January 18, 2016
Hi and welcome to this section. Before we continue on to this section, I want to ask you how your action steps were for the last section. Now if you haven’t already done those action steps in the last section, I invite you to stop this video now and take care of those few items.
So with that being said, once again, welcome to this section. So this is the section where we get to establish that baseline for your own meditation practise. Allow yourself to notice as we go through this section and allow yourself to be curious.
So let’s begin this section with another quote. And this time it’s from George MacDonald. So just like last time with Voltaire, George McDonald, he’s passed on to the beautiful afterlife in 1905. So he’s lived around 75 years.
And what’s really interesting about George MacDonald is that he’s an author, a poet, a Christian minister and he was known for being Lewis Carroll’s mentor, as well as being cited by CS Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien.
So let’s take a moment to read his quote. He says, “Work is not always required. There is such a thing as sacred idleness.” And for me this- this idea of “sacred idleness” is really what jumped out because, in my experience, meditation brings this out.
Meditation is a sacred idleness, a special time, a sacred time of inner awareness and unfoldment.
Now when you ask or rather when I’ve asked a number of people about what it means to be idle, the definition that they give me is that, well you’re basically doing nothing.
And this is where I want to invite you to have a shift in perception. Idleness is not the same as doing nothing especially when you’re in meditation. Meditation is such hard work and when you take that time, when you take the time and make it sacred, it’s no longer idleness.
It’s a lot of hard work where it looks like you’re doing nothing externally but the work you’re doing on the inside, that is tremendously profound. So with that in mind let’s explore what we have in the section OK?
So once again in the section we’re establishing the baseline for you. And so this is the overview video that you’re watching for this section. And after this video there are going be a whole bunch of videos that explain a few metaphors. And I wanted to start with these metaphors. Then after these metaphor videos what we’re going to get is this “barely guided” meditation.
So this is exploring the nitty-gritty. So it’s going to be like a 10 minute meditation; maybe it might go a little longer so please- please give me a break there if it goes on for 12 minutes or 11 minutes or something like that.
So in this meditation, I’m going to provide that simple framework for comfort. So all you need to do really is get a timer, set it on your smart phone and whatever. And then hit start and then you listen along to that “barely guided” meditation. And I hope you’re going to enjoy this.
And then after this meditation then we get to have a short quiz—OK?—on the contents of this section. It’s actually not that many questions—maybe like 5, maybe 4 questions—true, false, multiple choice—it’s quite easy. So just go ahead and keep in- keep in mind what we’re covering in this section.
And then finally, we’re going to wrap up this section with a few action steps like we did last time. And these action steps help you to embody the learning. So take care and I’ll see you in the next video.