Why Meditate‪?‬ Bob O'Haver

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.