- [Instructor] Welcome, and thanks for taking out the time
for yourself for what will hopefully be
a nice inward journey.
So just start off sitting upright,
feet planted on the ground
if you're ideally on some type of a firm chair.
And start to soften your gaze if your eyes are still open.
Gently close them.
I like to leave my hands on my lap,
palms up to the sky,
but whatever feels comfortable for you.
And then with your eyes closed,
gently become a little bit more aware of your breaths.
Make them a little bit deeper and a little bit slower.
At your own time breathe in,
breathe out, just a little bit deeper
and a little bit slower.
So the whole idea behind meditation
is trying to ease all the chatter
that exists in our brains,
trying to still our thoughts.
And so as we do that,
and every meditation I'm going to try to introduce
some frameworks, ways of thinking about your mind.
But as you try to quiet the mind,
it will inevitably get distracted.
It might get distracted by some noise in the room
or some noise outside, or more likely,
it'll get distracted by thoughts
that are just surfacing into your consciousness.
And if that happens, don't let it make you anxious.
A lot of folks, when they meditate,
they worry that they're doing it wrong,
and then if they get distracted,
it actually makes things worse.
They say, "I'm never going to be able
"to do this meditation thing."
The important thing is to approach the meditation
with a spirit of fun, a spirit of curiosity.
Have a sense of humor about it.
We are all literally human,
and we do very human things.
And so when you find your mind wandering a bit,
just laugh it off and say, "Oh, there you go, mind."
Just come back to the stillness, not a big deal.
Don't beat up on yourself over it.
And as part of that, as we go over to this meditation,
as much as possible try to keep a little bit
of a smile on your face.
Your eyes are closed,
but you can still smile a little bit
or at least smile with your mind.
Reminds you that this should be fun.
This is relaxing.
So with that said, let's keep breathing in, breathing out,
a little bit deeper, a little bit slower.
In the framework that I'm going to introduce
for how you can still your mind
is one that I use a lot,
which is imagining all the thoughts
in your subconscious as the ocean.
And the surface of the ocean is the interface
between your subconscious and your consciousness.
And most of us have a pretty choppy surface.
There's a lot of thoughts
that are jumping up and down out of our subconscious.
And sometimes we're drowning in those thoughts.
And one way to think about it
is we can elevate ourselves.
We can elevate ourselves above the surface of that water.
And when you start to elevate yourself,
you're not suppressing the thoughts,
but you're just looking down on them.
You see that they're still there.
The surface is still choppy.
There's still waves.
But as you rise and you look down on it,
you realize that you are not those thoughts.
You are not the surface of the water.
So whether the thing that's bothering you
is an assignment you have to do
or some interpersonal relations
or just something in your life
not working out the way that you would like it to,
remind yourself that that is not you.
You are not defined by the outcome of that situation.
Those are just waves on that ocean.
And the more that you surface above them
and you look at them and analyze them,
you realize that they have no control over you.
And once that happens, things start to slow down.
The surface of that water begins
to get calmer and calmer and calmer.
And there you are floating above that surface,
just pure awareness.
And you realize that you're a lot more
than you thought you were.
You aren't just your physical body.
You aren't just those thoughts
that you see as waves on the surface of that ocean.
You aren't even just that identity
that you associate yourself with,
your name, your position in the world,
your status, what people think of you, your relations.
Those are aspects of you, but they aren't you.
You are something much bigger than all of them.
You are the space in which they occur,
in which they happen, but they aren't you.
And now let's just try to sit in that pure awareness
for the next minute or so.
And once again, if your thoughts wander, not a big deal.
That's just the choppiness on the surface of that water,
and you need to elevate yourself back
to that pure awareness.
And if the quiet bothers you, don't worry.
I will be back in about a minute.
All right, so that was a relatively short amount of time
for you to be on your own.
And as you'll see,
as we do more and more advanced meditations,
give yourself more and more time.
And over time you won't need me talking.
In fact, that will probably annoy you.
You'll just be able to sit down and still your mind
and realize that you are not your thoughts
and that these things that are bothering you,
they're only going to bother you
as much as you let them bother you.
In the whole scheme of things,
in all of time and space,
none of them are really what should define you
or are anywhere near as important
as we sometimes make them out to be.
I'll see you in the next meditation.