Why Meditate?

Carrie Grossman (Dayashila) is a devotional singer, composer, and lifelong student of the mystical traditions. For over 20 years, she has studied the art of sacred sound, guiding people into the sublime realms of the heart through her concerts, workshops, and retreats. With a warm, approachable style, Carrie weaves together music and mantra, meditation, healing arts, and wisdom teachings to nourish and inspire seekers from all walks of life. Her acclaimed albums include Soma-Bandhu: Friend of the Moon, The Ram Sessions, Pranam, and Homeward. You can find her creations on Apple Music, Spotify, and the popular meditation app, Insight Timer. CarrieGMusic.com

At the age of 21, Carrie first traveled to India where she was introduced to kirtan (call and response mantra chanting). The beauty of the practice inspired her to sing, but due to shyness and self-doubt, 10 years went by before the music within her emerged. It wasn’t until a difficult life period that she began to write songs and play the harmonium. She has since produced several albums, including Soma-Bandhu: Friend of the Moon (2010), The Ram Sessions (2016), Pranam (2017), and Homeward (2019).  

Carrie began her journey as a scholar, earning degrees in Religious Studies from Brown University (BA) and Naropa University (MA), but ultimately she longed to experience the teachings directly. This desire led her to study with some of the world’s great masters and to receive further training and certification in yoga, mind-body medicine, and the healing arts.

Also a prolific writer, Carrie is the former editor of Common Ground magazine. She is deeply influenced by her longtime spiritual teacher Amma, and the many guides and mentors she’s had along the way.

To listen to more of Carrie’s music

Mitra Manesh, (the founder of Innermap and Innermap App.)  is a mindfulness educator with over 3 decades of experience and practice. She blends Western methods and Eastern traditions in a synthesis that cultivates intelligence and wisdom. A student of Rumi’s philosophy, a former Human Rights Commissioner, Mitra has a private practice in Beverly Hills, CA and teaches at UCLA’s Mindful Awareness Research Center in the School of Neuroscience/Semel Institute. 

A very rough transcription of my interview.

I’m here with Mitra Manesh and it’s meditation teacher mindfulness-based coach. The first question I have is. Why meditate?

Why meditate, because meditation is the study of South and eventually we can no longer skip over ourselves and we need to meet date except and hopefully greet ourselves and also meditation is a great sampler of how. A mindful life can look like so hopefully and eventually we would like to copy and paste what we do in our meditation in our daily life. I haven’t that nobody’s approached it from that place yet.

The next question is what is your definition of mindfulness? And what does it look like to live a mindful life?

Okay, so as you know, I teach mindfulness and have taught many many decades. So I’ve created my own definition nothing unusual. Just something that goes home for me and the way I Define mindfulness. As being awake and present with curiosity and compassion so I used for keywords. And the first one is a week. You may say what do you mean me to try I’m sitting here obviously up a week I drove for hours, right? But I’m not talking about physical weakness. I’m talking about with our sense of being aware and awake and knowing the here it’s opposite of being on autopilot. The second word I use was present and that is basically the opposite of being either in the past or in the future and you’ve heard me say that past is wonderful and we do want to go there but with a visitor’s visa. Because we want to learn or even maybe remember our grades experiences and learn from them even and also the future we would like to go there too. Lightly. The key word here is like the plan and come. After the present moment, so whenever we stay there too long either in the past or present or future and then that’s where all our troubles reside the extreme of being in the past brings a sense of sadness and even depression and extreme of being in the future brings a sense of anxiousness. So every sadness and depression needs a past and every anxiousness and anxiety needs a future. So it’s looking at but if we are looking into the past we’re looking at it in a light way. We’re observing it as opposed to living it exactly and grew up. There is a need for a purpose. That’s why I called the visitor Visa. I’m going to The Limited period of stay and I’m going to see some things of interest learn something. Hopefully, expand my Horizon of understanding life. So it’s very purposeful. I don’t go there to lament I go there to learn it’s a different and same thing with planning I go there to plan because of course if you and I didn’t plan we wouldn’t be able to meet today. Sure. However when anything. Even good and I have another relationship with good and bad. But let’s call it good whenever we do something over a certain line. It turns into something not useful. I’m in a very difficult sewn and why can’t we really plan and determine the future because at best I plan the day our the week with the knowledge of that present moment and as you know the knowledge or the facts are always changing, so I planned you plan to be here half an hour earlier, right? Did you know the traffic would be as know why beca...

Thank you for listening to our podcast and making it work.

Over the last 6 months, I have been busy with all things meditation. We have a great season ahead, and I am looking forward to new types of interviews and digging deeper into why we meditate. I am also interested in how we bring mindfulness into our daily life. And, no, I am not talking about going around like a zombie all day. As Shinzen Young put it. “If you are mindful you don’t need to do anything, just live” But how do we know if we are mindful? The practice of being present can take many forms. How do I tell? When you are mindful you see the world differently, you can really taste the food, see colors, smell the flowers. While your benefits may vary, you too can come of this journey. Start with an app by your self you don’t need to tell anyone. Let your friends notice the difference in you. Then, when you need help and have questions, find a teacher. If you are lucky enough to be in LA check out UCLA Mindfulness Research Center. UCLA has a new app if you are looking for something totally secular. Check out Diana Winston’s new book Little Book of Being Practices. Another free app you can use is Insight Timer app. This app along with being a timer it also has both free and paid guided meditations and courses. Free groups are places you can go to get answers from your community.

But, you should get a teacher, a living breathing in the flesh teacher person . Community is important to the growth of your practice.

Enjoy and Thank you again for listening.

Diana Winston is the Director of Mindfulness Education at UCLA Semel Institute’s Mindful Awareness Research Center (MARC) and the co-author, with Susan Smalley PhD, of Fully Present, the Science, Art and Practice of Mindfulness (DaCapo, 2010). She teaches mindful awareness practices to the general public to promote health and well-being. Called by the LA Times “one of the nation’s best-known teachers of mindfulness,” she has developed curriculum and taught mindfulness since 1993 in a variety of settings including hospitals, universities, corporations, non profits, and schools. She has taught mindful awareness to health professionals, leaders, teachers, activists, seniors, and adolescents in the US and Asia.

Diana is the founder of the Certificate in Mindfulness Facilitation, a pioneering year-long UCLA program that provides training, support, and supervision to those wishing to incorporate mindfulness into their occupation or to share mindfulness with individuals, groups, communities, or institutions. She is considered one of the early founders of meditation programs for youth, and taught on the seminal mindfulness and ADHD research study at UCLA in 2005. Her work has been mentioned in the New York Times, O Magazine, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, and in a variety of magazines, books, and journals. She is also the author of Wide Awake: A Buddhist Guide for Teens (Perigee Books, 2003), the CD “Mindful Meditations,” and has published numerous articles on mindfulness.

Diana is a member of the Teacher’s Council at Spirit Rock Meditation Center in Northern California. She is a graduate of Brown University and has been practicing mindfulness meditation since 1989, including a year as a Buddhist nun in Burma. Currently Diana’s most challenging practice is mindfully parenting a kindergartner.

Little Book of Being Practices.

A Ruff Transcription of our Conversation:

Hi, I’m with Diana Winston, Director of Mindfulness Education at UCLA and we’re just going to jump right into it.

The first question is why meditate?

Diana: Why not meditate, it’s such a broad question. Yeah, but there’s so many dimensions to it. You know, I think about all the scientific research showing why mindfulness is helpful and how it improves. All sorts of things like physical health conditions and reduces blood pressure reduces stress, I think about how it’s helpful for anxiety and depression and all sorts of mental health concerns and. There’s you know, there’s so many different studies these days that have been showing the benefits of mindfulness. So there’s as I had the physical health impacts insomnia, it can impact cardiovascular disease. It can impact, you know, just a whole Ray of stress-related health conditions and. Just around that. Yeah, do they do you are using the same mindful meditation that that you’re teaching here or are you using different types of meditations for different types of ailments or you know chronic pain or those kind of things are working with different? It depends. So we’re talking we’re talking there’s been like about three or four thousand studies and they all do different things the most popular thing that’s been done probably as mindfuln...

Father Thomas

New Camaldoli Hermitage is a community of Roman Catholic monks whose life is dedicated to contemplation and prayer. They are a worshiping community, celebrating with their friends and guests the Liturgy of the Hours and the Holy Eucharist. Their monastic fellowship extends beyond the walls of this hermitage and embraces a large and inclusive community of oblates, persons of different walks of life who live the grace of their baptism in spiritual communion with the monks. This page offers a brief history of the monastic men and women whose life and teachings have inspired the Camaldolese Benedictines to this day.

THE THREEFOLD GOOD OF MONASTIC LIFE

“…a threefold advantage: the community life, which is what novices want; golden solitude, for those who are mature and thirst for the living God; and witnessing to the good news of Christ, for those who long to be freed from this life in order to be with him.”

A ruff transcript of our conversation:

I am here with Father Thomas. Let me just introduce myself. Okay, Thomas Matus monk of Newcombe. I’ll delete Hermitage in Big Sur, California. Thank you, sir. Okay, thank you so much for meeting with me today after all of that. I think it’s been a long drive up from Los Angeles. Okay, so I’m just going to jump right into it.

And the first question is why meditate?

the question really is why not you see, right? It’s something that is being talked about being proposed. There’s an enormous amount of literature about it. It’s part of people’s lives. If you ask them why they meditate they might give an answer, but that’s really not pertinent to the experience itself. Right which is a discovery of a dimension of our existence. Which goes beyond the purely physical or the immediate and so forth and certainly isn’t something that is gratuitous. In other words. It is a pure gift. It is not something that produces something that they can be sold or put on the market and so forth. So all of these exterior criteria that are. Very important for people everyday life there their work there the income. What are we going to pay the bills at the end of the month it all of that? These are these are concerns that real concern for people but on the other hand, this does not feed into these concerns. It is a way also of finding a space where we need not be so concerned about. These contingent realities of our life. What are we going to do? What are we going to eat? You know, Jesus reminded his followers to look at the flowers of the field and the other words. This is a meditation that you’re looking beyond your immediate needs and requirements and so forth look at the flowers of the field. They don’t do work. They don’t spend they don’t so they don’t do other activities, but there they are and all their beauty right? There are more beautiful than Solomon in all his glory as the metaphor is in the gospel. So there you are. It is something that you could say. Does not have any justification because it needs no justification. There was no reason to say well I meditate because it does this or that people will say this and I don’t say they’re wrong. I just say that that’s a very marginal part of it. Uh-huh because meditation is discovering who you truly are and it also in a perspective that I think is there in much greater tradition. Of the greatest traditions of humankind who or what is the ultimate in this reality in which we’re immersed and obviously many of our tradition speak of God, right and in very different terms, they can be and all have different metaphors and so forth. I might mention Buddhists are sometimes referred to as atheistic. Well, they’re not because you just ask them they ...

Well, it has been a few months.  I have done interviews with Meditation Teachers, Rabbis, and Priests.  If you have been listening along you had heard that while they are all talking about meditation they look at it a little different.   Yet when we review these interviews we find that they are seeing differently but with the same goal or result.  As we all know everyone suffers and wants it to end and that suffering a lot of the time is caused by us, by our choices.  Meditation is a way (not the only way) to find control over our choices.  The great thing is the calmness, the better health, and all of the other benefits that bring people to meditation are just that benefits.

We get up every day and start our day if we start from a place of compassion and love we will go into our day sending that out to everyone we meet.  That, in turn, will make their day a little better.

My hope is to bring a little compassion and understanding to us about what goes on in each of us.  Thanks to everyone for listening and see you on the cushion.

New Camaldoli Hermitage is a community of Roman Catholic monks whose life is dedicated to contemplation and prayer. We are a worshiping community, celebrating with our friends and guests the Liturgy of the Hours and the Holy Eucharist. Our monastic fellowship extends beyond the walls of this hermitage and embraces a large and inclusive community of oblates, persons of different walks of life who live the grace of their baptism in spiritual communion with the monks. This page offers a brief history of the monastic men and women whose life and teachings have inspired the Camaldolese Benedictines to this day.

Cyprian Consiglio, OSB Cam.:

is a Camaldolese monk, musician, composer, author, and teacher. A native of Illinois, he spent his young adult years mostly in Arizona working as a professional musician. He joined the New Camaldoli Hermitage in Big Sur, California in 1992. After his initial years of formation there, and solemn vows and ordination, he lived in a hermitage near Santa Cruz, California for ten years, spending about half his time at home, and half his time traveling, performing and teaching, working extensively in interreligious dialogue, music, and meditation. Much of both his music and his teaching revolve around the Universal Call to Contemplation through spirituality and the arts. He has six collections of original music recorded and published through OCP Publications, and several independent releases, including those with his longtime collaborator, percussionist John Pennington. A student of the writings of Bede Griffiths and Abhishiktananda, Cyprian has a great love for comparative religion and has published two books based on wisdom culled from what he has gained from his studies, and numerous articles on spirituality as well as on music and liturgy. He has been to India numerous times as well as other countries in Europe, Asia, and the Mideast, performing as well as studying and teaching. Returning to New Camaldoli in 2012, he was elected prior of the community in 2013.

A Ruff Transcript of my Conversation:

Hello, I am here with Father Cyprien. Thank you. Listen on thank you very much for meeting with me. I really appreciate it. And we’re at great New Camaldoli Hermitage Big Sur. Okay, and so I’m just going to jump into the question because the storms Outside are calling me to get on the road. Okay pretty quick here.

The first question is why meditate?

Which is a great question as I mentioned you before.  These four principles that great teacher looked Anandi taught the four principles for meditation. He thought the most basic thing was every time you sit down to meditate. You should ask yourself why we’re meditating and I suppose every one of the Traditions will tell you in a different way. But I would say from the Christian perspective. There’s a great Lane line from st. Paul’s letter to the Romans. Where he says the love of God is poured into our hearts by the spirit living in us. So the most mystical understanding of the Christian dispensation is that. God dwells within us as the Holy Spirit God is Not Just in celeb Heaven light years away. The very ground of our being the ground of our Consciousness and the source of our life is the Divine who we call God who we call the Holy Spirit by the power of the spirit. So I would say from a Christian perspective. I meditate about the facial 12 steps to have conscious contact with that with the ground of my being with the ground of my Consciousness. Who is the Divine the love of God poured into my heart the spirit living in the great I can add Alleluia on the back? Yeah. The next question is what is your definition of mindfulness? And what does it look like to live a mindful life? Okay,

A short story about the battle within us.

This reenactment was inspired by a Native American story.Enjoy, at the end of the story take a few minutes to reflect on the battle going on in your own life.  Seek to find in yourself the power to overcome greed, hatred, and animus.  End your own suffering, you have to power to do it.

 I will look for stories like this to help us with our daily lives.  Have a beautiful holiday. 

Gloria Kamler, MA, is a holistic educator and stress relief expert, who has taught mindfulness meditation for the past 20 years. She facilitates all levels of the Mindful Awareness Practices or MAP classes at UCLA’s Mindful Awareness Research Center (MARC). In addition to teaching at UCLA, Gloria leads mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR) classes and retreats in Los Angeles as well as other U.S. cities and internationally. Throughout her career, Gloria has trained with mindfulness leaders such as Jon Kabat-Zinn Ph.D., founder of the Mindfulness-based Stress Reduction program (MBSR), teachers at Spirit Rock Meditation Center as well as Shinzen Young, Ph.D., founder of  Vipassana Support International. Gloria earned her B.S. in education from the University of Michigan and an M.A. in guidance and counseling from Eastern Michigan University.  She has maintained a personal meditation practice for more than three decades, and her dedication to living mindfully is an integral part of her life.

A ruff transcript of our conversation:

Well, hello, I’m here with Gloria Kamler meditation teacher and again in all disclosure. I met Gloria as one of my teachers over at UCLA. So we’re just going to jump in and how are you today before we get started?

I’m happy to be here good curious as to what this is gonna be and it’s very excited about what you’re doing great. I appreciate that.

So the first question is why meditate?

That’s a really good question. One of my teachers who has been shins and young. That’s one of the things he has asked when you first sit down every time you can ask that question and quite often. I do ask that question and I encourage others to ask themselves the same question as to why we do this practice. So I asked myself the question and I get different answers at different times. Definitely when I got interested in meditation. Thirty-some years ago. My reasons for meditating, I don’t know that I had a well-formed reason I just heard it was kind of an interesting thing to do and it was 1969 and I wanted to find some way to bring in some peace. And so I heard meditation maybe could be helpful in that regard. And so that’s what first got me into interested. You know, it’s the time of the Vietnam War and there was a lot of conflict and recognizing that maybe there’s more. Maybe there’s just more about life that I couldn’t see, you know, I sure so that with that’s what got me interested then and then I suspect over time. I got interested more specifically in mindfulness of that approach to meditation. Just recognizing that. I had a very serious meditation practice that was two and a half hours a day. Wow, and I did that for 10 years and that was a very long time to do practice Yeah, and. Over that time I always felt that something was missing for me in terms of the kind of meditation. It was it was it was a mantra focused practice, but for some reason it didn’t seem to be impacting my life in terms of me noticing. How important it was in my life. So I was looking after 10 years I was looking for. Wanting to meditate because I knew it was a good way to help me focus and to calm down a bit, but I wanted something more relevant for how I lived my life. Maybe the ethical way of living my life, right? Not sure what it was, but I knew I needed. Something different plus two and a half hours a day of meditation practice was unsustainable for me. I wasn’t the best meditator. So two and a half hour two hours of day. That’s that’s quite a bit two and a half hours is one-tenth of your day. Yeah, I’ll people tithe a tenth of their. This is a tenth of your time. Wow, and and I did it for a long time. But I never felt like I was very good at it. So I was looking around the last couple of years of in that ten year time of was there something else I could do?

Shinzen Young is an American mindfulness teacher and neuroscience research consultant.

His systematic approach to categorizing, adapting and teaching meditation, known as Unified Mindfulness, has resulted in collaborations with Harvard Medical School, Carnegie-Mellon University and the University of Vermont in the bourgeoning field of contemplative neuroscience.

Shinzen’s interest in Asia began at the age of 14 when he decided to attend Japanese ethnic school in his native city of Los Angeles.

After majoring in Asian languages at UCLA, he entered a PhD program in Buddhist Studies at the University of Wisconsin. As a part of his thesis research, he lived as a Shingon (Japanese Vajrayana) monk for three years at Mount Koya, Japan. It was then that he received the name Shinzen (真善).

Also during that time, he became friends with Father William Johnston (author of Christian Zen). Fr. Johnston helped broaden Shinzen’s interests to include comparative world mysticism and the scientific study of meditative states.

Upon returning to the United States, his academic interests shifted to the dialogue between Eastern meditation and Western science.

Shinzen is known for his interactive, algorithmic approach to mindfulness, and often uses mathematical metaphors to illustrate meditative phenomena.

He is the author of The Science of Enlightenment, Natural Pain Relief and numerous audio offerings.

Shinzen leads residential retreats throughout North America. In 2006, he created the Home Practice Program. These phone-based mini-retreats are designed to make deep meditation practice accessible to anyone in the world regardless of their location, health situation, and time or financial constraints.

Shinzen gives us a reading of TS Eliot’s poem “The Little Gidding”. A great ending to a great interview. 

This is the Shinzen’s Periodic table of happiness.  Click Here.

Shinzen’s in depth look at Mindfulness. Click Here

A ruff transcript of our conversation:  

Hello, I’m here with Shinsen Young an American mindfulness teacher and Neuroscience research consultant. Welcome.

Thank you. This is my favorite thing to do talk about meditation mindfulness and so forth. So I’ll yes, feel free to ask whatever you would like to ask.

I appreciate it. The first question is very basic.

Why meditate? I have a set answer to that question personally my favorite answer but then I think I would preface it by saying that the answer is Technical and therefore requires some explication. So in a word. Why should someone meditate?  Or in afraid it’s the phrase would be in order to optimize happiness, but we’re going.

Be precise about what we mean by happiness. I have developed something that I call the Periodic Table of Happiness elements. It looks yeah, it looks a little bit like a periodic table of chemical elements except.