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~I invite you to listen to the audio version shared above, where a guided meditation is provided that follows what is shared below in the text.
There is a teaching in mindfulness about the type of wisdom we give ourselves through training the mind, specifically by understanding our own mind. Through practice, meditation in the case of strengthening mindfulness, we gain experience of our mind, and as Jack Kornfield reminds in his book The Wise Heart, it is “like standing at the bottom of a ripe mango tree. We get to choose between the good and rotten mangoes. It is all to your profit, because you know which fruits will make you sick and which will make you healthy.”
As we become more trained in understanding our mind through the practice of regular meditation, we become better able to pull back and observe and not become caught in the ‘thinking mind’, which is what we have been doing unconsciously most of our lives, living by the whims and reacting to wherever it takes us. With our new strength of mind, we put ourselves in the driver’s seat of where we will let your mind wander and when we will divert its attention away from where it may have led us unconstructively in the past.
We practice meditation so that we can experience observing both pleasant and unpleasant thoughts and feelings, healthy or unhealthy fruit, to relate back to standing underneath a mango tree. Before we had trained our mind, we would just take whichever fruit would fall, no matter its quality. Now, we get to choose. And we choose to engage with healthy, pleasant, constructive thoughts. We choose thoughts that will help us create the conditions for love, generosity, integrity, and simplicity to come forth and be experienced within ourselves and with others.
Let’s begin . . .
~To conclude each meditation session, I encourage you to recite a mantra of your choosing and design. In the Contentment Masterclass, I share my example, which you are welcome to use, tweak, or look to as a template to design your own. Also provided to enrollees of the course is a free trial of the guided meditation app I use.
Click here to listen/read the previous Méditation in the series.
No. 12 — What Seeds are You Watering?
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~Learn more about TSLL’s Contentment Masterclass: Discover the benefits of Meditation, which is included in the detailed syllabus shared here, watch the trailer, and read student reviews.
~Comments will be turned off for Meditation posts as you cultivate a practice guided by what you need and your journey to cultivating inner peace and aligning with your true self.
