This track includes ten minutes of meditation practice; if that feels like a lot to you, maybe start at the beginning!
Turn on the TV, get comfy, and play this track after you’ve watched the episode: Power Animal (Season Two, Episode Seven).
The method of this sit is modeled after Shinzen Young’s “See, Hear, Feel,” so if you respond well to it, feel free to dig deeper on your own!
P.S. If you’re curious, here you can find out why I started this project.
Recording Transcript (Meditation Begins at 3:45)
Hello again, friend!
To be honest, I don’t know how much more there is to say. We’ve already learned that we can save our friends “by being an unfocused rowdy party dog,” so that’s pretty much it. Meditation dismissed.
I mean genuinely. Jake the Dog is a much better teacher of equanimity than I am. I myself relate more to Finn, with a mind that never slows down and produces enough mental energy to “power a huge machine.” Seriously, my skills of auto-pilot rumination are off the charts.
When I tried to meditate the first time, it was like a viscerally wrong-and-bad experience. I think that I would have benefitted from more guidance and support. And I also think I needed to get a little older, a little farther away from the intensity of trauma and mental volatility I was carrying in my body and mind. I share this only to say what I’m always saying: if this isn’t working for you in your life right now, that’s okay. You can always return to the practice in half an hour, in a couple weeks, in several years. For real.
Because there are pros and cons to being “a living dynamo that never slows down” and there are pros and cons to putting ice cream in a toaster over and over again. And we are constantly surrounded by voices telling us how we “should” be and how we “ought” to be, and it’s not that they’re always wrong, but that meditation offers a space for us to take a step back and assess. Because they aren’t always right either. There is always more than one way to save your friend from gnomes. And repeatedly asking “what’s wrong with my brain?” may not be the best one.
At the same time: it’s okay to feel these pressures. None of us exists apart from the world, and its people and pressures. We care about things, and sometimes we recognize the ways that certain tasks seem to require us to respond in a way that is different than our most natural inclinations. And that’s okay too.
As we continue our practice of equanimity (that is being with as much of our experience as we can, with a kind of warmth and self-compassion), the practice is all about being okay with what’s there. Sometimes we will encounter things that don’t feel good, that we aren’t okay with. And that might mean that we need to set it down and walk away. But it could be that we can kinda “zoom out” and “soften” a little bit more. To appreciate the fact that we are already finding ways of dealing with hard shit. All the time. And if we can’t “be okay” we might be able to be okay with not being okay. Or maybe we can be okay with not being okay with not being okay.
In these practices, we’re just softening around whatever is there, as much as we can. You don’t need to force yourself into some focused shape. You don’t need to say to yourself “Don’t think… don’t think anything.” You can simply observe whatever part of your body or mind or experience feels sorta-kinda okay, and hold space for some gentle appreciation for it. You know, if gentle appreciation decides that it wants to show up today. And if it doesn’t, then can you gently appreciate that you are not in the mood for gentle appreciation? Can you trust that your body may have some very good reasons for being unfocused and determined to shake it?
Okay, I think you get the point. “Let me show you how it’s done.”
