Wake Up, Human
Wake Up, Human is an exploration of the native powers of the human being. This podcast examines the ways we humans have become disconnected—from our innate wisdom, from each other, and from the natural world—and explores practical strategies for reconnecting to wholeness. Drop in for information and inspiration to help us reawaken and heal ourselves, our relationships, and our planet.
Wake Up, Human
Ep.09: Meditation as Medicine
Have you ever noticed the endless stream of thoughts running through your mind? The unexamined mental chatter that dictates your mood, decisions, and sense of self? What if there was a simple practice that could help you step back from this mental noise and reconnect with your deeper wisdom?
In this powerful solo episode, I explore meditation as a remedy for what I call "separation sickness" - the profound disconnection from our essential nature that manifests as anxiety, purposelessness, and the nagging feeling that something vital is missing from our lives. Drawing from nearly 20 years of personal practice, I share how meditation creates a revolutionary shift in perspective: the realization that we are not our thoughts.
This single insight transforms our relationship with our minds and the world. When we witness our thoughts rather than identifying with them, we reclaim sovereignty over our attention and choices. We can see cultural programming, advertising messages, and self-limiting beliefs for what they are - mental constructs rather than absolute truths. In the space between stimulus and response lies our freedom and reconnection to native intelligence.
The practice itself doesn't require special equipment, credentials, or complex techniques. Simply sitting quietly, watching the mind, and using the breath as an anchor provides the laboratory for this profound self-discovery. Like putting on glasses and suddenly seeing individual leaves instead of a green blur, meditation reveals the distinct nature of thoughts and our capacity to choose our relationship with them.
Ready to experiment with this "people's medicine" that's available to everyone regardless of education, wealth, or status? Join me in exploring how this ancient practice offers a revolutionary remedy for our modern disconnection - not by adding something new, but by reconnecting with the wisdom that has always been our birthright.
Hello everyone and welcome to episode 9 of the Wake Up Human podcast. I'm your host, shannon Wills, and in this episode there's no interview guest. It's just me, me talking about a subject that's dear to my heart and relevant to waking up, and that's meditation. Specifically, what I'm calling in this episode, meditation is medicine, so let's hit it. Welcome to the Wake Up Human podcast. I'm Shannon Wills, a curious wanderer with a passion for digging into life's mysteries and mining them for wisdom to apply to our modern lives. This podcast explores the ways we humans have become disconnected from our native ways of knowing what we have lost and what we can gain by coming back into wholeness. Each episode will explore this theme of reconnecting with our innate human power in order to heal ourselves, our relationships and our planet. Thanks for spending some time with me today. Now let's jump into the latest installment of Wake Up Human. Welcome to the Wake Up Human podcast.
Shannon W.:In this episode, I'm going it solo. Rather than post an interview, I've decided to spend some time talking about a single topic, one that's been foundational to my own development and is one of my favorite tools for waking up. It's meditation. As I just said in the intro, the purpose of Wake Up Human is to explore the essential powers of the human being, to explore the ways we've become disconnected from our native ways of knowing, and to explore practical knowledge and skills for coming back into wholeness. In my experience, one of the most practical ways to explore this theme of waking up is through meditation. Why? Well, there's a part of us that is behind our thoughts, behind our emotions. That's a part of original consciousness that's connected to our original nature. There's a part of us that knows things more widely, more deeply and further back than our culture and our society and our language have taught us to be. There's our original nature, and then there's the modern matrix of thoughts, opinions and beliefs that can gum up our minds and confuse our intentions and desires, and all that mind stuff can make us forget who we really are. So, for those of us who wish to wake up, we would do well to pull apart some of the threads of that matrix of culture, society and beliefs and look for the place behind it, the place where we connect with everything, that is, our conscious awareness. Meditation can help us get there.
Shannon W.:I've incorporated some sort of meditation practice into my life for close to 20 years, and that doesn't mean 20 years of so-called success or continued progress. Anyone who's practiced meditation knows that searching for success with the practice or quote doing it right is not the point. What that 20 years does mean is that I've got years of experience with starting and stopping, experimenting with different practices, experiencing not only some transcendent highs but also a lot of shadowy lows and lots of lessons learned. Sometimes I've kept a solid meditation practice for long stretches of time and others I've been really patchy. But after all this time, now, whenever I personally feel disconnected from my roots or my native wisdom or just my sense of inner calm, the first thing I return to, as sort of a zero point reset, is meditation. So that's the perspective I'm talking to you from today, not as an expert, not as a master meditator, but as a longtime practitioner who is still on this journey of discovering the process of finding self-mastery in relationship to the mind, mastery in relationship to the mind. So my assumption is that the majority of you listening will also have some experience with meditation, and you may even be meditation teachers or guides yourselves. My intention here is not to teach meditation or to promote any particular practice. There are tons of resources and teachers sharing meditation instruction out there today and I can share some of my favorites and some resources in the show notes for this episode, but I do encourage people just to explore and to learn about the practice and follow your interests.
Shannon W.:My intention here is to unpack a particular theme around meditation the idea of meditation as medicine. So meditation as medicine for what you might ask? Well, if you listened to episode two of this podcast, you'll be familiar with a concept I shared there called separation sickness. Separation sickness is the sense of alienation we feel when we're disconnected from our basic human beingness, when we're out of touch with our sense of knowing who we are, why we're here and what we need to be truly happy and fulfilled. It's a sickness that can come upon us when we're out of touch with the cycles and seasons of life or disconnected from a sense of place or meaning and we feel lost in the world.
Shannon W.:We can wonder what we're here for or what our purpose is, and in the modern world we're lost in our screens and we're running on the hamster wheel of life and we may not feel that we're getting anywhere. So we wonder anywhere. So we wonder what is it all for? And we want to be healthy, but we're disconnected from our bodies, so health eludes us. Or we want to have strong relationships, but we feel disconnected or isolated from each other. Or we care for the state of the planet, of other beings, and we want to contribute to the healing of the world, but we're overwhelmed. Or we just want to be at peace, but we're just continually stuck in a chaos of thoughts and emotions.
Shannon W.:We can get so stuck in our heads that we may find ourselves doubting the very existence of consciousness, of intuition, of a native intelligence that is beyond the mind. We may even doubt the very existence of spirit or soul. When we do that, it actually could be a sure sign of that separation sickness. We may not even know that we're sick from separation at all. We may just recognize that something is wrong. So separation sickness affects not only the mind but the body and the soul, and it results in a loss of connection and rootedness and purpose and just a sense of belonging in the world.
Shannon W.:So we go searching outside ourselves for fulfillment and answers to the meaning of life and happiness, but we often don't find it. And the reason we don't find it, as the sages would say, is that what we need, what we're looking for is already within us. Our fulfillment is part of us, part of consciousness that we come into the world with. We're born part of the whole. We are born complete, but our materialist society has taught us to look outside ourselves for fulfillment answers purpose. The irony is that we're already complete and when we look outside for completeness, we scatter ourselves around, we split ourselves into pieces and we get further away from the completeness that we already are.
Shannon W.:So this sounds maybe a bit esoteric, but really it's not. It's just a reality that we live in today. It's a byproduct of the consumer society that we live in. Our society is a PR machine that keeps itself running by convincing us that we need things, preferably new things, to keep us happy. So separation sickness is just what happens when we believe that false story and think we need a bunch of new things or new experiences or new knowledge. So we go to Walmart or we go to Amazon. Or maybe we don't like Walmart or Amazon I don't. So instead we go to the farmer's market and we buy some local organic greens, or we buy some artisan craft that was made by refugees from some other country, and then we feel good about our choices. Or we go traveling, or we take courses and workshops, or we get degrees and certifications, but whatever it is that we obtain, all of this is outside of us, and while it does make a difference where we choose to spend our money and our time and attention, when it comes to fulfillment, the truth is we don't actually need new things to be fulfilled. We don't need to go shopping, exploring or gathering experiences. What we need is to return to ourselves.
Shannon W.:Returning to ourselves, quieting, coming inward, helps us to reconnect to the community of life. When we're quiet, receptive, when we're listening, there's a whole universe of experience waiting for us to open our eyes to the mystery and wholeness of life. This is where our native intelligence can be found. So separation, sickness, is a social thing, and I don't think I need to prove this to anyone. I think anyone listening, if you stop and think for a moment, you'll find some version of truth in this.
Shannon W.:There's this epidemic of disconnection, of people sleepwalking through their lives, people living lives of quiet desperation, as Henry David Thoreau would say, people on a treadmill of the daily grind, knowing there's something more but feeling helpless to find it. So we see people stockpiling material objects in the name of security or fulfilling some kind of identity based on what they own. We see people resorting to violence in the name of their beliefs and ideologies, when those beliefs and ideologies are just surface differences between people. Well, underneath those differences, we're all humans. We're all human consciousness, which is the same everywhere. So we see people becoming suicidal when their life lacks meaning and they can't find that meaning. We're just not being shown where to find it. We're so desperate for meaning and purpose that we're willing to kill or die for it. And it makes sense, because meaning is a deep shared human need.
Shannon W.:But killing and destroying doesn't bring meaning. Killing and destroying brings more separation, but meaning is found in wholeness. So when we look outside ourselves for fulfillment, we become less whole. When we kill and destroy, we become less whole. When we isolate ourselves from the world, we become less whole, not more. Fulfillment is in connection, inwardly and outwardly.
Shannon W.:All of this is why separation is a sickness. So if we take this separation sickness as a real thing, the question is what do we do about it? If separation is a sickness, then it stands to argue that a remedy, a medicine, would be connection or reconnection in the places that we have become disconnected From that we could say that anything that helps us reconnect to our wholeness can be a kind of medicine for separation sickness. We could say if the sickness is called separation sickness, the remedy could be called a reconnection remedy. I like this. I like this idea of a reconnection remedy for separation sickness. All this is why I call meditation medicine, because meditation is a remedy. It's a tool for reconnection, and a really powerful one is a remedy. It's a tool for reconnection and a really powerful one.
Shannon W.:So in this episode I'll be exploring meditation as a reconnection remedy or as a medicine. I'll share a little overview of meditation and I'll talk about some of the practical benefits of meditation practice. I'll also share some personal stories from my journey and provide some practical tips along the way. I hope there'll be something here of benefit to both experienced meditators and beginners alike. I'm not a trained meditation teacher and I don't claim to have any special method or way to do things. I'm not trying to convince anyone, but rather to share my passion for something I find very exciting and helpful.
Shannon W.:I will say that I think meditation is worth trying for every one of us, even just to dip our foot into the pool of the practice and, even if nothing else to recognize that there is a pool. There's a pool of consciousness that we are part of, that is behind our thoughts and emotions. There's a part of us that's deeper, more deeply connected to the wholeness of life, and we can have access to it. It's right there for us to see through practices like meditation. All we have to do is drop in, get quiet and look, and when we do see it, we realize there's more to life than what we think. There's something deeper within us than thought. It's something that connects us to our own innate wisdom, and it connects us to each other and to all of life. When we drop into it, we come closer to what I call our essential powers or native intelligence. As human beings, our sense of interbeing with life is sharpened. We start to plug back into the ground of consciousness that the sages and yogis have always said is the path to inner peace, to inner peace in ourselves and outer peace in the world. We literally can plug ourselves back in, and that's why I call this a reconnection remedy. So thanks for joining me today and thanks for listening through this somewhat lengthy explanation. Now let's jump a bit more into discussion on this theme of meditation is medicine. And before we move on, I want to drop a quick note of thanks here to naturalist John Young, from whom I borrowed the terminology of separation sickness and the term epidemic of disconnection, and I humbly submit the term reconnection remedy as my working term for the medicine of finding our way back to who we really are.
Shannon W.:So I thought it would be interesting to share the story of my first meditation experience, just to give some context to my background. The first time I ever tried to meditate it blew my mind I was in college at University of Colorado. I came to a meditation class because I was studying yoga and the center that put on the yoga classes offered a meditation class and said that it would be something helpful for people who are studying yoga. We might be interested in this meditation class. And this class was taught by a Buddhist meditator, I believe she was from the Denver Zen Center, and she sat us down and she didn't give us any instruction other than to sit quietly, close our eyes and watch the mind. And she basically said this sit quietly, close your eyes, watch your mind and go, close your eyes, watch your mind and go.
Shannon W.:So I closed my eyes and immediately found myself in an absolute waterfall of thoughts, just a complete deluge. I was completely covered with thoughts. They were everywhere and it felt like I was completely overwhelmed and couldn't breathe. And I opened my eyes and everyone around me was sitting quietly and I looked to my right and to my left and at the teacher. Everyone sitting quietly with their eyes closed, felt very peaceful. So I decided to try again, closed my eyes and I closed my eyes. Boom, waterfall, thoughts everywhere. It was like screeching tires, it was like traffic, it was like TV show and radio was on at the same time. It was like past and future and worries, and I mean it was all at once Opened my eyes and it was gone. And I went how have I never seen this before? And it was pretty upsetting actually, because I, you know, here I had come to sort of quiet my mind and I realized that when I closed my eyes it was a waterfall, it was a total mess in there. I had no idea.
Shannon W.:So when we finished the meditation practice, the teacher I think she had us go around and share a little bit of something that we noticed and pretty much all of us said you know, we just have thoughts everywhere. How are we supposed to quiet our minds in such a loud environment of thoughts? And what the teacher said was you are not your thoughts. This practice is to recognize that thoughts are there, they come and they go. They're messy or they're in nice straight rows, or they're loud or they're quiet, but when you close your eyes, you witness them, you can see them, and the lesson is you are not your thoughts.
Shannon W.:And before that experience it had never occurred to me that there was any separation between my thoughts and me. It had never even occurred to me to question it. I had always understood my thoughts to be an integral part of me, like my skin or something that is always there and that just comes along with me wherever I go and that's intimately attached to me and my identity. I thought that my thoughts were me. But after that first meditation experience, that assumption got blown open and I got a completely different view, because I had gotten a glimpse of my own thoughts. I had seen, because I had gotten a glimpse of my own thoughts, I had seen.
Shannon W.:It was like a Looney Tunes cartoon that I was watching inside my head and I had seen my thoughts, not like I would see the skin that was attached to me from the inside, but more like I would see someone else's skin or someone else's life, something separate from me. I could see my thoughts, like I would see images on a movie screen, and I had seen them not as something that was always there, but really something that was coming and going Again like a movie scene. It was like there were thoughts coming in and thoughts going out and thoughts coming on top. I mean, it wasn't that clear at the time, but what it was clear is that the thoughts were happening when I closed my eyes and I was watching. And what that meant is that if I was watching that, I was not that. If I was watching the thoughts, I was not the thoughts. So it's not like I had this big aha and suddenly was able to turn my thoughts on and off and play with them like clay.
Shannon W.:This experience was just the original aha. So all it was was me realizing I am not my thoughts. And actually that's just when the work began, because now I would actually have to work with that understanding. I would have to actually practice to learn what that means. If I'm not my thoughts, what am I? And if I'm not my thoughts, what are thoughts and how does that matter in the reality of my day-to-day life? It's hard to put into words how important this realization was to me. It transformed who I thought I was and my perception of what was me and what was not me, or what is true and what might not be true. It made me wonder why I believed the things I did. Did I believe what I believed or did I believe what my thoughts believed?
Shannon W.:So another experience I can relate it to in my own life is when I got eyeglasses for the first time when I was 12 years old. I was living in Nebraska and I had an eye examination. I had always had perfect vision, I thought. And I had eye examination and they told me that I was nearsighted and I would need to go and get some glasses. Was nearsighted and I would need to go and get some glasses. So a family member of mine drove me across the state line from our little hamlet in Nebraska over to the bigger town in Kansas where I would be able to get some glasses, and I remember putting on the glasses and driving home along that country highway in Kansas.
Shannon W.:I will never forget the awakening that happened for me because it was during a season where the trees were all leafed out and I was watching the trees go by the window as we were driving and I saw something I had never seen before. I saw that the trees had leaves and I realized I had never seen leaves before All this time, before I got glasses. When I looked at trees, trees looked like a green mass, indiscriminate sort of amorphous green mass. And I understood that trees had leaves because when I could come up close to a tree, of course I could look at the leaves and explore the leaves, and I did. But I had never understood that when you go far away from a tree, you can still see the leaves. With my poor eyesight that I didn't realize was poor eyesight I just thought that when you step back from a tree it becomes blurry and that you can't see leaves from far away. So when I put my glasses on and I recognized that I could see the distinctions between the leaves on the trees, I could see the leaves moving in the breeze far away. It felt like I was seeing a new world and I was seeing a new world. I was seeing a new world I hadn't seen before. So it was a magical experience for me and I hated my glasses. I thought they were so dorky, but I loved putting them on, sort of secretly, and checking out the trees and all of the other little details around me. So this is pretty similar to what happened with meditation experience.
Shannon W.:In meditation it's like we can put on the meditation practice, like we could put on some glasses, and in practicing we can learn. And when we learn to see our thoughts, those thoughts become individuals, they become something that we can see the distinctions between. We can see thoughts moving like waves. We can see thoughts coming and going, passing by us, like a tree passing by our window when we're driving down the highway. There are distinctions between thoughts. We may not even realize any of that is happening if we don't look. It's like you don't know to put the glasses on if you don't know that you can't see. You don't know to put the meditation on if you don't know that you can't see your thoughts. So we need to be open to this idea of awakening our consciousness to the reality beyond the thoughts and the mind. We need to be open to the possibility that there are other realities, just as real as the one we're used to, just realities we haven't seen yet and that we need to be open to the fact that if we take time to look, we might actually see something new.
Shannon W.:So what do I mean by meditation? You may have already guessed this, but by meditation I simply mean the practice of witnessing and watching the mind. There are also meditation practices that focus our watching. We can focus on the breath or we can repeat a mantra. We can try different forms of visualization. We can try different forms of visualization, or we can focus on physical objects like a flame or passing our fingers over a string of beads, one at a time. There are forms of moving meditation that incorporate activity into our meditation consciously, like walking meditation or the spinning of the Sufi mystics. There's the Gurdjieff movements, a challenge to get the mind out of the way and allow the body to take over in a complex pattern of movement. There are also many forms of breathing exercises and yoga practices, and they go beyond simply sitting with our thoughts.
Shannon W.:So not to reject or leave out any possibilities for awakening here, but for meditation as medicine, I'm suggesting here just the basic act of sitting with the mind, sitting and watching. It's simple, it's clean and I think it can give us a clearer window into the contents of the mind and a great place to start waking up to the truth of who we are. So what does it look like to do this? It literally looks like sitting, sitting somewhere, comfortable, closing your eyes, ideally or you can leave them slightly open and watching, witnessing, and watching, witnessing, that's all. And when the cascade of thoughts comes in, witness that. Open your eyes. If you need to to compare the eye-open experience with the eye-closed experience, close the eyes again and watch. You may close your eyes and immediately, like I did, see a cascade of thoughts and a mess of thoughts all around you. You may close your eyes and have a few seconds, a few moments where your mind is clear before the thoughts come in. And the wonderful thing is, over time, the spaces between the thoughts do get wider. Whatever you see, there's no reason to judge it. All that's asked is to witness. Now, if you do feel like it's too much to ask, just close your eyes and witness. Feel like it's too much to ask? Just close your eyes and witness.
Shannon W.:The next thing I would suggest is to use your breath as an anchor. Close your eyes, focus on your breath, count your breaths, if you like. Like literally just in-breath, out-breath one, literally just in-breath out-breath one, in-breath out-breath two. The mind comes in, you continue to count. The mind comes in, you continue to breathe. If you get pulled away by thoughts, you could be away for a few moments, you could be away for a few minutes, you could be away for a half an hour, when you realize you're thinking, you recognize you're thinking and that is witnessing your thoughts, and you come back to sitting silently, or you come back to your breath or you come back to counting your breaths.
Shannon W.:This is the beginning, the beginning of meditation practice. Probably some of you have heard the metaphor of training the mind being like training a puppy, that when you're teaching a puppy to sit, the puppy sits for about half a second and then it starts wiggling its butt and it runs off. You're like no, you have to call it back and you have to say sit, call it back, say sit, call it back, say sit. You know, and that's what we have to do with our thoughts and we're training ourselves, just like the puppy gets trained, and eventually many dogs are able to sit and they will sit there as long as they have to. So thoughts carry us away and then we bring ourselves back and eventually these two activities become the two sides of meditation practice, like turning over a coin in your fingers Heads, tails, heads, tails.
Shannon W.:In meditation there's this dance of getting carried away, this dance of like getting carried away, coming back, getting carried away, coming back. After we turn that coin over heads and tails enough times, we're going to recognize what heads looks like, what tails looks like. What does getting carried away feel like? What does coming back feel like? They're connected but they're separate. It's not that one is right or the other is wrong, or one is good or the other is bad. It's just that one is one and one is the other. And this is the useful learning about the mind. So thoughts are like this. They come and go and come again.
Shannon W.:The idea that meditation means getting rid of thoughts completely is not accurate. Even if we're able to empty the mind in meditation, the emptiness is temporary. It's the nature of the mind to come back. When it becomes quiet, it emerges again. It's like it's the nature for spring to follow winter. So there's no need to feel like we've failed if our thoughts don't turn off or we don't get rid of our thoughts. That's not the point. The point is just to witness them. The point is not to be swept up in them. The point is to see them as separate from us, so that we are not them, and then, if we wish to deepen into the part of us that remains, that well of consciousness that exists before and beyond thought, and the deep well of intelligence and wisdom that we can tap in our practice.
Shannon W.:My experience with meditation is the thoughts don't ever fully stop, but over time our perception of thoughts in meditation can become more sharp and discerning. When we learn to fine-tune our attention like we would a lens, we can see the separations between the thoughts, we can see the contents of those thoughts and then we can choose how and whether to engage with them. There was one time I was meditating and I remember seeing a thought, watching a thought, and another thought came from somewhere else, like over to the left. It came into my awareness and it came up through the first thought and pierced through it and broke it into pieces. It was like one thought came in and pierced the other one through the middle and took its place, and that's crazy stuff. But these are the kinds of things that we can see, that can teach us that we are not our thoughts. So there's one more point here I want to make about recognizing that we are not our thoughts. So there's one more point here I want to make about recognizing that we are not our thoughts, and this is about sovereignty, this is about self-mastery.
Shannon W.:So most of us are probably aware of the saying in English don't believe everything you hear. And we know why that is right. It's because there are people who will lie to us and manipulate us to serve their needs. We want to be cautious of them. And there are also people who just don't know what they're talking about. They act like they know something but they don't, and we need to be discerning when we take in information from others. We can't just believe what others say without questioning whether it's true.
Shannon W.:But anyone living in our modern culture and that means all of us listening our modern minds are bombarded every day with a ridiculous amount of information, whether anyone means to do this to us or not. Our minds are being programmed. We're being programmed to pay attention to certain things and not others. We're being programmed to have short attention spans and to flick our attention from one thing to the other, and we're also programmed by our society to be logical. This puts us in our heads and separates us into our heads and out of our bodies.
Shannon W.:There's so much coming at us from the media, advertising and corporate interests who want our money and our attention and our allegiance and our obedience. There are powerful entities that benefit from us swallowing whole whatever information they give us, whether it's to buy their products, to make them their money, to buy their arguments, to make them their power, their money, to buy their arguments, to make them their power, to buy their lies, so they can get away with them. I don't want to buy any of that. I don't want to be that kind of consumer.
Shannon W.:So a benefit of meditation is this freedom from being bound to thought, is that we can determine what's true for us and become more critical thinkers. We do not have to buy into the narratives that are dangerous, damaging for us and for the planet. But if we don't realize that we're not our thoughts, then information that comes into our minds in the form of thoughts and images can feel like reality. News that comes to us from the TV or from the internet, opinions of others can seem like facts if they're said with enough conviction. The simple repetition of a piece of information fake news, fake news, fake news Whether or not it's even valid that can lull our minds into believing that something is true.
Shannon W.:Do you want to be the person that advertising and culture and society is selling you to be, or do you want to be who you actually are? Do you want to know what other people want you to think, or do you want to know what you actually think? These are interesting questions, even if you don't want to wake up or you don't care about that. Don't you want to be you? I do so. There's don't believe everything you hear. Then there's this alternate version of the phrase that I see on bumper stickers once in a while, and it says don't believe everything you think.
Shannon W.:If we don't learn that we're separate from our thoughts, if we think we are our thoughts, then we're doomed to believe what our thoughts say. We hear something in our minds and we hear it as true. I hear it as me talking to myself. So why would I not believe what I say to myself? And I say, oh, I just can't do this. Oh, this is not how it's supposed to be. Oh, this is not how I want it to be. That person looked at me that particular way and that means they don't like me. These are thoughts and we can think them and immediately believe them, because we don't see the space between the thought and the belief. But even a little self-reflection will show us that these things are not the case.
Shannon W.:One little trick is just to spend a day, like one whole day, and every thought you think ask yourself is this true? How do I know this? Do I really believe this? So if you say, oh, I forgot to go to the grocery store, it's like is this true? Did I forget to go to the grocery store? Yes, but then there can be thoughts that come through that we may not otherwise catch, that says something like oh, I forgot to go to the grocery store. I forget everything. Do I really forget everything? Is that true? Or I might say, oh, I forgot to go to the grocery store. That was so stupid. Was it really stupid or did I just forget? Maybe there was a good reason I forgot. Let's stop and step back and think about what those thoughts are saying and why. And step back and think about what those thoughts are saying and why. Or if you say something to yourself like I don't have any friends, or if you say I already know how to do this. I don't need any help. I've already got this figured out. These are things we can question. Is that true? Is it true that I don't have any friends? Is it true that I don't need any help? Do I really believe that I don't have any friends? Is it true that I don't need any help? Do I really believe that I don't need help?
Shannon W.:And, of course, it's also important to double check our thoughts, not just about ourselves, but our thoughts about other people and our beliefs about them. Our thoughts can reflect stereotypes or unexamined beliefs about others, or they can just be regurgitating cultural narratives we've never really examined, and it's important to question whether our stereotypes and narratives are true. So this practice can work for thoughts, our everyday thoughts in our own lives, and they can also help us sort through the thoughts that we have about other people in the outside world. So our thoughts are not us. They're simply one tool the mind uses to make sense of the world, along with the senses, the intuition and other tools.
Shannon W.:If we don't look at our thoughts objectively, we give up a great amount of sovereignty over our lives. If we believe everything our thoughts say, we give power to them If our thoughts tell us to do something and we think that's us telling ourselves to do something, we're more likely to do it, whether it's right or wrong. We can lose control over our choices and we can let our thoughts carry us away to where they want us to go, rather than using them as tools to get us where we want to go. And if we don't have sovereignty over our thoughts, we can get carried away and get swept up in a tornado of thought and by the time we get spit out on the other side of the tornado we're lost in thought or emotion or memories and we're crying or throwing a temper tantrum or we're all depressed about something that happened 20 years ago. And we sort of wake up out of that and we're like how did I get here?
Shannon W.:But the more that we can learn to stand separate from our thoughts, we also stand separate from all those small ego wants and desires and those self-centered emotional and psychological patterns that can sweep us up in their drama. And then we can start to see those desires and aversions that come up before they can sweep us away. We can see them not as necessarily oh, here's this thing I have to have, but that's a desire, or here's this thing I can't stand and it's going to trigger me, but instead that's just an aversion. We can start to see the personal preferences we have not as right and wrong, but as thoughts that are being posed by the mind. The mind is just offering us solutions and we can choose which ones we follow.
Shannon W.:When we become not our thoughts, we become more free, more free to be what we actually are. There's nothing wrong with thoughts and nothing bad about thinking. Thoughts are part of life, just like leaves are part of trees. But thoughts aren't meant to run the whole show of our lives, any more than leaves are meant to run the life of the tree. They're an integral part of the machine, not the head of it. So meditation is about separating ourselves from our thoughts, becoming the witness. It's about taking control over our own lives and becoming the masters of ourselves, of our thoughts, and becoming the masters of ourselves, of our thoughts. We can't shut off our minds, but we can learn to use them like tools, or even like friends, to help us live skillfully in the world.
Shannon W.:So, coming back to that basic lesson I am not my thoughts. I think it's a crucial lesson that every person has to learn, not only if we want to awaken our consciousness, but also to survive and not go crazy in this world of overwhelming amounts of information that are coming at us every day. If we're to have any chance of finding peace and clarity, let alone tap into our native intelligence, we have to learn how to make space inside our minds and make space between us and all those inputs so we can see what's there. Our species didn't evolve to live inside so much information. We evolved to live in nature, where the inputs move at the speed of nature. The speed of nature is our speed and we evolved to listen and see and touch and smell at that speed of nature. So we're not supposed to be up in our heads at the speed of thought all the time. There's space in nature and space between things, and there can be space between us and our thoughts, and that's where consciousness and interconnectivity and waking up comes alive.
Shannon W.:So let's just really drill down on the medicine of meditation for a minute. Well, what is medicine? Medicine is, we could say, something that heals. We understand as a culture that when our bodies are sick, the principal way we look to heal ourselves is with medicine. To some extent we believe this, for psychological illness as well. Turning to psychiatrists to prescribe us medicine, pharmaceuticals for the mind, world indigenous cultures have an even more expansive understanding of medicine, including not just medicine for the physical body and the mind, but also medicine of the soul and spirit medicine. From this point of view, medicine goes beyond just a prescription of pills and beyond a session with a psychiatrist into the realm of plant medicine, of animal medicine, of spirit medicine, of soul medicine. So medicine is something that heals, but depending on what needs to be healed. What does it heal? It heals a dis-ease. When something is out of ease, it needs to be healed or brought back into ease.
Shannon W.:When something is wounded, you have a wound, something's been cut open and the sides of the wound have been opened, exposed and separated. So a physical or psychological or spiritual wound is a place where a part has been cut away from the whole, where a separation has been made. And that's true whether it's physical medicine, whether it's psychological medicine, whether it's psychological medicine or whether it's spirit medicine. To heal the wound is to bind its parts so it can come back together. And this also has to do with homeostasis, with bringing the body, mind or spirit back into harmony, integrity with itself, so that it's not separated from itself by illness. So to heal a broken relationship is to bring people back into harmony with each other and from separate become united.
Shannon W.:So when we live in our minds without witnessing them, without realizing that we're not our thoughts, we're in a state of separation, realizing that we're not our thoughts. We're in a state of separation. When we're lost inside of our thoughts, it's like we're in a bubble. We're in there and we think we see what's going on, but we're really only seeing what's going on within the bubble. Everything that's outside of our bubble is separated from us. But in meditation, if we can pierce that bubble of thought and step outside of it and we can see that there's so much more going on than what our small thought world would have us believe. So meditation helps us to burst those thought bubbles and reconnect ourselves, replug ourselves into the rest of the world.
Shannon W.:So the practice of meditation is medicine when it strips away those veils of separation and helps us to see more clearly. It brings us back into right relationship with our thought. It brings us into an ability to hear our small, quiet voices within of intuition and inner guidance that otherwise can be obscured by thought. It can bring us back into the present moment, instead of being separated from the present moment by ruminating on the past or the future separated from the present moment by ruminating on the past or the future. And, of course, when we heal ourselves, we ourselves can then become medicine for the world, because each of us who begins to heal becomes one more person who is watching and who is present and who is whole. The more whole people we have, the more whole the world is. The world needs people who are whole. The world needs us to do this work Because our culture is sick.
Shannon W.:Violence, war, mental illness, addiction I believe all of these things are an outgrowth of our sick culture. So many people are suffering psychologically because they're missing something, they're not whole and they get out of balance and they look for something to ease their pain. And whether that be substances or addictions, whether it be ideologies or groupthink, whether it can be escapism, these things lead us to see the world as separate from us, to see the other as separate from us, to see nature as separate from us, to see non-human animals as separate from us. The world needs us to see the other as us, so when we meditate, we can be a source of this wholeness. We can be a light for others. We can see when others are sick in the ways that we ourselves have been sick. We can find compassion for others, even those who we are different from, or even those who hate us or treat us badly. We can see behind the hatred, the confusion, the unskillful actions, and we can see the pain behind those actions and we can heal ourselves and we can be a source for healing in the world.
Shannon W.:So I think it's important to bring this concept of meditation as medicine into our culture, because in our culture we consider that if we're sick, we look for some kind of medicine to make us well. If we don't think of something as medicine, we won't consider it as a remedy. When something goes wrong, to the extent that we can shift our mindset to one that considers meditation as a form of medicine, we may think to turn to it in times of sickness not just physical sickness, but psycho-emotional or spiritual sickness and we might think to recommend it to others who are suffering as well. And the beautiful thing about meditation as medicine is that we don't need a medical degree or a PhD to practice it or recommend it to others. We don't need to be able to prescribe pills. We don't even need to be an herbalist to put together an herbal concoction. We don't even need to know how to use a band-aid.
Shannon W.:Meditation is like a people's medicine. It's like herbal medicine, something that is available to all of us. It doesn't require permission from anyone, doesn't require credentials to practice, doesn't require specialized equipment or a lot of money to try it. It's like a power to the people. And when we write off meditation as soft or woo-woo due to our cultural programming, as we sometimes do, we're being a part of the sickness, when we could be a part of the healing. When we learn how to quiet the mind, we can hear what our body, spirit and planet wants. We can come closer to the language of nature to communicate and be understood. So much of our nature already knows what we need to heal, knows why we're sick and knows how to heal us. If only we can listen.
Shannon W.:There's so much more that I could say about meditation, but I know there isn't time in one episode to talk about all of it, so I'll leave some of it for later, and at this time I just want to give some basic thoughts and tips about meditation for people who would be interested to try. So first of all, meditation is not a cure-all for separation sickness. We need more than just meditation. For one thing we need action. So there's learning that happens in meditation, in contemplative practices, but then it's actually the living, that learning into the world that seeds it more fully into our being and also that actually makes it real in the world for ourselves and for others.
Shannon W.:So it's not like we can just meditate and then we're done. Also, we need more than just a sitting meditation practice. In my opinion, we need other things that are also very primal to our being. We need time in nature. We need observation of the cycles and the seasons of life. We need rootedness to our land, to our history, to our ancestors, to the cosmos. We need a sense of interconnection and brother and sisterhood with other beings. All of these things can be helped along by meditation, but they're in addition to meditation as well. Also, it's not like meditation is a box that we check off and then we're done. It's not like we learned to prune our tree and then we pruned our tree and now the tree is done. It's more like washing dishes, where we learn how to wash dishes but then we didn't have to just do that once. We have to continue to wash the dishes and wash the dishes, because there's always more dishes. There's always more mind stuff. There's always more meditation to be done stuff. There's always more meditation to be done.
Shannon W.:And it's not like the practice of meditation is just going up and up and up, getting clearer, getting calmer, getting more at peace, getting more skillful. There are ups and downs in meditation practice. So you know, what I would say to someone who's starting a meditation practice is don't expect that you're just going to get better, better, better, clearer. There are dips and there are failures and we can see that we don't live up to the person we want to be. It's not a reason to say, well, meditation doesn't work, or to stop our meditation practice. It's just that we the fact that we can see the separation between the person we are and the person we want to be can even be a sign that our meditation practice is working is clarifying. And I'm also not saying that by meditating we magically heal ourselves or heal the planet. I am saying that by bit by bit, as we practice and we come to know our own minds, we become capable to live more awakened, more sensitive and more sovereign lives, and that does contribute to the long-term transformation of our world.
Shannon W.:So there's a story that a friend of mine tells Mr Lauren Peters tells Mr Lauren Peters he is a courageous man who has stood on the front lines of nonviolent activism for decades. He's a friend whom I admire and deeply respect. So Mr Peters tells a story about September 11. He happened to be taking a class at UC Berkeley on peace and conflict studies from one of my mentors in nonviolence, dr Michael Nagler. So on the day of September 11th, all the world felt like a chaos when the Twin Towers fell and the country fell into shock along with them and Mr Peters as a student for the class, he questioned whether he should go. Everything felt chaotic, everything felt uncertain, but class was happening. So he went. He wanted to know what Dr Nagler might have to say about nonviolence in a situation such as this. And he got to class and he sat down down and Professor Nagler walked into class, looked around the room at all of the shocked and concerned, fearful faces and he said there's a lab for this class. It's called meditation. Interesting thing is there was actually a lab for the class and the lab was called meditation. It wasn't just a metaphor. Professor Nagler had set up a lab for his peace and conflict studies class the way a chemistry professor would set up a lab for a chemistry class.
Shannon W.:Just as we take a lab to experiment with the tools that we're learning about in our science classes, the meditation, professor Nagler believed, was the lab that was needed for practice with the concepts that were being learned in the Peace and Conflict Studies class. So just think about that for a minute. Meditation as a lab. So just think about that for a minute. Meditation as a lab, meditation as an experiment in becoming a more aware, connected and capable citizen and activist in the world. But, unlike a physics or botany lab, we don't have to be signed up as a student at a learning institution to take the meditation lab. It's something that is available to us at every moment.
Shannon W.:It's helpful to think of meditation as a lab in my mind because then it's not something that we have to, it's not something that someone else can teach us, but it is something that we can experiment with and learn about on our own, and it's something that then we own, just like the experience we gain in a chemistry or a biology lab. That experience is our own Once we run that experiment. If I run an experiment between Rolaids and Tums and I learn, based on my experience, that Rolaids is better at soothing heartburn than Tums, I learned that through my experiment. I did not learn it in an advertisement, I didn't learn it from a teacher or from political rhetoric. In the same way, when we meditate as an experiment, we own our experiment, we own our results. And also, once we have it, nobody can take it away from us.
Shannon W.:So meditation can be like this. It can be like our clinical practice, where we gain our experience and our knowledge about ourselves, our mind and the world. And when things get tough, when things get hard, in times of loss, in times of tragedy, in times of great suffering, those times are unexpected. We don't know when they will hit us in our lives. And that meditation lab that we visit again and again is practice for this moment and it's practice for those hard times too. And it's when things get hard that we find how much of a gift meditation really is. I wish I had learned about meditation earlier in my own life. I suggest that children learn this skill early, not that they have to sit in silence for half an hour a day, but simply that they learn early that they are not their thoughts, that they learn early to watch their thoughts and come into relationship with their minds. Our world needs creative, awakened and clear-headed, compassionate people to solve our problems. So let's learn to be those people and let's equip our children to be those future people too, our children to be those future people too.
Shannon W.:I hope you've enjoyed this conversation about meditation as medicine. Medicine is something we take to keep us healthy, to heal us when we're sick and to maintain health, and that goes for body, mind and spirit. My wish for each one of us is that we can remember meditation as a source of healing and when we feel bad, when we feel separated, when we feel disconnected, we can remember our reconnection remedy meditation as medicine. Be well everyone. That's it for this episode of the Wake Up Human podcast.
Shannon W.:I hope you've found something of interest or benefit from this topic meditation as medicine. I'll list some meditation resources in the show notes for this episode. You can find the episode and the podcast at my website, shannonwillscom. Forward slash podcast. If you have feedback or ideas or resources to share on this topic, let me know. I'd love to hear from you and, as always, if you know someone who can benefit from this information, please forward it to them. This podcast is a labor of love for me and I'm thrilled if it can be a benefit to someone else. Thanks so much for listening and I'll catch you on the next episode of Wake Up Human.