Our Mindful Nature: Meditation Inspired by Nature to Soothe the Overwhelmed Mind and Ease Anxiety

I have noticed the prevalence of two difficult emotions both in my own life as well as in my conversations with others - grief & anxiety. Difficult emotions to be sure. Over the next four episodes, I want to explore working with difficult emotions in our meditation practice. It can appear, at least on the surface, that there is no place for big emotion within our meditation practice - as if, somehow, meditation precludes us from experiencing heartbreak, fear or anger. This couldn’t be further from the truth. What meditation offers us isn’t exemption from emotion but rather comfort and trust in the wisdom of our emotions. Almost always amidst big emotion we are having a dual experience. We are Experiencing our feelings in the moment. Experiencing the thoughts, stories and beliefs we are having about our feelings.One is real; the other is very often untrue. Can you guess which? Join me for today’s episode of The Mindful Minute as we talk aboutWhat is real and what is untrueThe forethought of griefWhy there is always a place for your emotions, no matter how big, in meditationAt the end, as always, we will share in a 20-minute guided meditation.Sign up for my newsletter at http://eepurl.com/dBYEUL to receive free mini meditations each month, creative musings, and more.Make a donation or learn more about my free offerings and live classes by visiting merylarnett.com.IG: @merylarnett                 #meditatewithmeryl

"What if your discomfort was a portal to a rebirth, a remembering, an attunement to your true Self?"   - Tracee StanleyTracee Stanley is the founder of Empowered Life Circle, a sacred community and portal of practices, rituals, and Tantric teachings inspired by more than 20 years of study in Sri Vidya Tantra and the teachings of the Himalayan Masters. As a post-lineage teacher, Tracee is devoted to sharing the wisdom of yoga nidra, rest, meditation, self-inquiry, nature as a teacher, and ancestor reverence. Tracee is gifted in illuminating the magic and power found in liminal space and weaving devotion and practice into daily life. Today, Tracee joins The Mindful Minute to talk about her new book, The Luminous Self, and share some of the profound practices included within.The Luminous Self  is a book that answers the questions on how to inquire into our suffering and past conditioning, empowering ourselves to turn towards truth and power. It begins with the essential question : Who am I? This new book offers practices, rituals, yoga nidra, and self-inquiry to reveal inner wisdom, and inspire us to rest in a place of remembered wholeness and wellness. Tracee shares the practices that have been most potent and transformative in her life, and gives suggestions for how to offer these practices in community.In this conversation, we talk about so many incredible practices, ideas and insights. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did. You can save 30% on all pre-orders of The Luminous Self when you preorder at Shambhala.com with the code LUM30Learn more about Tracee by visiting traceestanley.comSign up for my newsletter at http://eepurl.com/dBYEUL to receive free mini meditations each month, creative musings, and more.Make a donation or learn more about my free offerings and live classes by visiting merylarnett.com.IG: @merylarnett                 #meditatewithmeryl

In this series, I named three things that regularly inspire awe for me -BirdsBooksMeditationAll 3 regularly stop me in my tracks, and they make my jaw drop. They make me smile, wonder, and listen. They weave their way into my conversations and my dreams. In short, they inspire awe within me. “Awe experiences are what psychologists call self-transcendent: they shift our attention away from ourselves, make us feel like we are part of something greater than ourselves, change our perception of time, and even make us more generous toward others.” - templeton.orgDacher Keltner - one of the foremost awe researchers - has written about taking ‘awe-walks’. Nature is an easy place to find awe, and he encourages us to go out with the intention of seeking awe. I’ve found that the more I do this, the more easily I experience it. We can also do this in our meditation practice. We can go on an awe-walk through our minds and our hearts. We sit with the intention of being awed by our own minds, or our own internal knowing. We sit with the intention of meandering through the caverns of our mind and the lake of our heart. We don’t rush, we don’t brush things off, or ignore them. We taste. We savor. We experience. There is a reason that all the Sages spoke of our inner being as a universe - one with mountains and lakes, rivers and valleys - it is because they could see that the awe we experience out in the world is the SAME experience we can have within ourselves.Now it is our turn. Join me for today’s talk and guided meditation practice. Sign up for my newsletter at http://eepurl.com/dBYEUL to receive free mini meditations each month, creative musings, and more.Make a donation or learn more about my free offerings and live classes by visiting merylarnett.com.IG: @merylarnett                 #meditatewithmeryl

I adore a good book, and I’ve noticed that often I feel a sense of energy or connection between what I’m reading and my meditation practice. Sometimes it inspires a question, a curiosity or even just a feeling.It isn’t something that can easily be named or explained, which is exactly what this series is about… The unknown, the mystery, the awe of an experience. In meditation, often we want to discuss what happens. We try to explain. But so often it feels incomplete, doesn’t it? You can’t capture the depth, the richness, the aliveness through a word that is in itself limiting.Our practice, like ourselves, is boundless. Limits are useless here. And often so is language.Books have their place. They point us to something.But experience is the only path forward… The only knowing. In this class, we explore books, language, signs and symbols as a way to relate to our practice and to accept its ambiguity. Join me for a brief discussion and 20-minute guided meditation. Sign up for my newsletter at http://eepurl.com/dBYEUL to receive free mini meditations each month, creative musings, and more.Make a donation or learn more about my free offerings and live classes by visiting merylarnett.com.IG: @merylarnett                 #meditatewithmeryl

This year, I have fallen in love with birds. I know, I know - it's an odd entry to a meditation class, but stay with me - We added a few bird feeders and a bird bath to our backyard garden at the start of the year, and the bird population has absolutely exploded. And, since I sit outside to meditate everyday, I have a front row seat to the show.At first, I found the constant birdsong a distraction to my practice, but I QUICKLY found that it became a soundtrack of upliftment and positive feelings. It is only natural then that I began to ask.. Why? Here is where it gets interesting - much like with any aspect of nature, while science can show that it DOES have a positive impact on physical and emotional health, it struggles to show WHY…And so I started to ask myself, could the feeling alone be enough?Could my own internal experience be enough?This appreciation of birds - would it change if I could identify every bird I see? Do I need to know in order to appreciate it? We are so cultured by technology to pull out a phone and identify, to Google, to search, to name the thing. When in fact, I believe our meditation practice is inviting us to step away from that pressing need to know and master everything we encounter.We aren’t here to know nature.We are nature. We are here to experience it.Join me for today’s short talk and guided meditation practice dedicated to the unknown, the ambiguous, and the uncertain.Sign up for my newsletter at http://eepurl.com/dBYEUL to receive free mini meditations each month, creative musings, and more.Make a donation or learn more about my free offerings and live classes by visiting merylarnett.com.IG: @merylarnett                 #meditatewithmeryl

What if emotions weren't a problem? What if you didn’t need to fix or change your emotions? What if they were actually not only helpful but vital to our survival? Today, I am delighted to share a conversation with author and researcher Karla McLaren. M.Ed. Karla is an emotions and empathy expert, and she's recently revised and updated one of her books, The Language of Emotions. In this conversation, Karla and I talk aboutEmotions as a sense rather than a problemAnxiety, panic and how to work with themBoundariesThe danger of spiritual bypassing in yoga & meditation communitiesWhy judgment isn’t a bad thingChildren and big emotions4 keys to emotional geniusThis conversation is rich with helpful tools for embodying and embracing our emotional life. Be sure to listen all the way to the end - Karla shares a practice that is simple and powerfully effective for identifying and establishing boundaries and space. You can learn more about Karla at https://karlamclaren.com/ and https://empathyacademy.org/ And here is the free emotion chart for kids that Karla mentions: https://karlamclaren.com/free-emotions-charts-for-kids/Sign up for my newsletter at http://eepurl.com/dBYEUL to receive free mini meditations each month, creative musings, and more.Make a donation or learn more about my free offerings and live classes by visiting merylarnett.com.IG: @merylarnett                 #meditatewithmeryl

It is an unbelievably beautiful gift to be alive and awake. The world will break our hearts both through its cruelty and its beauty. Our job is not to fix that paradox, but to learn how to live within it with resiliency and reciprocity.We grieve, we give thanks, and we act in some personal way in response to the gift of being alive.This last class in the Resilience & Reciprocity series will ask us to shift from an independent to an intra-dependent point of view of ourselves, others, and the natural world. All 3 ask for our grief, our gratitude and our reciprocal action. And, all 3 are uplifted and clarified through our meditation practice. Emergence Labs writes of intra-dependency - Intra-dependency on the other hand signifies how something is the outcome of another thing. One thing is “of” another. {...} The ‘whole’ is making us (even as we can identify ourselves as separate).The whole is making us. We cannot meditate solely for our own betterment. We cannot meditate solely for others. Or for the natural world. Because, as much as we view these as separate realms, they are threads of a whole.So, our meditation practice isn’t only for sacred halls and silent incense-filled air. It is also for dogs barking and children crying and the many experiences that make up a life.  In short, meditation practice is for you.Join me for today’s discussion on the Self, intra-dependency, and a 20-minute guided meditation.  Sign up for my newsletter at http://eepurl.com/dBYEUL to receive free mini meditations each month, creative musings, and more.Make a donation or learn more about my free offerings and live classes by visiting merylarnett.com.IG: @merylarnett                 #meditatewithmeryl

Do you know the refrain in Amazing Grace?Amazing grace how sweet the soundThat saved a wretch like meI once was lost, but now I'm foundWas blind but now I seeThis refrain has been running through my head as I created this month’s meditation series - “but now I see.”Last week, we talked about really ‘seeing’ the earth, and today, we will talk about really ‘seeing’ others, people that are different from ourselves in some way. One of the premises in this series is that comfort equals loneliness. If everyone around me looks like me and thinks like me, well that might feel pretty easy at first. I don’t have to stretch too hard to make anyone feel included. I don’t have to worry that my needs will be overlooked. I don’t have to risk discomfort in conversation, in activity, in food, in anything… But, the more I close off to anyone different, the scarier it is “out there”; the smaller my world becomes “in here”; and suddenly, I am very, very alone. So, let’s remove the blinders as a pathway to healing and wholeness. Let’s explore how meditation strengthens our capacity to see others, to see ourselves, and to see a path forward that is rich in connection and reciprocity. Join me.Sign up for my newsletter at http://eepurl.com/dBYEUL to receive free mini meditations each month, creative musings, and more.Make a donation or learn more about my free offerings and live classes by visiting merylarnett.com.IG: @merylarnett                 #meditatewithmeryl

In this mindfulness series, we are exploring resilience & reciprocity as skills we build when we bring mindfulness to our relationships with the earth, with others, and with ourselves. In today’s class, we bring the lens of mindfulness to our fractured relationship with nature. Diagnosis like plant blindness and nature deficit disorder, not to mention climate crisis, highlight how removed we are from nature. At the same time, there are writers, poets, artists, and scientists all screaming for us to go outside, to remember ourselves in nature. Yet, for the most part, we don’t.We don’t go outside because we are busy, because we don’t know where to go, or because we don’t like being hot, or cold, or the bugs. We don’t go outside because our culture has taught us to value comfort over all else. We don’t go outside because we might be uncomfortable.In the Apache language, the root of the word for land is the same root as the word for mind… an interesting parallel, isn’t it?We don’t like to be uncomfortable - with our thoughts or with the weather. However, what we see over and over again through lived experience is that discomfort allows us to tap into and appreciate joy so much more than staying sheltered, closed off, and “comfortable”.Join me for today’s episode of The Mindful Minute as we revive our connection to nature through resilience and reciprocity.Sign up for my newsletter at http://eepurl.com/dBYEUL to receive free mini meditations each month, creative musings, and more.Make a donation or learn more about my free offerings and live classes by visiting merylarnett.com.IG: @merylarnett #meditatewithmeryl

Hello dear ones. Today, we step into a new series that stems from some of my recent reading. Every spring, I re-read "Braiding Sweetgrass" by Robin Wall Kimmerer, and I also just read a new book from the Foxfire organization titled "The Foxfire Book of Appalachian Women".While these books are about different peoples, different times, and different landscapes, I see so many threads of similarity carried between the narratives - Threads of hardship, hard work & happiness. Threads of lack and abundance.Threads of fear and grief for a changing landscape.In this new meditation series, I want to follow a few of these threads through our lived experiences, and the ways they show up and can be worked with on the meditation cushion.If I had to choose one word synopses for these two books, I would choose:Resilience & ReciprocitySo, we will begin our series here. Join me as we journey through the plant world, the peopled world, and the inner world of the Self. We will talk, we will meditate, and we will connect. Don’t miss it!Sign up for my newsletter at http://eepurl.com/dBYEUL to receive free mini meditations each month, creative musings, and more.Make a donation or learn more about my free offerings and live classes by visiting merylarnett.com.IG: @merylarnett #meditatewithmeryl