5 • 632 Ratings
🗓️ 31 July 2019
⏱️ 21 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
You may have noticed that in meditation, as in life, sometimes it’s helpful to exert effort, and other times, effort just gets in the way. We need to let go, ease up.
In this episode, Thomas guides a longer meditation, pointing out the moments when it might be most helpful to “bear down and ease up.”
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0:00.0 | Hello and welcome to another episode of Mindfulness Plus. I'm your host Thomas McConkey. Thanks for listening today. So it's that time of the month. |
0:21.0 | It's that episode where we do a deeper dive into practice. |
0:24.8 | Less talky, more meditating. |
0:28.1 | Before we meditate, I'm in a talkie just a little bit. |
0:32.4 | About an insight you've probably had practicing. |
0:35.7 | Maybe you haven't thought about this formally or consciously, |
0:40.1 | but if you've meditated, you've sensed what I'm about to say. And that is that when we meditate, |
0:47.3 | we realize there are moments when it's skillful to use effort and moments when it's skillful, |
0:53.5 | skillful to be effortless. |
0:56.5 | When to bear down and when to ease up. |
1:00.9 | So in this meditation, I'm really going to underscore that. |
1:03.5 | I'm going to point to the moments where it tends to be really beneficial to bear down |
1:08.6 | or use effort when it tends to be very helpful to ease up and let go of all effort. |
1:14.9 | That's what we're up to. Get comfortable and enjoy. Phae Phae Take a moment to set up a posture, whatever posture that is, standing, lying, walking, sitting. |
2:08.6 | Just notice the body's arrangement in space. Find a sweet spot where you're soft and relaxed, but also present and alert. You can touch into a sense of stillness. |
2:43.0 | As the body becomes still, you can taste stillness in the body. |
2:50.0 | But at a levelness in the body. |
2:55.2 | But at a level deeper than the body knows, perhaps you can sense into a more profound stillness. |
3:02.6 | In any event, you can just hold an intention for a moment to be still, to be stillness. Connect to a sense of pleasure. |
3:33.0 | Maybe at the level of personality you like how you feel in the moment, you like the conditions that are present. |
3:45.6 | But deeper than the personality, you can direct your awareness to what we might call the simple feeling of being, just beingness. |
4:08.9 | And as you bring awareness more fully to this simple feeling of being, |
... |
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