How to Meditate Like a Buddhist

1. Welcome to How to Meditate Like a Buddhist: There is no other spiritual movement or religion that is more known for its association with meditation and Buddhism. How to meditate like a Buddhist really demystifies this ancient practice. And I gently teaches you everything you need to know about building a meditation practice that works for you, including guidance on posture, breathing mindset, and overcoming common obstacles. I've really distilled the fundamentals of Buddhist meditation into a clear and instructive guide. And this is really to help you establish a foundational meditation practice. Because a meditation practice can really help you release stress and anxiety and overwhelmed, it can change your relationship to the unhelpful thoughts and emotions that we may be feeling. It can help us really rediscover the quiet and stillness that lies inside and experience a greater sense of peace and tranquility in connection with ourselves and others. If you are ready to meditate like a Buddhist, this compact yet powerful course is a perfect place to start and I am really looking forward to getting into the material with you in these next lessons. 2. Meet Meditation and Mindfulness: Welcome to how to meditate like a Buddhist. If you are here, it means that you have heard about meditation before and they have either you've tried it and you've loved it or you've tried it and you found it awkward and maybe difficult and hard to do on your own. Or maybe you've gotten a taste of it at the end of a yoga class and you wanted to try it and you just haven't because it seems intimidating or it's not something you think you can do. Maybe you've done it and you want to learn more about it. It's also possible that you saw this course and you just felt drawn to sign up with having meditated, with not meditating at all. When I first meditated, it was right after my first love passed away unexpectedly. And I was really, really searching for a way to feel better in the world, to really feel safe and secure and connected and grounded. And I was needing more from the world and that I wanted to figure out how to be here and simply be without feeling so much sadness and anxiety, overwhelming. And I just had this feeling of urgency and rushing and everything being such a big deal. And I was really searching to find space and I was really searching to find quiet. I remember being a kid and needing to go up to my room and lay on my bed if something didn't go the way I wanted or I was upset about something. And that's really what I needed after Modi seal, my first love passed away. The difference was that I needed that within my mind. I could not get away from myself for just a second, myself talk my thoughts, and I needed a break for myself, my voice, or at least that's how it felt, right? I wanted some 0s, I wanted some piece. The first time I meditated, it was very, very uncomfortable. And I remember my thoughts telling me I was doing it wrong, that I didn't know what I was supposed to be doing. I was really all over the place. Sometimes I was falling asleep. Other times I was just annoyed at myself because I opened my eyes and I wasn't supposed to do that. And it was really, really hard for me to sit with myself, to be with myself. I'd never ever ever done that before. Also, I was extremely intimidated by the practice because I thought I had to go to India. I thought I had to wear sheet. I thought I knew a lot know a lot of stuff and be somebody that I wasn't. Even though it was uncomfortable in the beginning, I could feel shifts happening in changes. I couldn't explain them at that moment, but I could feel them, I notice them. I kept doing it and it just got easier to sit with myself and allow myself to be as I was in that moment without evaluating myself or judging myself, but with a pure observation in the sense of curiosity, it was almost like I became a subject. And you know, what happened? All the emotion I felt and the stress and the fear and the anxiety and the worry in the overwhelm, it didn't go away. I wish I could tell you it went away but it didn't. But it was just suddenly okay to feel it without letting it control me, which was really, really scary because I was taught you didn't want to feel anything bad or negative and to push it away. But I was no longer pushing it away. I was living to really learn alongside it and live alongside it. And I started to feel safe in the world again, I started to feel calm and present and joyful and connected. While I still have anxious and stressful moments, they are really moments instead of days and weeks and months. If you had told me 11 years ago that I would find peace in my life, I would form deep connections with others that I couldn't see the beauty in the world and just stop evaluating myself and others. I was very judgmental that I could change my relationship to fear into depth, into anxiety and stress. I would not have ever, ever believed you. But here I am. The impact for me. It was so profound that I went out and I became a certified meditation and mindfulness instructor for those that I work with, meditation has the same powerful effect I've seen. Meditation helped people tap into their creativity, be more productive at work and find overall well-being greater than they have ever felt before. I've seen marriages grow more intimate and loving and parents connect with their children and grow more peaceful within their families. I've really seen it All right. I've seen people accomplish more with less effort. I've seen people reduce their blood pressure, started sleeping better at night, reset their relationships with food, with money. Many say that really that they just started taking all the worry at all the fear, those thoughts that just go round and round in our minds. They take them less seriously, which has really created so much more joy and laughter and adventure in their lives. So just imagine for one moment what any one of these benefits could mean for your life. In addition to my own experience and that of my students, there are countless studies. Countless studies had measured the benefits of meditation on the body, the mind, and the spirit. In fact, it's really hard to find a scientific study that hasn't concluded in some parents whether that meditation is good for you. Just a cursory Internet search will give you a variety of peer reviewed studies showing physical, psychological, and spiritual benefits. So on a physical level, it regulates blood pressure. Meditation lowers your heart rate and cholesterol. It normalizes blood sugar, it increases fertility, reduces insomnia, and on a psychological level, it can help alleviate depression. It can increase contentment, reduces reactionary behavior, enhances concentration. On a spiritual level deepens really a sense of connectedness with life increases your intuition. And it increases if feeling of faith or a sense of faith. In addition to all of the above, there are some really key benefits of meditation from a Buddhist perspective. Meditation helps you to rediscover the quietness that lies inside you and provides access to an awareness and presence that is not affected by your past or the uncertainty of the future. Through meditation, you really begin to connect with the inherent goodness within you or what Buddhism refers to as your Buddha nature. While you may be accustomed to looking outside yourself for answers from others, Buddhism contains as radical idea and I love this. It's incredible that you already have the answers you seek within you. And meditation is a tool by which you can access these answers, by which you can access your own truth. So Buddhism really teaches that each of us has the power to relieve our own suffering. We are our own healers and we have everything we need within us. Suffering in this context really refers to anxiety, discomfort, pain, embarrassment, shame, and or self-loathing. Write anything really that causes you discomfort. This would be considered suffering and you're in it consistently. Meditation is really a way to change your relationship to this suffering because it changes your relationships to your thoughts and your emotions while you're practicing. By practicing meditation, what happens is you become a witness to whatever is happening. You become an observer to whatever is happening. You're no longer attaching yourself to the thoughts or you're no longer existing them, but you're simply observing them. You're really able to observe difficult thoughts and emotions and allow those sensations to be there without letting them lead you and guide you. And the more you observe and the less you judge, the more you heal. Meditation really invites you to find out who you are and to be who you are exactly as you are without evaluation or judgment. And in my experience, meditation can really help restore what stress, anxiety and overwhelmed. Maybe taking away, maybe already has taken away from you by bringing back some more peace and tranquility, meaningful connection with others. And just a sense of E is energy in your life and joyful living. During meditation, we really learned to be ourselves in the best and worst of times. We accept ourselves as perfectly imperfect, dynamic, and ever-changing. This in turn, allows us to see others in the same way, bringing a sense of compassion and connectedness into the world. You may not believe that the practice I will teach you over these next five days can bring the same to you. But if you're willing to commit to it and stick with it, meditating like a Buddhist will change your life. You've heard about meditation and mindfulness. I've just shared a lot of the benefits with you. But what actually is meditation and mindfulness? What are they? Are they the same thing? So what is meditation? Meditation simply is an ancient and modern technique used to reduce stress. To help you focus on one thing at a time to help you become more responsive in your interactions instead of reactive to be more attuned with the present moment. It really is the formal practice of mindfulness. What is mindfulness? Mindfulness is paying attention to the moment that you are in while you're in it. And anything can become a mindful moment. You can be getting into your car and feeling the sensation of the door handle and what it feels like to open the car, feel the coolness on your skin. You can be brushing your teeth in putting your attention on the way the bristles hit your gums or the taste of the toothpaste within your mouth. You can bring mindfulness to anything mindful movement. In yoga, that's mindful movement. You can do mindful walking where you're paying attention to your feet on the ground and how you're rolling through from your heel to your toe. You can take this moment right now and just look around you. What are you seeing? That's a mindful moment. That is mindfulness really bringing your attention to anything in the moment that you're doing it with a gentle attention of friendly attention, you're not evaluating it if it's good or bad. If you're just noticing, you're just seeing. Really, mindfulness is what I call more like informal practice because meditation is when we carve out time to sit and pay attention to the moment that we're in. Meditation is truly the formal practice of mindfulness. This is what I want you really to know about what's coming up for you in these next lessons. Each lesson is going to set up for you. And the day going forward, this is really important because within this course, you're going to watch the videos. Though. It's really about your daily action. You're going to watch the videos, you're gonna learn the information, and then you're gonna move into implementation in practice. You're going to watch the videos, then you're going to download the worksheets for the day, the daily action plan for the day. These next days together, they may feel a bit uncomfortable for you, and that's a good thing. Because a big part of this practice meditation is really learning how to become comfortable with discomfort, how to start witnessing and seeing it instead of becoming it. I know you can do this here with you each step of the way. Before we move on though, I really do want you to just take a moment and think about why you came to this course. Because this is going to help you remember why this practice is so important for you and it's going to help keep you committed to it. Are you ready in the next lesson, we're gonna get into it and we're going to learn how to meditate together. 3. Let's Meditate: Ever since I learned how to meditate, I have been eager to share what I know with others so that I can pass on these gifts, the gifts that I really found during one of the most difficult times in my life, the lowest of the low for me. And that is why this practice is so powerful and so important because it can truly, truly help us in the most difficult times and help us in the most incredible times. So to that end, I just wanted to get us meditating right away. So the one thing that I truly love about meditation is that it is so a profoundly simple that a child can do it while also being so rich with possibility that you can spend a lifetime exploring it. Before I actually learned how to meditate, the very thought of it seemed so complicated. In order to do it right, my brain was like, I have to invest in special cushions. I have to go get incentive, I have to go get guns, I have to do singing balls, I have to have an altar. I couldn't possibly I thought get anywhere by just sitting in any place, anywhere in breathing. Well, I was wrong. And this is the fascinating paradox of meditation. It contained in calm with nothing more than two simple things, two things that are available to you at all times and that is you and your breath. Even with all the different kinds of meditation and all the different options available in terms of posture in space and time, there are really only three steps that are absolutely required. The first is showing up, the second is choosing a point of focus, and the third is paying attention. When it comes to meditation. Showing up is a 100% of it, 100% of it cushions and NSAIDs. They don't really mean much if you're not showing up to practice. And yet just showing up can really present a real challenge. Are these are jam packed. We have to take care of kids, we have to go to work. We have to prepare and eat meals and clean a house or exercise, pay the bills, go to appointments, finished projects, keep up with friends and family. Mean you have a lot going on right? At the end of any given day. We often just want to plop in front of the screen or go to bed. Time is often the biggest obstacle when it comes to meditation. And let's face it, meditation can be a bit boring. When I work with students, I really just stressed the importance of just showing up for the first five days because it really doesn't take long to start seeing and feeling the benefits, which then makes it easier to show up for your practice. Even if after today you're feeling like sitting for a few minutes is too much to begin with. You can always begin with taking five long, slow, deep breaths in the morning and just starting there. Then once you feel like you want to go a bit deeper, you can come back to the practice. Right now. I want you to say this with me and say it out loud. You can pause it and start it and pause it and started, I commit to meditating with Cynthia for these next four days. I commit to showing up. Whether that's taking five long, slow, deep breaths in the morning or sitting with Cynthia and guided meditation. Done. You're ready to show up, which means now all you need to do is find the space to meditate. You don't need a special space necessarily designated for meditation, but it can be really helpful to establish a regular spot just for this purpose, especially when you're first starting out. So just take a minute now to think about where in your place you'll be setting up to meditate this way, you know, this is where I go to meditate. This is where I'm going to practice. Once you've got your spot, then you're going to want to decide whether you want to sit on it, inspiration or a chair for those who have knee or back pain, I really suggest meditating while sitting on a chair. And for those you don't have a cushion. You can use a pillow. Sometimes you can. If you have a yoga block, you can use a yoga block. The idea though is to make sure that your knees are lower than your hips if you're seated. If you're not on a chair, in no matter if it's a cushion or a chair, the most important is that you want to be comfortable. You want it to be an alert posture. Maintain a good posture, one that you respect. And the goal is to sit with a straight spine but not so rigid that it's uncomfortable. When people think about meditation, they often have these images in their minds at men sitting with their hands in different positions or a spiritual iconography with special hand positions that are known as mood Dreze and special new drugs. They're not required for meditation. They've been around since ancient times, but they're not often used in modern secular meditation practice. However, if you want to try meditating with a mudra, I'm just going to share with you simple ones here. So there's the beyond a Mudra. And this is used throughout many different meditation disciplines in it's known as the Mudra of meditation. You may see the images of the Buddha sitting with his hands positioned in his lap. In this posture, this mudra, the back of the right hand, rests in the palm of the left hand. With the tips of the thumbs touching each other. And it symbolizes the trend towards enlightenment, which is the right-hand over the world of illusion, which is the left hand. And it said to encourage inner peace. The next mudra you can try as the beyond mudra. And this is another popular mudra that you might see in many images of people meditating with their legs crossed. And this one consists of holding the thumb and forefinger together with the remaining three fingers straight outward. And it said to encourage focus in wisdom. You probably see people doing this. This one. These are, I just encourage you to try it out, see if you like them. Some people like to sit with them, others, others don't. Again, the thing that you're going to learn about meditation, then it is really important that you want to make it doable for you. You want to make it feel natural for you. And however that works, That's your direction. So the next piece that I want to get into, we now have committed to showing up. We now know where our spaces that we're going to go to meditate. We know if we're going to be on a chair or cushion. Now I want to really talk about the next essential piece of meditation, which is choosing your focus. Your focus can breed your breath. It can be a mantra. A mantra is word or a phrase that you repeat. It's not so much the words that matter. It's the vibration in mantra is known as the vehicle of the mind. And what it helps you to do is it helps disrupt your thought patterns. You can use your breath as your point of focus. You can use a mantra, you can use a sound, you can use body sensation, you can use an image there. In, with this, there are essentially two different schools of meditation when it comes to focus and point of attention. The first school emphasizes a focal point or an anchor at the outset and the meditator is instructed to concentrate on this point throughout the meditation. Examples of this anchor can include bringing your attention to your breath. You name the breath, inhale. You say inhale, exhale, you say exhale. You can repeat a mantra or a short prayer, or you can do counting in your head from one to ten. And the purpose of having a focal point is to give you a restless mind, something to do instead of rushing around from thought to thought like we normally do with a focal point. The key is that anytime you notice that you are distracted or lost in thought, you simply return to your anchor and begin again. So let's say you choose your breath as your point of focus, as your anchor. You'll put your attention on your breath, where it feels most clearly in the body. And then you're going to get distracted. You are going to have thoughts. Our minds are meant to think and we have like 60 to 80 thousand thoughts a day. The thing with meditation is that if you are just noticing your thoughts, you're just noticing them. And when you are aware that you are caught up in one, meaning you are down into Aunt Sally's jam that she spilled three weeks ago, then, you know, okay. I am no longer paying attention to my breath. It's time for me to come back. Then you just say, thanks so much for sharing. I see you. It's time for me to meditate now and you just move your attention back to your point of focus. This is what we're doing in meditation. This is really the practice, remembering to be present for getting to be present in beginning again, you can turn anything into your point of focus. The most popular and the one you're gonna be practicing today is the breath. You can focus on breathing to wherever you feel it most clearly in the body. It could be the rise and fall of the belly, the expansion of your chest or the temperature going in the nose and out the nose. And what you'll see is it's a gentle attention. Okay, so just go ahead right now and close your eyes for a minute. I want you to put your attention on your feet. Put your attention on your right hand. Move your attention to your left hand. Now notice your breath. Simply noticing the inhale and the exhale. Let go the breath and just open your eyes and come back. This is the attention we're after. This gentle attention. It's a friendly attention. It's not a hard focused attention. Very easy attention. This is the first kind of school of meditation when it comes to focus. Now the second one is a little bit more esoteric. This A method or practice really begins with a focus on the silence in-between your thoughts. For this approach, you're going to settle into your space. Choose how you're going to sit. And then you're going to bring your attention to your inner silence. And this can also be like your inner stillness or emptiness. And especially when they are getting this inner silence, it's going to be broken by random thoughts and feelings in the sense of trying to occupy, occupy our minds with that focal point. Now our attention is really to let the thoughts come in, let the emotion coming in. Not to ignore them or not to clean to them, but just to see them. And then you're just going to say thank you for sharing. Then you're going to come back to that inner silence, right? So now you're focusing more on the silence within as opposed to your breath or a mantra or an image. And the process is the same. You will notice that you're distracted. You will see it, you will allow it, you will talk to it, and then you will come back to your attention, which is on the silence within really what we can. Besides saying, thank you for sharing. We can just remind ourselves in those moments also that we can think about this later. Right now we're meditating. This signals to the mind that you are not dismissing anything really important. You're just merely reinforcing that there's a time and a place for thinking and the time and a place for being in silence. And after this acknowledgment, you simply bring your attention back to the silence in the present moment. In nearly all forms of meditation fall into one of these two methods and neither one is better than the other. It really is just a matter of personal preference. So the next essential we need here is paying attention. When I first started meditation, my thoughts would go like this. I can't be doing this right. I have no clue what I'm doing. I should just stop what is wrong with me. I can't do anything lately. I'm not even sure why I'm here. What was I thinking? I'm wasting my time in the instructor's time. Your mind is wandering again, Cindy, can't you just focus on the breath? Get back to your breath. In the midst of all this, I would hear the teacher say, there's no need to get upset with yourself for getting distracted or disturbed by your thoughts. Just say to yourself, thanks for sharing and refocus on your breath. And it occurred to me that I had never consciously just let myself be without deciding I was good or bad, right or wrong, better than or less than, and paying attention and simply noticing my thoughts without judgment was completely foreign to me. And I find this to be true for my students starting out as well. It doesn't feel natural to have thoughts and not take them seriously or to not get distracted by them. Allowing our thoughts to be without evaluating them and without judgment, without getting them. Uber importance can feel really strange and it can feel even a little bit dangerous. There's no forcing, existing or attaching or wanting to fix them. This is what happens when you pay attention to your thoughts as if you are an uninvolved observer. You notice your thoughts, but you aren't consumed by them. This brings us to one of the key insights and Buddhist meditation. And that is the realization that your thoughts are that voice in your head is not who you really are. Thoughts come and go. They rise, they fall. But there is an awareness or presence behind the thoughts that watches them come and go. The realization that you are not your thoughts is one of the gifts of meditation that Buddhism is perhaps most known for. These theories, steps, showing up your point of focus and relaxing and paying attention. All of these things are really the forefront of this Buddhist practice. Okay? So if you are doing these, you are practicing, you can't, you can't do it wrong if you're doing this. With this in mind, I put together a short list of what the actual process of meditation looks like for you. So think of this as like a little cheat sheet to get you started. And once you've meditated a few times, you're not gonna need this list anymore, but this is what it looks like. You're gonna take your seat. You're gonna settle into this space. You're going to close your eyes or you can focus a little bit in front of me with your eyes cast downward. You'll take a deep breath. You'll take maybe two or three calling breaths. And then you're gonna choose your point of focus, your breath, your mantra, a sound. Whenever you notice that you're distracted and you're caught up in a thought or a story, you're just going to observe it. You're gonna maybe say to yourself, thanks for sharing. I can think about this later and you come back to your point of focus and you're just going to continue the above for the set period of time when you're inside the meditation, just remember that it's normal that your thoughts are going to take you on all sorts of detours. And all of these thoughts. It's actually just stress being released from your body. This is really where the practice part of meditation comes in because after all, what we are working on when we were meditating, we're working on the process of paying attention in refocusing when our attention wanders, remember, thoughts are okay in meditation. Let go of any expectations you have about the practice. Don't try too hard and just stick with it. Now you know the material, so now it's time to start putting it into action. And I'll see you in the next lesson. 4. Three Meditations to Reduce Suffering: Welcome to our next lesson. So in the last lesson, you learned the basics of meditation. What it is, what it requires, and how to do it, the process of it. You've also learned the most common meditation practice, which is breath awareness. And while I really believe that the meditation practice we covered yesterday is an excellent place to start. Everyone is different. So I really believe in trying different types of meditations or at least becoming aware of them because some may resonate more with you than others. And it's really important to find one that feels right for you, or maybe a combination of them that feel good to you because they can help you deepen your awareness in different ways. So today I'm going to be sharing other types of Buddhist meditation so you can experiment with these ones as well. In Buddhism, there are known as there's what's known as the three poisons. And Buddhism explains these, that it's really mental suffering. Buddhism explains that mental suffering occurs from these three poisons. These three poisons our desire, aversion, and delusion. So along with the three poisons, Buddhism also offers us three mental states we can cultivate within ourselves that are antidotes to the three poisons. These are the mindsets of generosity, loving kindness, and wisdom. Today we're going to learn in practice meditation designed to help us cultivate the three antidotes in ourselves, therefore, reducing our suffering in the process. The first we're going to focus on is generosity. When we meditate on our own wholeness and contentment in naturally leads to a feeling of expansive generosity. And you begin your meditation through gratitude. And we can recite these phrases to ourselves. We can recite phrases like I am enough, I have all I need. I am, I am content. And then through our meditation practice, we are then able to bring it out into our daily life and start to look at how we feel right now about the things that we have. That we can see that we have everything that we need in this moment and we can appreciate what it is that is around us, within us happening, as opposed to where we often go, which is thinking more about what we don't have or what we want or what we desire. What we really want to do here is we want to start to focus On that. We have everything we need in this moment and all of our needs are met. We move into a gratitude meditation where we really begin to appreciate all that we do have instead of focusing on what we don't have. That's the first meditation to help us reduce suffering. His gratitude meditation. The second is called loving-kindness meditation. And it's also known as Meta, which is a Pali word that is typically translated as loving kindness. So although it's also translated as the single word love as well, and you may have heard or seen this term before as it's one of the Buddhist terms that it really has made its way into Western popular culture. It has a deeper meaning though, than the type of love we hear about in love songs or we see in romance movies, loving kindness is really more akin to an attitude of detached goodwill that we want to cultivate toward everyone in our lives, including ourselves. In this way, mega is really an antidote to a version. I mentioned this before that it was really during meditation that I first became aware of how much of my internal self-talk consisted of just judging and beating myself up. And through meditation, I really noticed how I was often my own worst critic, really unregulated, spoke to myself in ways that I would never speak to anyone else. And maybe you suffer from this two, maybe you have a lot of negative self-talk and Metta meditation can help you really extend loving kindness to yourself and change the way you speak to yourself in the process. And it's also really helpful when you're dealing with other people that you have a dislike or an aversion toward or when you're experiencing resentment or blame. Your mind is pretty much clouded by extending others the spirit of loving kindness. During meditation, we often find that the way we interact with them outside of meditation changes for the better. There are different ways to do metta meditation. The method I will teach involves five parts, and they all begin with the same basics that we covered before. So once you've taken your seat on either a chair or cushion and you've settled into the body for a few minutes. Your attention is then going to move towards meta. First, what we do is we see ourselves in front of us. Then we see those who are special in our lives in front of us. And then we see someone who is neutral like someone you see at the post office that you don't know, then you see someone who is difficult to you right now. And then we see the whole world and we start to repeat phrases or mantras. And the mantras that we use here are MAY You know, joy. May you know, peace, may be free from suffering. May you live with ease? The words aren't super important. The goal is to truly just cultivate the feeling of loving kindness within yourself. And don't worry about memorizing the words and phrases right now it's all in the meditation for you. What we do is we extend this feeling of loving kindness towards ourselves, towards others, towards those who were having difficulty with in towards the world. And what this does is it cultivates compassion and it helps reduce our own suffering. The next meditation we're going to get into is wisdom. So here we really enter some philosophical territory. Buddhism teaches that what we think of as the self is more akin to a collection of ever-changing thoughts and sensations in stories just swirling around in our conscious mind. And the mind. It's a storytelling machine. Events happened in our lives and the mind makes up a story to go along with it. And sometimes these stories are harmless. When we're using our imagination in a skillful way. They're harmless, they're wonderful, but at other times they can be really a source of suffering. Simply noticing the story as a story is a step out of delusion in, into wisdom. To cultivate wisdom, what we do is we practice self-inquiry where we ask ourselves questions. It's not about knowing the answer or making them up. We simply just want to start to ask ourselves questions. And His Holiness, the Dalai Lama, who is the spiritual leader of Tibetan Buddhism, really says that emptiness is the true nature of things and events. Our work right now within the wisdom meditation, which will be the self-inquiry meditation, is to access our emptiness, to access ourselves, not necessarily knowing the answers to the questions that we're going to ask, but just giving IT space. Now you know the material. Now it's time to start putting it into action. And I'll see you in the next lesson. 5. What Stops Us from Meditating (And What to do About it): Welcome to lesson four. Here we are. At this point, you are now familiar with meditation and you've tried out a few different ones. And I want to know how's it going. You might be thinking it's gone, okay, I've done it but I haven't figured out how to make it something I could really bring into my day to day. Or it's kind of boring and I'm finding it really hard to prioritize aft and think, okay, I'm going to do it and then I don't like exercise. And if this is, you know, that it's all totally normal. While the practice itself is simple. Doing it and showing up to do it is difficult. I mentioned this before, but why is it difficult? Because we're busy. We have plans. We need to get kids to school. We need to have meetings, work. We want to make ourselves food, we want to work out. Then we went to relax when we get home. Time is often the reason we don't sit. Well, I'm going to tell you right now that the only way that you can meditate wrong, you want to guess what it is. He's not to meditate it off. The best way to make it a part of your life is to make meditation doable for you. And we talked about this a little bit before, but even if it's five minutes, that's enough to help ground you into the present moment and see things differently. See the resistance to doing it really as your cue to do it. It's almost like your mind and your body telling you it's time. Just take a few minutes, close your eyes and put your attention on your reading or a sound or a word, and it doesn't have to be long. You can take these mindful moments throughout the day. You can feel like the overwhelming the stress and just in that moment, close your eyes. Take a few deep breaths. Put your attention on the inhale, put your attention on the exhale, and then begin again. So this is really what I see. Stop most people for meditating is the time piece. Though there are known, there are known obstacles that we have as well. In Buddhism there known as the five hindrances. And these are really the common blocks that are mine puts up to prevent us from meditating. And they are desire aversion and drowsiness and restlessness in doubt. So desire is really at the root of suffering in Buddhism, it's not desire itself, but the attachment to desire. In this case, the desire acts as an obstacle to your meditation practice because it says, I want to be doing something else right now. I had planned to meditate later, but I'd really like to just go to dinner instead. I wanted to meditate, but I'd rather relax on my couch and just bad job, right? So the desire to do anything else but meditate is going to be an obstacle. The next obstacle is aversion. This one I love because it's how we put up obstacles to make meditation difficult to do. And we all know that meditation is extremely simple and all you need is yourself to do it. But we say things like it's too cold to meditate or it's too hot or I can't do it on this cushion. It has to be over there in the sunlight. Everything has to be extremely quiet. It has to be very comfortable. I need to have an altar. I need to wear certain clothes. And we know that none of that is needed to sit to meditate. Aversion is another way that we prevent ourselves from the seated practice. The other piece is the boredom and sleepiness. Like both boredom and sleepiness are really, really common, especially in first-time meditators. If we fall asleep and meditation, we think I can't do this. This really isn't for me. It means I'm doing something wrong. Or we sit there waiting for something to happen when nothing is supposed to happen. So it feels, it feels boring. Those two pieces are ways that we will justify not doing the practice because it's like, oh, well, what am I really getting out of this? But the truth is, is that the boring and the sleepiness are again, they're all, cuz all of these are cues for you to lean into the practice more. All of these are things for you to start observing and seeing and being able to say, Oh, I see the boredom up, I see this sleepiness up. I see my desire to do something else. Oh, I see that. I'm trying to make this more difficult than it needs to be. And instead of giving into it to be able to say, Okay, thanks so much, I see you. And I'm gonna come back to my practice now. And I'm gonna come back to the breath now, and I'm gonna come back to my mantra now. These show up so that we can come back to the practice. The next one is restlessness. Here we are. We're sitting in meditation and we have an itch or our leg falls asleep or our stomach starts to grow and we think I can't sit any longer. I need to stop. We forget. We can just open our eyes for a minute. We can scratch the ICH, we can grab something to eat and then we can come back. What I will say is that when you are in meditation and you have an itch or your leg falls asleep for me, my leg falls asleep 15 minutes within within a meditation. Just bring it into your practice, meaning you just become mindful of it. You move your attention to it while you're scratching in it. Just make it a mindful moment, just pay attention to what your nails feel like on your skin. Then when the sensation is in strong, you just come back to your point of focus. When my leg falls asleep, I put my attention on the pins and needles and then I can feel the sensation of the blood rushing back to my foot as I stretch it out. And then once a sensation is in strong anymore, I move it back. It just is that you're changing your point of attention and then you move your attention back so we can always begin again in meditation. That is the beautiful thing in life. We can always begin again. The last hindrance that Buddhism points out a doubt, because meditation is so subtle and we're quiet, we're noticing our thoughts. Sometimes it feels like I'm not doing this right. Nothing is happening in the quiet space. It's really easy for our minds to run wild. Why am I doing this? I'm not getting anything from this. This is always a MyTime. This doesn't work for type a personalities. I don't want to zen out all the time. What am I doing? Our minds want to control. Meditation is where we sit to let go of the control. And this truly messes with us. So all these things, all these hindrances are going to try to prevent you from sitting and meditating. The practice is for us to see in meditation. To see meditation less as something we have to do or that we should do in more of something that feels good for us to do. It's like if you decide you want to climb Mount Kilimanjaro, you wouldn't just go and do it on your first day. You'd start training like a few days a week. It's the same with meditation. It's about starting where you're at, whether that's five long slow deep breaths in the morning and then five long slow deep breaths at night. Or maybe it's just sitting for five minutes. You want to begin where you are. And what's really remember is that all of these hindrances are all of these obstacles when they show up to prevent you from sitting in meditation, or they show up during meditation, your practice is to notice them, to become aware of them, to see them, to say thanks so much for sharing because they're coming up as a distraction, a way to distract you. And that's the beauty of meditation. Meditation shows us our distraction and it shows us that we can interact with distraction differently. So we get to say, thanks so much for sharing. I see you. I'm going to come back to the present moment now I'm gonna come back to the practice. Now, this sensation is really strong. I'm going to bring this sensation into my practice. I'm going to put my attention on it. When the sensation is no longer strong, I'm going to bring my attention back to what my point of focus was. Now you know, the material and it's time to start putting it into action. And so I'll see you in the next lesson. 6. At Home Mini-Meditation Retreat: Here we are in lesson five. So this lesson is really for those people who want to go a little deeper with what you have just learned over the last few days. And for those who have a meditation practice, established meditation practice who also want to expand on maybe the time that they're sitting in meditation, I find that mini meditation retreats at home are so great. They're such a great learning tool. And what they really help us to do is they help us see that we can create these spaces for ourselves. I'm going to share with you today and mini meditation retreats for those people who have a lot of time that they can carve out. And then I'm going to share with you mini meditation retreats for those who don't have a lot of time. The first thing you want to do though, is just decide on a date when you want it to begin. You can put it in your calendar, let those you live with, or those you're in touch with daily Know your plans so that they aren't alarmed if you're not answering your phone. Or maybe it's something the whole house can do together. You can choose to do a half-day or a full day. It can be from 09:00 AM to 05:00 PM. Really, the choice is yours. I just want you to start again to make this doable and to see how it could maybe fit into your life. After you've set the date, just make sure you set up your space. You have the place where you regularly meditate and now you just want to make sure that the rest of your living space is inviting. It's clear, it's simple. It feels refreshing in there, just a gentle environment. You're going to want to stock your fridge with nourishing foods. You don't have to think about what you're gonna be eating that day. You can prepare any kind of food that you like so long as it is something that you are going to eat with intention and care, some limits for the day. Just see if you can go without the television, your phone, the computer, smoking alcohol, caffeine, just during this time period that you've set for yourself. I'm going to walk you through two different schedules. So here's a whole day retreat scheduled. Before you begin, set your intention. What is it that's bringing you to do this right now? Then you're gonna do mindfulness, movement in the morning. This can be Yoga, this can simply just be moving your body. Then you're going to have breakfast, then you'll sit for meditation. Then you're gonna go on a walk. Then you'll come back, you'll journal. Then you're gonna eat lunch. Then you're going to meditate. Then you're gonna go on a walk. Then you're going to listen to an educational talk of some sort. Then you're going to meditate. Then you'll have dinner, then you will read. Then you will listen to an educational talk. Then it will be timed for stretching, and then it will be time for sleep. That's what a whole meditation retreat full day would look like in the house. It is really up to you the length of time that you spend in each of these places. What I would suggest though, is if you're just starting out with meditation, you keep the meditation parts. Maybe to ten minutes or 15 minutes. You want to, you want to go a little bit longer than you usually do just to kind of stretch you a little bit. And the same thing with those who meditate regularly. If you already have a practice of maybe 20 minutes, maybe you want to do 40 minutes. Because the in-home retreat is meant to help push your practice just a little bit. That's the schedule. If you have like a whole day to dedicate, I can tell you that I used to be able to do whole days. I cannot do holidays anymore because I have two little kiddos and that's not possible for me. So what I like to do is this next schedule, which is when for those who are working a lot, you just have chunks of time. You're gonna do the same thing before you begin, you're gonna set your intention. What is it that's bringing you to do this right now? You're going to wake up in the morning. You're gonna do mindful movement, stretching, moving the body, you're gonna sit to meditate, then you're going to have breakfast, then you're going to do what you do throughout the day. Then though, you eat lunch. Then you do a walking meditation, which means you, you break after lunch and you go outside and there's a walking meditation here for you. And you go and pay attention to how your feet are hitting the ground you're paying attention to. And the sound of the clothing as you walk down the street, you're paying attention to the air on your skin. You'll do a walking meditation. Then after that, you do your day, whatever you've got going on. Then you have dinner. You sit and you eat dinner. Then after dinner, you if you do what you need to do. If you've got kids running around, if you have best time or whatever you need. In that way. Let's say you have kids, so then you put the kids to bed, and then it's your time to read, to listen to an educational talk. Then you're going to stretch and then you're gonna go to sleep. That's what it looks like if you just have chunks of time throughout the day. I just want you to know like we all are going through overwhelming stress and anxiety. We're all struggling, we're all suffering in a lot of ways. And this is really the human condition and meditating. Buddhist changes our relationship to the suffering and changes our relationship to ourselves. And it brings awareness and peace and wellness beyond what we may have thought possible. I've worked with all kinds of people in every situation imaginable and people experiencing profound loss and debilitating anxiety and depression and ADHD and insomnia. Even just feeling like a general sense of blind every person I've taught, even those who thought they wouldn't be able to meditate could do it. Why? Because everyone has the ability to practice. We just convince ourselves. We just convince ourselves otherwise. The biggest thing to remember here is that meditation is a practice which means some days you're going to want to do it, and other days you're not going to want to do it. So please just be gentle with yourself. And if you need to stop for a bit, just make a plan for how and when you'll come back to the practice and know that again, you can always, always begin again. I hope you enjoyed our time together. I hope you now have learned different meditation practices that you can bring it into your day to day. And that you are starting to feel the benefits of meditation. And really my wish for you is that you can take the practice of meditation and really make it doable for you so that the benefits can flow into your life. Thank you.