Reflecting on Our Mortality | Meditation with Geeta

Mindfulness Off the Cushion

Season 3 Bonus - This guided meditation is for anyone seeking to explore the nature of their mortality. It is a profound practice that under the normal circumstances of everyday life – we rarely examine with mindful awareness.

Whenever we contemplate our mortality, many big and strong emotions may arise in the process of this exploration. My encouragement is that if you decide to practice this guided meditation, please do so in a safe space where such emotions can be held, nurtured, and explored.

As you will hear from the Geeta, we are asked to reflect what would be on our bucket list if we knew we had one year to live. We are then gently and lovingly asked to contemplate this very bucket list as the time of mortality shortens from one year to six months, to one month, to one week, to one day, to one hour, to one minute, and finally to one breath.

I want to thank Geeta because this guided meditation is one of those rare experiences where we get to make sense of what really, really, really matters to us.

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Our special guest, Geeta Cowlagi, helps us create the conditions to make contact with this body, mind, and heart from a place of safety and abundance. We explore how through the act of simply releasing and softening the body, we can begin to release and soften the heart against what Geeta refers to as the “ouches” of our lives.

As she points out, we humans can carry these “ouches” in the form of physical pain through tension in the body - or emotional pain through the stories or narratives we tell ourselves. And in this guided meditation, we explore, we feel, we make contact with what it would be like in this mind/body system to gently and patiently lay down our defenses against the ‘ouch’ and to soften and release in the face of the ‘ouch.”

The moment we practice doing this is a moment of kindness and compassion toward ourselves.

Thank you, Geeta, for this lovely meditation.

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We would love to hear from you! - What would you like to know about mindfulness or how it can help you with the issues you are facing? Record your question for our podcast team. If your message is selected, we will answer it on the podcast!
Ask us a question on our website at https://www.austinmindfulness.org/podcast
We hope you enjoy our season with Dr. Sears and are able to learn more helpful ways to practice mindfulness in your daily walk. Enjoy!
Host Lance Vaughn, Co-owner of the Austin Mindfulness Center
Co-host Claudio Barrientos, Mindfulness Instructor at the Austin Mindfulness Center