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Welcome to Meditation Oasis. This is Mary Maddox. You can visit us at meditationoasis.com.

Today's episode will be something different. Instead of leading a new guided meditation,

I'll be talking a little bit about meditation and about our podcast.

Actually, I've thought about doing an episode like this for quite some time, but I had some hesitations.

Sometimes I feel like the less said about meditation the better. Our concepts can get in the way of

having a fresh, innocent experience. If we sit to meditate and we think, oh, okay, here I am now,

I'm a meditator, and this is what a meditator does, and this is what meditation looks like,

and this is how it's supposed to be. They can set up expectations and goals that get in the way.

Our meditations are all about trust in the process. Trust in yourself and trust in life,

so there isn't really a right or wrong meditation.

It's all about your own exploration. It's all about the truths that you discover in yourself.

It's how you learn to use your attention, and how to shift into different ways of being and

perceiving. I find that when I lead gutted meditations with a group, I'm always amazed at what

people get out of the meditations. Their experience may be completely different than what I'm thinking

of as I'm leading the gutted meditation. In fact, I'm really not thinking of anything.

Because when I lead the gutted meditation, I'm actually literally meditating with you.

I'm having my own experience. I sit down, close my eyes, go within, and see what grows out of my

own inner experience. Of course, some of my knowledge about meditation comes into play,

but there's something that happens that has nothing to do with anything I've ever learned before,

and true meditation, authentic meditation, has nothing to do with any of our ideas or anything

that went before. Anything that did happen in the past, anything that was developed in some sort

...