Sit

Sit is a weekday meditation podcast hosted by Charles Shereda. Each episode starts with a short reading from a spiritual text like the Tao Te Ching, then a brief guided meditation, followed by a discussion.

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Ask the average Westerner about suffering,  and she will likely tell you that it is just an inescapable part of modern life. But meditation, she might suggest, can help relieve that suffering – a way to feel blissful. Like a legal drug with only beneficial side effects.

For many of us, though, reality looks somewhat different. The simple act of sitting quietly for a few minutes can amplify our pain, revealing to us our stresses, frustration, anger, anxiety, fear, shame, or self-abuse. These powerful feelings risk overtaking us when we finally take the time to sit still and be with what is. Acknowledging and respecting pain – and seeing it as a component of the journey – can help us finally begin to learn who we really are and listen to our inner truth. And recognizing that can help us stay committed to sitting when it seems like the pain will never end.

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Every time we sit, it’s a chance for us to practice deep honesty: to accept and understand what is, and to be compassionate with ourselves when we discover a story playing in our minds about how it should be.

We can learn what it means to be our true selves.

Episodes

About

What are you feeling right now?

Right now, in this moment.

This moment in which every decision you make and every action you take for the span of your entire existence as you – from the moment of the first spark of awareness in you until your last breath escapes your lungs – occurs.

Does the question seem strange? Can you answer it?

Or are you merely lost in thought, playing a story in your head about what’s going on? Dreaming of the future and reliving the past, judging everyone and everything in your path as either good or bad?

Are you truly happy? Are you experiencing joy? Or is that just some bullshit that you tell people because you think it’s what’s expected, while privately you suffer all the more from the anxiety your lie creates as it keeps you from being your true self, and from ever being seen as you really are?

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I’m Charles Shereda, host of Sit. I have worked and volunteered in some of the poorest – and some of the wealthiest – places on the planet.

Wherever I go, I see most people creating pain for themselves and others because of their personal story about who they are – the myth that they are living.

I have lived this myth too, and suffered and created suffering through living it.

Without exception, this myth is not one that anyone ever really chooses. Instead, it is inherited from family and from the culture when we’re too young to resist it.

I believe that each of us can reimagine our personal myth:

  • away from a story focused on shame, inadequacy, isolation, and pain;
  • toward one of completeness, belonging, and our unique place in this mysterious and incredible universe.

I have been a computer scientist and a dispute mediator and have financed small solar projects in rural East Africa. I enjoy learning. Cosmology, consciousness, psychedelics, human physiology and nutrition, and culture all capture my interest. I’ve also coached competitive rowing for youth and adults.

I draw on my diversity of experiences, my successes, failures, disappointments, heartbreaks, frustrations, fears, and the universal experience of joy to bring you Sit most weekdays.

I curse, too.

Thanks for sitting with me.