Podcast Summary: The ∞actualinfinity Podcast

Episode: Stop Trying So Hard: My Perspective on Meditation

Host: Steve Mattus
Date: February 19, 2025

Episode Overview

In this solo episode, host Steve Mattus dismantles conventional ideas around meditation, inviting listeners to stop trying so hard. Rather than prescribing another set of spiritual "to-dos," Steve explores what it means to drop the obsessive pursuit of achievement—even within meditative practices—and instead, to radically accept and embody the messiness of our human experience. This episode is a raw, compassionate, and occasionally expletive-laden love letter to those who have always been “too much,” offering a non-dual perspective where meditation becomes an effortless recognition of our inherent loving awareness.

Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Human Journey to “Enoughness”

• Steve shares vulnerability about his personal struggles: grappling with shame, trauma, abuse, religious exclusion, recovery, and forging his own spiritual path.
• Quote [00:45]:
  “All of that effort has led me to where I am today... I don’t want it to come across as me saying that any other form of meditation is less effective.”

2. Traditional Approaches to Meditation: Appreciation and Pitfalls

• Contemplative Emptying:
  • About quieting the mind, observing thoughts, seeking understanding.
  • Valuable, with evidence-backed benefits, but can become another spiritual achievement project.
  • Quote [02:10]:
    “You may have experienced, as you have sat in meditation, some of these ideas of my mind isn’t still enough and why can’t I get this right?”
• Mindfulness:
  • Focus on being present without judgment—moves us from “fight or flight” to calm.
  • Can devolve into a “stress management” or a box to check in the self-improvement checklist.
  • Quote [04:10]:
    “It can become another self-improvement project. Something we’re trying to escape our chaotic life with...”
• Devotional Filling:
  • Especially Sufi remembrance: opening the heart to divine love.
  • Nurturing, yet may reinforce the illusion of “separation” or lack.
  • Quote [06:05]:
    “It can also reinforce the illusion that there is something out there we need to take in that isn’t already here.”
• Transcendental Meditation:
  • Techniques to access transcendent states, often via mantras.
  • Can become mere “seeking” for special experiences—another escape.

3. The Illusion of Separation & The Non-Dual View

• Steve threads through these forms a radical claim: None are wrong, but all play into a core misunderstanding—the illusion of separation between meditator and meditation, consciousness and content.
• He describes “non-duality,” cautioning that the term often gets “weird” or overly esoteric.
• Quote [08:44]:
  “There is no separation between you and the meditation, between awareness and experience... This is commonly known as non duality. But I find that... it starts to get really weird. Not wrong, just weird.”

4. Meditation as Allowing, Not Trying

• Steve’s approach is a gentle rebellion against achievement-driven spiritual practice. Instead, he asks:
  • What if meditation required less effort, and could never be done “wrong”?
  • Distinguishes “allowing” from “accepting”: Acceptance is task-oriented; allowing is simply recognizing what is already here.
  • Quote [12:10]:
    “If you notice, like pain arising or fear arising or hurt arising, it’s difficult to accept that—acceptance doesn’t always feel acceptable... but the way that I teach meditation, you don’t have to accept it, just allow it. It’s here, it’s already here.”
• He invites listeners to observe rather than fix, to drop the “practice” and rest in simply being.

5. Who We Really Are: Loving Presence

• Outlines how everything changes—body, thoughts, experiences—but the awareness that notices all is unchanging.
• That underlying presence is “love.”
• Quote [16:50]:
  “The you that notices them all... is still the same, the loving presence that you are.”
• Meditation then, is not about achievement or escaping, but a natural returning—remembering who we’ve always been.

6. The Practical Impact: From Pursuit to Being

• Special states—transcendence, awe, falling in love, orgasm—momentarily dissolve the illusion of separation, but are not the goal.
• The “radical shift” is to let go of spiritual evasion and pursuit, and to discover that we are always, already whole.
• Quote [22:01]:
  “No practice that we can engage in will ever be able to give us what we already are. They can only point us back to this ever-present reality of our loving, aware being.”

7. Community and Holding Space: The Village

• Steve speaks to his online community, “the village,” where people can gather to hold each other’s experience compassionately and remember their shared loving awareness.
• Strong stance against spiritual bypassing: Pain and fear deserve to be held and loved, not dismissed or healed.
• Quote [27:03]:
  “If you’re in pain, that pain is valid. That gets to be here, that gets to be held, that gets to be loved. If you’re scared... that fear is real, it’s rational, it makes sense. It doesn’t need to be dismissed, it needs to be held.”

Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On the futility of seeking:
  “All of this evasion and pursuit… really all [of it] is trying to get us back, pointing us back towards the ever-present reality of love.” [21:20]

• On radical, non-bypassing love:
  “There’s nothing to heal. There’s a lot that needs to be held.” [28:30]

• On the core message:
  “You are the awareness, you are the love. And that is the deepest meditation of all.” [29:25]

Timestamps for Key Segments

• 00:00 – 03:30: Introduction & Steve’s personal context
• 03:30 – 09:30: Breakdown of four traditional meditation types and their hidden pitfalls
• 09:30 – 14:00: Introduction to non-duality; transition to “allowing” over “acceptance”
• 14:00 – 19:00: The unchanging loving presence; radical shift to effortless meditation
• 19:00 – 24:00: Special states, the illusion of separation, and the futility of endless seeking
• 24:00 – 28:30: Community invitation (“the village”); critique of spiritual bypassing
• 28:30 – 29:30: Closing: “You are the love”; affirmation & invitation for more love, not less

Summary Tone and Style

Steve’s delivery is intimate, conversational, and laced with warmth as well as irreverence. He gently rejects prescriptive spirituality and the self-improvement treadmill, urging listeners to embrace their own complex humanity. His language oscillates between the poetic (“the sun was always there”) and the bracingly direct (“the profound fucking beauty of divine love”), grounding mystical ideas in lived, felt experience.

Takeaways

• Meditation, in Steve’s telling, is not about trying harder, achieving, or fixing yourself.
• The most profound practice may be allowing everything to be as it is, knowing you are already the loving, aware presence you seek.
• All pain, fear, and messiness are valid—they don’t need to be healed, but held.
• True transformation comes not from effort, but from a radical embrace of the infinite, messy, beautiful truth of who you already are.

“More love, not less – all-ways.”