Hello and in today's

welcome back to practicing human, the podcast where every day we are getting a little better at life.

I'm your host, Kory Muscarra.

And in today's episode I'm going to be talking about why the moment before release is often when we grip the hardest.

More to come on that in a moment. But first, I am so excited. Why am I excited?

Because it's Two Bell Tuesday. No other podcast in the world. Do you get two Bell Tuesday. So I'm going to ring the bells twice.

All you need to do is listen and let this serve as an extended mini meditation

dropping you a little more deeply into the present moment. The D' Two Bell Tuesday, you make the world go round. Thank you very much.

Okay, the moment before release is when we grip the hardest.

The first time I saw the truth of this came, as many of my insights have come from my time in Burma. It was a period in the retreat

where my teacher encouraged me to extend my sitting meditation to about two hours at a time, seven times per day instead of just the normal one hour.

So at this point I was doing two hours of sitting half hour of walking another two hours of sitting half hour of walking

Now sitting for that length

created a lot of pain in my body that was often difficult to tolerate.

And to get through it, I'd need to shift my posture and sometimes I'd need to get up before

the two-hour mark. It was just too hard. And the more the

pain increased, the more I would often try to grit my teeth through it. It was kind of like a

knee jerk response. But the gritting my teeth just

led to further tension, resistance, and a general sense of gripping. And it was that resistance to the pain that would often cause me to give up because it was just too intense.

Now, I remember one meditation very vividly where I just saw this pattern happening over and over and over the

pain would arise I resist it and get up I said this time that no matter what happens I'm not going to move.

Even if I die in this pain I will stay still.

...