Charlotte Center For Mindfulness // Podcasts

Continuing with exploring the teachings of Sayadaw U Tejaniya, this week we look more deeply into the soft, gentle awareness that he teaches through the metaphor of tuning a musical instrument as well as the similarity I’m finding with training our new puppy.

This meditation explores energetically “attuning” to a soft relaxed awareness that can be with our conditions as we are as best as we are able. What a relief when we find this attunement!

Drawing from the same story as today’s meditation, we explore skillful investigation of the mind through a teaching from Sayadaw U Tejaniya.

This meditation starts with a beautiful short story about a Samurai and a Monk in which the Monk teaches on what makes heaven and what makes hell. How might the metaphor of the story be useful for your own practice in this moment now?

Paradigm shifts are when we come to understand that what we took as a reality is, in fact, not the deeper truth of things and it startles our systems enough into seeing the ourselves, each other or the the world through a whole new lens. Feeling into paradigm shifts helps shed light on the basic shift we are uncovering with our mindfulness practice.

In this meditation we explore the different feel of being caught in the reactive mind and those moments, no matter how small, when the body, mind and heart are in attunement. This attunement is what we are pointing to as “mindfulness,” and when we are aware of it, it has a natural sense of coming home. Again.     Please note: the mild echo is only in this podcast and has been fixed.

This sharing explores teachings from the book, Difficult Conversations. This book examines the ways conversations we care about can so easily get “hijacked,” and ways to help us stay grounded in having the conversation we want to have instead.

The is a meditation on bringing care to our internal “bad student”– i.e. meeting the part of us we want to get rid of, the part we see as disrupting our meditation. This willingness to meet our troublesome, annoying, distracted, angry, worried, tired, or any other version of the “bad student” is ultimately the path of our freedom.

This is a practice of grounding in the physicality of here and now in a way that naturally allows a connecting with our experience in alignment with our deepest values. This basic practice of the Arriving Sequence comes from Phillip Moffit. It is a beautiful practice, useful not only in formal meditation but also as a means of re-grounding in all of life.

We explore three necessary steps for a healing, empowering acceptance that more deeply engages us with meeting life as it is.

How does welcoming things as they are– not as we want them to be, but as they actually are in this moment now– open to healing? This meditation is a chance to explore working with a radical, freeing “welcoming” of our own selves as a first step.

Acceptance is a mind/heart quality that is so easily misunderstood… What is the difference between a reactive (i.e. fight/flight/freeze) misunderstanding this quality and an empowering opening to life? How might engaging with “acceptance” actually release some old story that holds us back and thereby free us for a transformative new understanding of life and how we might most powerfully engage?

We use the Arriving Sequence (Arriving, Being Available, Aligning) to ground ourselves in order to open to an exploration– what does it mean somatically, emotionally with curiosity to be accepting in this moment now?

Contemplating our “elemental” nature is a powerful way of breaking apart a sense of a separate self and understanding how fundamentally we are part of a flow of all things.

This meditation again explores the “Arriving Sequence” from Phillip Moffit and Dharma Ground. These 3 steps of 1) arriving, 2) being available and 3) aligning with our values and what inspires us is such a useful practice for formal meditation and for life in general.

In this version of a loving-kindness practice, we pay particular attention to how we meet our moments of distraction.

Night time worries, sleeplessness and morning “dread” are all prevalent as we deal anxiety in our changing world. In this sharing, we will explore a neuroscience based understanding of why this is so common and how mindfulness practice offers a clear antidote. Today, like every other day, we wake up empty and frightened. Don’t open the door to the study and begin reading. Take down a musical instrument. Let the beauty we love be what we do. There are a hundred ways to kneel and kiss the ground. — Rumi

One useful way to settle into a practice is to use the breath to attune or “resonate” compassionately with whatever is present in the body/mind/heart.

This sharing invites a grounded reflection on the 2 basic fears of impermanence: that we can’t hold on to what we want and that what we don’t want will last forever. Through a meditative inquiry, we explore how insight into the naturalness and ever moving flow of change offers a path of release for working with these fears.

A mountain meditation is a beautiful opportunity to explore a sense of a calm abiding mountain strength unmoved by the the endless natural changes of passing seasons, years and eons of time. It helps teach us about tapping into that kind of mountain calm abiding strength for flowing with the endless natural changes of our own lives.