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- [Eric] Trying to understand what mindfulness is.
It doesn't help with the term, first of all.
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- [Manijeh] Usually, I don't even use the word mindfulness,
it's not necessary.
Terminology reduces it.
- [Eric] But if we go to the root word,
it really means to remember.
To stay mindful of something
is to remember to stay in contact
or being aware of something.
(energetic music)
I remember my brother had an old GTO that he was rebuilding
and it had these big, powerful oil brakes
and he had been changing the brake fluid.
I took it for a drive,
he said, "Just be really mindful,
you're gonna need a lot more time to break
because there's not something wrong with it.
So pushing down of the brake took a lot more force."
So as I'm driving along,
I have to be really aware of cars and people on streets,
street signs, stop lights.
So what am I really doing?
I'm holding one thing,
I need to remember not to forget to brake in enough time
while managing all this other stuff.
So mindfulness as a meditation practice is,
oh, your attention is something that is absorbed
in everything that you're doing
if you're "paying attention."
But you're not paying attention
to how you're paying attention,
you're not paying attention to your body,
and you're not paying attention to the thoughts that you're having,
that really are running at high speed,
because you haven't trained yourself to do that.
So mindfulness is asking you
to remember to pay attention to yourself
in the moments of your life as you're doing things,
as you're talking to people,
as you're making a sandwich, as you're driving your car.
Can you be aware of this beautiful, extraordinary,
mysterious body and mind as you're doing things?
Now to do that, we have to train informal practices
to cultivate a part of the mind
that could observe everything else that's going on,
and remember to do it.
And that's why it's called mindfulness.
- I grew up in a very religious home.
We were Southern Baptist.
And I think it's kind of funny
because I grew up in Seattle,
which is pretty much as North as you can get.
And my family found the one Southern Baptist Church.
But I loved it.
I loved the ritual and the ceremony.
I loved the feeling of connectedness
that I experienced when I was there, but I'm queer.
And so when I was 14 or so
and started to become very aware
of the fact that I was gay,
I knew both intuitively and also blatantly
based off of some of the teachings that I was hearing
in my youth group and things like,
that the God of my understanding at that time
did not have a place for me in his home.
Thankfully, I had a fierce mother
and a very loving family unit
that supported me unconditionally, and I just left.
And it was oddly enough, easy for me to cut ties.
But I will say that
there was always a space left open,
almost like an energetic hole that was created
when I left that.
- My childhood and my early adulthood were very difficult,
filled with adversity.
When I was born,
I was born with a bilateral, it's called club feet.
And it's a congenital foot condition
where your feet are deformed.
My mom saw that my feet were misshaped.
And she told the doctor
and the doctor's like, "He's going to be fine."
And at six months or whatever age it was
for me to start wearing shoes,
shoes weren't fitting me properly,
and they just kept falling off of my feet.
So my mom took me into the doctor and they're like,
"Well, let's correct his feet."
And that's when I had my first surgery at like six months.
My earliest memories is of these casts I had to wear,
'cause after the surgery,
then they cast your feet so that they mold and form
when they heal properly.
The day before,
I would have to go in and get my foot wrapped,
the doctor would want the cast removed off of me
to just let the incision breathe out,
heal, get some air.
So my mom told me that
she used to have to soak me in a tub for hours and hours
to get the dressing off of the cast.
And I'm just six months old,
not knowing what's going on, crying.
Think of how traumatic this is,
like this is my mom, your caregiver,
who's doing this to you.
And yes, her intentions are well
and to help me,
but I didn't know that at the time.
I had no friends.
Another layer was that also my home environment
was also very stressful.
So that was like another layer on top of
not only dealing with that,
but then to a certain extent,
suffering certain verbal and physical abuse within the home.
So whenever I would swear,
or sometimes when I did something that my mom didn't like,
I would get held down
and I would get my mouth washed out with soap.
And as a small kid, having your parent, your guardian,
your protector physically hold you down
and shove something into your mouth is very traumatic.
I guess, I started to cope through food.
It was the only way I knew how.
I didn't have any coping skills at the time.
And eventually, I grew up as a fat kid.
And then once I did start going to school,
then I started to get bullied because of the way I walked.
And then I had to wear special shoes because of my feet.
I also had large male breasts.
It's a certain medical condition called gynaecomastia.
So the trauma just continued outside of the home.
For me, there was so much fear
that I would just hold my head down and just,
I was crying on the inside,
but I wouldn't show it to the bullies,
but on the inside I was crying,
but I didn't wanna show that.
And I would just put my head down
and walk fast past them.
I would just come home and just shove my face
and just completely numb myself.
I would eat to the point of just getting sleepy.
And then I would just play video games,
and it's still is tough.
I'm very cautious around groups of people,
because I don't know
or I have this history of childhood experience of trauma
of people bullying me, picking on me.
So I have this view that the world's a scary place.
And that's like my natural orientation.
Mindfulness has really helped me
overcome many of those issues.
I wouldn't say cure myself,
because they're still there,
as far as some of the symptoms I experience,
but I would say that mindfulness has helped me more healed
from the past trauma.
- I had a really interesting introduction,
and it actually says a lot about
what the viewer or the practitioner might consider
when thinking about,
this is such a great practice,
I want to share it with other people.
So some of the people in my mom's sphere
were really extraordinary people,
in that whenever they talked to me or I'd visit them,
I felt like I was the most important person in the world.
They're focused on me and their interest in me was palpable.
And because my mom was struggling with trauma,
my father was busy working,
and my brother was eight years older than me,
so he really was more like a cousin in some ways
because he was off to the races early.
Having that kind of attention
from somebody was really profoundly nurturing.
And later on, I found out these were meditation teachers,
and they never told me they were meditation teachers.
They never said, "Brian, you should really read this book,
or you should try this meditation practice."
They never said anything.
What they did was they embodied curiosity,
they embodied radical compassion,
they embodied kindness and gentleness,
all human beings crave that.
So I was craving it.
And when I found out who they were,
it was right about when I was 25 years old,
I had gone through my own dating odysseys and dramas,
and I found this amazing girl I was dating.
And I told her that all these family friends
were meditation teachers,
that have I been wanting to do meditation for a long time
but I didn't know how to start.
And she said, "Well, you have to do it now,
this is your time."
And so I began formal practice right around,
just before I turned 26,
that was 27 years ago.
- I met a man who taught mindfulness, who was a teacher,
but I didn't know he was a teacher when I met him.
So we were dating and he was teaching meditation.
So just to be with him,
I would go sit in the meditation classes,
and I loved what he had to say,
but the meditation was so hard, oh my God.
I tell my students so they know that if it's hard for them,
yes, it was so difficult,
that the entire time, whatever time we sat to meditate,
I was thinking never able to feel my breath.
Maybe in an hour, I was feeling my breath one time.
- The pain is actually what brought me to mindfulness.
I was going to therapy at Kaiser, and therapy was helping.
It was bringing a lot of understanding to my past,
but it wasn't bringing much relief to it.
I still had the symptoms.
I was aware of my symptoms,
but I didn't know how to manage them.
So then finally, they suggested,
"Well, why don't you try mindfulness?"
And I thought,
"Well, me meditate with my busy, crazy mind, no way."
But I went to a class
and I discovered that it was nothing what I thought,
that it's not so much of emptying your mind,
more it's just noticing what your mind is stuck on,
where your mind is at.
Is it on a thought, what type of thought is it?
Is it a negative thought?
Is it a pleasant thought?
What is that thought doing to your body?
What kind of reactions are going on?
Is it causing your heart to race?
So that gave me something to do, like to pay attention to
while I was meditating,
it gave me stuff to focus on.
And once I started to practice mindfulness,
I started to be able to learn how to create some distance
between my mind and my thoughts.
- For a long time I thought maybe I'm not smart enough,
maybe I'm not educated enough.
I just knew that I really wanted to explore meditation.
I had gone through this process
where I had just ended
a stint of being on television for three years.
And I made this business investment
that went south very quickly, I lost all my money,
and I was like,
"I got to try a new path here."
I was recently sober,
and I just intuitively knew that meditation
was something that was going to really serve me.
So I started volunteering at a Buddhist bookstore.
I started taking every opportunity I could
to learn how to meditate to quiet my mind,
learn the practices, learn the discipline.
And out of that arose a desire to give back,
not only give back to society,
but to give back to my specific community,
the LGBTQ community.
So I came up with an idea
to start hosting spiritual services,
spiritual events in gay bars.
And that's what I did.
And so in 2010, I got the keys to a gay bar,
they weren't charging me rent or anything, Sunday mornings,
and my mentor and I started doing these services
in gay bars in West Hollywood.
And it just grew and grew and it grew.
And 10 years later, I am now a licensed minister.
I've offered hundreds and hundreds
and hundreds of teaching on spiritual living.
I lead meditation retreats, and it was all an accident,
this wasn't the plan,
it wasn't what I was supposed to be doing.
However, as my career in television continued to grow,
my discomfort dissatisfied.
I was just so bored doing it.
And I felt such vibrancy.
I felt so alive when I was teaching this work
and dedicating myself deeper and deeper
to my own spiritual practice that I knew this was it.
- I did not know what mindfulness was at all.
I even asked the psychiatrist, "What is mindfulness?"
And she said, "Well, it's a meditation class."
And that's when I thought to myself,
"Me meditate, yeah, right, calm my mind, empty it."
But I was desperate, and I thought I'd give it a shot.
What I learned was that
it's not about emptying your mind at all,
instead, it's just noticing where your mind is,
what it's focusing on, what its habits are.
And when I understood that,
that gave me things to do as I was practicing mindfulness.
Now there are times where,
as I'm practicing mindfulness,
my mind completely goes silent.
And that's wonderful when that happens.
And I enjoy those times.
But in the beginning, I primarily use mindfulness
just as a way of escaping my busy head,
they're called ANTs,
it's called automatic negative thinking.
And these are just our automatic thoughts that automate.
We have a negativity bias.
What the bias is, is that at the end of the day,
we tend to think about all the things that go wrong,
or if we're involved in a project,
or if we have a job interview,
even if we receive a 95%,
we focus on that 5% that we didn't get.
Mindfulness helped me identify my negativity bias.
And once I became aware of it,
I was able to start questioning it
and questioning the validity of it and how accurate it is.
- The people I started studying with
were people who were practicing
something called the Fourth Way,
which is not derived from Buddhism as mindfulness is,
it's an embodied practice of awareness attention
and self-discovery,
that has its origins in the Transcaucasus region
and the areas around India,
it was brought to the West by a man named Gurdjieff.
At that time,
mindfulness was not something that I was aware of.
There was something called mindfulness-based
stress reduction that was being studied in universities
and hospital settings,
dealing with chronic pain and chronic stress,
but it really hadn't reached anything
in terms of the common knowledge.
There was lots of Buddhism was around,
there was lots of meditation Taoism,
other kinds of practices,
but mindfulness as we understand it now
as a secular practice
extracted from Buddhist training was not around at all.
One of the things that was remarkable
was that all these people
who invited me to practice with them
had waited for me to be hungry and seek something,
rather than just see that I was struggling
with something and suggest here's a solution.
So they had this interesting wisdom about,
when you really are ready for something, you seek it,
and you're more willing to take on the challenge.
- Mindfulness is a contemplative practice.
Contemplative practices have existed cross-culturally
for thousands of years.
Mindfulness is from Eastern.
What it means is Vipassana or insight meditation.
The reason why it's gaining so much momentum
is now science is starting to validate that it's beneficial.
There is a, his name is Dr.Jon Kabat-Zinn,
he is a psychologist.
He broke down mindfulness into an eight-week program,
because what we first need to do
is we need to break down things into numbers.
We need to have a program,
we need to see how long the program is,
and then we need to measure people's results
before and after they've received the program.
So his program was working.
He noticed that people dealing with chronic pain
weren't really benefiting much,
that pain medication had its limitations,
that medicine has its limitations.
And once we hit those limitations, then what do we do,
'cause the person is still in pain.
So he found tremendous benefits in Buddhist philosophy.
So what he did was he stripped the,
like the religious aspects out of it,
and he came up with just practical techniques
as far as noticing thoughts, noticing emotions.
And he came up with the program.
And what this program did was it allowed
for people to measure the effectiveness of mindfulness.
He found that people reported not only less pain,
but also that people reported better qualities of life.
- No, I didn't.
That's why I have a lot of compassion for my students.
I stuck with it because of my boyfriend,
who was a teacher, and because of the teaching service,
the teachings were so high-level, so kind and so logical.
I didn't have to believe in something,
I could verify for myself,
there was no judgment in it.
So that's what kept me actually,
not the practice of meditation.
When we talk about mindfulness meditation,
which kind of distinguishes it
from other types of meditation,
there are literally hundreds of types of meditation
that come from different traditions,
religions, or philosophies or systems,
and each one have their own structure and outcome.
Meditation is a specific type of meditation,
but mindfulness, as a space of mind
is not particular to anybody.
For example, let's say you went somewhere
and had a meal and this was a brand new dish,
you never had experienced it before.
So you become more in tune like,
"Let me see, wow."
You take your bite and you really about this thing.
And before your mind comes and says,
"Oh yeah, it tastes like this and it tastes like that,"
you have a moment of no opinion,
just experiencing and watching, "Wow."
Just like I told my,
I teach ADD mindfulness for people with ADHD.
And so I told them that,
"Okay, it's like we have these templates
of the ways we think.
When you are in that space of mindfulness,
you are detached from that template."
- I would say that mindfulness
addresses the human condition.
There are many wisdom traditions, religious traditions,
philosophical traditions
that recognize and question the nature of the mind.
It just so happens
that Buddhist cultures committed themselves culturally
to a systematic description of what ails the mind
in a systematic practice to rebalance the mind.
But really, they're not inventing anything new.
The reason why it affects everybody
is because everyone has a body,
everyone feels pleasure and discomfort,
wellness and disease,
everyone has a mind that can remember
or imagine that the future,
and everyone wants to feel connected
and want to have a sense of purpose,
and wants to have some sense of agency
over what happens to them.
And mindfulness addresses all those things directly.
- I think mindfulness is bigger than insight.
Insight arises within mindfulness.
The mindfulness space has to be there first
for the real reliable insight,
'cause sometimes you could be thinking that is insight,
and it's really not,
for a reliable aha moment or realization to happen.
- I became so fascinated by my thoughts,
more so, how my thoughts were dictating
the world I was experiencing.
And I think that's when you really know
you've tapped into your passion
when it's all you want to talk about.
And I would just go through books after books, after books,
I was like, I would say I was like a mad scientist,
just tearing through documents and doing different practices
and trying everything,
all to just become more aware
of the thoughts I was thinking,
the patterns that were active in my life,
the belief systems that were both conscious and unconscious
that were creating the patterns in my life,
the experiences that I kept having over and over again.
I think the first step in transformation
is the awareness that you're no longer
interested in experiencing what you're experiencing.
There's real beauty in contrast.
So you become aware that, "I don't like this anymore.
There's gotta be a different way."
And in your willingness to try a new approach,
I truly believe the path is shown.
So the second step in transformation is willingness.
I am willing to try a new approach, and in that,
something opens up in your consciousness,
a door opens or at least cracked open.
And the next step is always shown
and the next step is always shown.
Now, our job is to continue to cultivate the willingness,
to take the next step,
the courage to take the next step,
the willingness to get out of our comfort zone,
the willingness to explore and look at the beliefs,
both known and unknown,
that are creating your experience in the world.
I think right now,
socially is a gorgeous time for everybody
to look at the subconscious programming
that has created your belief systems
and how you move in the culture.
I am someone who remains willing.
And in fact, I love looking at the blocks
that I don't even realize are there
until they're pointed out to me,
and often times pointed out to me through meditation,
and sometimes pointed out to me
in something that feels like big slap in the face.
And I think right now, culturally,
is an opportunity for us all to hold ourselves accountable
so that a greater sense of unity can express itself.
And if you're not willing
to look at your own limited beliefs,
then what are you even doing?
- The beauty of it was that
there is surrounding teachings about kindness, compassion,
and little by little, that would impact me.
Now, there is a meditation called loving-kindness meditation
that is also very paralleled with mindfulness meditation.
I would not give into it,
because I believe that, "Oh my God, I'm kind enough.
I cannot be any more kind,
I cannot give anymore."
I felt like kindness was what I knew before this.
So I would resist, "Oh, it's for these other people,
it's not for me."
And then one day I came to sit,
I decided I'm gonna go sit and meditate.
When I sat to meditate, my mind said,
"Hmm, I'm gonna send loving-kindness to all the people"
"who have harmed me on my life just organically."
So I sat there, we had a Sheetz dog, Oreo.
He sat with me meditating.
I close my eyes and I had like three phrases,
may you be safe,
may you be healthy and strong,
may you be at ease, free from suffering.
I couldn't finish saying
one series of these phrases for somebody
who came fast enough
until somebody else come to my mind.
Oh my goodness.
And at the time I had divorced from my ex-husband too,
so he would come in-between.
So he got most of it really.
It was incredible.
It took about 40 minutes.
I just sat there.
And these people came to my mind,
and I remembered why I didn't like them
or what they did to me or something.
And I would send these kind thoughts to them,
and my stomach would be like yucky feeling.
It was just like remembering all that.
And so I took a deep breath and organically it stopped.
I got up, I said, "Okay, let's go, Oreo."
I got up and went and washed my hands,
and went on with my day.
And next day,
I went for a hike with my friend who is a therapist.
We both went through schooling.
I went to the routes of organization development,
she went and became a therapist.
So we were hiking,
and I told her about this experience, I said...
We were talking about my ex-husband, off course,
"Oh yeah, can imagine he came
and we've seen all these people,
and this is what's happened."
"So she said, 'What happened?"
"So I told her,"
Oh, I went and washed my...
She said, 'What, wait, you went and washed your hand?
"Do you always wash your hands after meditation?"
I said, "No."
"Huh, oh my God."
She smiled so beautifully.
She said, "It's like symbolically you washed your hands,
off these people, it's done."
It was just that realization.
It probably would have worked the same,
but that realization helps me feel like,
"Oh my God, yeah, it's done."
Just that experience alone,
I believe sets me on a journey of healing
that was so fundamentally powerful.
- Moments of mindfulness often bring powerful discoveries,
and some of them are not flattering.
I remember I was on a retreat once in upstate New York,
it was right after 9/11, I think it was 2002.
This retreat involved a lot of working meditation.
So there were sitting meditation and moving meditation,
but also working meditation.
So we were assigned to different teams
to do different kinds of work.
Some people were cooking, some people are cleaning,
some people doing landscaping.
I happened to be assigned to a small building
in this very rural area
that we had to take off all the roofing tiles.
And so the idea here in the practice is,
"How do I stay mindful as I'm climbing a ladder
and bringing up tools and working with a team of people,
and staying safe and not falling, and doing the job well,
and it's in the hot side of summer?"
This is one of those things
where you're humbled by the practice.
It was after 9/11, there was a lot of tension,
a lot of anxiety, a lot of distrust,
a lot of tribalism going on.
And one of my colleagues
who I'd never met on this roof, this particular moment
was a young man from Pakistan.
It was a hot, hot day and we were pulling off roof tiles,
and the idea is that
we're supposed to stay aware of each other,
but we're not supposed to have anything
but the functional speech.
So we're not gonna talk about the Dodgers.
We're going to just talk about,
"Oh, what kind of tools do we need for this job,"
and then it's silence.
And then you focus on being aware of the technique,
yourself and the other person.
And I became aware that I forgot my water,
and it was really hot.
What I noticed as I saw his bottle of water,
and I had a whole association,
my mind just went on a story about who this guy was.
And I could see that he was colored by 9/11,
because he was from Pakistan.
I saw this kind of prejudicial thinking
that projected identity onto him.
And just as I was thinking that,
he turned and grabbed the bottle of water,
and when he was about to raise it to his face,
he looked at me, he said,
"You look so thirsty, you have to drink."
And he pierced the bubble of that projection
of his identity in that moment.
And I was just shocked.
I was shocked at the, first of all,
I had to react to him,
and I took it and drank some cold water,
and was so grateful and thanked him.
But also, I had this digestion of,
"Oh, that's how prejudice starts,
is these projections of belief on someone
based on tiny bits of information
and conditioned experience."
And that this practice allowed my heart
to open to him immediately,
and seeing my own sleep around that,
my own dreamlike state of
not knowing who the person is and thinking you do.
So that was a profound experience.
It became part of a practice of just noticing.
I would see myself at a cafe or at a Starbucks,
and just practice noticing,
watching my own mind as I'm drinking my coffee
with the newspaper to kind of make it less weird.
And I would just look at people's faces
and just notice how my brain sizes them up as my tribe,
not my tribe.
And it's an automatic function of the brain.
That part of the brain is not my fault.
It forms from the evolutionary, a natural selection pressure
because it served a purpose back in the days
when there was more tribal fighting happening.
But it's my responsibility
not to let that automatic functioning be the end game,
I have to take responsibility for that functioning.
And so I practiced with that all the time.
- I lost my son three years ago.
An incredible, incredible, incredible tough pain,
that every time
that I got hit with the tsunamis of grief,
the first thing in my mind was,
"May no being ever experience this."
Because the extent of pain.
For the first 35 days,
I fainted every day, because my brain couldn't handle it.
With my practice, with awareness,
with compassion, with all that,
more and more and more, when an emotion comes up,
that is grief,
that it comes up because my eye caught a picture of him
or a thought came about him,
and that he's no longer here,
the brain produces the emotion of grief
to respond to that stimuli,
'cause the brain is predicting constantly
what do I need to do,
what do I need to do? What's next, what's next?
And it's 10 steps ahead of us too.
But with my awareness, I can notice,
"Oh this emotion is present.
Is it necessary?
Is it useful?
Is it conducive to my happiness?"
No, I don't have to entertain that emotion.
Knowledge, practice, understanding,
experience and capability,
that I'm not stuck with millions of mothers,
like millions of others around the world
for 20 years or 30 years for the rest of my life being done.
When a child dies, a mother or father,
most often they're done,
they're stuck in that emotion,
because the brain produces that emotion
and the person doesn't know what to do with it,
believes it and goes with it.
But now I can say, no, it doesn't mean I love my dear,
oh my goodness, my dear son less, but why should I suffer?
It's not necessary to suffer to prove love.
- And when we hear this
from our Eastern wisdom traditions,
that my enemy is my friend,
or that adversity is my opportunity,
and we just don't want that,
especially in the West,
we want something that's gonna be quick and easy,
efficient and get me to the place I wanna go.
And I don't wanna deal with all that disturbing crap.
But actually, it's during crises, during difficult moments
that the software that's running my life,
that I didn't design becomes visible,
because it's not functioning that well,
there's some dissonance, there's some suffering,
and that's my opportunity to see the functioning
and to decide, how can I notice that,
and not fully believe it all the time,
so that I can begin to participate in evolving my own mind.
I was at a meditation retreat practice,
where I was part of the serving team.
At the end of the retreat, there was a dinner,
and I was part of serving the meal and cleaning up.
And at the very end of the night,
people did a meditation, so it was quiet,
the dining halls cleaned up, everything's put away.
And after the meditation was over,
and people were hugging
and kind of talking about their experience.
I was part of a team,
but what I noticed as I sat there in my chairs,
no one came to me,
and all of a sudden
I became profoundly aware of this narrative
that I have had all my life, that I'm alone,
and that I'm not really part of other people's groups.
I had that ever since I was a kid.
I had to work hard to let go of it.
But at this particular juncture,
fairly young in my practice,
it was really painful to sit there and not be included.
And it's a classic thing.
Now, as a psychotherapist,
I know that people who have social anxiety
and who tend to feel lonely,
they're also reticent
to make the step that could solve that problem
by just getting up
and patting someone on the back and saying,
"Hey, that was amazing experience.
How was your experience?"
Terrified to do that because the belief is, no one wants me,
that's why they're not coming to me.
Why would they want me to go to them?
So I remember though,
some instructions from one of my teachers,
that when we're feeling
this extraordinarily effective suffering,
so my body is tight,
and it feels flooded with cortisol
and other chemicals of stress,
and my mind is telling me, "I don't belong here."
I remember the practice,
and the practice is just to simply
question the truth of that thought
and open my entire attention
to all the difficult sensations,
to noticing my mind wants to pull me out of presence,
come back to presence, stay with the body,
feel the discomfort,
open to it and let it sort of sizzle and cure me as it were,
and rest and watch this duration.
And it stayed for some time, maybe two or three minutes.
And then I was able to just notice
that this is a habit of mind and not the truth.
And I was able to get up and just say hello to a few people
and walk away feeling totally different.
This methodology is used now
in all kinds of forms of therapy,
like mindfulness-based relapse prevention,
mindfulness-based cognitive therapy,
and it's helping people, millions of people deal with anxiety and depression.
But I discovered it right there,
before I knew about any of those things,
just by applying the practice
right when I wanted to just get up and leave
and run out of the room,
but staying in the fire,
sitting in the fire with compassion
and letting it transform my mind.
- I often say that your life is your practice,
my life is my practice.
And that became very true for me
when I moved through the grieving process
after my son passed away unexpectedly,
he was eight months old,
and just a beautiful, healthy little boy.
And he got a stomach bug,
and he just didn't seem to get better.
And I would go to the doctor, they would send us home.
I took him to the emergency room,
they sent us home, and finally after one night,
he wasn't keeping anything down,
he was so upset.
I took him back to the emergency room and said,
"You gotta look at him.
Something's not right here."
And he looked a little dehydrated.
So they brought him in and they were gonna get him on liquids.
And then everything began to get out of control.
It felt like it was out of control.
It almost was like I was watching a movie,
those experiences in your life
when you really are just the observer.
And I will always have that memory of looking down at him,
and he just starts taking these kinds of gulps of breath.
And I asked the nurse, I'm like, "What is he doing?"
And then she just said, "This does not look good."
And suddenly there was 10 people in the room.
They placed a mask on him.
They were pumping air into his lungs,
and they revived him and I called my husband at work.
And he was glad I was going to the emergency room,
because he thought it would help me,
'cause he knew I was going to be at home alone
and he didn't want me to be stressed out.
And he knew I was worrying about our son
even though we thought he just had a bug.
And I just remember telling him, I'm like,
"Leave, get here now."
And he walked out of work and just came straight away.
And he said, he knew something was wrong
when a social worker greeted him at the hospital.
Within two hours, our son passed away of cardiac arrest.
It was an undiagnosed heart condition,
it's very rare, called Kawasaki disease.
He had gotten sick about a month and a half before
and turns out that was the initial symptoms
of the disease expressing itself in his body.
And the doctors had thought it was something else,
they thought it was just a virus.
Had it been detected then,
there could have been something that
they could have done, but the symptoms went away,
he seemed totally fine.
And what had happened was the disease attacks the heart.
And though he gotten a stomach virus,
his heart couldn't handle the virus going through that,
and his heart gave out.
I like to say that he was just
enveloped in so much love, his little heart burst.
But there was just this experience
of just watching people come in and out.
I'd say probably 30 people all in all,
entered the room and left the room trying to revive him,
trying to get him to just stay alive.
What a lot of people don't tell you
is that after a baby dies,
they wrap the baby in a blank and they hand them to you.
And I think that this is a way for the parents to transition
into the experience of letting go.
And they give you a hospital room for four hours
so you can be with the baby.
And I just remember having to call my mom
and I'm feeling that experience.
When I go back and I live the experience,
I get emotional because it's just like reliving it.
But you should know that my heart is so full of love
for my son, for the experience.
And for being able to move through this experience
and be present to what was enfolding when it was unfolding.
I just remember seeing my mom come
and her legs gave out on her, and my sister was there,
and a few of our friends came to say goodbye.
And we just kissed him goodbye.
We wrapped him in a blanket
that my mother-in-law had made for him.
And they took him away.
We put them in that because it just felt like,
it looked more like him.
I knew intuitively that it was time to pay attention.
I wanted to be present
for what was about to unfold in my life
and our lives collectively.
What unfolded in the months following
was this experience in which
I was fully present to the feelings of loss,
the feelings of grief, the feelings of agony, of sadness.
And instead of trying to push them away
or trying to get through it quickly,
I just allowed them to have residency.
So whatever needed to arise,
I just allowed it to come up and have its time.
And what I learned in that was sadness can be beautiful
and it can be healing,
and allowing yourself to have a layered human experience
is so powerful and meaningful.
And because I'm open to it,
I had little miracles that would unfold along the way.
And now I think the greatest gift my son gave me
was he walked me over the bridge from faith to knowing.
So there are certain things that I now know about life
that I would not
have been able to stand in authority and say,
I know this to be true,
had that not occurred.
Did it happen the way I wanted it to?
Absolutely not, but it happened.
I remember somebody said to me,
"No parent should go through this."
And I just found that to be so unhelpful for me,
because I was going through this.
And one thing that we must learn to do,
if we are going to experience peace
is accept what is unfolding before us.
- The process is, I liken it to log rolling.
It's just really hard for us,
just falling in the water, falling in the water.
If the water is your thoughts,
and being on the log is being in your senses,
you're constantly just falling,
and you have to be totally okay with that and embrace it.
Why?
Well, first of all, it's a new skill,
you're not supposed to be great at it yet.
But second of all, it also shows you about the nature of mind.
Falling into the water
when you're trying to experience a log,
tells you about water,
and tells you about balance, buoyancy,
all those things.
You're learning things, even as you "get distracted."
So you're never not benefiting from it.
And you always want to embrace that experience of,
"Oh this is not simple, and it's not easy,
but each moment I can try again."
And the ability to begin again,
and that spirit of what we call in neuroscience,
we call it the courage of repetition.
I had to keep embracing a thousand repetitions
as the yes to the experience.
But also, if you play a musical instrument,
if you play sports, if you paint or write,
you know what it's like to not think the technique.
In the beginning, if you're learning a tennis swing,
the coach is telling you to make sure
to have your racket face outward a little bit,
and the backswing has to be parallel to the cord
and your left hand should be forward if you're right-handed.
"Okay, I gotta to think about all these things.
And then I try and think of, and I can't do it."
But gradually, I start experimenting,
and my body and my mind are communicating,
and something becomes embodied,
when it's embodied,
I don't need to think it.
I mean, you put on shoes today.
I guarantee you,
you did not think about how to tie your shoelaces.
You were thinking about something else, because you can,
because your body knows.
So in the same way, as you practice this
and you begin to distinguish
between thinking breath versus feeling breath,
thinking wash the dishes versus actually sensing the plate,
feeling the wet sponge, hearing the scrub sound,
those are all immediate radical experiences
that don't need explanation or any kind of elaboration.
But the mind is used to talking all the time,
and narrating our experience, which is a wonderful thing.
The only way I can have this interview with you
is 'cause I can do that.
However, that's not the only experience that's possible.
And quite often, our internal narrative is not that pleasant
especially given cultural upheavals
and global health threats and contentious elections.
So it's helpful to have a choice
to let that sort of shift to the background,
and that my actual lived experience being the foreground.
So there's a great payoff to those thousand reps.
- The journey, there was an initial benefit
once I started to practice,
of just relief,
relief from my over active, busy, unable to settle down,
easily frustrated mind.
That was great. And I didn't have to drink any alcohol,
I didn't have to binge on any food.
This was just a skill and a tool to practice.
And I didn't have to be anywhere
or be with anybody to do it.
That was the initial benefits.
And then about six months into my practicing mindfulness,
I was in my backyard,
I had just finished yoga,
so I was completely exhausted.
And then I started my breath practice,
where I'm bringing my attention to my breath,
following it as it's coming in,
noticing little space in-between,
and then following my breath as I go out.
But I also count, so I do a count of five.
So as I'm breathing in, I do one, two, three, four, five.
And as I exhale, I count one, two, three, four, five,
it just adds more stimulus or more information for my brain,
my hyperactive brain to focus on.
But while I was doing that,
all of a sudden I had this experience
where my thoughts completely shut off.
When I also practice mindfulness, I close my eyes,
and when I close my eyes,
I see a little light in front of me.
And I focus on that light.
And while I was focusing on this light in front of me,
eventually the light kept getting
bigger and bigger and bigger.
Eventually, I became the light.
That saying, I saw the light, I am the light,
I felt it flow through me.
It was an experience that's indescribable.
I'll do my best, but just in my descriptions,
they're just like street signs, street signs,
they're not the street.
While I felt it,
I felt just pure peace,
just unbelievable calmness, peace, and joy,
and then it stopped.
And then I was like, my mind kicked back on.
My first thought was,
"Holy shit has just happened,"
because I had been reading
about this experience for many, many years.
The first time I had this experience,
I was in a car accident in the summer of '97.
I was actually ejected out of the vehicle,
my seatbelt ripped.
And I was, according to the police report,
thrown a hundred feet from the point of impact
to where my body landed on the ground.
I don't remember the impact.
I remember certain points,
my consciousness just kept coming in and out.
And then since we were so far away from a hospital,
they send a helicopter out to lift me air ambulance
to Holy Cross Medical Center in Mission Hills.
I was on the helicopter,
while I'm on the helicopter,
my consciousness is coming in and out,
one moment I'm there,
everyone's telling me to calm down,
it was just an accident.
I'm fighting people because I'm in such a state of shock,
I don't know what's going on.
I get to the hospital,
they rolled me into the emergency room,
I'm coming in and out,
I'm fighting the nurses,
the nurses are telling me to calm down.
So while I was in the emergency room,
and all this chaos was going on,
and they're sticking a catheter in me
and breathing tubes down my throat,
I felt my awareness or my consciousness leave my body.
I actually felt like my,
I don't know
if you want to call it spirit awareness conscious,
whatever you wanna call it,
actually leave my physical presence.
And I was able to actually look at myself
while I was in the room,
while I was lying down on the hospital,
while people were frantically working around me,
shoving breathing tubes,
giving me injections, holding me down,
but I felt completely calm and peaceful out of my body.
And I even saw this white light
out of like the corner of my eye.
And then when I went towards it,
then I just kind of blacked out.
And then I woke up in ICU three days later,
and then that's when everybody
explained to me what happened.
That was my first experience
of having, was that near death experience.
And then about six months practicing mindfulness,
I experienced it again.
And that really
has completely changed my life ever since then.
- Owing back to some of the things
that we know from science,
so we know that first of all,
I can take care of this marvelous, mysterious organism,
I can learn more about when I'm stressing
and what to do about it,
because I'm paying much more attention
to that throughout the day,
not just occasionally, not just on a retreat,
not just on a spa day,
but daily, I'm monitoring my body,
learning how the interaction with the world creates stress
and what I can do about it.
I'm monitoring my mind to see,
"Oh, where are their thoughts and beliefs,
that project a reality into the world
that needs to be verified?"
So I'm constantly doing fact-checking.
So I might believe certain things about
police officers or black lives matter
or whatever it might be.
How do I know?
Is that based on one article I read,
one interview I watched?
I need to really
start to bring my mindfulness into a place
where I'm taking on the responsibility
for verifying what's actual.
And instead of going into black and white thinking,
which just oversimplifies things,
I have to seek the gray, if I see the gray,
it's inconvenient, because I have to work for it.
I have to read more articles,
I have to do that with my adult discount of discernment.
I have to talk to people of all kinds
and disagree with them sometimes.
How do I do that skillfully?
Well, that altruism
that we talked about mindfulness cultivating,
which is compassion, curiosity, openness,
willingness, recognizing our connection,
not just our differences,
that will help me have those difficult conversations
that can shape culture.
So mindfulness is the tool,
the light by which I could see myself as I am,
as my body is,
as my mind functions,
as my affect animates me,
and take responsibility for it,
to try and find out
what's to the best of my knowledge today true,
what is the good in front of me
that I could do for myself, for others.
And how well am I doing that?
Mindfulness is the light that shines on that intention,
that methodology and those outcomes.
- It was like a drug when I didn't achieve it, I was like
"What the hell am I doing wrong?"
And I didn't realize like, "Well, that's not mindfulness."
Mindfulness is just noticing,
if that other thing happens, that's great.
But it's really just noticing wherever your mind is at.
The reason why
you don't wanna set that up as a standard
is because whenever you don't achieve that
when you sit down and meditate or practice,
then you're gonna get upset.
Or you're gonna think that
you're doing it wrong or incorrectly, and you're not.
When I have bouts of hyperactivity, I was like,
"I'm not doing it right."
And it's not that I was, I was doing it right,
it's just that I had this reference point,
I was like, "Oh, well, that's what I want to achieve.
I'm not calm, or I'm not having this experience,
therefore I'm doing it wrong."
There is no right and wrong.
That's one of the biggest misconceptions in mindfulness,
is that you practice just to practice.
There's no right way to practice
or there's no wrong way to practice.
And that while you're practicing,
whatever comes up just shows up,
and you greet it with a cup of tea and as a friend,
and with curiosity and investigation.
- When I teach a group of 25 people
in one of my UCLA classes,
I really right away invite skepticism.
I invite you to challenge me,
please do it with respect,
because it's a couple of people
to have disrespectful conversation.
But I expect doubt,
and I expect skepticism,
don't believe it because I say it, try it on.
And so this is where
we get really interesting conversations about things.
Part of the challenge is mindfulness,
because it has to be in a marketplace, has to be advertised.
And in the advertising itself,
it's gonna naturally select some people
and other people will read it and say, "That's poppycock."
That's (indistinct).
I'm not good at that thing.
"That's for those kind of people."
So it doesn't attract
the people who might be really valuable
and having a conversation about.
However, I do have a special population
for whom I am a mindfulness teacher,
and that is law enforcement and the FBI.
There, we have a very, very skeptical audience.
And it's very extemporaneous.
We have a loose outline, but it's very alive.
And we invite all the descent.
And one of the things that we know about mindfulness,
which is, again, reflecting back to my introduction to it,
you cannot force people into mindfulness
or demand that they do it, or even suggest they do it
without them asking for something, seeking something.
And so we had one bad experience
where Northern California city,
their chief went through one of our programs,
blew his mind open.
He went to the city, got finances,
had the entire department
trained in mindfulness in our in our program.
And many of them were resentful,
because they weren't given a choice.
And when we found that out,
no one told us that.
And they kind of rebelled in the classroom
during the retreat,
and we apologized to them and said,
"It should never be mandatory.
The beer is stocked, go have some fun leave.
If you want to,
no negative reports to your superiors, all good."
And most of them left except for five.
And those who stayed, we went deep.
This is really important.
This is not for everybody at all times.
This is a voluntary self-introspection.
And we really respect that.
We have to respect that.
And the other thing is that,
there's always a sense of self being developed,
"I've had my first mindfulness class.
I love mindfulness.
I want to tell everybody about it."
And that's natural exuberance.
You take a few more classes
and you start to see your friends struggle.
And maybe you see some struggles
or here's some struggles that you went through
but now you kind of have a better angle on,
and now you kind of like, "Oh, I'm mindful and they're not."
And so it's very easy to see
how I can inflate my sense of self,
which mindfulness is actually aiming to notice
that the sense of self is not what you think it is.
And certainly, that you're not better than me people.
But we can kind of go there.
I do some mindfulness training for political activists
who are canvassing the neighbors,
trying to get people to sign up and vote.
I tell them from the very beginning,
this is a non-sectarian egalitarian practice.
And if we're not careful,
it will be associated with only being a Democrat
or being a Liberal, and it's not true.
You can be a diehard Trump supporter
and practice mindfulness.
There might be all kinds of experiences that you might have
if you're working earnestly,
but it's not a club that you have join with an affiliation,
it's a human quality of paying attention, being aware.
And we all have delusions and illusions
about the nature of reality and nature of self.
No one is free from that.
- I don't know if mindfulness is different for me.
Now, my experience and introduction of meditation
was through Buddhism,
and mindfulness grew out of the Buddhist philosophy,
that practice,
and what I became to realize,
the more my practice matured was the meditation,
I practiced was mindfulness meditation,
which was simply sitting in stillness
and allowing generally my breath to be an anchor,
allowing my attention to gently fall on my breath,
and then just being aware of what arose
during the experience of sitting in meditation without judgment.
Again, I really have leaned
into this idea of playful curiosity,
because I feel like
that is sort of a wonderful goal to embody
with anything in life.
If you're driving in your car in traffic
and somebody cuts you off and you're becoming raged,
can you playfully be curious be like, "Why is rage?"
Do I really feel like that person isn't valuing me?
"What's a story I really have here."
And if we can just be playful in all of it,
I really do think that's a key to it.
Again, if we're not laughing,
especially at ourselves,
then I think we're missing a point.
- In my experience of people who have taken mindfulness,
there's usually two effects.
Daniel Goldman and Richie Davidson
in the book "Altered Traits" discuss this beautifully.
It's the wide narrow path.
And then there's the deep path that's not so wide.
What I mean by this is that
there's a lot of people that get relaxation out of it.
That's what brought me to it.
They just get a break from that
automatic thinking mind that doesn't shut off.
We get about 60 to 90,000 thoughts a day,
and we don't do 60 to 90,000 things a day.
So it's just our mind constantly going.
So most people when they first start practicing mindfulness,
they report a relief from a break
from just that mind that they can't escape.
And then there's that other paths
where the people that do have
an actual spiritual experience practicing it.
And that's what I experienced.
It's a switch from, this is something I do
as something to relax
to this is now who I am.
This mindfulness now is just a part of me.
- I have many teenage clients in my psychotherapy practice.
And one of the ways I get buy-in from them as I ask them,
"So what's it like kind of being like forced labor?"
And they look at me like, "What are you talking about?"
And I say, "Well, you kind of have to go to school,
it's not your choice. You don't have a choice about it."
And quite often, you don't have a choice of what school you go.
And certainly have not a choice of classes most of the time.
And you don't have choice to teachers.
So you're stuck and you have to learn
and you have to do these things.
And it results in poor education,
because you have to want to learn to learn.
In the same way,
mindfulness, you have to be curious
about the nature of experience.
Be curious about the nature of your mind,
be curious about what attention really is,
and what an emotion really is,
and whether your thoughts are true.
If you're not curious about that,
you're not gonna be looking.
If you're not looking, you're going to be learning.
So it's really important
that we don't insist on people practicing mindfulness.
Again, when I reflect back on my early teachers,
they never told me to read a book or try this practice,
they embodied kindness, compassion, curiosity,
temperance, caring, and that drew me to them.
So our best example, is if we can embody those qualities.
People who benefit from them might say,
"you've really changed
or what's your deal, what's your secret?"
And you might share it at that point
and maybe they're interested, maybe they're not.
But it's really important
to respect the individual's sense of agency
and where they are in their lives.
It's not for everyone all the time.
- What's really enjoyable about teaching mindfulness
is just the connection with others.
I noticed that when people discover it,
the ones that are really open to it,
it really changes their life,
just how it changed my life.
They really go through a transformation,
a mental transformation,
whereas before they were really suffering
with their mind that was uncontrolled,
that the negativity bias
and all those automatic negative thoughts
were really running their life.
And once they get a break, they're just so happy.
And also just being able to offer a class or a safe space
where people can come to and just talk about
what they're going through,
what they're experiencing in their practice
and in their life.
To me, my practice in my life,
they're kind of the same.
I have my formal practice and my informal.
My formal is when I just sit and don't do anything,
but then I have my informal practice.
So as I'm having conversations,
the moment the conversation turns to,
"Oh, now I'm not having a conversation,
now I'm having a debate,
and now I'm not listening to the person.
Now I'm just trying to get the person to agree with me,"
so I practice it in my conversations.
Throughout the day,
people report how it helps them,
now just eating meals.
So now as they eat their lunch or their dinner,
they're able to be really fully with the meal
rather than thinking about,
so if they're having their lunch,
they're not busy thinking about what's for dinner.
So people are reporting
just more moments of satisfaction throughout the day.
- I teach mindfulness,
and how I encourage people to use a mindfulness practice,
is to be able to create space
from that which we identify as the observer
and the endless ticker of thoughts that are going nonstop.
So you can be able to separate yourself from them,
see that, "Oh, I am not my thoughts."
And just because, like I mentioned earlier,
because I'm thinking it, doesn't mean that it's true,
and I can see it arise again and again and again and again
and I don't have to attach myself to it.
And that's a skill that is learned, and it takes practice.
And so meditation is the most tangible
practice you can do to support yourself
in developing that kind of awareness.
- Shortly after I was meditating
or practicing mindfulness during one of my sessions,
I just thought of how good I was feeling,
then I started to think about how limited I am
as far as work capacity with my chronic pain
and with my vision.
It's hard for me to just go to a 9:00 to 5:00
and sit at a desk.
I can do it with my vision,
but factoring in the pain and the vision
make it very difficult.
So I was feeling really good.
And I thought, "I can teach mindfulness."
It took me six months to work up the courage
to even offer the class at the Braille Institute,
because of just of my past trauma of being bullied.
So just offering the mindfulness class,
that was challenging for me and stressful.
And that's part of the PTSD as far as me overcoming it.
And now I can do it, no problem, as far as going to class.
And at first, the whole week,
the very first class I offered,
that whole week I was anxious.
Then I started to work on it.
And the more often I taught class,
the more comfortable I became,
they call it exposure therapy.
I was exposing myself to unpleasant stimulus,
and I was becoming comfortable with it,
so that I no longer experience that stress response.
And now I can have class
at the Braille Institute, no problems.
Just seeing the benefits and the effects it's had on me,
I wanna share that with others.
I want others to overcome their difficulties,
their challenges, their struggles.
For me, it's public speaking,
or going in unfamiliar situations or settings
or maybe having certain conversations with people,
but it's a work in progress.
- So owing to just the way information shared,
and there's no way to get around this,
whether it's a flyer, a website, a workshop,
a book, a podcast,
we convey mindfulness when we're not face-to-face
through words and concepts,
and it's in language, cultural language.
And that means inherently,
we have all kinds of misconceptions.
So if you look at the last couple of Time Magazine covers,
it's usually a white woman, gorgeous,
sitting in a lotus position with her hands like this.
And the messaging that's unconscious is,
this is for white people,
this is for upper-class people,
this is for beautiful people.
This is going to make you serene and peaceful.
And the person you always wanted to be around your kids
or the person you always wanted to be
to make your friend's husband jealous or whatever it is.
And so we have a lot of misconceptions about it.
If it's taught well,
what we start to see is that,
although the relaxation piece
is really tangible and immediately available,
and the fascination with this discussion
of what's happening in the world,
what's happening with this person
or what's happening with the psychology of that person,
but like, "Oh, what's the mechanism of being",
thinking, feeling, sensing?
Oh, there's something there to learn.
That's kind of amazing,
'cause that can be kind of exciting right away.
But one of the early misconceptions is that
it's gonna be really blissful and wonderful,
and it can be like that quite often.
And it also can be really painful, really difficult.
When I discovered that I had some prejudice,
I have some racial prejudice on that roof,
I saw aspects of my functioning, they're not flattering.
And so mindfulness is about trying to be as real
and true as possible.
And that can be uncomfortable.
- 'Cause mindfulness is not enough.
A lot of people put too much on mindfulness
and then they become disappointed
because it doesn't give them all the things
they thought is gonna give them.
And limited by calling it a tool,
calling it a practice.
- There's also some misconceptions
about having to be a good meditator.
So one of my first lectures was,
"Meditation is for noisy minds and it was overwhelming."
I had to find a new venue to make it bigger,
because everyone knows what that's like.
I can't stop my mind, I can't stop thinking,
"I can't meditate."
That's a huge misconception.
Here's the good news,
you don't need to stop your mind from talking, thinking,
you just need to try and develop a stable enough attention
to it letting your body sensations,
and just let that thinking go.
The analogy I like about this is
the body is more stable like a riverbank,
it's not moving very much,
it's just right there, and you can sit on it,
you can be in it. And the river is your thoughts.
So the river of thoughts, I'm not trying to,
when I'm practicing mindfulness,
dam up that river, dry it out, gouge it out,
fill it and stop it anyway,
I'm letting the river of thoughts just flow.
So a misconception about having to stop your thoughts,
prevent so many people from trying to practice,
but instead, let those thoughts go,
and just keep coming back to the riverbank
and resting in the stillness.
And soon, you'll find yourself there more and more,
and able to watch the river
and know what the rumor is about.
- One of the biggest misconceptions, and even I had,
was that I was going to magically achieve
this lightened, awakened, realized present state,
and that it was just gonna last,
that I was just gonna stay there
and all my suffering was gonna go away
and everything was just gonna be beautiful afterwards.
And that hasn't been my experience.
Now, there are moments where I may experience peace and joy,
but it's a process,
just that desire
to completely get rid of all of my suffering.
So like my symptoms, I experience as far as irritability,
frustration, nervousness,
my desire to completely get rid of those things
cause more suffering,
because whenever they would happen,
I'd be like, "This isn't supposed to happen."
I'm not there yet.
I haven't practiced enough yet
"or I'm not enlightened enough yet."
That's not it at all.
It helps me manage my symptoms better
when they are triggered.
They don't get rid of them, no,
it has help me have less of them.
And then when I do experience them,
I manage them more effectively, but get rid of them, no.
- We're at entry stage right now
where it's become so popular
that many people
want to very earnestly teach and show others,
because they've had some profound experiences.
And at UCLA,
we've really recognized that there's a need for the consumer
to have some way of knowing,
"How do I know what a good mindfulness teacher is?"
I don't know I think about this stuff.
I don't know how to trust somebody,
they seem good,
I like them, is all that is required.
And so we have the
International Mindfulness Teachers Association that's formed
to help certify certification schools.
So our school is one,
the University of California at San Diego, UCSD is one.
There are many of them, many programs that certify teachers,
and we're making this big grassroots effort
to get them all under one umbrella,
to have certain standards that we can send to the public,
this person or this organization
has met minimum competency standards,
so that we can keep you safe.
In general, most of the mindfulness teachers,
we think of like Jack Kornfield
or Sam Harris or Joseph Goldstein,
there are a number of people out there,
have really public faces,
and they're very, very much transparent
about their practice, their learning communities.
And so that transparency helps.
They're part of a teacher's council,
so they have checks and balances.
So one of the things we wanna look for in a teacher
is that they're not teaching alone in isolation,
because then there's no oversight.
Then there's a chance to step into areas
where they don't have competency or potentially abuse
in terms of students
who are putting them on a pedestal
and giving them too much power.
So I think it's most important.
There haven't been any, to my knowledge,
secular mindfulness teacher scandals,
but there have been a lot of Buddhist teacher scandals,
again, for this very reason,
that they haven't maintained
a council of eyes watching over them and transparency.
And that's really the core,
is to have a kind of transparency
where a community is participating
in maintaining the integrity of the teacher
so that there's no tendency
for some shadow side of a personality
to come out and take advantage of people.
- The number one thing
about first getting into mindfulness
is finding a teacher that you really feel comfortable with
and that speaks to you.
One person's experience
might not resonate with your experience.
I don't want people to say like,
"Well, that means mindfulness isn't for me."
I made that mistake in a yoga class,
I didn't really gel with the yoga instructor
or I didn't really like their techniques.
And I just completely gave up on yoga for a while.
The key is to really find a teacher that you connect with.
I think that is the most important thing,
and that can be done either in person or online
for people who can't afford mindfulness on YouTube now.
- There's a lot of different teachers that are offering,
posting their guided meditations online.
Or there are some teachers
that even offer classes online.
Once you find a teacher,
deciding to do it in-person if that's an option,
and if that's not an option, then to do it online.
I suggest to do it in-person 'cause just,
coming together and meeting and sharing
has a certain sacred feeling, connection
that I receive than just online.
- I love talking about this stuff.
I think I remain curious about the thoughts I think
and how it paints the landscape of my life today.
I think that my enthusiasm supports my students
and other people and booing themselves through the process
of developing something that works for them.
And this is why I really value spiritual community.
Having people that are walking the path with you,
that are practicing the same things you are doing,
that aren't gonna tell you
that it's stupid or crazy or weird or whatever.
And I always say like,
don't tell other people what you're doing,
leave it for other people that are also doing it,
so you don't have to get those seeds
of doubt or worry or shame in your mind.
The ability to give zero facts
about what other people think
is truly a state of a masterful practice,
because worrying about what other people think
has killed more dreams than anything else
I've come in contact with
as a counselor, coach, spiritual teacher.
Really becoming aware of the thoughts you're thinking
and that they don't have to be true,
that you can question them and that you can replace them,
that is the biggest aha moment
for most of the people that I've worked with.
The understanding that they can change their story
and they can release the past,
that they don't have to be victims of the narrative
or the inheritance of their family, that's freedom.
It's liberating to know that
you get to choose the life you'd like to live.
- You become aware of not just your cluttered mind,
but your way of behaving,
'cause we're constantly leaving an imprint
with our movement, with our actions
whether we want it or not.
And that imprint is not separate from us.
We are connected to the imprint, we benefit from it.
So if it's even for the selfish personal reason,
you wanna look and see,
what am I doing that's causing me
to be unhappy at the end of the day, unfulfilled.
- This is what I've been looking for my whole life.
I found it going inside.
I didn't find it going outside of myself.
I didn't find it getting a certain job
or going to school or accomplishing something,
I found it just in the backyard after a yoga session,
and following my breath.
And it was just very profound.
Now that I'm able to access that peaceful state,
that state of calmness,
I really wanna sh,
it's no good me keeping it to myself,
because I'm surrounded by others,
and I see a lot of suffering in the world.
One of my favorite gurus is Ram Dass,
who just recently passed away.
And I've read several of his books.
And one of his favorite sayings he has
or my favorite saying is that,
"The best way to solve any problem
is with a quiet mind and an open heart."
So my practice now is quieting my mind and opening my heart.
(energetic music)