Day 4 - Module 1

On the fourth day, I like to briefly review the concepts I’ve gone over in this class.  Since you have done a bunch of meditations in the past few days and likely had different meditation experiences, these concepts might resonate differently now then when you first heard them.  

1. What you are doing in this meditation is pointing your mind inward and then letting it go.  The way you let it go is just to not intentionally put in effort to control it.  That puts your mind on autopilot so that thoughts and feelings come up.  Your job is to improve at accepting whatever thoughts and feelings come up.

2. If you can’t accept what comes up, it doesn’t matter because you will gradually become more accepting just by meditating.  That is the best meditation advice I’ve ever gotten.

3. Another way to think about this point: To explain this, I like to use the example of a cold plunge.  I got into the cold plunge thing for a month or two.  I started with cold showers for a minute.  The first time I did it, my body immediately tensed up and I my mind raced thinking, “Oh my God this is awful.  TERRIBLE AWFUL.  AWFUL TERRIBLE.  IS IT TEN SECONDS YET.  AWFUL.”  After a few days or a week of this, I got in the cold shower, my body immediately tensed up, but my mind thought, “Wow, that’s cold.  This doesn’t feel good.  I don’t like it.”  It was still unpleasant but not nearly as awful as the first time.  How did I get used to it?  Just by enduring the unpleasantness.  I had no strategy to get more comfortable with the feeling of cold, I just got more used to the feeling by enduring it.  Cold is just one unpleasant feeling.  There are many buried in your mind.  Fear, Shame, Guilt, Anxiety.  I have all of those and a bunch more.  The feelings associated with them can come up in your meditation.  What do you do if this happens or your meditation just feels generally unpleasant?  Endure it, and like the cold shower, you’ll get more comfortable over time with the unpleasant feelings. (of course if it’s too unpleasant, still stop meditating and lie down.)

4. And yet one more way to think about this is the 1-minute video below.

5. This meditation is like taking your dog off the leash at the dog run.  Once you take your dog off the leash, it doesn’t matter whether he sniffs over there or digs a hole over there, the point is that he’s off the leash.  In this meditation, your mind is off the leash.  To stretch that analogy, being off the leash isn’t always pleasant.  There might be an annoying puppy that keeps jumping on your dog even though he just wants to relax or a big growly dog that scares him.  Taking your mind off the leash isn’t always pleasant either, but that’s the point.  Through this meditation practice, you become more accepting of how your mind is.

6. You don’t control what happens in meditation: The way to control things is through effort.  Since you are not putting in purposeful effort, what your meditation experience is, is out of your control.  So your mind does all the work, you are just along for the ride.  This is what I mean by taking your mind off the leash.  Another way to say that is, “just take it as it comes.” 

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