Week Three – The Building Blocks of Meditation

We went live with Week Three on Wednesday April 15th, 2020.

You can watch the entire YouTube recording HERE.

Below we have broken it down into nine separate chunks.  The format for this (and every week) is that there are some meditations broken up by some commentary about the nature, purpose and benefits of meditation.

Part One – Welcome

Welcome – Setting the context of tonight’s class, and a quick recap of what we covered in weeks one and two.

Part Two – The first meditation (10 minutes)

Relatively quickly we get down to do our first meditation. Simple, classic, focussing on the breath. When you notice you’ve lost focus, simply let go of the new focus and re-focus back on the breath. Start again. Rinse and repeat.

Part Three – Archimedes, Running Naked, or why I possibly shouldn’t be telling you this stuff

There is a school of thought within meditation that believes you should work most of this stuff out for yourself. There may be a good reason for that, and Archimedes forgetting to put his clothes on may show us why.

Part Four – The Building Blocks of Meditation: Part One – Focus

Focus is obviously part of what we’re doing in meditation. But there’s a lot more to this focus thing than you might expect. Working on our focus, and specifically working on our awareness of where our mind is focussed can pay huge dividends in our day to day life.

Part Five – The Building Blocks of Meditation: Part Two – Non-Judgment

As with focus, there are many reasons non-judgment is a key skill to develop for our meditation practice as well as for our lives.

Part Six – The second meditation (10 minutes)

Similar to the first, but with some different instruction about what to emphasize in our breath meditation.

Part Seven – The Building Blocks of Meditation: Part Three – Non-Striving

A weird term, but in meditation we want to move away from what we do throughout our normal lives. We are always looking to do things, achieve things, get things, avoid things. But in meditation we try to do the opposite – nothing. We are not striving for or against anything. We observe the moment, as it is, without agenda.

Part Eight – The Building Blocks of Meditation: Part Four – Curiosity

In the first weeks of this program we spend a lot of time emphasizing that it’s fine to get distracted, in fact it’s inevitable. It’s not even bad, since part of meditation is about becoming familiar with our own mind. As we notice it jumping around we are doing just that – becoming more familiar with it. However, we are also wanting to become more familiar with the state of being where we are simply in observation of the present moment. Developing our innate and childlike quality of curiosity is a powerful aid to getting us into this state as well as holding our attention there.

Part Nine – Final Meditation (10 minutes)

Again, this is somewhat similar to the first, but with some slightly different directions to help us approach the meditation without striving, but with some curiosity.