Introduction to the Nature of Meditation

Hello, my name is Michele, and welcome to this introductory episode about this Nature of Meditation Podcast that I'm going to be creating throughout 2025. Today is the 7th of December, 2024. And I'm making this introductory episode to explain what the podcast, Nature of Meditation, is going to be about, and how you might get the most out of it. I also want to say a bit about myself and my goal, motivations, and intentions for creating this podcast on Silent Meditation Practice.

I'm an English mindfulness teacher and coach with a professional background in psychoanalytic psychology and humanistic counselling. My students and clients have been asking me to create a podcast about meditation practice. And so here it is.

One of the motivations to create this podcast is my intention to start a PhD in meditation next year.

So the recreation of this podcast acts as a meditation research device to prompt my research and study of silent meditation.

I also practice as a gestalt counsellor, which is a phenomenological, experiential approach, focused on present moment experience in the here and now.

Gestalt therapy is also considered a humanistic approach, in that a lot of heart is needed to stay unconditionally present in the moment, without criticism and judgment of oneself, one's experience and of others.

The motivation for and intention, therefore, is to help me learn, reflect on, develop and consolidate my understanding of silent meditation, an embodied present moment experience.

And in the process, record and share my understanding with my students, clients, friends, and the general public. I'm aware that my current understanding of silent meditation, and also my current meditation practice, is limited at this time. And that the understanding I possess now is not complete and unchanging, but is growing, deepening, and changing over time. So if I made a podcast on silent meditation in five years time, maybe after completing a PhD in meditation, obviously my understanding would be different, and the content of the podcast and my way of speaking and being would be different to how it is now.

I also want to say a bit about my way of speaking in this podcast.

I have written psychoanalytic research papers on diagnosis through the phonetic sound of the voice. But any person searching through podcasts and videos online for study or entertainment purposes will understand that the question of who one chooses to listen to is a subjective and personal matter. And many factors come into play in choosing to listen to a particular public speaker, teacher, coach or therapist.

So I want to be transparent as is possible. And share with you that the audio recordings that I'm producing for this podcast, I'm purposely using a deeper tone of voice and a slower pace of speech than I use in my personal and social life.

In my social life and personal life, for example, my voice is much more melodic with higher tones and pitches, containing much more of my personality, using much more intonation, and a much wider, broader width between the high notes and low notes. But that's not the case in the way that I'm speaking for you at the moment.

So I'm deliberately using a more mindful and careful way of speaking for these podcast recordings.