How Meditation Can Help You Handle Injured Feelings and Injured Muscles | Dawn Mauricio

Overview

This episode features meditation teacher Dawn Mauricio, who shares her journey into meditation, the transformative power of retreats, and how mindfulness has helped her navigate challenges, including a recent injury. The conversation explores how meditation can foster resilience, joy, and accessibility in practice.

Notable Quotes

- The joy helps us hold the hard. It’s not a way to bypass or avoid, but a vehicle that helps me be with what is even more. – Dawn Mauricio, on the role of joy in meditation.

- It all belongs. All of the ways we show up also belong. – Dawn Mauricio, on embracing imperfections in meditation practice.

- Suffering looks the same on everybody, but freedom is a magnification of people's personalities. – DJ Kashmir, reflecting on how meditation manifests uniquely in individuals.

🧳 The Journey to Meditation

- Dawn’s meditation journey began during a quarter-life crisis while backpacking in Southeast Asia. A series of serendipitous encounters led her to a 10-day Vipassana retreat.

- She describes the retreat as the hardest thing she had done at the time, requiring her to confront her mind without distractions like reading, music, or even emotional eating.

- Returning home, she struggled to reintegrate into her marketing career, ultimately pivoting toward meditation and yoga teaching over a decade-long process.

🧘‍♀️ The Practice of Vipassana

- Vipassana, often translated as seeing clearly, is a foundational practice in mindfulness meditation. Dawn explains its roots in Buddhist traditions and its emphasis on insight and awareness.

- She highlights the emotional intensity of retreats, where suppressed feelings like sadness and anger often surface, offering opportunities for deep self-exploration.

🎨 Personal Style as a Teacher

- Dawn describes her teaching style as playful, accessible, and infused with joy, aiming to make meditation approachable for diverse audiences.

- She emphasizes the importance of experimentation in practice, encouraging practitioners to treat meditations as tools to explore their inner world without rigid expectations.

- Her goal is to foster qualities like calm, compassion, and freedom from suffering, which she believes are universally beneficial.

🩹 Mindfulness Amidst Injury

- Dawn shares how a recent Achilles injury has tested her mindfulness practice. Despite the physical and logistical challenges, she has found gratitude in the care and generosity of her community.

- Her practice has helped her notice the gifts in difficult moments, such as deepening her appreciation for relationships and the teachings of generosity.

- She reflects on how mindfulness allows her to hold space for both her own and others’ emotions without rushing to fix or suppress them.

🎧 Meditation as a Joyful Experiment

- Dawn’s new guided meditations, available throughout July, cover a range of practices, including grounding, metta (loving-kindness), and noting.

- She encourages listeners to approach these meditations with curiosity and playfulness, using them as experiments to discover what resonates.

- Joy, she asserts, is a key motivator for sustaining a meditation practice and a tool for navigating life’s challenges.