for yourself for what will hopefully be

a nice inward journey.

So just start off sitting upright,

feet planted on the ground

if you're ideally on some type of a firm chair.

And start to soften your gaze if your eyes are still open.

Gently close them.

I like to leave my hands on my lap,

palms up to the sky,

but whatever feels comfortable for you.

And then with your eyes closed,

gently become a little bit more aware of your breaths.

Make them a little bit deeper and a little bit slower.

At your own time breathe in,

breathe out, just a little bit deeper

and a little bit slower.

So the whole idea behind meditation

is trying to ease all the chatter

that exists in our brains,

trying to still our thoughts.

And so as we do that,

and every meditation I'm going to try to introduce

some frameworks, ways of thinking about your mind.

But as you try to quiet the mind,

it will inevitably get distracted.

It might get distracted by some noise in the room

or some noise outside, or more likely,

it'll get distracted by thoughts

that are just surfacing into your consciousness.

And if that happens, don't let it make you anxious.

A lot of folks, when they meditate,

they worry that they're doing it wrong,

and then if they get distracted,

it actually makes things worse.

They say, "I'm never going to be able

"to do this meditation thing."

The important thing is to approach the meditation

with a spirit of fun, a spirit of curiosity.

Have a sense of humor about it.

We are all literally human,

and we do very human things.

And so when you find your mind wandering a bit,

just laugh it off and say, "Oh, there you go, mind."

Just come back to the stillness, not a big deal.

Don't beat up on yourself over it.

And as part of that, as we go over to this meditation,

as much as possible try to keep a little bit

of a smile on your face.

Your eyes are closed,

but you can still smile a little bit

or at least smile with your mind.

Reminds you that this should be fun.

This is relaxing.

So with that said, let's keep breathing in, breathing out,

a little bit deeper, a little bit slower.

In the framework that I'm going to introduce

for how you can still your mind

is one that I use a lot,

which is imagining all the thoughts

in your subconscious as the ocean.

And the surface of the ocean is the interface

between your subconscious and your consciousness.

And most of us have a pretty choppy surface.

There's a lot of thoughts

that are jumping up and down out of our subconscious.

And sometimes we're drowning in those thoughts.

And one way to think about it

is we can elevate ourselves.

We can elevate ourselves above the surface of that water.

And when you start to elevate yourself,

you're not suppressing the thoughts,

but you're just looking down on them.

You see that they're still there.

The surface is still choppy.

There's still waves.

But as you rise and you look down on it,

you realize that you are not those thoughts.

You are not the surface of the water.

So whether the thing that's bothering you

is an assignment you have to do

or some interpersonal relations

or just something in your life

not working out the way that you would like it to,

remind yourself that that is not you.

You are not defined by the outcome of that situation.

Those are just waves on that ocean.

And the more that you surface above them

and you look at them and analyze them,

you realize that they have no control over you.

And once that happens, things start to slow down.

The surface of that water begins

to get calmer and calmer and calmer.

And there you are floating above that surface,

just pure awareness.

And you realize that you're a lot more

than you thought you were.

You aren't just your physical body.

You aren't just those thoughts

that you see as waves on the surface of that ocean.

You aren't even just that identity

that you associate yourself with,

your name, your position in the world,

your status, what people think of you, your relations.

Those are aspects of you, but they aren't you.

You are something much bigger than all of them.

You are the space in which they occur,

in which they happen, but they aren't you.

And now let's just try to sit in that pure awareness

for the next minute or so.

And once again, if your thoughts wander, not a big deal.

That's just the choppiness on the surface of that water,

and you need to elevate yourself back

to that pure awareness.

And if the quiet bothers you, don't worry.

I will be back in about a minute.

All right, so that was a relatively short amount of time

for you to be on your own.

And as you'll see,

as we do more and more advanced meditations,

give yourself more and more time.

And over time you won't need me talking.

In fact, that will probably annoy you.

You'll just be able to sit down and still your mind

and realize that you are not your thoughts

and that these things that are bothering you,

they're only going to bother you

as much as you let them bother you.

In the whole scheme of things,

in all of time and space,

none of them are really what should define you

or are anywhere near as important

as we sometimes make them out to be.

I'll see you in the next meditation.