Episode 4: Wildfire

One Heart One Mind

Thomas McConkie

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

5 • 632 Ratings

🗓️ 22 May 2019

⏱️ 24 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

It is a fact of human life that often, maybe even many times a day, we’ll experience significant disturbance that starts as a spark that sets off a wild blaze.

In this episode Thomas offers practical advice and guidance for not letting these sparks connect to tinder. As we deepen this practice, we realize that living in a state of happiness beyond conditions is a real possibility in this very life.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello and welcome to another episode of Mindfulness Plus.
0:16.0	I'm your host Thomas Mekonki. Thanks for joining us today. So last week we did a little bit longer of a meditation
0:24.2	working with evenly distributing awareness throughout the senses. If you didn't catch that episode,
0:31.6	I'd encourage you to listen to it. Maybe you could revisit it if you've heard it already.
0:35.7	It's a great practice to just keep up over and over until we cultivate this powerful habit of presence.
0:45.5	So today, I want to talk about a little bit different of an area of practice.
0:52.6	And as is my want, I like to evoke a little bit of an image and story if it serves our purpose.
1:01.2	So I've mentioned in a former podcast, we were at a meditation retreat as the Lower Lights community.
1:07.5	That's the community I head up here in Salt Lake City. We were down in southern Utah, and during
1:14.1	the time we were down there, one of the largest wildfires in Utah history was sparked. I think it
1:20.3	ended up taking about 70,000 acres, and we were pretty enveloped in the smoke, and for several of
1:27.1	the days we were down there, we thought we might need to evacuate.
1:30.7	Later on, we heard through the news that the fire was started by fireworks, and it became an interesting metaphor to me,
1:42.2	that the fireworks in and of themselves that caused untold damage
1:48.5	were not inherently destructive, but it was the tinder. It was the spark that connected
1:56.6	to fuel that was able to burn down a big chunk of our beautiful state. And it occurs to me that we see
2:06.5	this scenario on an individual level all the time in life, all of the time in mindfulness practice.
2:14.0	So what do I mean by this? We have challenging thoughts. We have negative emotions. We get activated,
2:26.3	provoked, disturbed, triggered every day of our lives, often many times. And when we have an experience in life where we find
2:38.1	ourselves deeply disturbed and what we're feeling we feel like we can hardly stand we hate to feel
2:46.2	the way we're feeling and sometimes this is more overt it's in other words, it's obvious what the connection is.
2:54.2	You know, I am somewhere in public, let's say the library, and an altercation breaks out.
	...

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