A Serene Encounter With Reality

Hi, welcome back to your Daily Mindfulness. In today's session, I'm going to share a bit about what meditation is and what it isn't. And I'd like to frame this with a quote by the great Zen meditation teacher Thich Nhat Hahn. And he says, "Meditation is not evasion. It's a serene encounter with reality." "Meditation is not evasion.

It's a serene encounter with reality." So remember this thing that we're doing, this practice, this taking five minutes, 10 minutes, 20, 30 minutes to stop and tune in, it's not designed to be a practice of escape or disconnection. It's a practice of moving closer to our experience. But as we do, we relax into it. We find peace within it. The alternative is, yeah, we can try to evade, but it doesn't get rid of our life circumstance.

It doesn't get rid of the thoughts, emotions, sensations. We just tend to then have new troubles that often come from numbing ourselves or shutting down. And so the ability to really find it a true peace, a peace that is grounded in the truth of what's here, that comes from turning toward the reality of the moment, a serene encounter with reality. But I, I want to focus on that word, serene. It's a word many of us have heard before, and I've heard a number of times, but I looked it up to really get a sense of why did he maybe use that word.

And, uh, uh, serene, the word serene actually means calm, peaceful, and untroubled. Calm peaceful and untroubled. And so this, the meditation process itself, it's a turning toward our experience. Noticing the thoughts, being with the breath, feeling all the different things that arise in our awareness. But it's not this pure perception or a judgmental kind of awareness.

Calm, peaceful, untroubled. We're building an internal container that can meet what arises with grace, with serenity. So a lot of this you probably already know from meditating, but I think it's a really important reminder as we continue our practice. So as you go into the meditation today, see if you can embrace it as a serene encounter with reality. See what that would feel like for you.

As always thank you for your practice and let's settle in for our meditation.