Meditation is great, its benefits incredible. And…most of us resist it. Not just because we are busy, but because meditation—like any space of quiet—would have us face stories and beliefs that we prefer to avoid. In this episode, we explore our resistance to meditation and, hand-in-hand, a practice that may help us look forward to learning meditative practice like never before. This episode launches a mini-series made up of short episodes about meditation for people who know little about meditation, resist meditation, or feel bad at meditative practice.

Every story is an arousal story, because arousal is the soul’s ultimate energy: we long for connection and become panicked at the possibility of disconnection. Arousal, in this sense, is far greater than sexual arousal—it is the energy animating all things. In this episode, we explore the idea of resolved arousal and unresolved arousal, with plenty of story examples and illustrations. Ultimately, we invite you to name how you experienced fulfillment or frustration in your story, and the beliefs which became operative in you because of it. In this naming, there is a world of agency, action, and potential freedom.

In this short, we explore the importance of naming our emotions at a granular level as well as exploring how “negative emotions” may be (1) protecting us while (2) keeping us from what we long for. The more fluency we gain in naming our emotions and how they function to protect but also limit us, the more agency—which expresses itself as choice and freedom—we will have in our lives.