This sharing explores teachings from the book, Difficult Conversations.  This book examines the ways conversations we care about can so easily get “hijacked,” and ways to help us stay grounded in having the conversation we want to have instead.

The is a meditation on bringing care to our internal “bad student”– i.e. meeting the part of us we want to get rid of, the part we see as disrupting our meditation. This willingness to meet our troublesome, annoying, distracted, angry, worried, tired, or any other version of the “bad student” is ultimately the path of our freedom.

We explore three necessary steps for a healing, empowering acceptance that more deeply engages us with meeting life as it is.

How does welcoming things as they are– not as we want them to be, but as they actually are in this moment now– open to healing? This meditation is a chance to explore working with a radical, freeing “welcoming” of our own selves as a first step.

Acceptance is a mind/heart quality that is so easily misunderstood… What is the difference between a reactive (i.e. fight/flight/freeze) misunderstanding this quality and an empowering opening to life? How might engaging with “acceptance” actually release some old story that holds us back and thereby free us for a transformative new understanding of life and how we might most powerfully engage?

We use the Arriving Sequence (Arriving, Being Available, Aligning) to ground ourselves in order to open to an exploration– what does it mean somatically, emotionally with curiosity to be accepting in this moment now?

Contemplating our “elemental” nature is a powerful way of breaking apart a sense of a separate self and understanding how fundamentally we are part of a flow of all things.

This meditation again explores the “Arriving Sequence” from Phillip Moffit and Dharma Ground. These 3 steps of 1) arriving, 2) being available and 3) aligning with our values and what inspires us is such a useful practice for formal meditation and for life in general.

In this version of a loving-kindness practice, we pay particular attention to how we meet our moments of distraction.