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Meditation Spirituality

Is What You Seek Actually Already Here?

John J. Prendergast — February 15, 2020

 

As we let go into the current of truth, it gains momentum, and an increasingly intimate inner dialogue unfolds between our conditioned mind and our unconditioned nature. If you want to cooperate with this process (which I assume you do), it is important to honestly examine your motives.

 

MEDITATIVE INQUIRY

What Do You Really Want?

 

Find a quiet, comfortable place where you won’t be disturbed, close your eyes, and take a few deep breaths. Let your attention settle down and in, resting in the heart area. When you are ready, ask yourself: “What is it that I really want?” Let the question go. Don’t go to your mind for an answer. Just wait, listen, sense, and feel. The response may come first as a sensation or as an image before it becomes a word. Or it may come first as a word or phrase.

 

Whatever comes, check for inner resonance. Does it ring true for you? Something usually lights up, enlivens, releases, or opens up in the body if you have touched an important inner truth.

 

***

 

It is crucial to be honest with yourself. Usually we have mixed motives. I certainly did. Even as I was highly interested in discovering what is true, I was also looking for approval from others and wanting to survive. Social acceptance and physical safety are fundamental, closely intertwined desires, and we often need to play them out until we see through them. This usually takes time.  

 

If you believe that your happiness depends upon finding the right partner or career, or upon accumulating wealth or power, you may need to explore these options in order to discover their limitations. Conceptual insight—knowing that happiness does not depend upon circumstances—is rarely enough. Your life experience is a vital curriculum, and there will be a number of opportunities to experience its fierce grace.

 

You may be able to speed up this process by asking yourself what you imagine you will gain if you acquire the objects or meet the goals you are seeking. As a thought experiment, complete some of the following sentences that resonate for you:  

 

If I find the right partner, I will feel _________.

 

If I have children or grandchildren, I will experience _________.

 

If I have enough good friends or belong to the right community, I will feel _________.

 

If I have the right job or career, I will be _________.

 

If I have enough money and own a home and nice car, I will be _________.

 

If I have better health, I will _________.

 

If I eat enough delicious food, have great sex, travel to enough interesting and exotic places, and work hard enough, I will finally _________.

 

If I am at the right place at the right time in the future, I will _________.

 

If I discover my soul’s purpose, I will _________.

 

Then ask yourself: 

 

Is it true that what I seek is not already here?

 

If you let your heart wisdom answer, this last question can be a mindbender. The strategic mind will be stunned. If you trust your heart’s answer and act on it, you will master life’s curriculum much more quickly, avoiding some of its remedial dead ends.

 

As intention clarifies, attention focuses.  

 

Of course, we can gain some degree of transient satisfaction if the above if-then statements are fulfilled, but there will always be an underlying sense of dissatisfaction until the Deep Heart is consciously recognized. My teacher Jean Klein often observed that “the object never fulfills its promise.” Certainly not for long. Have you noticed that once we attain an object or reach a goal, the hunt is soon on again? Although part of us enjoys the drama of the chase, it is the respite from the search that we most want—the true homecoming.

 

Once we discover an underlying wholeness in the depths of our being, the relationship to desire changes. We are much less attached to getting what we want and much more grateful for what we have. It is a path of natural contentment rather than willful renunciation. An inner sense of fullness arises that is increasingly independent of circumstances, and we feel happy for no particular reason.  

 

Journey into the depths of your own heart with Dr. John J. Prendergast’s guide, The Deep Heart: Our Portal to Presence.

John J. Prendergast, PhD, is a spiritual teacher, author, psychotherapist, and retired adjunct professor of psychology who now offers residential and online retreats. For more, please visit listeningfromsilence.com

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Buy your copy of The Deep Heart at your favorite bookseller!

Sounds True | Amazon | Barnes & Noble | IndieBound

 

 

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Meditation Mindfulness

Justin Michael Williams: Stay Woke

Justin Michael Williams — February 11, 2020

Justin Michael Williams is a meditation teacher and personal coach who is also a Billboard top 20 recording artist. With Sounds True, he has published Stay Woke: A Meditation Guide for the Rest of Us. In this special video episode of Insights at the Edge, Tami Simon speaks with Justin about his upcoming “Stay Woke, Give Back” tour, in which he will explain his unique approach to meditation and give copies of Stay Woke to youth in various cities across the US. Justin explains his “freedom meditation” technique and the experiences that led him to practicing mindfulness. Tami and Justin also discuss the blind spots of traditional meditation, the need for spiritual practices to acknowledge real-life struggles, and the dangers of spiritual bypassing. Finally, they talk about why it’s essential we begin teaching all children mindfulness skills from an early age and how we as a society can make that happen. (66 minutes)

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Meditation Mindfulness

3 Ways to Practice You This Holiday Season

Elena Brower — December 18, 2019

Practicing being true to ourselves is a delicate dance of knowing ourselves, then respecting and serving that truth. This requires cultivation of both internal stability and external ease. How can we do this when we are surrounded by cultural chaos as well as our own family dramas? Here are three ways to Practice You this holiday season.

Write It Down

Set a timer for five to ten minutes; write who you are and where you’re going. Note every label and defining element of who you perceive yourself to be, and then note your vision for yourself next year, in five years and in ten years. Coming to know yourself will help you be steady when confronted, soft when you’d normally get agitated, and more kind at just the right times.

Sit With It

Nothing changes in an instant, and we can continuously and simply ask to be shown what the next step might be. If prayer is when we speak to our idea of a higher power, meditation is a moment to listen for healing, becomes a respite, a break in the day, a time to heal ourselves. Sit with it. Sit with what you learn when you listen a few minutes more.

Move More Slowly

One of the simplest ways I practice being myself is to simply slow down. I’ve learned this from every moment of deep loss, grief, or heartache–if i move more slowly, I won’t break. I can see what’s useful, what’s nourishing, what’s holy about this moment. Slowing down for myself helps me refine what I’m practicing and choosing in my life.

 

Elena Brower is a Mama, author of Practice You, yoga instructor, designer, and artist based in New York City. Devoted to cultivating meditation as our most healing habit, she’s created potent online coursework and produced On Meditation, a film featuring personal portraits of renowned meditators. For more, visit elenabrower.com.

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Meditation Spirituality

Micah Mortali: Rewilding

Micah Mortali — December 17, 2019

Micah Mortali is the director of the Kripalu School, a certified yoga teacher, and a longtime wilderness guide. With Sounds True, he has published Rewilding: Meditations, Practices, and Skills for Awakening in Nature. In this episode of Insights at the Edge, Tami Simon speaks with Micah about humanity’s growing disconnection from the earth and how “rewilding” can help slow that trend. They talk about rewilding both as individuals and as part of whole ecosystems. Micah also shares the story of an intense, revelatory trail encounter with a bear and comments on the “species loneliness” of urban environments. Mulling the sense of grief they have for humankind’s effects on the environment, Tami and Micah consider how modern people can grapple with being in exile from the natural world. Finally, they discuss the barriers many have to reentering nature, as well as ways to initiate your own rewilding experience no matter where you are.(64 minutes)

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Meditation Parenting & Children

Goldie Hawn: Moving in a Direction That Matters

Goldie Hawn — November 26, 2019

Goldie Hawn is an Academy Award-winning actor, director, producer, and activist best known for her roles in films such as Cactus Flower, Private Benjamin, and Death Becomes Her. She created The Hawn Foundation, the nonprofit organization behind MindUP™, an educational program that is bringing mindfulness practices to millions of children across the world. In this episode of Insights at the Edge, Tami Simon speaks with Goldie about her longtime interest in meditation and why it’s so important to teach brain basics to kids. They discuss the neuroscience that demonstrates the clear benefits of teaching emotional intelligence, mindfulness, and the basics of brain science to children from an early age—as well as why Goldie is teaching these aspects to her own grandchildren. Finally, Tami and Goldie talk about what it means to differentiate one’s true self from the projections of others, as well as why love and family remain Goldie’s first priorities in life. (67 minutes)

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Meditation Mindfulness

The Basics of Natural Awareness 101: Dropping Objects

Diana Winston — September 12, 2019

The Basics of Natural Awareness: Dropping Objects Header Image

There are three deliberate mental shifts you can make during classical mindfulness meditation that can help point you toward natural awareness: relaxing effort, broadening attention, and dropping objects.

If you have not read the previous two steps, you can find Relaxing Effort and Broadening Attention on our blog.

Dropping Objects

When you’re practicing classical mindfulness meditation, probably the most important shift you can make to invite in natural awareness is to move your attention from objects to objectless-ness. Now what on earth does that mean?

Objects of meditation are, simply put, the things we focus on, such as the breath, body sensations, emotions, thoughts. An object can also be something outside us, like another person, sights, or sounds. Any kind of thing can be an object of meditation. Taking something as the object of our awareness is basic to classical mindfulness meditation, as you saw in the previous chapters. Focusing on objects and attending to them is generally how we live our life as well.

Objectless awareness, typically developed in meditation and uncommon in daily life, is when we focus less on the objects of awareness and instead focus on the awareness itself. There will be objects arising in our meditation—thoughts, emotions, sensations, for example—but since they are not the focus, they are less distinct, and we become aware of awareness itself. So instead of our anchor being our breath, for example, our anchor is awareness itself.

People tend to experience objectless awareness in three different ways: that in which everything is contained, that which knows, and that which just is.

That in which everything is contained. Broadening attention from a narrow focus to a more panoramic perception is closely aligned with the experience of objectless awareness as that in which everything is contained. You will notice me using analogies like “Our mind is like the sky, and everything in it is like clouds floating by.” This helps me convey the idea that awareness contains everything. So when we turn our attention to the sky-like nature of our mind, noticing the boundless space around things, we are noticing the field of awareness in which everything is contained. Some people experience objectless awareness in this way.

Think about looking out a window at a busy street. When we look out the window, we take in the full view in a relaxed way. Rather than specifically focusing on individual vehicles, we somehow are aware of everything that is happening simultaneously, and our vision seems to contain everything.

That which knows. The second idea that objectless awareness focuses on is a little tricky. Most of us are used to focusing on objects when we meditate, but what happens when we make the shift to noticing that which is being aware—to seeking the knower? Oftentimes this shift can feel quite joyful and freeing. Many of the practices in the book move us toward awareness of awareness, as you will see. If you start searching for the knower, what do you find?

The idea is that we can notice things, and we also notice the thing that notices things. We can take our attention from an outward focus on objects and turn it inward, as if we are reversing our attention—trying to move from that which we are aware of, to that which is aware of what we are aware of.

This is excerpted from The Little Book of Being: Practices and Guidance for Uncovering Your Natural Awareness by Diana Winston.

Little Book of Being

Diana Winston headshot

Diana Winston is the director of Mindfulness Education at UCLA Semel Institute’s Mindful Awareness Research Center (MARC) and the coauthor, with Dr. Susan

Smalley, of Fully Present: The Science, Art, and Practice of Mindfulness. She is a well‑known teacher and

speaker who brings mindful awareness practices to the general public to promote health and well‑being. Called by the LA Times “one of the nation’s best‑known teachers of mindfulness,” she has taught mindfulness since 1993 in a variety of settings, including hospitals, universities, corporations, nonprofits, schools in the US and Asia, and online. She developed the evidence‑based Mindful Awareness Practices (MAPS) curriculum and the Training in Mindfulness Facilitation, which trains mindfulness teachers worldwide.

Her work has been mentioned or she has been quoted in the New York Times; O, The Oprah Magazine; Newsweek; the Los Angeles Times; Allure; Women’s Health; and in a variety of magazines, books, and journals. She is also the author of Wide Awake: A Buddhist Guide for Teens, the audio program Mindful Meditations, and has published numerous articles on mindfulness. Diana is a member of the Teacher’s Council at Spirit Rock Meditation Center in Northern California. She has been practicing mindfulness meditation since 1989, including a year as a Buddhist nun in Burma. Currently, Diana’s most challenging and rewarding practice involves trying to mindfully parent an eight‑year‑old. She lives in Los Angeles.

For more information, visit dianawinston.com and marc.ucla.edu.

Buy your copy of The Little Book of Being at your favorite bookseller!

Sounds True | Amazon | Barnes & Noble | Indiebound

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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