I love the winter. I find a surprising sense of energy and creative spark that comes with the darkest, coldest months. The cold makes me feel alive; soups and stews, fires in the fireplace, and rich oils for skin make me feel nourished and cared for; and the dark… well, the dark is where I feel most awake. I don’t mean that I'm a night owl… quite the opposite actually. I'm an in-bed-at-9-and-up-at-5 kinda gal. But those quiet, dark hours - when I’m in the liminal space of physical wakefulness and subconscious wakefulness… Those hours are my most insightful. This meditation series, The Dark Side of Meditation, is a nod to meditation teacher Deborah Eden Tull and her book, Luminous Darkness. Her teachings and my own experience have guided me to pay deeper attention to the dark; and so, we will use some of our winter months to stop chasing the light and learn how to savor the dark.Did you know that humans lived on earth for more than 600,000 years BEFORE learning how to kindle a fire? That is 600,000 of living in the rhythm of daylight and darkness; of living in rhythm with the seasonal changes in light. Living in rhythm is a practice of being embodied. When we think about sinking into the rhythm of the seasons and this darker time of year, it is about inviting ourselves deeper into our own bodies. And, meditation my friends, meditation is a practice of embodiment.Darkness has been a crucial teaching in so many spiritual and awakening traditions - Taoism, Buddhism, Christianity, Hinduism, Aboriginal and Indigenous traditions - and yet, culture today places so much emphasis on light, on progress, on achievement, and on growth. It is all about ‘enlightenment’.On the flip side, darkness is associated with scariness, with the unknown, with spiderwebs and skeletons. Don’t go into that dark closet without a flashlight! Turn on the lights so you can look under the bed, but the problem is if you keep turning on a light, your eyes never adjust to the dark. This time of year asks us to be patient enough, brave enough, to linger in the dark. Join me for today’s episode of The Mindful Minute podcast as we explore endarkenment rather than enlightenment.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

Friends, today I get to share a conversation with one of my personal favorite meditation teachers, Diana Winston! Diana is the Director of Mindfulness Education at UCLA, the author of several incredible books about meditation and a former Buddhist nun.Together, we talk about the second edition release of her book, Fully Present, as well as my personal favorite book, The Little Book of Being.Diana shares some insights on how the field of mindfulness meditation has evolved over the last ten years. In this episode, we talk about The ethics missing from most meditation teachingsThe science of kindness {hint: meditators are kinder than non-meditators!}How the practice is evolving from me-centric to community-centric Mindful parentingNatural awareness and the pleasure to glimpse practicesGrab a cup of tea, pop-in your headphones and join Diana and me for this conversation and a short guided practice from Diana at the end.For more information about Diana, her books and the apps she teaches on, visit https://dianawinston.com/ and https://www.uclahealth.org/programs/marc Be sure to Sign up { http://eepurl.com/dBYEUL } for my newsletter 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

How to make your practice so lovely, so vital that you won’t skip a day:Make your practice beautiful. Don’t cram it in; savor it.Ask for what you most need. Name your intention, your purpose, your hope for this practice.Dedicate the merit.Our practice is never just about ourselves. Friend, fellow teacher and former Mindful Minute guest Caverly Morgan in The Heart of Who We Are:“The longer we cling to the notion that there’s a separate self who awakens, the more arduous our path will be. We realize freedom together.”Patience, Presence, Kindness is my intention. It is for my interactions and sense of wakefulness in the world, and it is for the collective. We could all use more of these qualities, couldn’t we? Meditation is a practice of collective empowerment. It is for us, not me alone. So, at the end of the practice, let us offer up the merit. May this practice benefit all. May this practice be for the good of humanity. May patience, presence and kindness spread across the planet. Remember where attention goes, energy flows. Join me for today’s talk and guided meditation practice, and consider following this class up with my interview with Caverly Morgan. You can find that episode anywhere you get your podcasts.  Be sure to Sign up { http://eepurl.com/dBYEUL } for my newsletter to receive free mini meditations each month, creative musings, and more. BIG NEWS: The Mindful Minute is now on YouTube! If you’d like to watch these classes visit youtube.com/@themindfulminutepodcast Make a donation or learn more about my free offerings and live classes by visiting merylarnett.com. IG: @merylarnett #meditatewithmeryl

This month’s meditation series is a foundational challenge to help you build up to a 20-minute/day nourishing meditation practice. I want to get away from the ‘check-it-off-the-to-do-list’ mentality and instead build a practice that feels so vital and lovely that you wouldn’t skip a day no matter what happens. A piece of this nourishing practice comes when we specifically name what we most want or need from the meditation practice. Some of you will resonate with naming an intention; some of you might resonate with requesting a blessing; or naming a desire; or a goal… My personal practice has been built with the intention of cultivating patience, presence and kindness. When we name for ourselves why we are practicing, there is more encouragement to show up to the cushion each day, and there is more mindful energy carried throughout our day. Because we aren’t really practicing for those 10-minutes on the meditation cushion; we are practicing for the other 23 hours and 50 minutes of our day.Join me for today’s talk and guided meditation practice as we build our meditation practice to 15-minutes/day this week!  Be sure to Sign up { http://eepurl.com/dBYEUL } for my newsletter to receive free mini meditations each week, creative musings, and more. Make a donation or learn more about my offerings and live classes by visiting merylarnett.com. IG: @merylarnett #meditatewithmeryl

Happy New Year! Every January, I see an influx of people who are ready to try a meditation practice, and every February, I see most of those people fall away once again. And so this year, I thought - “what can I do to help people immediately reap the benefits of meditation?”Normally, in January, I do an introductory series that lays out the foundations of a practice, and I stress that starting with even 5 minutes/day is enough. But I wonder if it is really enough to keep you practicing. Because, at least for me, if I try to cram a 5-minute rushed practice between my last meeting and carpool, well… I’m still pretty stressed. It doesn’t feel great, and I’m very likely to forget to do it again the next day. So this year, I’m offering something different. I’m offering an introductory series into the depth and beauty of the practice. In the next 3 weeks, you will go from meditating 10 minutes/day to 20 minutes/day, and my hope is that you’ll discover the beauty within this practice and within yourself as we go. This series is both a beginner series and a series for those that have lost the magic in their practice. This is a series to remember our loveliness and that of the practice.Let’s begin!Be sure to Sign up { http://eepurl.com/dBYEUL } for my newsletter 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 meditation series has been an exploration of time. For most of us, time appears to be as steady as a stone - something that is always here, guiding us along - reminding us where we are supposed to be by what time it is. But, things aren’t quite as they appear when it comes to time or to stones. Time is both flexible and relative. It moves at different speeds depending on where you are and if you are moving or not. The phrase ‘now’ has no meaning outside of your direct personal experience. Now is only now for you right now. It is an ever-expanding edge rather than a static point.And, that ever-moving edge reminds us that the universe is made up of events not things. Even things we think of as things, like stones, are actually just long events.So, over the course of the first two classes in this series, rather than time being like the steadiness of stones, we’ve really discovered time is more like the unsteadiness of stones. I’ve shared this mostly through physics and the brilliant minds of people like Newton, Einstein and Carlo Rovelli. However, we don’t have to be brilliant scientists to understand the wildly mysterious ways of time. We simply have to meditate. My guess is you already know time is relative and flexible because you have experienced it within your meditation practice. You’ve meditated on a tough day where 3 minutes felt like interminable hours.On other days, you’ve meditated and fallen into the realm of timelessness. Where a minute lasts a day, and it feels like you can’t even remember when you took your last breath and it doesn’t really matter because you might never need to breathe again. When we meditate, time becomes circular, all encompassing and all knowing, rather than a step by step progression. There is no where you need to be because you are already exactly where you are. Join me for this final installment in our exploration of time and guided meditation practice inviting you into the timeless realm of your deepest knowing.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

Let’s start with two scientific facts:When we are in motion, time contracts.The universe is made up of events, not things. In my exploration of time, I came across a sentence from physicist Carlo Rovelli that stopped me in my tracks. He wrote - “Now means nothing.”Now means nothing. Nothing?! What have I been teaching for the last decade if the truth of the present moment has been disproven by science? What are we meditating for, and what are we experiencing? The more I reflect on scientific facts above and the dissolution of the present moment, the more I find an invitation to stop thinking of ourselves as something to fix and our meditation practice as something to get right. This isn’t a static moment in time and we are not a thing to improve upon. We are an event, a becoming, and when we sit still time expands. We are shifting from contraction to expansion and witnessing the ever-changing dynamism of our internal experiences as a direct experience of the universe. Join me for today’s talk and guided meditation practice as we explore the expansion of ‘now’. Be sure to Sign up { http://eepurl.com/dBYEUL } for my newsletter 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 don’t have enough time”“Take your time”“You have all the time in the world”Common enough phrases; each signaling something about our interaction with the experience of time. Phrases hinting that we should move faster, or slower, that we should do something, or not. And all of which create a cascading story of beliefs for each of us.Time is such a funny thing. It feels fast and slow {sometimes all at once}. It feels like a separate entity 'out there' that we have no control over and which has enormous control over us... and yet…There is no universal, objective time. It isn't out there on its own. It is only HERE; in relation with a where and a who. Time is inextricably bound to where and to who. It is personal, flexible, and relative. In this all new 3-part meditation series, we will explore our relationship with time: how our experience of time impacts our meditation practice and how our meditation practice impacts our relationship with time.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: https://www.instagram.com/merylarnett/ #meditatewithmeryl

Today, on The Mindful Minute, I am sharing a conversation with meditation teacher and author Caverly Morgan about her new book, The Heart of Who We Are: Realizing Freedom Together.Caverly is a meditation teacher, author, speaker, and nonprofit founder. She is the founder and Lead Contemplative of Peace in Schools—a nonprofit which created the nation's first for-credit mindfulness class in public high schools. She is also the founder of Presence Collective, a community of cross-cultural contemplatives committed to personal and collective transformation.In this episode, Caverly and I really hone in on the phrase “realizing freedom together” and explore what this means in relation to our meditation practice, which far too easily can feel singular and isolated when we aren’t practicing in community. We talk about book clubs vs. book collectives; about freedom, community and privilege; and what it means to stop imagining that liberation comes only when ‘I’ as a singular being awaken.We go deep, y’all, and yet, I feel like we barely scratched the surface. Perhaps we’ll ask Caverly to come back and share more!Make sure you listen all the way to the end. Caverly leads a 20-minute guided meditation inviting us to reflect and create awareness around all the self-imposed beliefs we hold onto about our separateness. You can learn more about Caverly and her new book by visiting her website: caverlymorgan.orgLearn more about my Awakened Heart Meditation Community: https://www.merylarnett.com/awakened-heart-meditation-community If you enjoyed today’s episode, please consider making a one-time or monthly donation to support the growth of this labor of love. Your monthly donation will aid in keeping this show sponsor-free, employing additional small businesses AND funding the ongoing creative growth I invest in. Donate here: https://www.merylarnett.com/support-the-mindful-minute Download freebies and learn more about my offerings, classes, and more by visiting merylarnett.com. #meditatewithmeryl

There is nothing I love more than responding to student questions about meditation, and recently I was asked two really good questions that I thought would be useful to the greater Mindful Minute community. At the end of our Political Resilience series, I was asked about what to do if you want to forge connections, to return to the table, but everyone else is hostile?And, I was asked a crucial and common question about what to do on days when you are too busy or stressed or overwhelmed to meditate… my answer might surprise you.Join me for a short Q&A session followed by a 20-minute guided meditation. Learn more about my Awakened Heart Meditation Community: https://www.merylarnett.com/awakened-heart-meditation-community If you enjoyed today’s episode, please consider making a one-time or monthly donation to support the growth of this labor of love. Your monthly donation will aid in keeping this show sponsor-free, employing additional small businesses AND funding the ongoing creative growth I invest in. Donate here: https://www.merylarnett.com/support-the-mindful-minute Download freebies and learn more about my offerings, classes, and more by visiting merylarnett.com. #meditatewithmeryl