Welcome! You are listening to The Mindful Minute, Meditations Created for Everyday Joy. I'm your host, Meryl Arnett, and my passion is making meditation accessible and enjoyable. This podcast is recorded from my live Monday Night Meditation Class, where we have a brief discussion followed by a guided meditation. If you would like to access these meditation practices as standalone audio files for your daily practice, please subscribe to my newsletter at merylarnett.com.
It's free and you'll receive a new mini meditation each week, along with behind-the-scenes content and bonus material for each podcast episode. Alright, let's grab a cup of tea, a comfy seat, and settle in for today's practice. Alright! Hello, Happy Monday! Happy Sneaky Monday! Right? We've got a fifth Monday in this month, which is confusing and messes up the flow of my three-week series. It's like, what am I going to do tonight?
I forgot there was a Monday here, and I decided to put a little fourth part to our upcoming series, A Little Precursor. And this really came about truly from a repetitive refrain in my own mind and in my conversations lately. So I have noticed over the last month, six months longer, a reoccurring experience and discussion around high emotions like grief and high anxiety. Both in my own experience and in conversations with those around me.
And I thought that we should take a look at that really specifically because it almost feels when you're in those high intensity moments, it almost feels like it is budding up against your practice. Like I'm doing this practice over here and sometimes it feels so good and I feel peaceful and content and I'm exploring all of these amazing teachings around non-attachment, around contentment, all of these things.
And then something rises up and it's like it knocks us off that cushion and we're stuck in the mud, right? We're stuck somewhere that is likely much less pleasant than where we want to be. And it can be easy, I think, to feel like that is not part of my practice. That is not part of this path or these classes that we do together.
And I want to make sure that we not only talk about but really spend serious time acknowledging that it is not only part of the practice, it is the purpose of the practice. I'll say that part again, it is the purpose of the practice. If your practice is only helpful to you in the good moments, what good is that practice? Right, it's doing nothing for us. What we need is a practice for the moments when we have been knocked down.
And so I really want to spend, we're going to spend the next three weeks talking about how we do that, how we wrap a meditation practice around the most difficult of emotions. And I won't get it 100% right because it is so personal.
The way we experience these high intensity emotions is so personal because so much of it has been drilled into our mind that it is bad or shameful or only acceptable in certain ways that your family, your church, your community, somebody in your life spelled out for you. And it was so long ago that we've all forgotten the lesson except that we live in Brie that every single day. And so while our conscious mind might be saying, it's totally fine to be sad. It's totally fine to feel anxiety.
There is a much larger unconscious part of our mind that is repeating the rhetoric we heard very early on. As a parent of young kids, I witness myself doing this very thing that I'm talking to about tonight. I don't want to, I wish I didn't. It's so hard to be with intense emotion, which we know from our own experience. But then when you're watching a little person go through it, my four-year-old was like a wreck today for no logical reason that I could ascertain, but she was a wreck.
Everything set her off with like huge tears and loud expressions of her displeasure about everything that happened. And it's so easy to be like, well, I'm done with this. Stop it. Go to your room. I don't want to hear it anymore. I mean, I can write a novel of all the things I think in my brain when this is happening. And we all had that exact same experience, but a little bit different, right? Our own parents, our own communities said their own little words.
So I want to offer that framing that I'll do my best, and you might have to tweak it a little bit because your experience of emotion might feel a little bit different. I almost didn't, but I have to do it. I'm sorry for it. I'm going to read a poem that I've read 37,000 times to y'all. And I'll probably read 37,000 more because it's one of my all-time favorites. So forgive me for that. But the piece of wild things by Wendell Berry is one of my all-time favorite poems.
And as I have been thinking about and dreaming about this series, there's one phrase in particular that keeps running through my mind. It's the mantra of this series. So I'm going to just start by reading the whole poem, The Peace of Wild Things. When despair for the world grows in me, and I wake in the night at the least sound, in fear of what my life and my children's lives may be, I go and lie down where the wood drake rests in his beauty on the water and the great hair and feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things who do not tax their lives with forethought of grief I come into the presence of still water and I feel above me the dayblind stars waiting with their light. For a time I rest in the grace of the world and am free. I come into the peace of wild things who do not tax their lives with forethought of grief. And I love this sentence so much because I feel like it encapsulates a bit of what our meditation practice is offering to us.
Our meditation practice is calling us into a present moment experience, right? But the truth of that is our present moment experience is really a dual experience. There are two things happening in any moment, one of which is I'm feeling something. I'm having an experience in my body physically. Also, I am having thoughts, stories, opinions, beliefs about what I'm feeling. Right? Do you see how that's two entirely separate things? One of which is happening inside my body.
If you can't see me, I'm motioning down, like down into the center of my body. And then the other one is up in my head. It's all my thoughts. It's all my stories and beliefs. And those things are happening simultaneously. Tara Brock, when she teaches about this, she uses one of my favorite phrases, which is real and not true. Real and not true. And what she means by that is that the physical, emotional, feeling experience that I'm having is real. I'm feeling this thing right now that's real.
And almost always, all of the things that I am thinking about what that means, who that makes me, what that says about what's going to happen next, all of those stories, all of that conversation is almost always not true. I want to preface that that not true is specific to the moment that we're in. It might be true in the future. We don't know. But we're not there yet. Where we are, where we are practicing, is the present, this one specific second and likely, very, very, very likely.
The stories are not true in the second. And so as we frame up three weeks of exploring big emotions and how our practice holds them, I want to start with this container that says, we're not going to discount the feelings. We're not here to fix those even. What we're here to become aware of and to ask to please move out of our way is all the stuff that stuck up in our head. The feelings take care of themselves. They move through our body when they're unencumbered pretty quickly, actually.
It's the stories, it's the conversation, it's the rehashing the argument 97,000 times. Those are the things that keep us stuck. Those are the things that keep us down. And so this is not going to be a series on how to fix your anxiety. This is not going to be a series about how to move through grief quickly or heal from grief. That's not the series. The series is, can I discern the difference between my grief and the fourth thought of grief?
And I discern the difference between my anxiety and the fourth thought of anxiety. And so we'll start this practice tonight by inviting ourselves into our body, practice you know well, and just working with this dual sense of my thoughts are happening and there's also a feeling happening. You know, as we're talking, I'm just having this memory right now, I just had a very similar conversation actually with one of my clients. And often when I talk about meditation, I'm very hands in my talks.
I use hand gestures, right? We're on Zoom, I'm like doing my hands everywhere. And one of the things I do is I sort of talk about my experience of being in meditation as if I was up and behind myself a little bit, right? So there's all this stuff happening in my mind. I'm thinking about what I'm doing tomorrow and you know, who's driving where and what bills need to be paid. All that stuff. Think, think, think, think, think.
And there's a part of my mind that is up and back a little bit and sort of watching that whole story happen, right? That's mostly my experience in meditation. But a piece of my mind watches the other part of my mind think. And my client was saying like, I totally have that experience. That's exactly what happens. And what we got down to was also if I'm only up here, if I'm only up and back outside of my body, I'm discounting all the things happening in my chest, in my gut. Right?
And so thought wise, I want to be able to watch, to witness. And feeling wise, I want to be down in it. I want to feel it. So even in our practice, it's as if we are inviting in a bit of that dual experience, we just talked about the part that feels and the part that watches. So why don't we try that together today? And then we'll spend the next three weeks deepening this exploration in ways that we can hold this practice around ourselves as we work with big, big emotion. Yeah?
Okay. So let's take a minute if you've already been seated that whole time, just kind of wiggle around. Move your toes, shift around until you feel comfortable. And whenever you're ready, you will let your hands rest onto your lap. You will find yourself in a comfortable seat, whatever that means for you in this moment. And as you get comfortable, you'll decide, would you like to close your eyes? Or would you like to stare softly down at the ground?
Whatever feels right for you in this moment is welcome. And together as a group, let's start with the deep inhale in. Exhale out a sigh. And we'll do that once more inhaling deeply. Exhale out a sigh. And allowing your breath just to flow. Taking a moment to let go of all of the thoughts, all of the ideas, the questions that might have arisen during our talk, just see how much of that you can let go of. Settle in yourself down into the depths of your body.
And let's begin our practice by silently saying to ourselves, now is my time to say, now is my time to meditate. And as you say those words to yourself, I wonder what you can let go of. Perhaps you can soften some of your expectations. Perhaps you can soften some of your trying or your need to get it right. And instead maybe we can all just be here, just as we are in this moment. Perhaps you'll find that you can soften the edges of your body a bit. You can go of any gripping, any tightness.
And take a moment to feel up the length of our spine, making sure that we feel somewhat tall and awake. And then slowly leave the top of the head lift a little bit, and letting go all the way down through the face. And let it soften any and a crush your forehead, letting go crush your eyes and behind your eyes. and the inside of the cheeks. Feel yourself breathing out across your shoulders. Imagine your collarbone's melting. Maybe you notice the arms feeling long and heavy.
In a very moment, you feel your chest rising and falling as you breathe. And you let go of all the muscles and the belly. Taking a moment to simply feel your body breathing. As we sit and we breathe here, internally, might just feel as if you were directing your gaze or your awareness down. Down inside yourself somewhere. Perhaps you feel drawn to the center of the chest. Perhaps you feel drawn down into the belly or into the pelvis.
And today, as we sit and we breathe, will each just do our very gentle best to rest our awareness down inside the body. You'll let yourself feel whatever it is you feel. You don't have to describe it or narrate it. You don't even have to name it or understand it. And without doubt, we will get distracted. We will get pulled up into our minds for a thought, for a story, or conversation. And when you notice that happening, you could just smile to yourself.
You might even remind yourself of that phrase, real and not true. And then gently direct your awareness downward once again. And inside the heart or the belly as you breathe. And in this way, we practice differentiating the feeling and the forethought of a feeling. We differentiate the feeling and the story about the feeling. We'll sit here now about 10 minutes in silence, continuing to breathe, to feel and to soften. I promise this is going to be the essence, the last.
But, as that comes from that moment, this moment was another vacuumed scene, we start now. Feel your breath here. Noticing where your awareness is. And one more time, sending it down into your body. Deepening your breath into all that you are feeling in this moment. When you feel ready, you'll start to wiggle into your fingers and your toes. You'll find your edges. Together, we'll take one last deep breath in. Exhaling out of sight. Thinking all the time you need to let go of your practice.
To slowly open your eyes once again. Thank you friends. Thanks for listening to The Mindful Minute. If you enjoyed today's episode, please consider sharing it with a friend. For leaving me a review wherever you get your podcasts, this helps others to find the show. And let's face it, we could definitely use more meditators out there. The Mindful Minute is recorded on Muscogee land and is produced with the support of Michael Sayhouse and Brianna Nielsen.
To join my live classes, ask questions or learn more about my teacher trainings, please visit MerrillArnet.com.