Podcast Episode 17: Guided Meditation on Expanding Our Container

In this episode of The Steward Project podcast, I'm offering something a little different.

This episode, I'm offering a guided meditation to help us expand our containers in order to thrive in a challenging world as we do radical work. When I was in Mexico for my yoga retreat, I made sure to sneak down to the beach and record this guided meditation for you!

This is one of my personal Radical Self-Care practices...whenever I'm in nature (whether it's the ocean, a lake, the redwoods, or a warm summer night with crickets singing), I record a minute or two of the sounds. Then I listen to the sounds again in a moment when I need a break. I highly recommend this practice. Another way to ground ourselves in the midst of chaos.

In this episode, I share a parable from Sharon Salzberg, the revered meditation teacher. What she suggests is that the things in our life that we cannot control is like salt. What Sharon says is, if we take a teaspoon of salt and put it into a cup of water, it will change the consistency of that water. But if we take that same teaspoon of salt and put it into a lake...it will not change the consistency of that water.

Since we cannot control the amount of salt being thrown at us daily, Sharon suggests:

"Our true work is to create a container so immense

that any amount of salt, even a truckload,

can come into it without effecting

our capacity to receive it."

A few things I highlight in this episode are:

We cannot control everything about our lives or our work. Our job, then, is to pull into courageous practices that keep us sustained in this life and in our work.
We cannot control the amount of "salt" in our lives, but we can expand our container to be able to accept any amount of salt without being impacted by it.
Pulling into this meditation for Radical Self-Care is NOT about numbing ourselves out or distracting ourselves from the systemic work that needs to be done. The only way we can dismantle these systems is to STAY IN THE WORK...and the only way we stay in the work is by doing the self-care.
Loving-Kindness: The Revolutionary Art of Happiness by Sharon Salzberg
Radical Self-Care practice of recording nature audio and replaying it in times of stress.