Week One

“You can meditate”

We went live with our first online broadcast in early April 2020 with the scale of the pandemic just starting to hit and lockdowns in place in much of the world.

You can watch the entire 90 minute YouTube recording HERE. Or, below we have broken the class into ten separate chunks. The format for this (and every week) is that there are a bunch of meditations broken up by some commentary about the nature, purpose and benefits of meditation.

The following morning we started broadcasting short daily meditations along the theme of each week’s class. The videos and audio versions of these can be found HERE.

First Week’s Class

Part One – The Introduction

Welcome – Setting the context of tonight’s class – Advice for beginners and for those with experience.

Part Two – You CAN meditate

The most important message of week one: You can do this. Even if you think you can’t. Many people (even some with lots of experience) have misconceptions about what meditation is and isn’t. In week one we want to start with a more helpful understanding about what it is, and prove that you can do this, than anyone can do this.

Part Three – The first meditation (3 minutes)

You now know how to meditate – so now we practice this new knowledge with a short (just 3 minutes) meditation exercise.

Part Four – Meeting Your Mind (perhaps for the first time)

Even your first meditation starts to teach you something about your own mind. In some ways meditation is really about meeting your mind and realizing that although your mind is a part of who you are, there is also a part of you that is slightly separate from your mind – that can see your mind thinking.

Part Five – Second Meditation

Although we hope the information given during the talks is helpful and encouraging, the real point of all this – in fact the only point of it – is to have you discover your own meditation experiences. So please try to actively do the meditations – that’s where the benefit is.

Part Six – The structure of this program

A quick overview of what we’ll be covering during the twelve weeks.

Part Seven – The third meditation (10 minutes)

Another partially guided breath meditation.

Part Eight – Why meditate?

What’s so great about watching your breath, getting distracted and then starting again? How could that possibly do anything? Here Justyn offers three high level reasons to meditate.

Part Nine – The Final Meditation (adding counting)

A small variation on the first meditations. Just adding an element for the mind to hold onto by counting each in and out breath up to ten, and then back down to one.