Transcriber: Zsofia Gocze
Reviewer: Tanya Cushman So, mindfulness is a way
to train your attention using your ordinary senses
and perceptions. Maybe you've heard about it. There's this explosion of research
that's validating its many benefits: the way it helps people manage stress, reduce their anxiety, and even sleep better. I was skeptical about these claims because I have kind of
a natural talent for stress. (Laughter) One time, I was stressed out on vacation after a massage (Laughter) at a hot springs spa resort. And I kept thinking how I wanted to take
a picture of this place because it would help me relax when I got back to the job
I was dreading returning to. So, that gives you an idea
of what I was up against, but I decided I'm going to give
this mindfulness a try. So I've been practicing
every day for 13 years. And I noticed that it started
to quietly transform the way I was living my life when I stopped trying to get
the outcomes I was hoping for and instead put my attention on doing the exercises
required to get there. It reminded me what I already knew
about physical fitness. If you take the stairs and you notice your heart
starts to beat faster, maybe your legs start to burn, you don't say to yourself, "Oh, I must be taking the stairs wrong." Right? (Laughter) You say, "This is what
taking the stairs feels like." And if we always take the elevator in order to save time
and avoid discomfort, we just miss opportunities
for developing our physical health. And it's the same thing. It works the same way. So many people try mindfulness and they're convinced
they're doing it wrong, so they give up. And they miss an opportunity to change their relationship
with discomfort. And if you expect your everyday life to be free of discomfort and confusion, you're going to spend
all your energy worrying, trying not to feel what you feel, and saying, "This messy life is not my real life." So what keeps us holding out
for these perfect, comfortable lives that we imagine? And how can training your attention
help address these habits? There's an underlying story problem built into the way we relate to our lives. It feels like I'm a character
navigating all these challenges in order to get somewhere. And this narrative structure
is incredibly useful. It helps me decide what's important. It makes it possible to work towards
and achieve goals. But there's a problem. My obstacles don't seem to be
part of what I consider my actual life. They feel like temporary annoyances
that I have to push through in order to get
to what's on the other side. But very often, it turns out what's on the other side of my obstacles ends up not being the relief
I'm hoping for. Am I the only one? It ends up being another obstacle. And I have a spoiler alert here. This pattern keeps repeating
and repeating, and we end up waiting for, habitually waiting for
whatever's happening to pass. And this dilemma scales all the way down
to the moment-by-moment experience. All these little looping stories of waking up on time
and trying to get to work and going to a meeting
and dealing with difficult people, deciding what to eat. And maybe the best we can do
is sometimes comfort ourselves with the idea of evenings
and weekends and vacations. Right? But it's at this moment-by-moment scale where the work of mindfulness occurs - all these little places
where we distract ourselves and go onto auto pilot. But mindfulness isn't a solution
to your story problem. So don't cancel your therapy appointment. (Laughter) It's not a narrative solution at all. It's actually a solution for the problem of living
within these narrative constraints. And any time that you habitually check out starts to become an opportunity
for checking in. So let me give you a little exercise
that you can use in any situation. All you have to do is pause to notice some sensory detail
of your current experience. Let's give this a quick spin. For just a few seconds,
what's it like to see? That's right: it's easy. What's it like to hear? What's it like to notice
some sensation in your body? So that's probably the shortest
exercise workout I've ever led. But what I'm hoping to - what I'm hoping you'll do is compare it to what you already know
about physical fitness. One push-up's not very impressive. It seems kind of trivial. But we know that if we make a habit and we do several push-ups a day, over weeks we're going to start noticing
more strength in our upper body. So instead of trying to be mindful, what if you tried to notice
what's happening. Every time you stop and pay close attention
to what's happening, you disrupt that narrative, that narrative of your life, from inside your story. Instead of trying to live in the moment, what if you just started to sneak
this kind of noticing into your routine? When you take a shower, what would it be like to actually feel
the water hitting your body or smell the shampoo? What would it be like
to taste your coffee? What if you notice what it looks like
to see the screen in your hand and, once in a while, look up
and see what's right in front of you? Right? Any activity that doesn't require
much thinking will work for this. And it turns out, there's a lot more
of them than you realize once you start looking. And nobody needs to know
that you're doing this. In fact, I recommend
you kind of keep it to yourself. (Laughter) I've kind of learned from experience
that nobody wants to hear about the relaxation you're savoring
in your legs during a meeting. (Laughter) And the details you notice
don't need to be pleasant. What's it like to run late? What's it like to be standing
in the slowest line in the grocery store? What's it like to watch
your windshield wipers as you're waiting
for the light to turn green? Your strategy for living in the present will go a lot better when you accept how frequently
the present sucks. (Laughter) (Applause) So I've been describing
a way to pay attention in the midst of ordinary life. But there's also a formal version
of the practice you might be familiar, where you pick something to notice
over and over again for a set amount of time. So maybe 10 or 15 minutes, you notice what it feels like to breathe. You might notice what it's like
to hear sounds around you. And whenever you realize that you've completely
lost contact with that, you just gently bring your attention back. This timed practice is what everybody thinks
is the only thing that counts, and I want to challenge this assumption. The timed practice is intended -
it's like going to the gym. It supports your ability to be attentive
throughout the rest of the day. So you might notice relaxation
during your timed practice and then check in throughout the day to see if there's something restful at all that you can detect and savor. So one time I was teaching a class, and it wasn't a mindfulness class, but it was the first night. I get a phone call,
and I had the start time wrong. So I was late, and I didn't realize it. There's a classroom full of people
waiting across town for me. So I spent this whole evening toggling back and forth
between the course content and how rattled I felt. My senses were heightened, my face was hot, my breath was shallow. I felt embarrassed. It was super vulnerable. And over the next three weeks, during my formal practice time, it became about observing
all the related feelings and thoughts. And then throughout the day, I would check in to notice, can I detect any
of those flavors emotionally? And they were always there, simmering on a back burner. And I think people
would be surprised to know that if you saw me sitting every morning
for those three weeks, you would say,
“Oh, he looks so relaxed. He's not moving. I want some of what he's having." But inside, it was a total shit storm. (Laughter) And I wasn't doing it wrong. This is what my embarrassment
and the reverberations felt like. I think people would also
be surprised to discover that the catharsis I felt during that time was worth every moment of turning towards
that icky, garden-variety discomfort instead of pushing it away. The narrative mode of intention
wasn't always our default. Louise Glück says, "We look at the world once, in childhood. The rest is memory." Noticing that you're alive is a taste that adults have to reacquire. People think they don't have time
to practice paying attention in the way I'm describing, but I think what we really resist is being willing to set aside
our unresolved story problems, even for a few seconds. And I'm not advocating
noticing every sensation all the time. Instead of trying to put your story aside
for even 15 minutes a day, what would it be like
if you limited your worrying and your numbing
and your unconsciousness to 23 hours and 45 minutes? (Laughter) You don't have to try to be mindful. You don't have to be relaxed. Just by remembering to notice, again and again, that this messy life, with its one obstacle after another, really is your life, and that it's possible
to train your attention so that you feel more at home, both in your story and in the direct experience of living. Thank you. (Applause)
Oh hey, this dude was my roommate on a meditation retreat a few years ago. Neat.
Excellent talk. He cuts right to the core of what mindfulness is, makes it understandable to a wide audience, and provides solid suggestions for integrating mindfulness into daily life. Share this with family and friends you think might be receptive to learning about mindfulness, as this is just about the best introduction to mindfulness I've come across.
On a personal note, I tend to chastise myself for not being mindful enough. This was a great reminder to stop trying to be perfectly mindful all the time. Even intermittent, brief moments of mindfulness during the day are beneficial and add up over time. So, in addition to being a great intro, I think this talk is also beneficial for those who are already practicing mindfulness.
I like that. Almost always people come to meditation hoping it will fix them in some way, make their problem go away, seeking that "narrative solution". All meditation offers is awareness, and while that may change your idea of what the narrative of your life is, that narrative itself is pretty much irrelevant as far as meditation is concerned.
I think it's a point many people have trouble getting because they're so caught up in the narratives that they tell themselves. For example, someone could easily say to themselves, as silly as it sounds when stated explicitly, "By not seeking a narrative solution through meditation, meditation will provide a narrative solution for me." And so the person falls for the same trap, but this time it is more pernicious since the person believes they're not seeking a narrative solution and may stubbornly refuse to accept that they're doing so.
This is why keeping a beginner's mind is so important, because more often that not any achievements we think we've attained through meditation, like that we've stopped using meditation to achieve a narrative solution, is itself a trap we've fallen into to. Beginner's mind is one of the strongest safeguards we have against such pitfalls.
I enjoyed this. Thanks for posting.
My practice has been weird lately. Very similar to the three week period he refers to. I'm glad i got to see this. Thanks for posting.
Insightful talk. So many people miss the relationship between meditation and mindfulness - they believe they just meditate for "x" minutes every day, and then go about their lives. That's why people complain that meditation does nothing for them, and people try it for a few days and then give up. They are missing this key understanding.
Similar to Krishnamurti. Mind if strengthened by rote and brute activities.
To me most useful part of this video was the phrase "whats it like to ... ?". Gives a nice simple way of thinking about what mindfulness is about.