Module 2 Audio Recording: The Grasping Nature of the Mind

“The Simplicity of Inner Peace”

NOTE: During the centering practice in this module I am going to mention the ‘base of your body’ Some of you might know this as the base or root chakra or Muladhara. I’ll be explaining a bit more about the Muladhara in the written material for Module 2 that comes to you next week.

Below is the transcription of this audio for those of you who like to read along as you listen:

Hi, this is Wenndi Freer welcome back to The Simplicity of Inner Peace.  We’re in Module 2: The grasping nature of the mind.

During this module, I am going to teach you how 21 century living affects your ability to go inside and find inner peace and what to do to overcome these affects.

Here’s a brief breakdown of what we will be covering during our time together

1. in the first part we’ll talk about the grasping nature of the mind and why it’s worse in the 21^st century than ever before
2. In the second part we’ll talk about a way to let go of the grasping and how an energy based meditation can help with that.

And then we’ll end with a centering practice

So in this module the main topic is the grasping nature of the mind.

I’m pretty sure this is something you have probably felt or maybe feel regularly but you probably call it something else. Some people call this stress, anxiety, or a mind that just won’t be quiet. It can manifest as insomnia, difficulty staying focused or a strong pull to just give up. Whatever you call this grasping nature of the mind it’s a reality and it’s worse now than it was thousands or even hundreds of years ago.

With clients in my private practice and in my own life as well, I find this grasping of the mind is the one thing that we would all like some relief from. And often the things we do to find relief are temporary or sporadic like vacations or walks in nature but what I’d like you to consider is that this relief is something you can experience every day. At the end of this module I’ll be leading you through a short centering practice so you can get a taste of what I’m talking about.

So If you feel like you’d like some relief from the fast pace of your busy life then stay with me. Stay to the end and maybe even take some notes as I share tips on how to organically quiet the mind. I won’t be talking about forcing your mind to be quiet but a more natural movement toward silence and inner peace.

My objective in this module is to help you connect with the part of you that knows that if we could internalize our energy for a short period of time, if we could just take a moment to rest and have relief from the stress of our busy mind something greater could open and we can start to feel connection not only with other people but most importantly with ourselves and with our spirit.

So let’s start with some terminology, you might want to make some notes:

When I speak of the grasping nature of the mind I’m not talking about the universal mind. I’m talking more about the ordinary mental consciousness we live in day to day. The part of our mind that has our to-do list. The blah, blah, blah that happens throughout the day as you’re attending to work projects, tasks and chores. Or the repetitive thoughts that just go on and on.

And when I say grasping, I’m talking about the tendency of the mind to grab hold of thoughts and run with them. One thought leading to another and another in quick succession. That’s the kind of thing that can really ruin your meditation and end up having you sit quietly for 20 minutes thinking instead of really meditating.

***When it comes to thoughts in meditation you want to let them come and let them go. One way you might think about this process is this. If our thoughts are like a flock of birds, our job is to let them pass through the sky without really watching them. The birds fly through but the sky remains. It’s the expensiveness of the sky we want to stay with. The feeling of vastness and openness that comes when you look at the sky is a great representation for this open, relaxed state that is necessary to not grab hold of thoughts in your meditation.

Then next point I’d like to make is that our mind is different than it was even 200 years ago never mind thousands of years ago when the rishis or the seers in India were meditating as part of their spiritual path.

So let’s look at what’s changed in the last 200 years. It’s hard to believe that Just 150 or 200 years ago the radio hadn’t even been invented yet and most people worked on the land and not in front of a computer monitor. Early 20^th century agriculture in the US was labor intensive and employed close to half of the population. Half of the population worked on farms, they were way more engaged on a physical level everyday than on a mental level and today, in today’s society most of us are engaged in our mind and with our mind as we sit behind computers. We have more stress and higher demands on our time & energy and many of us work in more mentally challenging jobs. I’m not saying any of that is bad but I’d like you to consider that it does shape and change the fabric or the nature of our mind and our subtle energy. As a society we predominantly rest our awareness in our head and spend very little time actually feeling sensations in and around our body.

Really if you think about what I’m saying it’s kind of crazy. We have changed so much, in just a 200 year period. Our life is faster and more furious than ever and so it’s more important than ever to find balance and take time to internalize our energy to bring some relief from this fast paced and very exciting world that we live in.

So what’s our option and how do we learn to internalize our energy?

One point that I’d like to bring forward that I find many of my clients have a bit confusion around is that when you internalize your energy things don’t get smaller you actually move into more expansive states of consciousness. The memory of this expansiveness is right there in the background of our consciousness and we just need to let go and rest back into it. When you do the centering practice in just a minute you’ll want to feel for a sense of spaciousness or frictionless-ness.

It’s kind of counter intuitive because meditation is not about focusing and forcing internalization, It’s about letting go and gently being pulled into our natural state which is a more internalized state of being and as we go inside it gets bigger rather than smaller. That creates an expansiveness that we can rest in and that is what I mean when I say resting on something other than your mind. You’re not using focus, you’re not using concentration. Basically you are just falling back into what is already present in your energy and catching the inward flow. Now, doesn’t that sound easier than trying to make your mind be quiet?

I realize that this may be a little hard to wrap your head around but it’s exactly because it’s not about your head it’s about a sensory experience. Your energy understands this, the grasping nature of the mind does not. Internalization of our senses happens best when we let go of the grasping nature of the mind and simply feel.

In an energy based meditation like the third eye meditation it’s all about feeling sensations or qualities rather than focusing with your mind. It’s about resting on something other than the mind and in just a minute I’m going to lead you through a centering practice based on feeling vibration. The principle here is that if you are deeply feeling you can’t think at the same time. It’s not about fighting against the thoughts when they come, it’s about letting go even more and choosing to feel qualities like vibration, light or color that already exist in your body of energy. So it’s a choice to let go of thoughts and move into feeling sensations or qualities. When you rest on and in these qualities there is a natural movement toward silence and stillness. You don’t have to do it, you can let it be done for you. You just have to feel.

So let’s see if I can use my story as an example. How would my story in module one have looked different if I was resting in the grasping nature of my mind at the time that I was being tossed around in the ocean. Well, it certainly would have brought up a lot of fear and panic especially because I had experiences of near drowning as a child. And most likely my body would have been flooded with adrenaline making it almost impossible to let go and really surrender to the waves so that I could be pushed back toward the shore. The aftermath would have been a collapse rather than the ability to feel grounded and expensive as I stood on the beach. The grasping nature of the mind makes us much more reactive and it limits our perspective and potential. We’ll be talking more about reactions and becoming LESS reactive in the next module.

Am I making it easy to get the picture? When you rest on something other than the mind you can have a completely different experience of your life. Because I was resting on something other than my grasping mind I was able to feel the part of me that knows light, the part that IS light. The part that knows vastness and understands expansiveness and the reason I was able to connect with that part of myself is because that is part of the practice in my daily meditation and that ability to move into those states transfers to or bleeds over into my daily life.

So here’s where I give you a chance to actually feel what I mean when I say resting in something other than the mind. It’s time for our centering practice that I promised at the beginning of this module. So if you need to take a minute to pause the audio and get yourself comfortable, do that and come right back.

For this practice it’s good to sit up straight and position your hands in your lap or on your knees. Close your eyes and relax your jaw. Don’t let your top and bottom teeth touch remember we are moving away from grasping and clenching. – NOW for the centering practice

(Centering Practice)

This is what I’d like you to practice for the next week – whenever you feel the need for relief give yourself the time to feel the simplicity of inner peace by feeling and resting on the quality of vibration.

I’m looking forward to connecting with in the next module where we’ll be talking about the buffering effect of meditation and how that helps us be less reactive even in stressful situations.