https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=499Fbur9LEA
Yes. Welcome to Meditating with John Revecki. We live stream every weekday morning at 930 a.m. Eastern with Mondays alternating between a new lesson, Dharma Day, which was what happened yesterday, and a review of the whole ecology of practices, Upaya Day, which will be next Monday. Please remember that there is no stream next Wednesday. I’m sorry, which is tomorrow. There is no stream tomorrow due to scheduling conflicts. If you’re joining us for the first time, you’re welcome, and you’re welcome to continue meeting with us. But what I recommend you do is for previous lessons and SITs, see the description. Do the first lesson immediately and then join us every day. But once or twice a week do another lesson, and then you’ll slowly catch up and integrate with the rest of us. I would ask all of you to help me by please liking the stream to increase the visibility in the YouTube algorithm. At the end of today, at the end of SITs, we usually have a Q&A. I’ll answer questions that have been held over at the end of today, but I won’t take any new questions today because Amar is on here today controlling and monitoring the stream and abstracting, I guess is the right word. Yeah, abstracting questions from the chat for me to answer. So please hold those questions and I will be able to address them on Thursday. In general, when there is questions at the end of the SIT, please limit them to questions from anywhere, from the psychology of practices. For more encompassing questions and concerns, please come to my live stream Q&A every third Friday of the month at 3 p.m. Eastern time. So a couple of notes. I’m going to, again, I’m going to mute the mic manually. Once I say begin, hopefully I’ll remember to turn it back on because there is some background noise. That’s where you can slightly see it in the screen for me, so I’d be able to reach it. And I know that the lesson yesterday on walking meditation, was difficult and challenging. Some of you have commented to that and I’ve replied. I want to encourage you all to keep going. The fact that it’s demanding and specifically is challenging coordination and balance is part of the design feature of the walking meditation. That is how you’re going to really trigger the cerebellum, link it to the frontal cortex and then bring it into a moving mindfulness practice. So the design is, well, it’s ancient and it’s deliberate and it sits very well with current cognitive science. Remember also to get into the flow state, you have to put significant demand on your attention and the tasks that you’re engaged in. If you were simply walking, the chances of getting into the flow state, getting into that absorption and really training the cerebellum cortex loop are significant. So I understand that it’s difficult, but I taught this for literally decades. And what usually, what very reliably happens is if people practice this in a dedicated fashion within a week or so, they can do it fluently. Again, it’s still demanding to me. And I’ve been practicing for 29 years and that’s why it’s a great gift from the Daoist tradition. But there are some things that you can do to practice this. And that’s what’s really interesting about it. You can get to this place that is simultaneously fluid, but also still demanding. And that’s a great gift. So try to be patient with yourself, dedicate yourself to getting to that sweet spot. And then I assure you, because this is what I’ve seen over and over again, once people get there and they get and they’re starting to taste that, they come to a deep appreciation of it. OK, I think that’s everything. Oh, about that. I will also review the working meditation on Thursday and Friday. I’ve decided to hold off adding the arms in, the brush knees. And what I’ll do is I’ll do a little bit of mixing of Dharma and Upaya next Monday, because I’ll also take a bit of time and on Monday I’ll add in the arms. So we’ll just do review on Thursday and Friday of the walking. So you’ll get extensive review. There’ll be three videos on there that you can consult. Lots of questions and answers around it. OK, everyone. So I’m going to do my best to scaffold and support you. I know it’s challenging, but I also know that it is really, really worth it. OK, so I think that’s it. We will. Oh, I just realized. Probably. Yes, I will chant first and then I will turn the mic off. There is some construction going on from the background, but I’ll leave the mic on until I’m done the chanting. So I’ll have to move slightly. I hope that there’s not too much disruptive noise. So everybody get into position. Please set your phones on do not disturb. We will begin when I say begin. We will begin with the chanting. We will begin with the chanting and then we will go into the silent practice. Let’s begin. Oh. One. Oh. One. Oh. One. Oh. One. One. Oh. One. Oh. One. One. Oh. One. Begin your silence. You You You You You You You You You You You You You You You You You You You You You You You You You You You You Slowly come out of your practice. Try as best you can to integrate what you cultivated in your practice with your everyday consciousness and cognition, character and communities. Perhaps by reciting the five promises to yourself. Oh. Oh. One. Oh. One. Oh. Oh. Oh. One. Oh. One. Oh. One. So we’ll do a couple of questions. I’m just going to go off camera for one sec. Okay. Okay. Great. So we have a question held over from Mark. Welcome, Mark. It’s always great to have you in the Sangha supporting it so much with your enthusiasm and encouragement, how you edify other people. Mark’s question is, having issues during meditation around problems in my life that crop up after I seem to reach a meditative state, these aren’t thoughts so much as feelings around entire narratives. So this is very important. This will start to happen more. And it is a good sign. Because it indicates that there is now active, resonant reciprocity between patterns in your life and patterns in meditation. And this is part of your inner teacher. Waking. Trying to bring them more into active, lived consonants and coherence with each other. So the thing to do is also part of the response is an existential response. Try to apply, respond, it’s almost like a dialogue, by taking mindfulness into those narratives. Try in your life to notice those narratives coming up and then bring mindfulness. Try to bring a state of a pasna, meta, perhaps even prajna to those processes and patterns. See if you can open up and unlock the co-identification. See if you can bring mindfulness and insight into those. So when that’s happening, that’s a sign that the patterns in your life and the patterns in your practice are, and again, this is a way in which you can see your inner teacher coming to be. They’re trying to come into a more consonant coherence and so there’s a responsibility there. You must respond. There’s responsiveness. First of all, take that into the patterns in the narrative. Within your practice, and typically what happens once, I don’t know what to call it, that dynamical system, once your inner teacher, once there’s a sense that you are responding, that will generally start to shift things in your practice. In your practice, when the narratives are coming up, I recommend first of all doing the five factors of inquiring mindfulness and then directing and then shifting whatever your practice is onto those narratives. These are not, I mean, they’re distractions, but these are particularly, and notice the word I’m using, significant, sign significant patterns because they indicate a place where there is the emerging nascent affordance of a deeper consonant between your practice and the patterns and processes of your life. So respond, the first thing is respond in your life to those narrative presences. Try to, what’s, I mean, it’s like, it’s almost like meditative questioning. What is really going on in these narratives? And again, not just theorizing, but mindful, inquiring mindfulness, deep meta, you know, affording a possibility of deep restructuring of co-identification as you ask yourself, what is going on in these narratives as you encounter them in your life? And then in your practice, trying to step back and do inquiring mindfulness and meta on those narratives. Make them the focus of your practice for a while. Now, that doesn’t mean go seeking them, Mark, but if they continue with a life of their own to be pressing themselves upon you in this fashion, there is a deep opportunity there that you may be able to realize. Prashita Kavlar. Hello, Prashita. I’m not sure if I’ve had a question from you before. I hope you’re here today. Is there anything wrong with smoking cannabis and meditating? Generally, I would recommend against that. The reason for that is what’s called encoding specificity. So, we tend to store not only what the information we’re trying to specifically learn, but because we are embodied and embedded, we also store all of the contextual processing information around us. So, a classic example of this is you get people to take, study some material in room A, and then half of them take a test on the material in room A, and the second half take the same test, but in room B. Overall, the people in A, in room A, will do better than room B, even though they studied the same material, have the same, and you’re just randomly distributing them. Because context matters to memory deeply, deeply. And I don’t mean just context out there, especially your embodied context. That’s often like, for example, if you lose something when you’re drunk, you can’t remember, then when you’re drunk again, you’ll remember where it is. So, if you smoke the cannabis, you’ll get into a particular state of processing and context that is going to be fused with what you’re trying to learn in the meditation. And unless you’re going to be smoking cannabis throughout your life, I mean, throughout your daily life, I don’t mean like, you know what I mean, I mean throughout your day, that’s what I should be saying. You’re going to actually create a roadblock to transferring from your sit to your life. This is not me being some prude, as many of you know, and it’s now legal in Canada anyways. I’m not around prohibiting drugs, but I’m against the use of drugs outside of a spiritual context. I get it, you’re not asking that, you’re trying to use them within a spiritual context, but I think the context of what we’re trying to do here is especially in an educational context, and you’re trying to educate for transfer to your life. And because of encoding specificity, the cannabis can actually, although it may give you short term, like help you get into the state, and I understand that, I can appreciate that. Long term, it will actually act as a block to you transferring it spontaneously to your day to day life. So, I would recommend against it for that reason. So, this was a little challenging, but I think we all made it through. Jason was here helping me a lot in the background, and I hope we were all able to work things together. Please remember that there is no live stream at all tomorrow, and then Thursday and Friday, I promise I won’t add anything in, but we will do a review again of the walking meditation. And then when we do a Paya, I’ll mix a little bit of dharma in and add the arms in on Monday. Thank you all for joining. And again, thank you so much, Jason, for all of your work. Please subscribe to this channel to be notified of the next video. On the channel, you’ll find links to the lecture series Awakening from the Mean Crisis, the Diologo series, Voices with Raveki, in which these themes are discussed in depth, brought into a relationship with important relevant other themes, and then the whole thing is situated within an encompassing framework of philosophy. Please invite others who might benefit by sharing this series. There’s a lot happening. I was at, I spoke at the Movement Summit last Wednesday, and there are so many emerging communities, vital, vibrant, in my opinion, I hope it’s an educated opinion, healthy, growing communities of mindfulness and movement, ecologies of practices, so many, and there, and the conference showed, you know, that the possibility of networking this into a more extensive cultural home for people is there and it’s growing. We have so much, and so I encourage you to get involved with that. One way you can is to bridge between this, the Senga community, and the larger home that’s found on the Discord server. Brett is here. I did live Q&A last night on the Discord server, and some of you were there last night. I believe Kira was there, Mark was there, asking questions. I really encourage you to do this. I especially encourage it for tomorrow. Perhaps the Senga can meet on the Discord server. I know that they do the moving practices first, and then they meet, and then they sit, and then I believe sometimes they do lexio, sometimes there’s discussion. The voices with Reveke, there’s awakening from the meeting crisis to discuss. People that are on voices with Reveke come in for Q&A. It’s just rich and vital, and I strongly recommend it. There is these are hard times, and I aspire to being very realistic. I’ve never been accused of being overly optimistic. That’s not my demeanor, but I am strongly encouraged by what I see happening here in the Senga, in the Discord, and what I’ve seen at the conference on Wednesday. There is real power and potential at work that is acting as I want to say this carefully because I’m not a utopic person, but I think it’s acting as a growing and viable way forward for us individually and collectively. So I strongly encourage you to get involved with that as much as possible. We are doing this otherwise every weekday morning at 9.30 Eastern time, again, not tomorrow morning. Please remember that continuity of practice, especially with the walking meditation, is more important than sheer quantity of practice. There is no enemy worse than your own mind and body. There is no friend, no ally, no true companion on the path better than your own mind and body. Belapse unto yourselves and to each other. I’ll see you all on Thursday. Take good care.