Mindfulness Interview II

And then the fact is that by virtue of being alive, we're kept alive by this mysterious process that we call breathing. And we're being breathed more than we're doing it because you can't not breathe because you. You forgot. So we can just tune into. The breath sensations in the body wherever they are.

And how the body is interacting with the movement of the breath flowing in and out of the body. Both at the nostrils and in the chest and perhaps even down in the belly.

And recognizing that you're awareness. Is not really wedded to the breath sensations or any object of attention that you're tuning into. The awareness these these objects of attention are the door into an awareness, that is basically available 24/7. And is a place that you can actually reside that you can take up residency here in your own awareness even in the midst of tremendous turmoil.

And stress and challenges and very real problems that you need to do with today or tomorrow. And for now simply holding it all in awareness without trying to. Do anything or get anywhere?

And dropping underneath any streams of thought especially if they tend to be caught up in anxiety or worry or. Fear or? Prognosticating about tomorrow or the future or? Caught up in the past. So the in this very moment you're already free in a certain way the stress your your transparent to those stressful forces just in this moment not not for any time later simply for now.

And we simply rest here. You could even say take refuge here. Out of the winds out of the storm just for the briefest of moments.

Perhaps recharging your batteries. Might be a good metaphor for understanding this you have to go back out into the storm, but you could actually recharge your batteries or another metaphor tune your instrument. Before you take it out in the world and play it.

And the more we see our minds getting caught up in our thoughts and reacting to our anxious thoughts in these moments of stillness, which they will do the more we can liberate ourselves from that simply in the seeing of it. And then that is the responding to the stressful event or thought or emotion right in this moment.

And it requires an enormous, you know, or if it actually makes available and enormous reservoir of kindness and compassion for yourself. The very act of taking your seat and dropping into the present moment and into your breath is a radical act of sanity and compassion and I would say even love.

In the largest and most beautiful and deepest sense of the word love. Both for yourself and for the world.

And then you can bring this awareness because it's portable into every aspect of your life all back into the storm back into the stresses. And and then everything may be different because how you see how you feel how you respond rather than react is really a moment a moment.

Adventure in how to navigate. The unwanted difficult the challenging in the only moment any of us ever have which is this one. So whether you're in your home in some things come up in the family, or whether you're at work or you're on the front lines or whatever it is that you're doing.

Can you actually be fully present with it? And then see that you have a range of different options when you get out of the or out from under the narrative that is continually running that reactive scenario of. Unhappiness or anger or despair or whatever it is and those are just waves on the ocean you're the ocean you have a lot more options for how you hold the whole thing.

Both in the doing and more importantly in the being. And then when we let the doing come out of this silence out of this stillness out of this wakefulness out of this domain of being it's a radically different doing whether it's relating to your spouse your partner or your work or your child or your grandchild or your parent or the full catastrophe of how the human condition is emerging as.

We move more and more into the pandemic even though help is you know on the way in the form of these vaccines we're facing a hugely difficult next few months. And. It's really an occasion to. Doing your mind in a certain way and tune your body so that we don't lose our minds when we actually need them on board.

The most. And it makes a critical difference if we can navigate this way. So although I've had my eyes closed and I've been talking for a long time the invitation in these meditation practices that drop underneath my voice and we're and what I'm actually saying into where the voice is actually pointing inwardly to yourself and then realizing that like I didn't ring any bells to start the any this meditation.

I'm not going to ring any bells to end it because there is really no end to this meditation practice it's moment by moment by moment it's none other than life itself if you're willing to show up in awareness for it. And at the same time. Let's keep in mind that we're not trying to create some kind of ideal this is seriously messy the mind is seriously messy our reactions can sometimes be frighteningly ugly or horrific and astonishing to ourselves even never mind to people we know and love and it's very important for us to give ourselves permission to not be ultra-judgmental and self condemning in this particular moment in time but to cut ourselves as much slack as possible and realize how.

Human beings are even under very very difficult circumstances and trust that you're one of those human beings no matter what you're narrative is about your own limitations and this practice is very much like exercising that muscle of mindfulness that the more you work with the resistance and the challenges and the messiness and the difficulty whether it's cognitive or emotional or somatic or social whether it's at work or whether it's at home, the more the, World and your body and well-being.

Respond to that. Commitment to orient yourself in that particular way just like you would orient a sale if you were a sailor of a sailboat you need to orient the sale in just a particular way so that you make maximal use of a potentially hugely destructive force the wind.

John I say so help and thank you for that lovely experience of mind for us which will continue as you say moment by moment throughout our time together and beyond I want to ask you about the phrase self care, which is something that gets talked about a loss at the moment.

I mean, it's been lovely actually to see the amount of talk about from what you might mental health and are sort of emotional state during these difficult times it seems to be a lot more public awareness of this importance but self-care sometimes as a term that's rather loaded around sort of individualism and sort of pampering and looking after just yourself and of course, you've just taken us through a very proactive.

Self-care but do you feel that that's okay is is a selfish act or do you think as you were sort of hinting out there that perhaps there are some ripples around the way in which it affects others and in fact in some ways we can't help others unless we start with that that inner focus.

Yeah and hopefully more than ripples because you know in a very real way when you start to investigate what we even mean by itself, all of a sudden it evaporates are you your name are you your age are you you're gender are you what you know, are you what people don't know you don't know are you what you don't know you don't know and you see we construct narratives about who we are that are way too small for the miraculous like mystery of what it means that be a human embodied in at this moment.

You know across a life trajectory which is independent more and more uncertain, especially if you have pre-existing conditions or your particular age groups or anything like that, so all we know is that we're alive now, we don't know how long it will be alive none of us do so the invitation in a certain way is to see whether we can live life as if it really mattered while we have it because we don't know how long we're going to have it but if we're zoning along on autopilot reacting rather than responding in our own minds even never mind if it's it's not just, That do that to us we're constantly reacting and caught in little self-narrative so self-care in a very profound way would be penetrating into what the Buddhist might call the empty nature of self and seeing that our stories are so too small for the beauty of what it means to be alive and to be human and to be conscious or sentient in this moment that we don't have a vocabulary for really understanding who we are but one thing we know is that we are deeply interconnected with each other.

And that we do not humans do not do well by ourselves completely isolated and part of the mental health pressures or the challenges of a pandemic is that we've been cloistered up and not able to hug and not able to even see people that we you know love and care for and so this is requiring us to stretch our own envelope and find other ways to express that love and to express that importance of the other and express.

Are gratitude for the the things that do work in our lives and that we do have and that and and and then offer that up to the world as a as a way of yielding the world because one could say the pandemic is a huge wake-up call it won't be wasn't the first one, it will not be the last one if we don't wake up to certain elements and I know action for happiness points to this a lot if as a species as humanity we do not wake up on this planet to the ways in which we are kind of you could say the autoimmune diseases of the planet we're more dangerous than Gov it to our own health and well-being.