Episode 8 – Lorin Roche. Meditation can actually be easy

12/07/20 • -1 min

Really special episode this, with one of our favorite meditation teachers. Lorin is something of a ‘meditator whisperer’ – having spent much of his life being an unorthodox counsellor to meditators who were having trouble in their practice. Lorin casts aside monasticism, ascetism, and puritanical thinking for a clear-eyed and honest look at what it means to meditate as someone ‘in the World’: Someone with family, responsibilities, a career – and all the other things that exist outside the Ashram. We hope you enjoy this as much as we did – please let us know your thoughts!

NB. A problem with the stream meant we couldn’t capture Jasmine’s video.

Audio Version

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Subscribe Links Sites

Lorin’s main site – https://lorinroche.com/
Lorin & Camille’s teacher training – https://www.meditationtt.com

Books

Transcript

(First 40 minutes only – that’s all we could get for free from Otter app )

Bill 0:09
Lauren, thanks so much for joining us.

Lorin Roche 0:12
Oh, it’s delightful. I miss England so much.

I love London. And

it’s fun to be a California in like a beach person. Good. I’ve lived most most of my life within a mile of the Pacific Ocean. Yeah, I like to live right? right near the shore. And once I was in London, and I was like, looking around, like, Where am I? Where’s the where’s the tube? So this guy comes walking along on the street, and I go, he looks like he knows his way around. It was wearing his bespoke suit, this fantastic looking guy. And I said, Can you tell me where’s the subway or the tube? And, and like for half a second. He goes like, it was like, you don’t talk to me? Do you understand? Like, I’m a high class person. You don’t just speak to me without being introduced? for about half a second. And then you saw I could see him process my accent. And then go, he’s an American, and then shift to being friendly. And then like, he’s probably a California and he could tell and that he just dropped the whole thing. And all of a sudden, I was his friend. And he just like took me under his wing and was showing me a we don’t have that. That same. Like, same structure. Yeah, like yeah, here. Camille and I were both born, right, right here at the beach near the beach in LA, and our mothers were. But in Los Angeles. If you’re here for a week, you’re an old timer. It’s like if you’re here. You’re a Dennison. Do you own it? If you hear your inhabitant? It’s a totally different, different attitude.

Bill 2:23
Yeah, yeah. Yeah, there’s a constant class war on the streets of Britain. I thought when I, I lived in Japan for a couple of years. And when I got back to London, I was just in shock. at the striation level, the barriers in the streets.

Lorin Roche 2:43
Yeah, wow.

Bill 2:46
Cool. Well,

Lorin Roche 2:47
to me, it’s kind of like exotic

Lorin Roche 2:50

— to see that kind of order.

Bill 2:55
Awesome.

Lorin Roche 3:00
And, but, you know, that brings up the point, that the meditation traditions come from these intense caste system. Yeah. And the people who wound up in the monasteries might have been just the debris. The people who couldn’t fit in, yeah. broken. And, and weird and transgender, like, they didn’t talk about there’s very few notes. But in, in the monasteries, people who like why would somebody join a monastery when when everybody’s supposed to get married and have kids? Is it people who, when they hit puberty, whatever age, that would be 10, or 11, or 12, or 13, just freaked out and said, I’m out of here. Or their parents sold them to the monastery. Because there was no food, they couldn’t feed them, from much of from much of human civilization time, from much of time. There. There were the famines and times when there’s no food. And literally, people were starving, even if they were farmers. And so they would give one of their kids to the monastery. So it’s a motley crew.

Bill 4:26
Yeah. Wow. I love that we’ve dive straight in but lines for a minute. Could you introduce yourself to our listeners? I think some of them may not have heard of you. And it’d be. I’ve watched like nearly every interview, I can find a viewers on YouTube or whatever. Yeah, be great to get an intro. So welcome to the show. Lauren, how are you?

Lorin Roche 4:50
Thank you, Bill...

NB. A problem with the stream meant we couldn’t capture Jasmine’s video.

Audio Version

Subscribe in your favorite podcast app:

Subscribe Links Sites

Lorin’s main site – https://lorinroche.com/
Lorin & Camille’s teacher training – https://www.meditationtt.com

Books

Transcript

(First 40 minutes only – that’s all we could get for free from Otter app )

Bill 0:09
Lauren, thanks so much for joining us.

Lorin Roche 0:12
Oh, it’s delightful. I miss England so much.

I love London. And

Lorin Roche 2:43
Yeah, wow.

Bill 2:46
Cool. Well,

Lorin Roche 2:47
to me, it’s kind of like exotic

Lorin Roche 2:50

— to see that kind of order.

Bill 2:55
Awesome.

Lorin Roche 4:50
Thank you, Bill...

Previous Episode

Episode 7 – James Kite “Social ecology”

A friend from Awakin Circle (no relation), James is a remarkable character, engaged in the social dimensions of awakening and community.

Audio Version

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Subscribe Links James’ Projects

Find Enlight Project
Enroll Yourself Learning Marathon (Creative & Analytic thinking )
QT – Community Magazine During Lockdown

Influences

Creative Mornings (Creative Lecture series )
Awakin London (Local Mindful community)
Plant Environment (Local Growing Community)
RSA
Ken Willber & Integral theory (Clean up, Wake up, grow up show up)
Metacognition & Self Referential Thinking in arts & life
Neuroplasticity
Permaculture thinking
Systems Thinking

Conduit Club has sadly closed!

Bill’s work

Endlesss – collaborative music app
Hopin – virtual events platform

Transcript

(First 40 minutes only – that’s all we could get for free from Otter app )

Jasmine 0:09
Today on the show is the lovely James. And initially how we first came to know him myself and Bill was both, again through the awake in circles. And you do something special, I think, James, for your work, I think you’re probably on the side of – it’s more unusual, I guess.

And even the theme that you proposed today was very interesting. And so maybe you can explain to others like what you do, and maybe where you are right now.

James Kite 0:56
Cool. Hello, both of you. Thanks for having me. So, being able to explain what I do is probably taken me more than 10 years, and I don’t know if I’m ever gonna get there. But the last out a six to seven years or so I’ve been in the fields of like social arts producing. And for me, that involves kind of jumping from different domains. It involves, like community development, it involves cognition, being understand being able to understand myself and the way I relate to other people. And I guess the framing of how I ended up in this space was, I was really introduced to polymathic thinkers very early on. And I saw the benefit of being in multiple disciplines. And I see the benefit for myself individually. But then the next step is being able to communicate to people that I’m just not in one domain, but I enjoy being in multiple domains. So in summary, I used the word social odds producing, but it’s probably a lot broader than that. And yeah, so that has, that kind of led me to running events with various themes, some mindfulness, some social, economic, some interpersonal, and I’ve been using event as like playgrounds to explore the multiple domains I’ve been running into. So I would say that’s a summary of it. I guess we could probably delve a bit deeper as, as the conversation proceeds.

Bill 2:43
It sounds fascinating. I still don’t quite understand, but I’ve got a slightly better idea now. What What would you say? What would you say? Your what, what what are your aims? And what what are you what? Like, obviously, real life events are kind of off the menu at the moment. But yeah, what have you been looking to achieve with with your work, I guess?

James Kite 3:12
I’ve been looking to kind of develop, like a fuller sense of myself, and feel a sense of the community around me. I think that, at the deepest core of what I’m trying to do is find the most conducive way for us to as a humanity and, and myself to, to kind of coexist and thrive. And, yes, so that’s led me into the like the field of creativity. I kind of come from a bit of music background, but I felt like the skills in music, or the things that you’re practising is actually applicable to so many different fields, the skills of like centering yourself, incenting, what you want to communicate to the world. And I’ve thought of that as just community building. So that’s the that’s the simple kind of answer community building that’s able to not just withstand the world we’re in but kind of build a new world based on the way we interact with each other based on the spaces we create, and how that creates new ways of engaging. Hmm, yeah, it’s kind of like, i...

Next Episode

Episode 09 – Reunion

It’s been a while! Excited to kick things off again as we (hopefully) start to see the beginning-of-the-end of the COVID pandemic. What a strange and interesting time to be alive.

We speak about covid goblins, our practice, journaling, the climate crisis, effective philanthropy, the real consequences of actions in the modern day world, greenwashing, colonialism / capitalism, brewing green tea properly, the fantastic fungi documentary, psychoactives and microdosing and meditation parallels, Jasmine’s grandma’s mushroom stash and homeopathy.

Audio Version

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Subscribe Links

Transcript

(First 40 minutes only – that’s all we get for free from Otter app )

Bill Tribble 0:08
And we’re back. To those of you who asked us for more and asked when the next episode was coming Thank you did encourage us this is a long and rambling conversation but we’ve included most of it here it goes into topics that you might not associate with our podcast – but what is meditation but life?

you know a while ago I was thinking that we should probably if we if we’re going to do any if we’re not going to do anything with the podcast we should at least like have a kind of wrap up like coda to do you know mean 10 series Yeah exactly. But you know that that chat the other day it was like loads of interesting things we can do and and I feel more positive about it because we are coming out of this

Jasmine Che 1:03
lockdown it’s

Bill Tribble 1:04
awful space dreadful terrible time the is a great podcast the blind boy podcast if you come across it and is this wonderful Irish guy who he calls it the Goblin of uncertain times with his wife he didn’t want to mention the pandemic but he just kept on going on about this Goblin which is a nice way to put it really well it seems you know uncertain times have not ended but at least we feel safe now vaccinated and so forth to actually hang out in person a bit which is fantastic because that was kind of the whole impetus for the podcast in the first place as I recall

Jasmine Che 1:51
I don’t remember many of the podcasts were not in person well they weren’t all of them were not in person but

Bill Tribble 2:00
when we first met we were hanging out and no it was it was like on the tube train back from that awake in no relation event that it’s about differently readers will we’ll put a link in the show notes the we were chatting with Liam and we were having a good time to talk and we were like well let’s just record a podcast that’s it was it was in it was because we were enjoying those conversations in person as as I remember it and then and then we carried on because we still had that impetus for me after about huddle Adam to be managed maybe nine months of stuff by that point I was burnt out and I still kind of am on things

Jasmine Che 2:51
yeah I think with work particularly being intense for you at the moment like has been in this new project Yeah, and now everything has switched to zoom as well i think that doesn’t help

Bill Tribble 3:04
Yeah, yeah and work is still like I spent half my week on video calls yeah that’s just the nature of my job so so yeah,

Jasmine Che 3:14
whereas I don’t really mind hopping on if like you know we have a guest who is somewhere else in the world yeah not really a biggie for me

Bill Tribble 3:23
No I’m up for it more now as we discussed because the the goblins receded somewhat and

Jasmine Che 3:33
balance is restored a little

Bill Tribble 3:37
bit I feel a bit more grounded in the in the real world because I no longer have to stay in my home all the time and live in fear of other people in quite the same way or live in fear of you know me giving something you know, I still feel it I got on the bus here. And I’m like, am I wearing a mask? Yeah, I guess wearing a mouth is all people on the bus. I put my mask on because you know it’s for them and then and then there’s all that kind of in the goblins still there because you’re looking around at the people who aren’t wearing masks thinking well, why they don’t worry masks you ourselves. And the Goblin continues. So here we are, is 2020 is slightly better than it was

Jasmine Che 4:24
I mean much better than it was it’s

Bill Tribble 4:26
much better. It’s much better I feel much more grounded in reality. I mean it’s still like ridiculous things happ...