Contentment in Times of Stress

Discover the secret to finding profound contentment even in the most stressful times. What if you could cultivate a deeper sense of fulfillment through mindful awareness and systems thinking? On today's Conscious Classroom podcast, Amy Edelstein guides you through transformative insights that will help you create  spaces for rejuvenation. You'll learn how to  harness the power of meditation to develop an inner sense of wholeness and simplicity, empowering you to maintain a backdrop of contentment no matter the challenges you face.

Transcript

Amy: 0:10

Welcome to the Conscious Classroom podcast, where we're exploring tools and perspectives that support educators and anyone who works with teens to create more conscious, supportive and enriching learning environments. I'm your host, amy Edelstein, and I'll be sharing transformative insights and easy-to-implement classroom supports that are all drawn from mindful awareness and systems thinking. The themes we'll discuss are designed to improve your own joy and fulfillment in your work and increase your impact on the world we share. Let's get on with this next episode. Share let's get on with this next episode. Hello and welcome to the Conscious Classroom. My name is Amy Edelstein.

Amy: 0:52

Today, I want to talk about contentment in times of stress. I want to talk about what it means to be able to be content in the midst of very challenging times, and I want to talk about some habits that we can develop, as well as how to relate to our meditation practice in a way that brings a type of contentment that's much deeper than that which comes and goes, much deeper than anything we can have and get and strive to insert into our lives in order to feel more content. Now, oftentimes, when we seek for contentment, we look outside to create the perfect place, and I can understand that. I have several places in the world where I go, where I experience a level of restoration and rejuvenation, where the land itself is so vibrant and vital and filled with a living sense of being that I can't but help but let go and find myself waking to the experience of profundity, moving through my day with a sense of delight and lightness of being and coming to the end of the day feeling just extraordinarily blessed by the richness of life and the grace and the unbelievable good fortune to just experience that sense of a living world, a living universe, and being non-separate from that living universe. So I encourage everyone to find those places where you go and experience that sense of restoration and rejuvenation in a very simple life, simple way of being. Or create that space in your own environment, in your home. Clean out that storage room and paint it a color that brings to mind sacredness, and create a little room that is only for contemplation, only for restoration of the self, only for the evolution of the soul. So sacred spaces are very important, and particularly when we live in environments or in times, like we do, where there just is so much friction.

Amy: 3:53

At the same time, what I want to talk about today is experiencing with such a depth, that level of wholeness and simplicity of being, that there is a background, a backdrop of contentment, even in times of stress, when we allow ourselves to immerse in our meditation practice and give ourselves the luxury and the time to really let go of thought, really let go of anything unresolved, let go of petty frustrations or more serious grievances. Let go of heartache, petty frustrations or more serious grievances. Let go of heartache. Let go of hurts, not to say that there might not be times and modalities where those hurts need to be tended to. Not every injury is going to heal of its own accord. If we break a bone, it's far better to go and get it set properly so when it heals we'll be in good shape. The same is true for our inner world.

Amy: 5:21

At the same time, allow yourself to really go deep in your own meditation practice. Whether you have a short period of time or months to dedicate to retreat, really let yourself. Let go. Let go of the surface of thought, let go of unresolved angst and need, let go so that you experience, in a way that you truly know, that there's a substrate, groundwater in the deepest recesses of yourself that is pure and vibrant and whole and light filled with light filled with goodness. The more you let yourself rest at that level of being, the more accessible it becomes to you in the middle of really challenging times. Allow yourself to step back from everything you know you need to tend to in your life, as well as all the aspirations and plans and dreams that maybe you don't need to tend to at this moment, and give yourself to the practice of resting in complete contentment and doing nothing, because there's nothing that's needed to be done at that level of wholeness of self.

Amy: 7:30

And while sometimes a single glimpse is enough to truly transform our lives, a single parting of the clouds, so that we see that the sun was always there in all of its brilliance, it was never obscured. It could never be obscured. It was only us who thought that veil of clouds meant something about the light itself, and that light is our nature, is our essence. So sometimes one single glimpse is enough, and sometimes the repeated habit of letting go of unresolved issues, letting go of the mind, letting go of frustration, letting go of doubt, letting go of need, letting go of self-criticism, letting go of doubt, letting go of need, letting go of self-criticism, letting go of fear, letting go of self-hatred and allowing ourselves to rest in the recesses of our heart, heart and we find extraordinary beauty, grace, divinity, life force, energy, or chi or prana, or whatever you want to call it. There seems to be a term for this life essence in so many different languages and traditions. You can also call it love, that quality of love that is without object. It's not the love where I love that or I love so-and-so, and that can be a transient being or environment or sunset that comes and goes. We discover in the innermost recesses of our heart, when we let go of that constant negativity and fear, we discover an essence of love that becomes endlessly fascinating. It's like a tractor beam that draws us into it. It's like a tractor beam that pulls us close and allowing ourselves. It's like a tractor beam that pulls us close and allowing ourselves to go there over and over again. We really experience and realize that there's a wellspring of positivity that can support us through anything.

Amy: 10:35

I was reflecting on this. A dear old friend was asking me about doubtlessness. And Is there something that I know to be true, that I cannot doubt, and on one level, the level of my constructed self that's set in time and history. Of course, we can never know what the future is going to bring. We can never know if something we felt certain about today may be upended in the future, or some emotional certainty we felt may get washed away in the tidal wave, challenge or suffering or global concerns. So we don't really know. At the same time, this touch point that I've been speaking about is something that I've experienced provide enormous steadiness in the midst of the most challenging times, the times filled with most personal doubt and self-doubt. I was going to tell you a story right now and it just kept not coming out of my mouth. So I thought maybe what we really need right now is to do some guided practice together, as I always say, because you never know where somebody might be listening to a podcast. If you're driving, keep your focus on the road ahead and be alert and save the meditation for when you're not in a moving vehicle, and save the meditation for when you're not in a moving vehicle, and maybe I'll tell you this story later about why that is such a caution for me.

Amy: 12:47

Let your eyes close and allow yourself to sit back and sink into yourself. Allow the weight, the anchor, the steadiness of your true heart to settle you like an anchor dropped at sea allows the ship to stay in place. Imagine that that anchor of your heart grounds you, extends to the center of the earth, where you're held with the love of billions of years of evolution, where you're held connected to the heart of the manifest world, steady, embraced, treasured and welcomed. Allow any tension to melt from your face. Allow the tension to dissolve from your jaws, your eyes, your ears and neck and shoulders. Allow the pressures of the mind to be ironed out as the heart pulls everything smooth, releasing the kinks and the wrinkles of day-to-day living and the inevitable frictions and conflicts of the world.

Amy: 16:05

Let your attention, your vision, turn inward. Let your attention, your vision, turn inward towards the core of your heart that you can't see and yet you feel its presence. You feel it as something that is you, as if you were the flavor of the most fragrant tea entering and pervading the warm water. You can't separate the fragrance from the water. The fragrance is in the water, the water is in the fragrance is in the water, the water is in the fragrance. And feel that embrace of your heart in the same way that your heart embraces you and you are that embrace. Allow yourself to dissolve into this experience, letting the mind settle.

Amy: 18:01

Letting the mind settle, letting feelings of awe, joy, happiness, wonder, grace, grace, sanctity, grace, care, nobility and love Flow into your experience and out of your experience. Allow a smile to come over your face, an inner smile or an outer smile. Take a deep breath in and a deep breath out. If your eyes have been closed, if your eyes have been closed, allow your gaze to return to your surroundings, finding one single object or shape that fills you with delight. Let yourself connect with the little beauty in your surroundings. Each little grace of a half circle or a bright color carries with it the seed of the immense joy you allowed yourself to settle into. Take a deep breath in. Take a deep breath in and, with a smile on your face, exhale.

Amy: 21:02

Take another breath in feeling the shift from the depths of letting go to engagement with the world as we return to the thinking and feeling orientation to life. Notice how different that experience is right now and allow yourself to move into this next moment, from this altered place, this place of integration, this place of wholeness, this place of joy and contentment, and freedom from the need for anything else outside us to complete us. Freedom from the need to be or discover anything else, freedom that's immediate and filled with such gentleness and care For life itself. Now that you've discovered and experienced a taste of that contentment, where we didn't remove any of the issues and where I didn't even tell you a story to inspire you and uplift your mood, to inspire you and uplift your mood, we simply shifted our lens of attention from the surface layer of conflict to that quality of love and energy and light and goodness that runs through the groundwater of existence. And when we shift our attention, that moves into the foreground of our awareness and floods our being, it's almost like a cellular level where we feel that flood of joy and happiness that's so excited and delighted that our cells can hardly contain the energy. Just like you can think that sometimes atoms or electrons get so excited they can hardly contain their energy and they burst out of their customary path and merge and bond and form new compounds.

Amy: 24:27

So we can get into the habit of appreciation, we can develop the habit of returning to contentment by shifting our gaze, whether it's in our meditation or it's in the moment of walking down the hallway or getting on a phone call or turning back to our work project, where we're about to complain either aloud or to ourselves, where we're about to look at fragmentation, disappointment, being let down, where we're about to look at what needs to be corrected, what is out of place, and we can shift our attention to wholeness. We can shift our attention to wholeness, we can shift our attention to appreciation, we can shift our attention towards what is blessed and as we do that, we develop a different habit, a different habit towards ourselves, a different habit towards life, a different habit towards those around us and whether things need fixing and need correcting and need uplifting. All of that is true, is true. But we can respond to the fragmentation in the world from a perspective of ultimate wholeness, non-separation, profound interconnectedness, closeness, intimacy, freedom from boundaries. Freedom from boundaries and developing that habit, supported by these periods where we turn our attention consciously towards that wholeness, will allow us to be steady in life. In life, it will continue to strengthen that anchor that holds us steady in the hurricane on the surface of our experience.

Amy: 27:11

So I encourage you to really spend time of our experience. So I encourage you to really spend time exploring this level of yourself and I encourage you to take seriously your glimpses of this profound wholeness and embrace of the earth, the way the earth embraces all of creation, from the beginning of the first attraction of the first atom, the first proton that met its first neutron and formed into being and held, and from that first forming our whole universe, solar system, planets, stars, creatures all formed from that embrace and all formed from that embrace and we're formed from that embrace. We're not separate from that embrace and that embrace is both us and continues to hold us. And from this vantage point we see that we were never alone. We were never separate from everything else that is and that can give us great support in the midst of a world that has so much turbulence.

Amy: 29:01

Thank you for sharing this contemplation with me. Continue to explore contentment in times of stress, share with me what you are discovering and how it's changing your own life and the lives of those around you, and let's keep doing everything we can to blow on the sparks of being and bring more light and energy and experience of that connectedness into the surface of the world. Thank you so much. Thank you for listening to the Conscious Classroom. I'm your host, amy Edelstein. Please check out the show notes on innerstrengthfoundationnet for links and more information and if you enjoyed this podcast, please share it with a friend and pass the love on. See you next time.