Episode Details

(0-10 minutes)

Hannah introduces herself and Within Meditation. Within Meditation studio is in San Francisco and they offer 30 minute guided meditations to people who work in the financial district.

Hannah talks about how she teaches beginners and how that is different from teaching more experienced meditators. Beginners have a lot of expectations and they aren't sure what exactly meditation is. This requires Hannah to be more present throughout the meditation with cues to come back to the breath and the body. When she teachers more experienced practitioners, she usually leaves a lot more silence as that is what they are looking for.

We talk about our mutual experiences with Vipassana. Stewart asked Hannah which day was the worst day. She says that day 3. Stewart asks her about integrating after the ten-day meditation retreat. She says that in Vipassana on day 8 they usually talk about how people can bring back what they have learned on retreat. She said that a voice inside her said, "having a child is a way to bring love incarnate into this world". At the time she had never wanted kids and after the retreat, she ended up coming back and having two of them!

She talks about how having kids is an amazing experience of unconditional love. Stewart mentions that they originally taught him how to do loving-kindness or Metta meditation and Hannah's description of being a parent perfectly describes this.

Stewart asks Hannah where she got the idea for Within Meditation. She says that she noticed that in other countries with meditation traditions that they don't consider ten days to be too long. Here in the west, 10 days is a really long time. She realized that for people with busy lives the best way to introduce meditation is in short sessions and she started offering 30-minute sessions to people at pop-up events. Then they found a space in the financial district.

(10-20 minutes)

Stewart explains his own meditation practice and story and how he worked in office environments. He explains how he met a founder at a cryptocurrency event recently that reminded him of this intense energy that founders have when they try to create something out of nothing against a lot of barriers. He asks Hannah how she deals with this intense fire energy that founders have or how does it show up in her work.

Hannah replies that when she takes her teaching into office environment's she often meets people who are skeptical about the whole practice. She says that skeptical people often say that they have good thoughts and they want to hold on to them because they are good. She tells these people to ask themselves "What are we doing right now? Are we just thinking or is there something else going on?".

This reminded Stewart about a time on meditation retreat where he had a good business idea and he couldn't do anything about it at the moment. He couldn't let it go and it caused him to have insomnia. Once he learned how to let it go he was able to find that there will always be more ideas, but very few ideas that you actually want to spend your time or energy on.

We talk about how creativity arises out of a natural byproduct of the meditative state and a quiet mind. Not a permanently quiet mind, but a mind that finds the spaces in between the thoughts.

Hannah says that a lot of beginners realize that their minds and neurosis are running their lives. They realize that meditation is a non-pharmaceutical way of calming the mind and letting go of the neurosis.

Stewart explains that a lot of beginners have an idea of what meditation will be like. He asks Hannah how she helps people move away from these preconceived ideas of meditation. She says that she helps them realize that mindfuln