Thomas Wirthlin McConkie: How Meditation and Being Still Help Us Know God
All In
DB Podcasts
4.8 • 6.3K Ratings
🗓️ 7 August 2019
⏱️ 45 minutes
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Summary
Despite being born into a family with strong Latter-day Saint roots, Thomas McConkie stopped attending church at the age of 13. However, a spiritual journey, which spanned nearly two decades and included becoming proficient in Buddhist meditation, brought him back to an unlikely destination: The faith of his youth.
"I'm really comfortable with the definition of meditation as remembrance. And that feels very much like a gospel principle to me, like when we remember what are we remembering? Well, let me just riff a little bit: We remember that we are sons and daughters, that we're children of a living God. And when we remember that, the quality of our whole life in this very moment changes."
Show Notes
3:08- Leaving the Church at 13 years old
4:51- Discovering Meditation
5:46- Redemption in Stillness
12:26- Power to Heal a Generation
16:49- The Meaning of Meditation
19:34- Stillness Among Saints
25:34- Changing a Culture
28:15- Home-centered Church's Opportunity
31:49- Ministering and Meditation
33:05- Creating a Community
35:56- Message to a Teenager Struggling With Faith
37:50- If You Love Someone Struggling With Faith
39:29- A Grandfather's Love
42:36- What Does It Mean To Be All In The Gospel of Jesus Christ?
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | 24 hours later and I'm still not over how much I love the conversation you're about to hear. |
| 0:05.6 | I hope you love it as much as I did. If you do or if you've enjoyed any of our recent episodes, |
| 0:11.6 | please do me a huge favor and leave us a rating or a review on Apple Podcast. |
| 0:17.2 | One little rating or review can help us so much and I read every review personally and they |
| 0:23.5 | make my day. So thank you so much and now we'll get on to this week's episode. |
| 0:27.6 | Thomas McConkey is the grandson of Joseph B. Wurflin and the great nephew of Bruce R. McConkey. |
| 0:35.2 | Two names you might recognize and yet at the age of 13 he stopped attending church. |
| 0:41.6 | Ultimately a 20-year spiritual journey to China and back led him to return to the faith of his youth. |
| 0:49.2 | What healed what had previously been a painful space in his life and called him home? |
| 0:54.7 | Meditation and stillness. |
| 0:57.2 | Thomas Wurflin McConkey is author of navigating Mormon faith crisis and the founder of Lower |
| 1:04.0 | Light School of Wisdom. He has been practicing mindfulness and other meditative techniques for 20 years |
| 1:10.5 | and studying their effects on human potential. He and his wife Gloria live in Salt Lake City. |
| 1:19.8 | This is All-In, an LDS living podcast where we ask the question, |
| 1:24.0 | what does it really mean to be All-In, the gospel of Jesus Christ? I'm Morgan Jones and I am |
| 1:30.4 | so grateful to have Thomas McConkey with me today. Thomas, welcome. |
| 1:34.5 | Thank you. Good to be here Morgan. |
| 1:36.4 | Well, I have been so looking forward to this conversation and I would love just as we start to |
| 1:42.8 | kind of introduce people to you and to your story. So if there's there are people listening |
| 1:48.4 | that are completely new to you, don't know anything about you, how would you briefly sum up a |
| 1:54.5 | little bit about your faith journey? How brief. I can be so brief or just give us some detail. |
| 2:04.5 | I'm the guy who accidentally became proficient in meditation and realized that it is a spiritual |
... |
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