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If you want evidence before you invest your time, this one's for you. Wanting to know how something works before you commit isn't resistance. It's intelligence.

Episode Three is about what's actually happening in your body and brain when you meditate.

Your nervous system has two gears. The problem is that the alarm can't tell a house fire from burnt toast, and modern life is very good at burning toast. Most of us walk around with that system half-on for years. The stress response was built as an emergency broadcast. We've turned it into background music.

Almost none of it answers to you directly. One thing does, and that's where the practice gets in.

We also get to why the wandering mind is the whole exercise rather than the failure. Why exercise doesn't make you stronger and recovery does. And what a study of London taxi drivers has to do with your attention.

There's a gap between what happens and how hard you react to it. That gap is where your choices live.

Try the three breaths while you listen. You'll feel it move.

Join me next time for Episode Four. Is There a Right Way to Do This?

Support the show

Reading Your Own Life With Swami Larry is written and hosted by Larry Lee. Season One is based on a manuscript written by Swami Larry with Faith Bleasdale.

New episodes every Monday and Thursday.

More at: https://substack.com/@swamilarry

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/swami_larry/

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@swami_larry

TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@swami_larry

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I'm too high-strung. My brain never shuts off. Trust me, meditation is not for people like me.

People say that with total confidence, as if calm were an entry requirement. It's like saying the gym is only for people already in shape.

Episode Two clears away the things meditation isn't. Nobody handed you these on purpose. They came from pictures: the monk on the mountainside, the woman on the magazine cover with nothing in her head. You absorbed them without deciding to, and when your experience didn't match, you concluded the problem was you.

We take them one at a time. That you have to empty your mind, which nobody has ever done, including me, including this morning. That you need an hour a day. That it's religious, which you might not expect a man with Swami in front of his name to argue against. That it's escape, when most of what fills a day already is.

Your thoughts are leaves on a stream. The practice was never about stopping them.

If your mind is loud, you're not disqualified. You're who this is for.

Join me next time for Episode Three, What's Actually Happening When You Meditate?

Support the show

Reading Your Own Life With Swami Larry is written and hosted by Larry Lee. Season One is based on a manuscript written by Swami Larry with Faith Bleasdale.

New episodes every Monday and Thursday.

More at: https://substack.com/@swamilarry

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/swami_larry/

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@swami_larry

TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@swami_larry

If the show is useful to you, a rating or a review helps other people find it.

Send us Fan Mail

When I was six, my best friend was a dog named Fluffy. Behind the house there was a patch of woods with a stream running through it, and that was our spot. We'd sit and watch the water move over the rocks. Birds landed close. Sometimes nothing happened at all.

I didn't have a word for any of it. I was six. My first formal training didn't come until I was fifteen. But I'd already started.

Season Two of Reading Your Own Life is about meditation, and it begins with the sentence people say to me most often. Not a question. A confession. I've tried meditation, I can't do it. My mind won't stop. I fall asleep. I'm not spiritual enough. The details change and the conclusion never does: something is wrong with me.

I don't believe that, and I never have.

Episode One is about the picture you were handed of what meditation is supposed to look like, and why failing at someone else's version isn't the same as failing. A child with a coloring book. A friend who told me for years she couldn't do it, while doing it every morning in her backyard with a garden hose.

You have your own version of that stream. You've probably already been there. You just didn't call it that.

This week, notice where your time disappears.

Join me next time for Episode Two, Why Are You So Sure You Can't?

Support the show

Reading Your Own Life With Swami Larry is written and hosted by Larry Lee. Season One is based on a manuscript written by Swami Larry with Faith Bleasdale.

New episodes every Monday and Thursday.

More at: https://substack.com/@swamilarry

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/swami_larry/

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@swami_larry

TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@swami_larry

If the show is useful to you, a rating or a review helps other people find it.