Metta for the difficult relative
A listener asked how to stop dreading her mother-in-law's Sunday visits. Chamari introduces metta, loving-kindness practice, explains why it starts with yourself, and guides a practice aimed at one ha…
Your mind is not supposed to stop
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Show notes
Wandering is the practice
The first episode addresses the reason most people quit: they sat, their mind raced, and they decided they had failed. Chamari explains that noticing the wandering is the whole exercise, and that the Buddha's instructions assume a restless mind from the first line.
- What sati, usually translated as mindfulness, actually means
- The breath as an anchor, not a prison
- A listener in Galle on practising in a three-wheeler in traffic
- Guided practice: eight minutes, eyes open, counting breaths to ten and starting again
Chamari suggests doing the practice once a day for a week and sending in what happened, including the bad days.
Transcript
Hello and welcome to The Breath Between. My name is Chamari Wijesinghe. I grew up in a Buddhist home in Kandy, I spent three years in a forest monastery, and I want to tell you something at the very start of this show: my mind still wanders. Constantly. It wandered this morning while I was writing this introduction. So if you have tried meditation and decided you are the one person it does not work for because your thoughts would not stop, this episode is for you. Your mind is not supposed to stop. Noticing that it moved is the practice. We will look at what the Buddha actually said about attention, hear from a listener who practises in a tuk-tuk, and then I will guide you through eight minutes you can do with your eyes open. You are listening on Witspeak Podcasts.
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