Hello and welcome to another episode of One Heart, One Mind.

I'm your host Thomas Mocke.

Thank you for listening today.

If you're new to this podcast or if you're a return listener, I want to let you know that

what I'm about here is to help you have a deep and meaningful relationship with stillness.

And by stillness, I mean the source of life, love, and light.

Some people call this source God. Some people call it ultimate reality. Whatever you call it,

I'm interested in creating a space here with you where we can all

return to the source of life, love, and light. If you've been working at this, if you've

been practicing at coming to stillness and deepening your reservoir of interior silence, you'll find that

it's challenging enough to find some time in your day in this busy world to settle in.

And perhaps it's even more challenging to come out of a period of centering, where we have an intention to be still,

and then we meet the full catastrophe of daily living.

So in this episode, I want to focus on the part where we get up from the prayer, when we get up from our centering practice and how we meet the day.

Starting with a personal story, I get this question a lot.

I've been teaching meditation, contemplative prayer, and such for almost 15 years now full

time.

And before that, I was a really earnest student just trying to taste stillness in my life and maintain some sense of centeredness throughout my day.

And I found it to be really difficult until I didn't, which is to say in the beginning it felt extremely effortful.

It felt like a heroic lift and effort to taste the tiniest bit of stillness with the very tip of my tongue.

And the moment I tasted that fleeting taste, no sooner did I enter that piece

than the world with all of its commotion and frenetic activity swept me out of it and I lost touch with it.

...