Welcome to MNDFL. I'm Ellie Burrows, and I'm the CEO and co-founder
of New York City's first drop-in meditation studio.
We feature 35 expert teachers offering simple techniques in an accessible manner.
MNDFL exists to enable humans to feel good.
We do that by helping them build and/or maintain a meditation practice.
In 2008, I was working in the film business,
and I had a little bit of a health scare,
and it landed me in the office of a wonderful functional medicine doctor
here in the city named Dr. Frank Lipman.
While Dr. Lipman was helping me solve the physical aspects of my problem,
there was an emotional component that also needed to be addressed.
He introduced me to a series of masters,
and teachers, and healers who ultimately blew open the door on my adult spirituality.
I found myself engaging in a practice called ecstatic breathwork,
which is a really dynamic practice
where you're taking deep breaths in and out in a certain cycle,
and you end up feeling quite euphoric after a few hours of practice.
But, you don't really want to send an email after that practice,
and you don't really want to drive a car, and it's not exactly practical for everyday use,
but I loved the benefits I was beginning to see
from just engaging with my breath in a more meaningful way,
and having that anchor, my un-stressing practice.
Through the practice of ecstatic breathwork, I was beginning to see
that relaxation that I was experiencing right after the practice,
the more consistently I would do it, the more I would begin to feel that relaxation
throughout my day over the course of the week.
It's a bit like going to the gym.
If you go to the gym once,
it may not do much for you, but if you go consistently,
you'll begin to see the benefits. You'll see your physiology change,
you'll see your endurance change,
and the benefits can be cumulative.
However, the ecstatic breathwork practice would take like 3 hours to get to that state.
For me, I wanted something that was a little bit more practical for everyday use,
something that I felt like I could send an email after,
or get into a car and drive and not get into an accident.
I started struggling with mindfulness meditation.
I was learning online, I was trying to access different teachers,
and I was having a problem really making it stick consistently.
I set up a cushion in my home, and an altar.
I noticed that I was showing up for my workout, in between jobs,
2 hours a day, 6 days a week,
but I could barely show up for the cushion and the altar in my own home.
I kept thinking about what this accountability structure
was that was missing from my practice.
At the time, I was volunteering for Lodro Rinzler,
who ultimately became my co-founder of MNDFL.
I asked Lodro to go to tea,
to get some advice around how to be more consistent with a meditation practice.
I also asked him how come there wasn't a place I could go in the city
that didn't involve a week-long commitment, or adopting a new religion, or
was intimidating to get into.
He said, "It's only a matter of time before meditation studios are like yoga studios."
I said to Lodro, "You know,
I feel like I could probably raise the money and tell you what this space should look and feel like.
I know where I would want to go every day to practice.
If you could bring me the teachers and the content."
And now, we're sitting at MNDFL.
Mindfulness is the act of bringing your full attention to the present moment on purpose.
If you're practicing mindfulness meditation,
that's the act of bringing your mind to your breath,
but meditation also has different subcategories.
Meditation could be the act of bringing your mind to a mantra.
It could be a contemplation practice, like a loving-kindness practice,
or contemplating a quality you would like to cultivate in your life,
like more patience or more compassion.
It could also be visualization—
envisioning a deeply relaxing scene, perhaps, to help you lull your body into sleep.
There are many different categories of meditation
and then there is a definition to mindfulness.
If you want to bring more mindfulness into your life,
you probably should practice mindfulness meditation.
But people get really confused between the two,
and mindfulness is, unto itself, its own thing,
and then it's also a type of meditation.
There have been incredible studies coming out of Harvard, MIT,
Stanford, showing the benefits of meditation:
increased gray matter in the brain, a reduction in stress,
increased creativity, enhanced communication skills.
I know, firsthand, how I experience the benefits of meditation.
My personal favorite benefit is—
it really gives you a choice in how you want to respond to things.
When it comes to meditation, I like to remind people of the three Cs.
First, the commitment to practice.
Second is the consistency with which you practice.
Third is the cumulative benefits.
If you really want to see the benefits of practicing meditation,
you have to practice for a consistent amount of time.
In order to practice consistently, you really need to make the commitment to do so.
That means really setting aside time throughout your day and your week to practice.
Maybe that starts with 5 minutes, and it turns into 10 minutes,
and it turns into 20 minutes. Maybe it never even gets to 20 minutes,
but just that consistency of setting aside time and practicing,
you'll begin to see benefits from your practice.
To add a fourth C, because it's my favorite benefit,
I love that meditation really gives you a choice.
When you're practicing, for example,
and your mind ends up going down a rabbit hole of thoughts,
you gently and without judgment remind yourself to come back to the breath.
That aspect of, "Oh, I'm noticing, I'm thinking,
and now I'm reminding myself to come back to the breath,"
or, "I'm noticing that I wandered off the mantra,
and now I'm reminding myself to come back to it,"
that awareness that builds between you and your own mind, your own consciousness,
starts to seep into different aspects of your life.
When you're feeling triggered, let's say,
by an email or an angry spouse,
and your body is feeling the chemical reactions as if a tiger was attacking you,
you have the ability to say,
"Wow, that's definitely not a tiger who's attacking me.
I can feel myself feeling a bit triggered.
I can feel my mind going into all these places of fight or flight and wanting to lash out.
I also can feel my choice, that I can be more open-hearted in this situation.
I can show myself more compassion, the human in front of me more compassion,
and maybe choose a kinder way forward."
One thing I like to remind people, when they're starting a meditation practice,
is to surrender their preference for what they would like to occur.
At MNDFL, we ask you to check your shoes at the door,
and I would also ask you to check your expectations at the door.
One of the Tibetan words for meditation is "gom,"
which means, "to become familiar with."
Meditation really helps you become familiar with all of who you are.
When you walk in to sit on the cushion for the first time,
and all of a sudden, your to-do list is coming up and you're uncomfortable with your seat,
and your leg is falling asleep, and you're like, "Wow, I hate this stuff,
this meditation, I'm never going to see the benefits of that,"
that's part of the process when you're starting.
It can take up to a couple weeks, probably,
to start to feel the benefits of initially practicing,
and then, the more consistent you are, like I said, the more the benefits build over time.
There's no such thing as a good or bad meditation. Our brain likes to categorize things as good or bad,
but meditation is really about sitting with yourself and learning about all of who you are,
and your relationship to yourself,
and hopefully, then, the relationship to the humans around you and the environment around you.
More often than not, when you first come to the cushion,
"Am I doing this right?" is everyone's first question,
because the art of sitting and essentially doing "nothing," at first,
seems to be kind of a weird practice.
People say, "Well, my brain is running a million miles a minute.
I must not actually be meditating."
Meditation is a dynamic practice that uses your brain in the first place.
You need your brain to help you bring your full attention to your breath.
You need your brain to help recite a mantra.
What we try to do is, we try to
incorporate a more healthy relationship to that thinking process,
which is, rather than attaching "good" or "bad" to the kind of thoughts we're having,
instead, we're just allowing those thoughts to all simultaneously occur
without attaching any specific categorization to it.
It's no longer a man in robes on the other side of the world,
telling you that meditation is good for you.
It's your doctor, it's The White House, it's Google,
it's Harvard, it's MIT, it's Stanford.
There's all this scientific research now around meditation that is really bolstering
a movement towards meditation.
Lodro and I often joke about this term "post-tech."
We're all so fluent in our devices, and we're so fluent with technology,
and it's such a massive part of our life that
we begin to realize is, on the other side of that device
is another living, breathing human being.
I think, ultimately, we're beginning to crave more meaningful connection.
Sometimes, we feel like we're mindlessly scrolling into oblivion,
or we have no control over our relationship to technology.
Meditation is returning, not only returning to the self
and reconnecting with the self, but that also leads to more connection with others.
We also like to use this analogy at MNDFL that
meditating on your own, self-guided practice, is a bit like singing in the shower,
and meditating in a group is like singing in a choir.
Both are singing, both are wonderful, but they have very different tangible feelings to them.
The draw of group meditation is accountability.
There are other humans sitting next to you, in the process with you.
At the end of class, you're able to raise your hand
and ask a question that maybe you were thinking but you didn't want to ask.
There's this support aspect to it that I think helps with
the consistency and accountability piece.
I practice Vedic Meditation, which is a mantra-based practice
that, when I'm not training to be a teacher,
I practice twice a day for 20 minutes.
That practice is so unbelievably consistent,
I do it twice a day, that if I miss a meditation,
I can feel the effects of missing a meditation.
It feels really similar to how I used to want coffee every day at 4:00 pm.
By 4:00 pm, I'm sluggish,
my body is craving it.
It's so used to the release of bliss chemicals that happen during practice
that it will miss and crave those chemicals when I'm not practicing meditation.
I've been practicing for so long,
I can't recall when it didn't feel like that when I missed a meditation.
I think it would be different in different traditions,
so I can really only speak to my own personal experience of that.
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