Episode 20: My Grandfather, The Lotus

One Heart One Mind

Thomas McConkie

Meditation, Spirituality, Mindfulness, Contemplation, Psychology, Buddhism, Development, Thomasmcconkie, Religion & Spirituality

5 • 632 Ratings

🗓️ 11 September 2019

⏱️ 20 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Who are we really? And what ideas do we have about ourselves and others that keep us distant from them, keep us isolated?

In this special episode, Thomas tells a story of an encounter he had with his grandfather recently, and the unexpected moment of Presence that shone through 26 years of estrangement.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello and welcome to another episode of Mindfulness Plus.
0:15.7	I'm your host Thomas McConkey.
0:18.0	Thanks for listening today.
0:26.0	I have a story, as I often do, to tee up our learning today,
0:33.4	our practice. This story is a little bit different in the sense that it's quite a personal story,
0:37.8	and I'm a little bit afraid to tell it. But I figure we have a limited number of breaths in these bodies.
0:45.0	And if you're going to listen to a podcast and if I'm going to record one, we may as well go big.
0:50.8	So I want to just take a little risk here.
0:57.8	This was something that happened just a few days ago at the family dinner table where so much of provocative life unfolds in human life. It was a
1:08.3	Sunday dinner and we were all sitting around.
1:11.6	It was, you know, my family, a few of my siblings who live in the area by my parents, one of my uncles and my dad's parents who are quite old now.
1:26.0	Like most families, we spend a lot of energy not talking about what's really painful,
1:32.3	and there's a good amount of pain in our lives right now and our family.
1:40.3	Speaking of pain, the relationship I've had with my dad's father has been one of the more painful relationships in my life.
1:51.0	To just give you a little bit of a background on it to help you kind of sense into some of the pain that was swirling around the dinner table on Sunday.
2:01.6	I was raised in the LDS Church and when I was quite young, felt really strongly about not wanting to participate in the church.
2:14.6	And so I refused and I removed myself. And that was much to the consternation of
2:23.0	a lot of my family, including maybe especially my grandfather. And from that time on, from the time I was about 13 till Sunday, I'll get there in a minute,
2:41.0	but I just perceived this kind of persistent tension and conflict and distance and estrangement.
2:52.6	You know, with all things, I think part of it was just me and my perceptions and my sensitivities.
3:00.6	And I also think it was there. I think it was in my granddad.
3:04.6	And, you know, we had a genuine falling out over differences in our kind of religious opinions and beliefs.
	...

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