Welcome to Unshakable Man Breathwork. If you feel like you’ve lost touch with your practice or you’ve felt resistance to allowing yourself to show up, whether that be in a check-in group, breathwork, or the core practice of meditation. Today is for you.
I invite you to repeatedly come back to this session whenever you want to renew your practice. These sessions are recorded so you can fit them into your shila and your schedule. Every time you return to a guided meditation you get to see yourself, your practice, and what is shared in the session in a new way.
Join our brotherhood of conscious men at unshakableman.com
Video Recording
Related Readings
“No matter what our life may be right now, whether we are feeling pleasure or pain, whether we are living or dying, in a sense it is the perfect life for us. This is because it is right here and nowhere else, in this situation, at this moment, that we meet what is ultimately real and meaningful in the universe. It is here that we discover our purpose for being and find the gate to our ultimate fulfillment. And we are invited to see that ultimate fulfillment is not at the end of some long road but is already fully and completely present to us in this moment of life as it unfolds in us on its way toward the future. Ultimacy is to be found, not in some other time and place, but only right here and now.” – The beauty of the practice of pure awareness. – Pg. 190
“Uncomfortable as our state of mind may be, there seems to be no way out, because at this moment we can even imagine that there is an alternative, that any “outside” even exists. We are caught within the circular, solipsistic logic of our thinking mind. Neuroscience explains that when we get trapped within the endlessly repeating loops and circuitry of our prefrontal cortex like this, we tend to mistake our thought for reality and are oblivious to any other way of knowing or seeing or even to the notion that there is any other reality to be known. Research shows that even in the face of blatant somatic evidence to the contrary, we often habitually refuse to see or acknowledge it. This is the height of self-deception, yet it is the human default when our thinking mind is disconnected from our body and our somatic experience.” – Resistance, when we can’t get to our practice – Pg. 162
“When we are caught in our thinking mind, we don’t quite see the point of all this meditation. At the same time egos default mode – trying to run faster and faster and pushing even harder to control everything right now – seems to be the only reliable way to resolve our gnawing existential discomfort or pain. At this point, we are really trapped in ruminating and have lost the ability to see through it. Especially if we are new to meditation, the logic of our thoughts can be so compelling and overwhelming that we begin to distrust the practice and its whole approach. This is the moment when, in my experience, the new meditator is most likely to quit, running off to find something better: drugs, social media, a new therapist, exciting travel, a new relationship, a new teacher, anything but this” – Page 163
“If we have been practicing meditation for a while, we are still vulnerable to this mental contempt for nonconceptual reality. In this case, abandoning the meditative journey rarely happens via some dramatic decision. Rather, say on Tuesday we have a lot to do, and when the time comes to meditate, it just seems like we should be doing other things, so we skip our practice. We say to ourselves, “I will certainly get back to my practice tomorrow.” Then on Wednesday, again we have a busy day ahead, and so again we skip our practice. Thursday we may give it a try but feel stale; so we feel, “what’s the point?” Friday and Saturday, we just can’t get to it. Then on Sunday, our family is going away for a few days, and we think, with some relief, “obviously I can’t do anything then.” In this way we are building a pattern of avoiding our practice, meanwhile justifying and rationalizing it to ourselves. We are building a case against meditation, bit by bit. We are believing the voice in our head telling us that mediation is possibly a big waste of time or at least can be deferred…”
“…That presupposes a fundamental view about human life that is INCORRECT: Fundamental and lasting human happiness cannot be gained through the path of consumption and gratification. It is just not how we, as humans, are set up. If we would like to feel happy, fulfilled, and at peace with ourselves, we need to connect with our own state of being, our own body, our own human experience, and our incarnation in its totality. Again, continually scrambling around to feed our sense of lack with the poisonous fruit of compulsive consumerism just is not going to work.” – Commitment, Discipline, and Devotion – Page 165
And so… we begin our practice.