Using Meditation to Get Off the Grid

Additional Info

• Segment Number: 3
• Audio File: wellness_for_life/1510wl5c.mp3
• Featured Speaker: Sister Jenna, Founder of Meditation Museum
• Guest Website: Meditation Museum
• Guest Twitter Account: @americameditate
• Guest Bio: Sister Jenna is an award-winning spiritual leader, author, radio and TV personality, renowned speaker and founder of the Meditation Museum in metropolitan Washington DC. For decades, she has demonstrated an extraordinary level of improvement in the quality of lives of people ranging from heads of government to children in villages. She has traveled to over 80 countries where she continues to provide practical life tools and solutions that empower people to foster and build stronger relationships. Her wisdom, peace, and compassion for humanity are expressed through the variety of initiatives she spearheads for youth, women, governments, and communities and through her syndicated radio show, America Meditating. Sister Jenna is the recipient of numerous awards and proclamations including, the President's Lifetime National Community Service Award, Every Day Hero Award by the Foundation for Better Life and the Friendship Archway Awards, to name a few.
• Transcription: RadioMD Presents: Wellness for Life Radio | Original Air Date: March 6, 2015
  Host: Susanne Bennett, DC
  Guest: Sister Jenna
  
  It’s time to feel better with help from Dr. Susanne Bennett. Allergies, nutrition, ultimate wellness—all discussed right here, right now. It’s Wellness for Life Radio on RadioMD. Here’s your host, Dr. Susanne.
  
  DR. SUSANNE: In this fast-paced lifestyle we all manage daily, many of us feel an urgent need to decompress and get off the grid. Researchers in the new field of interruption science have found that it takes an average of 25 minutes to recover from a simple telephone call. That fact is taken directly from the blog of my next guest. Please welcome the renowned speaker and founder of the Meditation Museum in Washington, D.C.
  
  Welcome, Sister Jenna. It’s so good to have you on Wellness for Life Radio.
  
  SISTER JENNA: I am just so enthusiastic and happy hearing you on the radio. I’m already off the grid even though I’m using technology to connect to you and your audience, but glad to be with you, Dr. Susanne.
  
  DR. SUSANNE: Awe. Thank you, Sister Jenna. I know how you're so busy. I see your websites, your Twitter, all the things that you’re doing. It’s so amazing. Now, I would like to ask you the first question. What is interruption science, Sister Jenna?
  
  SISTER JENNA: Well, you know, it’s really about observing oneself. It’s really a spiritual terminology, but internally, there’s a lot going on in the soul and the soul has a natural sort of a wave of peace. It was born with that peace, but after living lifetimes and going through experiences where things are just not working out the way that you think they’re supposed to, something gets erupted on the inside and it shifts our natural peace because we’re no longer centered or no longer really coming from the place of who we really are. We’re coming from an acquired place. And so, it’s really been out there and I’m very happy to know a little bit more about it. It amazed me when I realized the shift that happens after I get off of a phone call, but can you imagine those calls where it was devastating when you got them? Or didn’t get them?
  
  DR. SUSANNE: Well, I know that when it comes to interruptions, I mean, when I’m on my inbox, I’m looking at my mailbox, it’s constantly pinging me. Constantly. And, I mean, I often feel like I am being a hostage. I’m being held hostage to my email inbox because I’m constant with these notifications and the need to respond to like 300 emails, I get per day. I mean, it’s really, really tough. So, what advice would you give for people, just like me who are feeling the same way I do? Feeling like you’re a hostage. What do you advise to do? What do you give? What kind of advice?
  
  SISTER JENNA: We only have a few minutes on the air, but I would suggest that everybody call Pico Aire and ask him. He’s a journalist that writes for Time and many newspapers globally and Pico doesn’t even own a cellphone. And I think that it’s a choice that we have made and I’ve told my assistant, Antonia, time and time again, I, too, wish to just turn my phone off, but there is this sense, I think, Dr. Susanne, that we feel karmically responsible to showing up in these relationships. That’s one. So, if my response to my karmic responsibilities are offered from a sincere and loving place, it’s not really that stressed. But, there are times that we are responding only because of duty and there really isn’t much love in it. Those are where the stressful factors occur and when I get to those emails or those messages, they tend to be the ones that I don’t know why, but I put those last to respond to and I’m working on it because I don’t wish to have, you know, variations of how I’m dealing with my relationships, but I do put them a little bit more on the pending file than the ones that are emerging from the heart. Another thing that I try to do is just be more of a witness of the way that I’m looking at these messages or approaching these messages and there’s something I keep reminding myself: that the world existed before these smart phones and emails and messages and people and the world will exist after these messages, emails, texts and with me involved in these stories. So, it’s really creating an awareness, Dr. Susanne, that will pacify our stress factor within. It’s not getting away from the world and trying to empty your mind. We can’t empty the mind. It’s not possible.
  
  DR. SUSANNE: You know, I love what you’re saying because it gives me, like, I feel like you’re giving me permission, that it’s okay not to respond. That’s one thing. And, really, be mindful of what I’m actually doing by even reading these spam messages or anything that really doesn’t pertain to what I truly love to do and how I want to express myself. So, I really love that idea that, you know what? It may be that I might not look at those emails at all, right? Because the people that are very close to me, that really are meaningful, they know how to call me.
  
  SISTER JENNA: Right.
  
  DR. SUSANNE: They know my personal phone number, wherever I’m at in the world, they will be able to reach me, if I need them. I really like that, what you’re saying.
  
  SISTER JENNA: I was having a discussion with Antonia when we started out the A.M. show and even with the Meditation Museum and social media it is such a big thing and when we started…Now, I know hundreds of thousands of people globally on an internet level and when we started our social media, whether it was Facebook or whatever, I think there’s just that expectant feeling. Like this feeling that everybody would just sign up, but my people are not like that and my friends are not like that. We don’t need to show too much of ourselves to be recognized or acknowledged. I remembered like later on I was telling Antonia, after I was asking her, "How many likes? Two? Oh, my god. Nobody likes us? It’s been a month."
  
  But, what we were realizing is that our world is so genuine and sincere, we don’t move that fast. We don’t do things that…We do move fast, but we don’t move in that genre. But then, we realized that there were two purposes. That, of course, if you’ve got a good message, it’s great to keep getting it out like your radio show. When you Tweeted us today--I love Tweeting--so I tweeted it out to my friends. But, I love to share that. I get that. But it shouldn’t be that I’m driven by this concept of social media to define who we are or our worth. I think that can create a stress factor that’s unnecessary. The kind that of…One that moves us sometimes off the grid, you know?
  
  DR. SUSANNE: Right. I know for myself, when it comes to off the grid, I travel to Mexico. I have a little place down there all the way down south in La Paz, Mexico, and we have a place that’s pretty much off the grid. Yes, we’ve got internet, but we barely have the service and I just go there to decompress and rejuvenate my body and just really get centered doing a lot of mindfulness and meditation the way I meditate. I know you founded and created the Meditation Museum and I really would love to know what inspired you to do that.
  
  SISTER JENNA: Courage. In a city like Washington, D.C., you need courage. If you don’t have backbone or courage, it’s a hard place to continue and with the business of spirituality. It’s not always easy, but the Meditation Museum was this thought: We have 200 museums here. How about one that can help people to find themselves? So, we got influential friends, we did it and it’s doing great. Two hundred events per year and still ticking.
  
  DR. SUSANNE: Wow, that’s amazing.
  
  SISTER JENNA: It is.
  
  DR. SUSANNE: It’s amazing and that’s like almost, I mean, 200 events. That’s so many. Every week something is going on.
  
  SISTER JENNA: Let me explain, though, about this. A lot of people have this conception that meditation is emptying, getting away, being away from yourself. I’m teaching people, step up, get deeper in yourself. Lean in to life, but stop thinking waste and negative thoughts and that’s really my message to your listeners. No more waste or negative thoughts. That’s where the big amount of stress comes into the soul.
  
  DR. SUSANNE: Mmm. Gosh. Lean into yourself. That is phenomenal. You know, I listen to some of your songs. I suppose they’re called songs, but these meditations called Off the Grid into the Heart. Everyone can find that at iTunes. Really beautiful because your words are so powerful and I know you use your words very efficiently. Just by us talking today, I can feel that your words have such meaning in the way you express them and the way you’re delivering it. So, everyone, that
  CD is Off the Grid into the Heart.
  
  Oh, wow. This was so wonderful.
  
  Thank you so much, Sister Jenna. What insightful information. F
  
  For more about Sister Jenna, you can definitely go to iTunes or go to my Wellness for Life radio show page and I’ll have all sorts of goodies there.
  
  Until next time, this is Dr. Susanne sharing my natural strategies for ultimate health and wellness right here on RadioMD.
  
  Stay well, everyone.
  
  [END OF RECORDING]
• Length (mins): 10
• Waiver Received: No
• Host: Susanne Bennett, DC