TEDx Talk, Mindfulness as a Means of Self Discovery

Published in the Uncategorized

Berkeley Lake Park
Denver, CO.

September 22, 2019

Produced by Passport to Mindfulness

I was asked to give the opening talk at a mindfulness retreat for the parents of the children who were off doing other stuff.

Mindfulness as a Means of Self Discovery

First I’d like to acknowledge Lauren and Ahva and Jason and Drew and everyone else whose names I don’t know who envisioned this event and have done the months-long difficult work to create it for your benefit, and also the many who are invisibly supporting us this afternoon so we can do this work together. Any other day this lawn is a beautiful park for families to gather, but today they’ve created in a very real sense a sacred space for community. I was thinking this morning of another empty field that was turned into something special–“If you build it they will come”–and here we are. We’ve gathered—as families who have decided that today is the day we bring more mindfulness into our daily lives.

But they’re not the only ones who did the hard work necessary to have this event. I want to thank every one of you who showed up today. Anyone who’s been the parent of a preteen knows how busy you are, how many things are calling for your attention, how a Sunday together is precious to a family. That you’re spending this Sunday afternoon here to learn about mindfulness with your children says so much about you … and them.

So when I was asked to address the parents while their children were being taught mindfulness practices, I knew I wanted to give you something useful and practical, but then I had to figure out what. In situations like these, I often use a saying one of the authors I worked with at Sounds True used at times like these, which was “The most important thing … is not to forget … the most important thing.” So I’ve considered what’s the most important useful practical thing I can present in 25 minutes, followed by a Q&A.

If this was a general population, I know exactly where I’d start, which is with the scientifically determined benefits of mindfulness practice. Lowering of blood pressure, lowered heart rate, improved immune system, psychological benefits around anxiety, depression, and post-traumatic stress disorder are just the most notable. There are entire shelves of books now written about these benefits by doctors and neuroscientists and the information in them is important and useful and practical, which I’ll only review before going on with my talk. 

I think the best overall book on the subject of mindfulness and the brain, and the one I gave to my son when he asked for advice, is Rick Hanson’s Buddha’s Brain. It’s an easy and convincing presentation written for a general audience. If you’re interested in what’s happening in your body and your brain as you practice mindfulness, this is a good place to start. It’s obviously rooted in studies of how meditation practice affects the brain and physiology, but the basic biochemistry of practicing mindfulness is the same.

If you’re interested in the subject of mindfulness and neuroplasticity, which is how we can intentionally rewire our brains, I strongly recommend someone who came out of the scientific tradition and who practices mindfulness in daily life but does not formally meditate or come out of a meditation tradition, and that’s Dan Siegel. He wrote a trilogy of comprehensive books on the subject of the brain, the mind, and the benefits of mindfulness practice. The Developing Mind is about how our brains are formed and how they work and how we can use our minds and what’s known of neuroplasticity to intentionally to change our brains for positive results. The second is The Mindful Brain, which focuses on what happens in our brains and bodies when we practice mindfulness. The final book, “Mindsight,” is about how to apply all this information to create a healthier brain and life experience for ourselves. He also has several books on parenting that I’ve listed on the reverse of the hand-out. The science of mindfulness was my passion when I worked at Sounds True, and these were my favorite two authors on the subject.

The bottom line is that if the benefits of mindfulness were available in pill form, we’d all be taking them. But since it’s not a pill, it’s free and has no adverse side effects and you can’t overdose or run out, even in an extended emergency. Mindfulness is present on-demand in even the most chaotic and stressful situations when you need it the most.

Anyway, you’re here already so I don’t have to sell you on mindfulness. What you want are the how-tos, the practices, and today you’ll have four opportunities to learn the skills and techniques that you will bring home tonight to your families. You’ve even brought your children here today who are learning skills that they can come home and share with you tonight. When you go home today you’ll be living in a home that’s mindful of mindfulness. And  you’re all superstars in this already, you’ve lapped the field, just by showing up. And by showing up you’re going to get what you want out of today’s program and life, and I’ll come back to why later.

For anyone who’s thinking, “I’m not a superstar, I’m not even sure I know what mindfulness is or if I’ve ever experienced one actual moment of mindfulness,” I want to assure you that what we’re talking about is part of human physiology. If you came here today in a human body, I can explain what a moment of mindfulness is in a way that you can recognize you already experience these moments but you probably don’t acknowledge them. But I’ll get back to that later as well.

So I returned to the most important thing idea. And I questioned myself, what is it that has kept you practicing mindfulness for 46 of your 65 years? And I know what you’re thinking. “Forty-six years? I don’t have 46 years. And he’s not even enlightened yet.” And you’re right, I am not enlightened, even after 46 years of practice, which doesn’t mean the practice or I have failed. Personally I have a lot of things I want to do before I get enlightened. I’m having too much fun. It’s a personal goal for others that I don’t share. My life goal is to live my life fully and experience as much of it as I can and do what I enjoy as much as I can, and I’m doing okay with that.

When I was in college studying psychology back in the early ‘80s, we read about a study that reported the biggest regret people had at the end of their lives. Does anyone know what that regret is? I’ve seen it quoted quite a bit in the last 40 years. Spoiler alert: It wasn’t I wished I’d spent more time doing mindfulness practices. It was that they felt they hadn’t lived their authentic lives. They’d been good children, good spouses, good parents, good friends, good co-workers, good neighbors, and good citizens, but they felt they’d missed something, something irretrievable. They felt they’d missed the only opportunity they had to live their authentic lives.

When I heard Greta Thunberg talk about first hearing about the climate crisis she said she couldn’t believe that the adults around her were acting as if nothing was happening. Why wasn’t this front-page news? Why wasn’t anyone doing anything about this? This, for her, was the most important thing.

I felt the same way, hearing that millions of people were going to their deaths believing they’d missed their only opportunity to live their authentic lives. I certainly didn’t want to die believing that I hadn’t lived my authentic life. And I can say this: I will not die feeling I have not lived my authentic life. I’ll have a lot of other regrets, but the one I won’t have is a feeling that I didn’t live my authentic life. And I believe I owe the feeling of living my authentic life to regular moments of mindfulness, which luckily is the subject of today’s event, and something I think I can present in the roughly 15 minutes I have left is how mindfulness can help you discover your authentic self.

And the best news is you won’t have to change in any way to live your authentic life. You won’t have to practice for decades or study with a teacher or do anything different at all except for regularly finding moments of mindfulness in your daily life. You may want to study with a teacher, you may want to go on and learn more, but that’s not necessary.

And you can still be good children, good spouses, good parents, good neighbors, good employees, good citizens. In fact, I’m guessing it wouldn’t be your authentic life if you stopped being a good person. Living an authentic life turns out to be mostly coming to realize who you are, and mindfulness, at its root, is a form of self-knowledge or self-exploration … or more likely self-remembering.

On the other side of the reading list is a very bad reproduction in black and white of an underwater scene, with a lot of activity near the surface, a dark and featureless expanse in the middle, and some of the light-fall on the ocean floor. I’m going to use this image to try to create in words an illustration I saw once when I was 19 years old, 46 years ago. It was part of the instruction for Transcendental Meditation—which is a meditation practice that was popular in the late ’60s that was my first experience of practicing mindfulness. They used an illustration like this in class to explore the different layers of who you are that I still find useful.

So first imagine someone floating on top of the waves, moving up and down, back and forth. The sun is beating down and other days there’s rain and snow and hail. There are ocean liners, sailboats, other swimmers, flotsam, cyclones, hurricanes, big mammals coming up for air, sharks, fishermen with nets. Up top, it’s busy, it’s confusing, it’s distracting, it’s ever-changing, and you control almost none of it. You often can’t even see anything beyond the waves on either side of you. You could be drowning and not know that there is an island on the other side of one of those waves.

This is a metaphor for our daily lives. All day long we’re interacting with our children, our spouses, our co-workers, strangers on the street. Everyone we interact with has an agenda. We’re pulled and pushed all day, then we make it home, relax a bit, go to sleep, get up and do it all over again. The reason I believe that most people feel they haven’t lived their authentic lives is that they spend their whole lives on this level of reactivity, and never really identify with who they are underneath it all.

Now we’re going to the other two levels but first I want to emphasize that these three states are not sequential. It’s not like you’re restricted to the first level until you build the second. These three levels are all happening simultaneously, but the top third is the one that usually catches and holds our attention, while these other processes often go unnoticed.

The second seemingly empty featureless area between the top and bottom is representative of the unconscious non-personal reactions we deal with every day. This is where the silent and invisible but powerful tides can drown you, pulling you this way and that.

Some of these powerful forces you’ll experience—which are often unspoken—include gender expectations. People responding to or making demands of you that have nothing to do with you other than their expectations of someone—anyone—of your gender. There are also racial expectations. If I was an African-American male, you’d probably respond differently to me, without even knowing why. There are socio-economic, class, and caste expectations. If I was in a three-piece suit with a flashy gold watch and a $200 haircut, the same words would sound different than if they were spoken by a homeless person standing here. These are just some of the social non-personal forces that have nothing to do with the authentic you and yet we deal with this stuff every day.

And there are also larger, almost mythological forces at work that are intrinsic to human development. For instance, there’s the Jungian female and male archetypes; for women, it’s the Virgin, the Bride, the Mother, and I like to add the Wise Counselor here, for when the kids are out of the house and you’re suddenly free, and finally the Crone. If you think back, whether you’re a man or a woman, there have been distinct stages in your life. Since you are all parents, you’re currently in the Mother or Father archetype—you are no longer the Virgin or the Boy, no longer solely the Bride or Husband. It’s why you’re here and not out partying with your friends on a beautiful Sunday afternoon, which you probably would be doing only a decade or so ago. The substance of your daily life has changed. Your concerns are different now, your behaviors, your activities, desires and dreams. On a Jungian level, at least, we are humans, and subject to all that humans are subject to. But you won’t find your authentic life in your general humanity.

So, what’s happening on the bottom level? Well, there’s still killing going on down here, but not much. There are some bottom feeders, but it’s not like the confused frenzy above. I don’t know if you’ve ever scuba dived, but if you have, you’ll know exactly what I’m talking about. Even after you dive off the chaotic and cramped and noisy boat, there’s a lot of confusion and disturbance and noise and traffic near the surface. But then you as you go down, things thin out a bit and at some point, you feel underneath the ocean. There’s not very much movement of the water on the bottom, you’re just floating. It’s quiet down here, spacious, clean, you can see forever. You can look up and see the boat, maybe some of the chaos, other divers, but it’s not real somehow, not as real as this—that you’re aware, surrounded by beauty, and at ease.

This is the experience of a moment of mindfulness. You’re the same person you were topside, but it doesn’t feel the same. You feel settled and at the center of your experience, and your awareness fills the space around you. You’re not actively looking for anything but you’re aware of everything, you’re witnessing, observing whatever is happening within your field of awareness. Not reacting, not involved, just you.

And when you turn your gaze up to all the frenzied activity above, or the powerful tidal forces of prejudice and ignorance, you can see that it’s not a part of you, it’s what’s happening to you. 

This feeling of retreating from the noise, of settling into yourself and centering is a common experience when doing mindfulness practices. There’s an interruption of the dailiness of life when you re-direct your attention inward, a settling down inside yourself that happens almost automatically. Eventually just closing your eyes with the intention of having a mindful moment is enough to trigger the relaxation response.

I said I’d be able to explain the experience of a mindful moment in a way that you could recognize it in your own experience even if you think you’ve never had one. I’m positive there are mornings you’ve been fully awake but not yet aware of anything specific, just that you—whatever that is—are awake. Then you begin filling in the picture. “Oh, I’m home, it’s morning, I’ve got to get up and get ready for work..” It’s that moment *before* you begin to recreate who you are from scratch every morning. This is most obvious to me when I’ve been annoyed at something the night before, really angry. I’ll wake up feeling great and then at some point I’ll remember this negative interaction I had. At first, there’s no real emotion, it’s just an observation, followed by maybe a mild irritation. But then I’ll begin to rehearse my grievances—”How could they do that, how could they say that, that’s just wrong!” I can feel the anger and resentment return and very quickly I’m at full boil. In less than a minute I’ve gone from pure awareness to anger and resentment. Nothing has changed, nothing has happened. It’s my mind that’s done this while I’m blaming others.

Yet that moment of waking up fresh is not the result of years of hard work and instruction. It happens automatically. It’s part of everyone’s human experience, whether they identify with it or not. The top two levels of experience usually demand all of our attention, every waking moment of every day. But you can intentionally stop reacting, and reverse the process using mindfulness. It’s not easy to practice mindfulness when you most need to—when you’re overwhelmed, angry, or ill—but it wasn’t easy for you to get here today and you managed that. Sometimes just by turning your back on all the hubbub for just a moment, breaking the trance for just an instant, you can discover that island behind you that was there all the time but you couldn’t see because you were distracted.

This pure awareness that you connect with every morning is the foundation of who you are. You can’t destroy it, tame it, lose it, or control it. But you can identify with it, you can be it. You are it, underneath all of the distractions. It’s—as they say—your birthright. If you were born into a human body, it’s standard equipment. When you begin to identify with the experience of mindfulness rather than life’s exterior demands, the difference is obvious. You better understand what’s happening and your place in all of it. Maybe after a moment of mindfulness, you’ll go right back to anger and resentment. I know I do sometimes. But it’s different somehow. I can’t help but do it mindfully, and never 100 percent. Once you’ve broken the trance of everyday reactivity, you can get overwhelmed or lost in the present moment, but you can never fully fall asleep again.

I told you earlier that what got you here is what is going to get you what you want, which doesn’t rely on what anyone else says or does. To show up today you had to be informed, connected, tuned in, and aware. You had to want to be here and prioritize it, you had to make a real effort to get here, you had to say yes to everything being here demanded and no to everything else. And you did. The internal drive that got you here comes from this deeper part of you and you listened. Who you think you are is just a bubble on top of the powerful force that got you here today, despite all the practical and impractical reasons you had for not coming, despite all the real-world forces that were pulling at you. On this level, you’re already living an authentic life, prioritizing what you need to prioritize in order to change the big picture of your life, because if that doesn’t change it’s just one day after another until you’re at the end of your days, feeling that you failed at most important responsibility you had when you were given life. Because life is a gift. Did you enjoy it, did you exhaust it, did you truly live?