Good morning.
So good to see you again.
Would you care to join me for a cup of coffee this morning?
Oh,
That would be great.
The water just got hot.
And we use a French press here.
So,
Is that okay with you?
Do you use a French press?
Okay,
I'm going to pour the water into the press.
One of the things I like about morning coffee time is all the little steps that happen.
And to do them kind of mindfully and quietly.
To get my day off to a meditative start.
I've already had my morning meditation.
I usually use insight timer and listen to someone who has a good meditation.
Or you just use the timer and set it for 10 to 20 minutes,
Depending on what my morning looks like.
So now that meditative time kind of gets extended with morning coffee time.
I'm so happy that you could join me.
So let's get the hot water into the French press.
The coffee is already down the bottom.
And here we go with the hot water into the French press.
There we go.
And that first smell comes out.
That's so good.
And then I stir it.
Always stir it.
Make sure all the little pieces of coffee grounds get touched by the hot water.
And you can smell that coffee coming up now.
That's such a nice part of this ritual.
In some ways it's not the coffee so much,
But maybe it's a combination with the smells and the time,
The sun just coming up.
Yeah,
This is nice,
Isn't it?
So we give it a few minutes.
While the coffee is steeping in the French press,
I was just wondering what your meditative practice was like.
How are you doing about keeping a daily meditation practice going?
And has that been rewarding for you to do it that way?
I wonder if you've been thinking about how your meditation practice evolves over time.
And how you can kind of bring,
As one of my early meditation teachers used to say,
You can bring your meditation with you throughout the day.
I wonder about doing that for yourself.
Have you thought about that,
About keeping that meditative state going?
That teacher was Paramahansa Yogananda,
And I studied his lessons for quite a few years.
He had some beautiful meditations and still does.
You can still access Yogananda's teachings,
That wonderful book,
The Autobiography of a Yogi.
Have you ever read that?
Oh,
It's really good.
Yeah,
I highly recommend it.
It touches on so many different aspects of spiritual life.
Yeah,
To think maybe about how meditation itself evolves for us.
I started meditating in 1976,
Which was a few years ago.
I was 20 years old,
So that will date me a little bit.
But a young guy and I immediately had some experiences that were out-of-body experiences and full-body meditation experiences that were pretty phenomenal to me.
I would actually lose myself into the meditation and not feel my body anymore.
I wonder how yours has gone.
How has your meditation practice felt,
Like through your body and through your emotions and your own thinking,
And maybe even like your own sense of yourself?
How have you thought about that as your meditation practice being a part of that sense of yourself?
For me,
Over all these years,
It's part of what's become true,
Is that my meditation practice is a part of who I am now,
And there isn't really a separation.
One of my other spiritual teachers,
Dennis Adams,
That I encountered years ago would say,
Meditate everything.
And I took that idea pretty seriously and installed meditative practices in my work as a therapist and as a spiritual coach,
And how I lead workshops,
How I taught the seminars that I taught to graduate students for so many years,
To meditate everything.
Maybe after we're done with our coffee,
We can talk about that idea of meditating everything.
But I think the coffee is ready now.
It's been steeping long enough.
Dennis is how long I let coffee steep,
So I think we're about ready.
So,
Can I pour you a cup?
Oh,
Great.
Here we go.
There you go.
And I'll pour myself a cup too while we're waiting.
Now,
Here at our house,
Boy,
That smells good,
Doesn't it?
Oh,
It's good.
Here at our house,
We use coconut cream.
We skim the cream off the top of cans of coconut milk.
There's a Thai brand of coconut milk,
And we open the can up after we refrigerate it for a day,
And you can scoop an inch to two inches of thick cream off of that,
And it's so good in coffee,
And it doesn't add all that dairy into your body.
It's allowed me to lose quite a bit of weight,
To be honest.
That's a nice after effect.
So,
Would you like some coconut cream?
Okay,
Let me scoop some of that for you.
And then we stir it,
Of course.
I kind of let that cream come to the top.
It almost looks like a cappuccino,
Which is kind of fun.
And then I put a little tablespoon of maple syrup,
And sometimes two if I'm really into the sweet stuff.
So,
Would you like some of that?
You're going to pass on the syrup.
Okay.
All right.
I'll take some for myself and stir that in.
So,
We have a beautiful setting here.
How about if we walk out onto our portal,
They call it,
Here in New Mexico,
In the southwest of the United States?
We have a beautiful view.
Yes,
I know.
It's really,
Really nice,
Isn't it?
Of this valley below us and the hills,
The mountains off in the distance.
And sometimes we can sit out here with our coffee and the bright southwest sun.
Even in the wintertime,
The sun is so warm here that we can have coffee at eight in the morning.
It'll be 30,
40 degrees Fahrenheit.
And the sun will be so warm that we can sit out here and have our coffee.
So,
This is nice,
Huh?
Mmm.
That first sip is always so good.
I love the calm of the morning.
How quiet it can be.
I used to get up when my kids were little and make myself a cup of coffee or tea and sit before it was time to wake them up for school.
It was always such a special time.
And I remember being eight and nine years old.
We lived on one of the Great Lakes in the state of Michigan.
We lived on Lake Huron back then.
And I would wake up really early,
Six o'clock in the morning in the summers,
And quietly walk down our stairway,
Which was in an old house,
So it was kind of squeaky.
And I'd walk out the backyard,
And at the end of the backyard ended in a hill,
And down the hill was the beach and Lake Huron,
Which was such a big lake you can't see the other side.
I loved mornings like that when I was a kid.
And I love mornings like this,
Where I can be quiet and calm and share this time with you.
So thank you so much for joining me.
How do you like the coffee with the coconut in it?
Oh good,
I'm glad you like it.
I'll give you a can of the coconut milk to take with you.
Yeah,
Let's have one more sip here in the quiet space.
The serenity,
The stillness,
The open space before us,
Both physical open space and our day opening up for us.
The open space of what we can create today and share with each other.
Thank you so much for joining me,
And I'm really glad you like the coffee.
Take good care and have a wonderful day.
BELL
