Treating ourselves tenderly
a meditation prompt for beginners
Hi, everyone. I have a meditation prompt for you today. Maybe you’ve never meditated before, or could use a little welcome back in? This one is short and accessible—I hope you consider giving it a try.
My mindfulness practices include some things others might not think of in this category: journaling, dancing, laughing, singing loudly (esp in the car), tea drinking, lighting candles, and Liana Finck’s cartoons. Anything that helps me pause, come back to my body, and feel more alive in the actual moment.
Meditation and yoga are both practices that I know will be good for me, that I really want to do, but just struggle to actually do for any number of reasons (my resistance to “meditation teacher voice,” lack of time, ambivalence, the moon is in the wrong phase, my bad knees, etc etc). Can you relate?
When I was at a low point with my mental health a few years ago, my friend, Jane McCafferty (featured in this recent interview) asked me if I meditated. I hemmed and hawed as usual, but she followed up with, “Have you tried Tara Brach’s meditations? They’re great and free.” Because I trust Jane, I gave it a try.
Tara Brach quickly became a touchstone for me. Her meditations and talks proved that meditation could hold some real transformative power for me.
It’s often wildly uncomfortable at first, but if you can hang in there, it’s powerful to witness the way your mind naturally returns to your habitual patterns of thinking when it’s not focused on, or distracted by, something else. What is so resonant for me about Brach’s approach is that she centers self-compassion, something that I was, and often still am, sorely in need of. Brach writes in her first book, Radical Acceptance, “this revolutionary act of treating ourselves tenderly can begin to undo the aversive messages of a lifetime.”
It’s discouraging to see the way I slip with lightning speed into obsessing about the usual suspects as soon as I close my eyes and sit in the quiet—cycling through worries about my kids or work deadlines or when my migraine will go away. I often feel miles away from the calm and expansiveness that I know is just out of reach.
But if I keep sitting there, eventually the clouds in my mind start to part and I feel a little lighter and if I can keep breathing in and out, I can float above the stress and anxiety—I can get to that clear, expansive space people talk about. And I feel free. I hope today’s prompt will help you get there, too.
So, here’s your prompt for today (ok, three possible ones):
Tara Brach’s “RAIN of Compassion” meditation. I linked to Spotify but you can find it anywhere for free. It’s 9 minutes long and gives you an intro to her RAIN method, which I highly recommend.
If you only have 5 minutes (which is usually me on mornings before heading in to work), this one is stellar, too: “9 Magic Breaths.”
If you’d like a longer one, here’s a great one that’s 18 minutes: “Mind Like a Vast Sky”
If you try one, let me know what you think!
Be Where You Are is a newsletter about how to use writing and mindfulness to be where you are. I’ll be back on Sunday with a mini-essay. You’re always welcome to reply to this email, comment below, or find me on instagram (@mohnslate) or elsewhere. If you enjoyed this, I’d love it if you would send it to a friend.