Julianna was recently interviewed for the insightful podcast “OneMind Meditation”. A lot of us think about trying mindfulness meditation, but it can be pretty hard to know where to begin. In this podcast interview, Julianna Raye goes deeply into Unified Mindfulness Meditation, thoroughly discussing with Morgan Dix what it is, how you practice it, how she applies that modality with her clients and how she coaches them in the practice of Unified Mindfulness.
Julianna became interested in teaching Mindfulness because she felt like she would be able to communicate the process in a way that would be useful and helpful to people. She was getting so much out of it herself, Julianna knew that was a way she could share and contribute to people’s lives. She currently does one-on-one coaching as well as group and corporate trainings. According to her, one of the great things about coaching people is that you get familiar with them and then you get familiar with whatever challenges they might be facing.
If someone asked Julianna to describe what the benefits of practice have been for her in one word, that word would be resilience. Challenges don’t just go away over time. You don’t work through your conditioning until it’s all gone and you’re a perfect, loving person. Growth never stops. You never stop improving, so it’s a life long process. But in the meanwhile, what is happening is that you are loosening the grip of the things that hook you. Whatever drags you down become less and less “sticky.” So, you rebound much faster and you let go more easily. A lot of the things that used to hook you, stop bothering you. That holds true in all aspects of life, including your sitting practice. The moment you start to recognize that your practice is challenging and you’re struggling with it, that’s where the growth is. You stop getting so attached to peak moments where you drop into profound states, because you see the big picture. It’s true that the peak moments are serving as a new level of insight and clarity. But equally valuable are those moments where you’re dragging yourself through your practice and struggling with it. Those are also serving a really powerful and useful purpose. They’re growing you stronger and deepening your spiritual maturity and compassion.
What you start to appreciate as your practice develops is that there is this pendulum swing that happens between the peak experiences you have and the challenges that come along with being human, whether it’s loneliness, physical distress, or whatever it may be that’s making you feel solid and separate, because of your relationship to it. A mature practice is one in which we are willing to flow all the way to that peak experience and we are willing to flow all the way back to that solidness and separateness. That is the real journey. The more willing we are for that process, then the deeper and more sustained the peak experiences become and the less sticky the solid and separateness becomes. That’s what makes you increasingly free. It’s the liberating activity and it’s ongoing.