5 - "Why Can't I Meditate Easily?" - How Meditation Works.

Hello,

This is William Cooper.

Welcome to Awakening Together.

I hope you're having a good day.

In the last podcast,

We talked about the qualities of being.

You experience yourself as a deep peace and well-being and happiness and radiance,

Powerful like an atomic bomb,

That powerful,

Love.

To the degree we're not feeling that,

We're blocking ourselves.

Nobody else is doing it to us.

We're doing it to us.

So today,

I'd like to start to talk about one very powerful method of dissolving those blocks and that's meditation.

Often when somebody first starts meditating,

The most common complaint that I hear is they say,

Oh,

My mind won't stop thinking and I feel so many emotions when I meditate and it does not feel peaceful.

It feels horrible.

I feel so antsy.

I want to get up.

I want to watch TV.

I want to go for a walk.

I hate it.

I hate it.

I hate it.

Meditation does not work for me.

Help.

Well,

As we began to look at last time,

There are many different realities going on at the same time.

So let's look at some of them involved in meditation,

At least just as a first step.

So what's going on here?

Imagine a rubber band wound very,

Very tightly.

You get a rubber band and you twist it and twist it and twist it and it's now full of knots.

You let go of one end and it spins like crazy and releases all of its pent up energy until it's very slack and relaxed.

Well,

That's what we're like inside.

We're all wound up.

Very,

Very tight.

And when we finally sit still,

We're releasing tons of energy because we can't distract ourselves and dissipate this energy or have it stuck on other things,

Such as running to the refrigerator and eating a pie.

During meditation,

You can't do that.

You have to sit for 20 minutes or 30 minutes or 10 minutes.

When you sit,

All of this old unhealthy pent up blocking energy starts to release.

And what does that look like?

It looks like your mind is spinning out of control.

Your emotions are blowing up.

They're spinning out of control.

That's just a release of unhealthy energy is what's going on.

You don't want that inside of you.

It's unhealthy.

So it's unwinding like that rubber band.

And so meditation does not feel good at first because it's releasing old,

Repressed sludge,

Poisonous emotions,

And horrible thoughts.

These aren't who you are.

It's just poison that's been stuck in your body that you put in or you accepted sometime in the past,

And it's causing trouble for you.

It could cause health issues.

So when you sit down,

That can happen when you meditate.

That's what's going on there.

The second thing that can happen when you meditate is I used to have a meditation teacher,

An awakened man,

And he would say,

Awareness is curative.

When you meditate and you feel and just let things arise,

Let them come,

And you just feel them,

It's like the sunshine shining on an ice cube.

You have these blocks.

They come up,

And because they're no longer repressed,

They hurt.

They're releasing pain.

They're releasing all sorts of things.

But you just watch them.

You feel them.

You don't get away from them.

You experience them fully.

You just let them do their thing,

And they begin to melt like snowballs on a hot skillet.

They just melt.

It takes time,

But they do melt.

And remember in the last podcast,

I was mentioning that all created things are ultimately made out of love and light and well-being.

All blocks are created things,

And when they melt,

They turn back into love,

Light,

And happiness.

So as you meditate,

You just let them melt.

The sunshine is your awareness.

You're aware of your thoughts.

You're not your thoughts.

You're aware of your thoughts,

And that awareness is melting them.

It's melting your emotions.

And I am mentioning thoughts and emotions because all mental emotional problems are made of thoughts and emotions.

So those are the blocks,

Your own emotions,

Your own thoughts.

They melt as you watch them.

They melt in the light of your awareness.

The third thing that's important to note is.

.

.

Well,

Let me give you an example.

Imagine that you go on a beautiful vacation to the mountains.

You have a beautiful retreat center with lots of good food,

And the mountains are so gorgeous.

Mountain streams,

Evergreen trees,

The air is crisp and fragrant.

You get there,

And you walk straight back into your bedroom and flip on the TV and watch Netflix.

The whole vacation.

You never leave your bedroom.

That's all you do.

You're lost in the images of Netflix.

Well,

How much of the mountains do you experience?

None.

You're cut off from your own mountains,

Your own experience,

Your own vacation.

You're cut off.

You're lost in a fantasy.

Well,

What are thoughts?

Are they reality?

Is the word tree the same as a tree?

No,

It's a label,

And thoughts are a bunch of labels,

And so are emotions.

Emotions just fill out thoughts.

They're like 3D visceral labels.

Thoughts and emotions are not reality themselves.

They're a shorthand way that we use as a tool to represent reality.

Just like a TV show isn't really a real reality,

It's a fiction that we can be lost in.

We can also be lost in our thoughts and our emotions,

The same way that we're lost in a TV show.

And in our culture,

That's mostly what we do.

We're lost in our mind,

In our emotion.

We're cut off from ourselves.

Why is that important to our endeavor of feeling very happy and clear?

Well,

When you're cut off from yourself,

You create a problem.

Anytime you're cut off from yourself,

You create separation anxiety,

And you build a personality built around fear,

Because separation anxiety is fear,

Also around abandonment.

When you're separated,

You feel abandoned.

That's hurt.

And you're also angry about the whole situation,

So that's anger.

We'll get to all that in a later podcast.

But you generate large amounts of hurt,

Fear,

And anger when you get lost in your mind.

And ironically,

You get lost more in your mind in order to avoid the great amount of hurt,

Fear,

And anger that you've generated because you're lost in your mind.

It's a big loop.

In our culture,

We use the mind,

Which is a very powerful tool,

To solve problems.

It is very good at solving mathematical equations,

Going to the moon,

Building cars,

Walking dogs,

Frying eggs.

It's good for all these things.

But one thing it's not good at is solving the problem which its own use is itself creating.

So unfortunately,

We have the idea that if we have a personal problem,

We use our mind and our emotions to solve it.

But as I just explained,

The mind and the emotions are what is causing the personal problem.

So the more we use it,

The worse it gets.

So we have to step out of the mind.

We can't use the mind to get rid of or to dissolve a block because the mind itself is the block.

So what to do?

In meditation,

We sit down and we don't get lost so much in the mind.

Sure,

It happens because it's an addiction.

We're addicted to the mind.

But we begin to withdraw from that addiction.

We sit down and we watch the mind.

We experience the mind.

We experience emotions.

And when you experience something,

Remember awareness is curative,

It begins to melt.

And what does it melt into?

Well,

We saw in the last podcast,

Everything is made of love,

Peace and well-being.

It's made of light itself.

So it melts into love,

Peace and well-being.

That's what the thoughts and emotions and blocks melt back into,

Which by the way is what we are.

So everything comes back to center and merges once again as we meditate.

Really,

This is just a thumbnail sketch.

We're going very quickly here.

We're going to slow it down.

But I want to go to cover these basics right now because we're going to start meditating soon after we learn a basic meditation to clear out all the blocks.

We're going to circle back around and really focus on many,

Many helpful subjects,

Including what we've just touched on in this podcast.

Okay,

I trust you'll enjoy the rest of your day.

And I look forward to talking to you soon.

Take care.

Bye everyone.