

But you're actually in meditation you're doing something,

It's not that you're not doing anything,

In meditation you're sitting down and that in itself is a choice and that in itself is an activity that you choose not to give your energy or your thoughts or your feelings or your physical body to just reactive states of mind,

You decide to sit down and just be present.

That in itself is an activity,

But it's not seen as an activity in the Western paradigm or in the paradigm that we live now as reality in our society,

It's just seen as sitting and relaxing or sitting and letting go of certain thoughts or letting go of certain ways of thinking.

This is the confusion when it comes to understanding meditation and I would like you to sort of understand this because it's one of the confusions that sometimes people create in their minds that meditation is different from life,

So sitting down in meditation is a sort of an extra activity that one has to just find time to do,

Okay now I'm going to sit and be still,

Now I'm going to be sitting here and meditating and we label it as a type of activity that's coming from the understanding of the world that has nothing to do with this present moment,

It has to do with just the way that the mind has organized reality and perceives reality,

So then all of a sudden meditation just becomes another thing that the mind has to think about,

Okay now it's nine thirty,

I have to sit down and meditate or now it's five thirty and I have to sit down and meditate and so our reference isn't coming from this stillness or from this wisdom that's within stillness,

But rather from another perception that we create about meditation or anything else,

It's so interesting how the mind works because we like to label things and so that in itself becomes the activity that we think is normal and our perception then is not just based on that but its structure has a quality that is based upon activity or reactivity because very often for most human beings being active means being reactive,

We have a thought and we think oh yeah that's right,

Got to do that,

We have a thought I'm a bit late today,

Oh okay I've got to speed up,

Or we have a thought oh I forgot to go and shop today,

Gosh it's too late to go today and then we begin to worry about tomorrow,

So reactivity is the type of activity that we're comfortable with,

So to change that and sit in meditation is a revolution in itself,

To sit down in meditation means that we have to let go of the structure that the mind is comfortable with,

The addiction that the mind is used to and to be able to do that in itself is a revolution and for most people very confusing and when I say for example that the way to let go of an active mind or a reactive state or being is to come back to awareness,

All of a sudden that creates some sort of understanding but we don't really know what awareness means and so we need tools to come back into a communication or a connection to what awareness truly means and this is what the transmission is about,

This is why I'm so excited to share with you over the next weeks more about these tools and practical tangible ways of actually connecting to awareness that then allows for us to be receptive to the inner wisdom that's within rather than reactive to the thoughts even if they're profound and beautiful and even if they have good intentions if we react to those thoughts we lose our connection to the inner stillness that allows for wisdom to speak a language that we've somehow forgotten that we don't understand that confuses us and this language of awareness is within the space that we can always experience but because we are somehow forgetting that this space exists within our minds,

Within our feelings,

Within our perceptions then our focus is not on the tools that can help us come back to an understanding of awareness but rather on the issues that the mind is so focused and concerned and caught up within.

So the first tool,

The first and most important tool is trust,

To trust that awareness is real and it may sound simple to the mind of course I trust that awareness is real but believe me when you sit in meditation and you begin to explore the activities that you're focused upon then very often awareness is just a concept it's not,

It doesn't have the energy it doesn't have the qualities of,

It doesn't have the same sort of energy such as thoughts so the thoughts are really there but awareness is just concept so how can we trust awareness,

How can we trust ourselves and how can we trust the space of awareness which allows us to understand ourselves in a better way?

Well trust is something that we are all born with so we don't have to do anything,

We don't have to force ourselves to trust something that we don't understand,

We simply have to let go of those things,

Those things that we have somehow accepted as true and real throughout our evolution as human beings also throughout our growing up period in family and in social settings,

Socialization we have accepted certain belief systems,

Certain ways of thinking as real and even though they may be real in a sense that may help us to navigate within the complex social settings that we have to navigate through they're not reality they're just perceptions so the first step to coming back to trusting is to simplify our worlds so that what we're looking at is not just the complexity of our evolutionary state or the complexity of our mind as it has developed from the age of zero up to whatever age you are now but rather to simplify things so that we can really focus our energies upon that which is important.

So simplification is one of the qualities that allows for trust to be more real,

To be more accessible,

To be more tangible for the mind to comprehend and to put into practice.

So it's not about changing anything it's just about letting go of certain belief systems that prevent the energy from being focused upon the natural trust that's within the heart,

The natural trust that exists within the heart and this is something that takes a little bit of practice this is why meditation is so very important and the practice of meditation is so very important because as with any habit that you may have experienced habits become very powerful when they're repeated so a repetitive sort of behaviour or repetitive sort of thinking or repetitive sort of focus upon certain feelings creates habits and habits then become very powerful and become so very strong that we forget that they're habits we believe that they're reality.

So to simplify things around you means that you somehow have the wisdom to recognise that you're repeating a situation so repeating a thought say maybe the thought is I'm not good enough or I can't meditate or meditation is difficult you know if you have such a thought or any thought that is compromising or limiting your potential,

Limiting your possibility to experience trust and to be open up enough and open up to awareness in such a way where trust happens just naturally.

It's so interesting when we speak about important things I find that sometimes it's like trust you know when something is clear something is obvious like when you sit in meditation very often there is resistance and sometimes that resistance becomes obvious on many levels including technical ones so I have experienced this many times you know when you sit and meditate there is all sorts of interesting things that you come up against and you are challenged by all sorts of interesting things including technical things that happen but it's all fixed now so it's good.

So I was speaking about trust and I was speaking about how interesting it is when we conceptualise trust and when we understand trust from a mental perspective rather than from this connection or this directness that comes from awareness.

And I was also speaking about how to simplify our lives or how to simplify our energies so that we are not caught in the reactive states of the mind which then creates paradigms and belief systems that allow for those reactions to happen and then to become not only perceptions but to become our mode of thinking and our mode of feeling.

And I was explaining how we can't really stop activity but we can come back to the natural activity that is beyond reactivity and one of the ways is to let go of the situations within the structure of our thinking or within the structure of our feeling that creates these reactive states within us.

The reactive states aren't just thought states but they're also physical,

Emotional states that happen because of cortisol or because of adrenaline that gets released because of certain thoughts that are happening in the background.

So trust is so much more than just changing your perception or changing the way you think.

Trust is a revolution into connecting back to the original that is part of this present moment rather than the reactive that takes you into the future or into the past.

And I was explaining that the practice of meditation is so very important because as with any habit that you may have developed throughout your life here on earth or perhaps habits that we've inherited from our genetic makeup that we have acquired due to the evolution of humanity and the history of humanity.

As with any habits,

The first step is not just to be aware of what is,

What the structure that's creating these habits but also to know that habits can change when we practice things in a different way.

So when we sit and meditate we are creating a spacious environment where the mind can relax,

Where the cortisol can come back to a normal level and the adrenaline comes back to a normal level where we change the physiology and the structure of our thinking and the structure of our feeling in such a way where things come back to a natural state,

A more natural state.

And this is what happens when you sit and meditate.

You come back to the natural state of being.

And coming back to this natural state of being is a blissful experience.

So it's natural to then begin to trust the joy and bliss that you're experiencing as you let go of the reactive,

As you let go of that which prevents awareness from being part of your experience and see that you're letting go of this,

Become aware that you're letting go of this.

So then it becomes even more exciting that you're letting go of those states of mind that create unhappiness or create suffering and everything becomes so much easier.

Everything becomes so much easier and it seems like awareness allows for a natural flow.

So you begin to flow into the trust that is part of our inheritance because,

You know,

We trust if you look at a baby and the way that the baby looks at the mother and the father and everyone around with such a trusting energy,

It's inbuilt in us to be part of this connection of love that trust is all about.

So we lose this when we're socialized and when the reactive states of mind begin to create certain realities within our thinking and certain paradigms within our understanding of reality that then takes us away from this natural state of trust that is there all the time because actually we have that little inner child within us.

We have this sort of inner child that still trusts even after all those experiences that many of us have gone through pain and suffering and just hurt and whatever.

We still,

There is some part within that still trusts but this is what we have to be more aware of.

This is what,

This part of ourselves,

That's what we have to come back to as part of the practice in meditation.

That's what we have to remind our thoughts and feelings that this space of trust is real and to enjoy it also because that's part of meditation.

That you come back not just to trusting but you're trusting that which brings joy,

Just like a baby.

You know,

A baby is naturally joyous when the trust allows for all the communication and all the connection to happen with mother,

Father or just the environment,

Just the beauty of life.

You know,

It's a natural state,

Trust and bliss are natural states and they are very,

Very powerful states of consciousness that we can recognize when we are aware and meditation is all about awareness.

So these are some of the steps that are useful to remember in your practice,

In the practice of meditation.

So of course I can speak about these things for a very long time but the idea is just to somehow give you some tools that you can put into practice today.

So today when things,

Perhaps maybe not for you but for you,

If this happens for you it's interesting to put these tools into practice or if it happens to other people around you maybe you can share these tools with them.

So if today you are faced with a situation,

A challenging situation and you can't trust that things just fall into place and rather you get very preoccupied with your mind and the thoughts that come up as the mind focuses on this challenge or focuses on this reactive state.

So notice that you have a choice in the matter all the time just like you have a choice when you sit in meditation to come back to this state of awareness.

You have a choice to use these tools to change the habits because by using these tools you are creating new habits,

Very functional habits that allow for awareness to be very tangible in your experience.

And one of these tools is coming back to the state of trust and I find it very useful to create a journal so that trust can be more clear because there are so many things that are going on around,

So many things that happen during the day,

24 hours that by creating a journal we create a clarity,

A statement where we focus upon certain aspects of awareness.

So the journal is always positive.

A journal isn't writing down,

It's not about writing down your problems,

It's writing down the answers to your problems or the potential that you can see through awareness of how to change those problems.

So it's important that the journal is a positive space and there is a very useful way of starting the day and I call this the five minute journal,

Whereby you just have a journal and it's important that you have a beautiful journal,

Not just pieces of paper that you write on but something that feels like a temple because this is where you're writing,

You're communicating your inner most thoughts and your inner most feelings and the dynamics of what's happening in your meditation and the dynamics of addiction,

The way that the mind gets caught in fear or pain or whatever.

It's important that it's something sacred and beautiful that you feel inspired by when you write in this journal.

So all you need is to spend five minutes of your day before you start your day,

Perhaps after a meditation,

After the transmission,

Five minutes.

It's not really that much.

Some people say,

I don't have the time,

But believe me,

When you spend five minutes writing in this journal,

This is a tool that will empower you.

This is a tool that will change your meditation so that it becomes more focused upon awareness rather than just caught in everyday thinking and the paradigms that you've been socialized to see as just normal,

Your normal experience.

So it will help to transform your experience and create a sort of space within yourself that saves time in the long run.

So the five minutes you spend writing in your journal,

For sure,

Within a day or two,

You will see,

For sure,

You will save that time just because your focus has become more aware.

So writing down whatever in the journal is about what you want to focus upon today.

What is important for you today?

Of course,

I'm speaking about practical things as well as mental states,

As well as emotional states,

As well as physical states.

So you could say,

It's really important for me to,

Every hour sitting down,

Just to stand up and stretch and breathe in and to nurture my body,

Not to just sit down and get caught in whatever I'm doing.

Five minutes.

And yet you can be doing things in those five minutes.

You could be just breathing in and just allowing your mind to come back to clarity again or oxygenating your body,

So allowing your body to feel good,

Blissful and happy again.

It's not that you're just sitting and doing nothing in those five minutes.

You're choosing an activity that helps with awareness,

Helps you to be more aware so that when you sit and do whatever office work or whatever work that you need to do,

You're energized and vitalized.

So the five minute journal is about writing things that are important,

That will help you come back to awareness within your work,

Within your meditation,

Within your communication to other people,

Within social relationships,

Within personal relationships with your partner.

And it's very important when you write these things down that you don't overwhelm yourself,

You know,

Like write a list of 20 or 30 things,

But to just write a list of,

Say,

Five or six things and say,

This is my focus.

This is what I'm going to focus on today and I'll give my energy and I'll give my time and I'll give my many hours I have into coming back into understanding that this is important.

You know,

I'm not just going to write it down and then forget about it.

I'm going to write it down and really put it into practice because practice is what creates a new habit and changing old habits comes from the space of awareness but also comes from the activity that comes from within awareness.

So when you begin to do this,

It's a very positive connection to the trust space that I'm speaking about because you begin to trust that things are possible.

Most of us believe that we can't change the world.

We are disempowered by what is going on,

By our experience,

By the pain,

By the complexity of life,

By the fact that we just can't change too many things,

The climate or whatever else.

We're just caught in this.

We are disempowered.

We feel disempowered by things around.

When we begin to create little changes,

Like all these micro steps,

Then we begin to change everything.

It's almost like the domino effect.

We change one thing and it begins to change many things,

Structures that you may not even be aware of,

Structures within your mind,

The way that the neurons fire and wire within you that you may not even be aware of.

And it's so amazing when this begins to happen in your meditation,

When you begin to become aware that there are so many possibilities that you can focus upon rather than just the reactive mind.

Wow.

There is,

That's when meditation becomes super exciting.

That's when meditation becomes super,

I don't even find the right word to describe it.

Super,

Not super exciting,

But just so wonderful that you just want to keep practicing more and more and more because you actually transform the old habits that prevent the awareness of trust,

That prevent that trust that allows you to connect to things that are meaningful and that create moments of joy and moments of happiness.

You transform,

You begin to see the transformation happening in your day when you write in your journal,

Five minutes,

You write in your journal and you begin to see that,

Yes,

I can change this.

I can change this even if it's not changing everything.

I have begun to change and that is what meditation is about.

Meditation is not only about awareness and trust,

But it's about the empowerment that comes from realizing that you have a choice,

That you have a choice and that change is part of that choice.

And no matter what the situation is,

No matter what is going on around you,

Change is our human birthright.

This is why evolution happened in the first place.

Yeah?

We decided to change,

You know,

From the little,

People say,

You know,

From the little microbe or a little bacteria or whatever swimming in the ocean millions and millions of years ago and now we have decided to incarnate in this physical format and it's very different from the little bacteria that we originally came from according to the theories of evolution.

Change is something that we know.

We know deep inside of ourselves.

So please remember to utilize these tools that I've shared with you,

Especially creating this journal so that after the transmission,

The energy of the transmission is written down so that it becomes tangible in ways.

Just write down,

Oh,

I want to be a millionaire or I want to be,

You know,

I want a new car.

Don't fall into the mind's picture of trying to create happiness out of desires and out of needs being fulfilled,

But rather focus upon the change that you can create in your life.

What you can do that changes things.

Little changes are very important.

Little changes make a big difference.

So it's not about changing everything.

It's just as I explained,

You know,

Five minutes standing up and stretching or it could just be smiling at people.

Every time you want to react,

You just think,

Okay,

I relax my body and I smile at people around me and notice what happens.

Notice that you are empowered to change things much more than you think,

Much more than some part of your brain thinks because of course deep inside you know and you think very differently than the habits that are being expressed or communicated in life.

There is a depth of thinking that meditation brings you back to.

So with all these tools,

I would like to share with you now a practical meditation and this will just take a few moments.

Just a practical meditation so that the words make sense in practice.

And all you have to do is make sure that your posture is upright.

You know you're not scrunched and you're not sitting in a way where the energy isn't flowing from the base of the spine up to the top of the head.

So just making sure that the way that you sit is conducive to the flow of energy.

As you breathe in and breathe out,

Just making sure that you let go of any tension.

Just scan your body for any tension that may be obvious.

Usually people have tension around their shoulders or around the neck area,

Very often also around the hips and the lower back.

Just consciously letting go of this tension.

Just breathing into this area and relaxing the body.

Gently allowing the breath to come back to more tranquil still space.

So you're breathing in in a way where you know everything is okay and you're just allowing the body to come back to a deeper state of relaxation by letting go of tension,

Physical tension.

It's blissful to relax.

The body enjoys being in a relaxed state.

So you gently allow this to happen by letting go of tension,

Wherever you notice tension,

Letting it go.

Then this bliss,

This sense of well-being that is made possible as you let go and as you come back to the natural relaxed state that the body understands.

This sense of bliss,

This sense of joy communicates itself to the space of the heart.

So you feel more relaxed,

You feel more still,

You feel more present to the stillness.

As your feelings begin to change,

Not only are you feeling connected to a relaxed body but also you begin to feel connected to the positive and more happy aspect of your being.

Perhaps the thoughts even change and you become aware of,

Oh it's a beautiful summery day or it's warm and I'm happy to be part of this wonderful warmth and so light.

You begin to think of positive things.

As the body relaxes and becomes more still,

It's natural for the mind to focus upon the positive.

It's natural for the mind to think positive thoughts.

You may notice as this transformation continues,

You may notice that the energy of your body relaxes,

That sort of inner tension that so many people carry around relaxes.

As your body,

Physical body relaxes,

As your mind and your emotions come back to a more positive natural flow,

Then it's easy for the energy to relax and you may wish to just expand this energy around you.

So it's almost as if this positive energy is all around,

Not just around your body or inside of your body but also within the room that you're sitting and meditating in or within the space that you're sitting and meditating within.

Just letting go and allowing for this expansion space to flow from the positivity,

The positivity that's happening as you relax the body.

As you just come back into the natural state of being that is presence.

This is a state that is higher in consciousness.

It's higher consciousness.

As you come back to presence,

You come back to higher consciousness.

And there is no need to do anything because now as you relax and you come back into connection with higher consciousness,

It's almost as if a natural space of trust.

You're trusting the process because you feel better.

You sense the energy that is around you from a space of positivity so it's easier to trust.

Just allow this trust to extend not just to your body or to your thoughts or to your feelings but also to the space that is around you.

The room that you're meditating within or the space that you're meditating within,

Just extend this energy,

This positive flow of energy that comes from trusting higher consciousness,

Awareness.

Just extend this into the space around you.

It's very interesting when you do this.

You'll notice that the space,

The quality of energy within the space begins to change.

Because as we know in quantum physics and as we know in science today,

As science begins to explore the many levels of reality that become obvious as space travel and microscopes investigate things that we just didn't understand before,

We can change the energy around us.

Not just through awareness but just by allowing ourselves to come back to higher consciousness.

So actually now what you are doing is creating this wonderful space of higher consciousness that remains around you even after the meditation,

Even after the meditation comes to a conclusion this energy around you becomes very obvious in your day.

You've created a molecular structure around that is vibrating from consciousness,

That is vibrating from your presence to consciousness rather than from the reactive states that you're so used to.

Just that little thought,

Just that little practice that you now have been able to experience changes everything.

And now all that remains is to come back to trust with those little changes that are happening around you that you are focused upon.

The changes continue throughout your day,

Continue in a way that may be invisible to your perception but continue in a way that becomes obvious given time.

So as you breathe in and breathe out let go,

Let go and you may wish to continue in meditation for a few more moments.

Just focusing upon the stillness,

Letting go,

Coming back to the stillness.

Deep breath.

Thank you.

Reviews

Thanks for sharing with wisdom and love.

Thank you so much for being part of my practice.

I always find tony very interesting but sum of Tony’s meditation have quality that are more soft voices with pauses this was a bit fast!

Informative
Enjoyed the meditation at the end to bring it all together.
thank you .
~🙏🏾Namaste