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How to Meditate: Meditation 101 for Beginners
10 Science-Backed Benefits of Meditation
What is Meditation?
How to Meditate: Meditation 101 for Beginners
10 Science-Backed Benefits of Meditation
What is Meditation?
Benefits of Mindfulness: Mindful Living Can Change Your Life
Mindfulness 101: A Beginner's Guide
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Hi, welcome back to
your Daily Mindfulness.
In today's session, we're going to
talk about the experience of tension.
So I'm going to offer you a
quick formula to think about
how tension can get created.
And then this formula is, experience
times resistance equals tension.
Experience times
resistance equals tension.
Now, the first thing I want to say about
this is that we're talking about internal
experience, not external experience.
There's a role for resistance
against external experience that
we can very logically justify.
Resisting things that we're seeing
around us, maybe a relationship
that we're not being treated well or
something we see systemically that
needs to change, resisting these things
is an important way that we grow as
individuals in relationship and as a
community and as a global community.
So that's not the resistance
I'm talking about.
The resistance I'm talking
about is the one that we apply
to our internal experience.
The emotions that we're feeling,
the thoughts that we're having, the
sensations that might be arising,
or any sort of sensory experience.
When we apply resistance to that,
that's when we're going to get an
internal experience of tension.
So if you think of an experience
of sadness, that would be the
experience in this equation.
Resistance to that sadness could be
something like, I shouldn't be feeling
this, what's wrong with me for feeling
this, or trying to suppress the sadness.
There's a role for skillfully
compartmentalizing experiences at times
when maybe it's not the appropriate
time to feel that emotion fully.
But there's a way to do that
gracefully, where we can acknowledge
that this experience is here and
then say, I'm going to work with
this later, but not right now.
That's very different than I
shouldn't be having this experience.
What often happens for people is that
they develop all of these different
ideas and stories about experiences
they can have and shouldn't have,
experiences that are okay and experiences
that they might put shame around.
And all of that shame and all of
those ideas about I shouldn't have
this experience is a form of internal
resistance that creates excess
tension that can arise in a moment,
but can also continue and sustain
itself for long periods of time.
So as you go about your day today and
perhaps for the rest of the week, and
maybe for the rest of your life, I
encourage you to look at, what is your
relationship to your internal experience?
Chances are there's lots there
that you have full permission to
feel, lots there that feels open,
spacious, good, compassionate.
But maybe some other experiences
that you find yourself contracting
around, fighting, pushing away.
And what would it look like to meet those
experiences with a little more openness,
curiosity, presence, and even compassion?
There's a good argument to be made
that there's no experience that can
arise in your internal, internal
experience that doesn't warrant some
degree of compassion and presence.
It doesn't mean you have to give it
full reign, but you can at least give
it the space within yourself to be
seen, to be acknowledged and then to
be responded to in a skillful way.
So I hope this gives you
something to think about in your
journey of navigating tension.
We'll continue to work with it as we
go throughout our meditation practice.
Thank you for your practice and let's
settle in for today's meditation.
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