Transcript:
[00:00:00] I'm Parker Wilson, and I'm a doctor of clinical psychology, a practitioner of Buddhism.  
[00:00:09] I've been trying to cultivate mindfulness on some level, I suppose in some serious way, for over a decade now.  
[00:00:22] And more and more psychology, clinical psychology, cognitive neuroscience, and these kinds of things  
[00:00:28] are starting to understand there's benefit to mindfulness.  
[00:00:32] Benefit in a clinical sense and in a neurological sense as well, to the extent those two are linked together.  
[00:00:40] And I was kind of curious about all of you, how many of you meditate a little once in a while?  
[00:00:54] How many of you would consider yourselves serious meditators?  
[00:01:02] Okay, okay.  
[00:01:04] And then those who don't meditate at all, maybe this is your first exposure to it.  
[00:01:09] Okay, alright.  
[00:01:13] So maybe we should begin just with some basic orientation.  
[00:01:18] My intent is just to start right off the bat with cultivating mindfulness,  
[00:01:24] and learning how to do that in a formal way, so we'll sit for a while.  
[00:01:28] Before we do that, maybe we should talk about what mindfulness is.  
[00:01:35] What actually is mindfulness?  
[00:01:37] What's the big deal about it?  
[00:01:40] Clinical psychology and neuroscience and all these things are going crazy around it,  
[00:01:44] and Buddhism has been kind of a hot religion for 20 years or so.  
[00:01:51] What is all that?  
[00:01:53] Why is it useful?  
[00:01:55] Does anyone have an opinion?  
[00:01:57] How is mindfulness useful to you?  
[00:02:00] Clearing the mind.  
[00:02:02] Clearing the mind, okay.  
[00:02:05] It makes you be aware of what's going on around you, and not to get too caught up in too many things all at once.  
[00:02:12] Be mindful of being open to everything.  
[00:02:15] Okay.  
[00:02:16] What's bad about being all caught up in several things at once?  
[00:02:20] Like another way to frame that might be multitasking.  
[00:02:23] Back in the 80s, multitasking was the place to be, right?  
[00:02:27] Working your mind, where you want to pay attention to what you're doing,  
[00:02:30] so you can do a better job at whatever task is at hand,  
[00:02:34] so you're not thinking too much on your mind,  
[00:02:36] and not paying attention to the importance of your task.  
[00:02:41] Okay.  
[00:02:43] Being caught up in the thought that you're not in control of what's going on.  
[00:02:49] Multitasking is you being in control of everything, doing one thing at a time,  
[00:02:55] which is fine if you're the one who's doing the action.  
[00:02:59] Being caught up in means that it controls you.  
[00:03:03] Okay.  
[00:03:05] So maybe there's some sense of fragmentation,  
[00:03:08] like a non-mindful mindset, like a mindless mindset.  
[00:03:13] Maybe there's some sense of confusion, fragmentation,  
[00:03:17] low levels of anxiety maybe,  
[00:03:19] that decrease our ability to have clarity with what we're doing in any one individual thing,  
[00:03:26] something like that.  
[00:03:29] Okay, so for me,  
[00:03:33] the first thing I noticed about myself when I started being mindful,  
[00:03:36] more mindful at least,  
[00:03:38] was really how much time I spent,  
[00:03:41] just the sheer amount of hours and levels of energy I spent,  
[00:03:47] telling stories about the future or the past,  
[00:03:50] and using the present to do that.  
[00:03:54] So there would be horrific, kind of catastrophic stories  
[00:03:57] about something that might happen at some point in the future,  
[00:04:01] or about something that had happened in the past,  
[00:04:04] and I would invest, with the full force of my mind,  
[00:04:08] I would invest the stories about the future and the past with reality,  
[00:04:12] and believe in them very strongly,  
[00:04:14] to the point where I was having reactivity in the moment  
[00:04:18] to the stories that I had actually created that didn't exist.  
[00:04:22] Does that make sense?  
[00:04:24] And so, that was just,  
[00:04:27] because they were all horror stories,  
[00:04:29] because it just left to my own devices,  
[00:04:31] my mind kind of spins off into all kinds of fatalism,  
[00:04:37] and it's never a really good ending for me.  
[00:04:41] Any story I tell about the future,  
[00:04:43] it just naturally kind of spins in that direction.  
[00:04:47] Then I spent a lot of time being pretty anxious,  
[00:04:50] pretty kind of stressed out.  
[00:04:53] That could spin into a depression.  
[00:04:56] My mind was just really all over the place,  
[00:04:59] and usually involved in some kind of afflictive emotion  
[00:05:03] based on some story I was telling about the past or the future,  
[00:05:07] pretty routinely.  
[00:05:10] And that didn't work very well.  
[00:05:15] Like, that didn't work out very well.  
[00:05:17] When I started just paying attention to what was actually going on in the moment,  
[00:05:21] I found that there were very small levels of stress and anxiety,  
[00:05:27] and that basically, for the most part,  
[00:05:31] maybe 90% of the time, everything's okay in the moment.  
[00:05:35] Truly.  
[00:05:37] I mean, if you just look at it now, what were you worried about today?  
[00:05:41] What did you spend a lot of time consumed with, one way or the other?  
[00:05:45] And how much of it was about the future?  
[00:05:48] And how many of those stories were kind of catastrophic and horrific?  
[00:05:52] And how much of it was about the past?  
[00:05:55] The past is dead.  
[00:05:58] It's gone.  
[00:06:00] There's no way to change it.  
[00:06:02] And the future doesn't exist.  
[00:06:05] In the sense that, you know, not to be morbid or anything,  
[00:06:10] but you may not make it home tonight.  
[00:06:14] I might not make it home tonight.  
[00:06:16] Like, the horror story I'm telling about next week or next month or ten years from now,  
[00:06:20] is just like, from that perspective, is a total waste of time.  
[00:06:24] It doesn't make any sense.  
[00:06:26] To like, spin out the moment and stress myself out about something that will probably never happen.  
[00:06:32] I was reading Mark Twain a little bit this week,  
[00:06:35] and one of his quotes was,  
[00:06:37] "The very worst things in my life never happened."  
[00:06:42] It's kind of that idea.  
[00:06:45] So, if you can notice,  
[00:06:49] and I just started noticing,  
[00:06:51] I would do little informal, mindful things.  
[00:06:56] And these are tricks now that are kind of like a usual part of clinical psychology.  
[00:07:01] Certainly any kind of mindfulness-based intervention.  
[00:07:04] You would pick one thing,  
[00:07:07] one mundane thing that you do every day,  
[00:07:09] and commit to doing that mindfully.  
[00:07:11] So if it's washing the dishes,  
[00:07:13] or taking a shower,  
[00:07:14] or brushing your teeth,  
[00:07:15] or putting on clothes,  
[00:07:16] or taking off clothes.  
[00:07:18] A good way to become mindful is like,  
[00:07:21] pay attention right now to your pinky toe,  
[00:07:25] on your right foot.  
[00:07:27] And just like, attend to the pinky toe.  
[00:07:31] And how does it feel?  
[00:07:33] How does the sock feel against the toe?  
[00:07:35] How does the toe feel against the shoe?  
[00:07:37] How does the toe feel against the other toe?  
[00:07:41] And that's kind of like a way to get a little more subtle with it,  
[00:07:44] to attend to something.  
[00:07:46] But if you pick one thing mindfully,  
[00:07:49] to do every day, like washing dishes,  
[00:07:52] how do you actually feel standing at the sink?  
[00:07:55] How does it feel to have your feet on the ground?  
[00:07:57] To actually be standing,  
[00:07:58] to have your hands in warm water,  
[00:08:01] to wash the dish,  
[00:08:02] to feel the dish in your hand?  
[00:08:05] What does it feel like to breathe while you're doing that?  
[00:08:08] What does it feel like the air moving across your face,  
[00:08:11] and the hair on your arms,  
[00:08:12] while you're doing that?  
[00:08:14] You just attend to the sensations,  
[00:08:17] of doing whatever it is you're doing in the moment.  
[00:08:19] Along with all the thoughts and emotions that might arise about what you're doing.  
[00:08:23] Like, I hate to wash dishes,  
[00:08:25] so I have a lot of thoughts around my hate of dishes,  
[00:08:29] and washing dishes.  
[00:08:31] Then I'll have emotions about the thoughts I'm having,  
[00:08:34] like, yeah, that's right, it sucks.  
[00:08:37] This whole thing will be going on in my head.  
[00:08:41] And I can just kind of take a sidestep out of that process,  
[00:08:46] and become aware of all of that going on.  
[00:08:50] And it's fundamentally relaxing.  
[00:08:54] It's kind of nice to be able to do that.  
[00:08:58] It makes life so much easier.  
[00:09:00] So the alternative to that, what I was doing all the time was,  
[00:09:03] like, here's whatever I was feeling or thinking,  
[00:09:06] and here's me,  
[00:09:08] and we were like this all the time.  
[00:09:11] Constantly.  
[00:09:12] I was totally caught up in and identified with  
[00:09:17] whatever I was thinking and feeling.  
[00:09:19] And you can see it in our language.  
[00:09:22] It's like, I am angry.  
[00:09:24] I am this thing.  
[00:09:26] Anger.  
[00:09:27] It is what I am.  
[00:09:29] There's no separation between me and it.  
[00:09:32] And maybe an example of mindful language might be,  
[00:09:36] I'm experiencing an angry emotion.  
[00:09:41] So one has no space.  
[00:09:44] I am this thing, whatever it is.  
[00:09:46] One has some sense of space to it.  
[00:09:48] There's a difference between me and the emotion I'm experiencing.  
[00:09:53] I don't have to identify with it.  
[00:09:56] And just in that simple concept,  
[00:09:59] if you can cultivate that and make it larger and larger,  
[00:10:03] then you would actually be in a position to watch the whole space of your mind.  
[00:10:08] The space of your mind is, say like imagine,  
[00:10:11] close your eyes and imagine the word blue written in blue letters.  
[00:10:17] This is the space of your mind.  
[00:10:20] This is the domain of the psychologist.  
[00:10:24] First person subjective phenomenon.  
[00:10:27] So these are judgments, emotions, opinions, beliefs, memories, fantasies, dreams,  
[00:10:33] all these things.  
[00:10:36] So that's what comprises your mind.  
[00:10:39] So you might be in a position to actually observe that.  
[00:10:43] Instead of being all caught up in it all the time,  
[00:10:46] continuously identifying with one emotion or another,  
[00:10:49] exaggerating things, making them way bigger and more powerful than they ever were.  
[00:10:54] Just simply because you don't know how to do anything different.  
[00:10:58] Like you don't know how to, like we're not born understanding how to do this.  
[00:11:03] This is a skill.  
[00:11:05] It's a cognitive skill that should be cultivated.  
[00:11:10] I mean if what you want is some sense of peace and well-being,  
[00:11:15] it should be cultivated.  
[00:11:16] If you don't want those things, don't cultivate it.  
[00:11:20] You don't get what you want one way or the other.  
[00:11:25] So to the extent mindfulness might be a good idea then,  
[00:11:31] it's possible to actively engage in training your mind to do that.  
[00:11:36] To learn how to do that more and more.  
[00:11:38] And it becomes very interesting.  
[00:11:41] The habits that you see playing themselves out again and again and again in your mind.  
[00:11:46] This kind of compulsive, reflexive stuff from childhood and adolescence,  
[00:11:53] just bad mental habits that we've gotten into over and over and over again.  
[00:11:58] You'll be able to kind of watch that unfold.  
[00:12:02] Instead of just being caught up in it, grasping at it very tightly and going along for the ride.  
[00:12:08] So the usual analogy from a Buddhist perspective of cultivating mindfulness,  
[00:12:15] which begins with some sense of concentration,  
[00:12:18] some ability to actually have your mind stay at one point for an extended period of time.  
[00:12:25] Because right now our minds are very fragmented,
[00:12:28] And just kind of all over the place, all the time.  
[00:12:31] And it's interesting, we don't stop to notice it, but it's really kind of fascinating.  
[00:12:35] Like if I just asked you to put your attention on this bottle of water for 30 seconds,  
[00:12:43] I bet you couldn't do it.  
[00:12:45] Unless you're really a serious meditator, then you could.  
[00:12:49] But what would happen?  
[00:12:51] Maybe I'd do that for 5 seconds.  
[00:12:53] And then I'd start thinking, this is boring.  
[00:12:57] Maybe the feeling of boredom, being bored, would come up.  
[00:13:01] It would reinforce the thought I had about it.  
[00:13:03] Maybe I might remember other times when I was bored, and I didn't like that.  
[00:13:07] I'd have memories about that.  
[00:13:10] And I'd be like, this whole thing is starting to feel bad.  
[00:13:14] I don't want to do the water thing anymore.  
[00:13:16] And I'd just move on to something.  
[00:13:18] It might take 10 seconds.  
[00:13:19] It might take shorter than that.  
[00:13:22] It might take 3 or 4 seconds.  
[00:13:24] And all of a sudden I'd be completely off.  
[00:13:26] My mind would be somewhere else.  
[00:13:30] So what happened there?  
[00:13:32] Maybe I identified with the thought, I'm bored.  
[00:13:35] I became that thing.  
[00:13:37] I didn't recognize it as just a thought.  
[00:13:40] One thought among thousands, tens of thousands, that I have on a daily basis.  
[00:13:48] Nor did I recognize boredom as being just one emotion among a panorama, a spectrum of emotions,  
[00:13:54] that I experience routinely.  
[00:13:58] So I decided to identify with it.  
[00:14:01] It was a decision, even though it didn't feel like that.  
[00:14:04] I decided to identify with it.  
[00:14:06] And so I reinforced the fragmentation one more time.  
[00:14:10] So instead, the idea of mindfulness would be like,  
[00:14:14] take this bottle of water and leave your mind here.  
[00:14:17] Leave your awareness here.  
[00:14:19] And if you recognize thoughts arising, which it will,  
[00:14:21] you have a human mind, and so it's going to wander.  
[00:14:24] That's the way it works.  
[00:14:26] So it'll wander away, and it'll do its thing.  
[00:14:29] And then you just notice that that's happened.  
[00:14:32] So I'm thinking about something else, or I'm caught up in some kind of feeling.  
[00:14:36] Or I have some kind of memory about the thought I was having  
[00:14:40] that has some feeling associated with it.  
[00:14:42] One way or the other, I become distracted.  
[00:14:45] Now it's time to bring my attention back to the water bottle.  
[00:14:49] And then it'll happen again.  
[00:14:51] And you bring it back again, and it'll happen again, and you bring it back again.  
[00:14:54] So the usual analogy is like an untamed horse, from a Buddhist perspective.  
[00:14:59] Your mind is an untamed horse, kind of like roaming the prairies.  
[00:15:04] So you're in this position of having a lasso now.  
[00:15:09] You've got to go out on the plain and find this horse,  
[00:15:12] and you're going to throw a lasso around it,  
[00:15:14] and you're going to bring it back, kicking and screaming, into the corral.  
[00:15:19] And now it's this process of breaking the horse.  
[00:15:23] Alright, so how do you do that?  
[00:15:25] Well, you're going to get up on its back, and it's going to throw you off.  
[00:15:29] And you're going to get up on its back again, and it's going to throw you off again,  
[00:15:32] and again, and again, like that, over and over and over again.  
[00:15:37] Until the horse actually stops throwing you off.  
[00:15:40] Until it learns to accept you on its back.  
[00:15:44] Now at that point, the power, the qualities and the characteristics of the horse,  
[00:15:50] really become under your control.  
[00:15:52] So now it will go left when you pull left on its reins.  
[00:15:55] It will go right when you pull right.  
[00:15:57] It'll stop when you need it to stop.  
[00:15:59] It'll go faster when you need that to happen.  
[00:16:04] Okay, so now what would happen if the guy training the horse, breaking the horse,  
[00:16:09] did it with a lot of anger and irritation and frustration?  
[00:16:15] Probably wouldn't work out very well.  
[00:16:18] You'd probably have kind of a traumatized horse, right?  
[00:16:22] Who just kind of ends up being afraid of you.  
[00:16:26] So you do that like any good horse trainer will tell you.  
[00:16:30] You do that with compassion.  
[00:16:33] You do it with patience.  
[00:16:35] You do it with generosity.  
[00:16:37] Some sense of the well-being for the animal itself.  
[00:16:42] And for your well-being.  
[00:16:44] And in that way, you get a pretty solid horse.  
[00:16:49] Who's going to like human beings, who's going to respond to them.  
[00:16:53] The same kind of relationship you should have with your mind in this process.  
[00:16:58] When it goes off and becomes distracted,  
[00:17:01] try not to get irritated.  
[00:17:03] So if irritation and frustration rise up, that's one of your triggers.  
[00:17:06] Maybe you've got control issues like the rest of us.  
[00:17:10] It's not doing what you say it's going to do.  
[00:17:13] And so you feel irritation and frustration rise,  
[00:17:17] just breathe in to the irritation.  
[00:17:20] Just relax into it a little bit.  
[00:17:23] And bring your mind back. Release the distraction and bring your mind back.  
[00:17:27] You do this over and over and over again.  
[00:17:30] Until you get to a point where your mind just won't move off the object very much.  
[00:17:37] It'll start doing it less and less.  
[00:17:41] And you'll become able to be more and more concentrated on an object.  
[00:17:46] Now, why would this be useful for clinical psychology?  
[00:17:50] Because you can't fix a problem until you know what the problem is.  
[00:17:55] It's not possible.  
[00:17:59] So if I were an MD and someone came into my ER that was traumatized,  
[00:18:04] the first thing that I would need to do would be to get some scissors  
[00:18:08] and cut their clothes off and get some bright lights going on the situation  
[00:18:13] and examine the body of the patient to see what's the matter.  
[00:18:18] That's where I have to start.  
[00:18:21] So if I can't apprehend the problem, I can't fix it.  
[00:18:24] I mean, I don't even know what's wrong. How can I even approach it?  
[00:18:28] So concentration serves this purpose.  
[00:18:31] If you want to know the nature of this bottle of water,  
[00:18:34] you must be able to focus on it for an extended period of time  
[00:18:38] with a mind that's really kind of undistracted by other stuff.  
[00:18:44] And in that way you can kind of see into the nature of this water bottle.  
[00:18:51] Or it might work that way with your minds too.  
[00:18:55] Like if you can become very still, very stable, very relaxed,  
[00:19:00] with your mind, right, with this observing awareness,  
[00:19:04] you might be able to apprehend and see into the nature of your own mind.  
[00:19:09] Which still, even in the 21st century, sounds like very Buddhist-y and mystical and whatever.  
[00:19:14] It's really not. I mean, everyone in this room has a mind.  
[00:19:18] And that mind, quite logically, must have some kind of nature to it.  
[00:19:23] So like we're seeing from a psychological perspective, this is quite useful.  
[00:19:28] Quite useful to learn how to do.  
[00:19:31] How does your mind create so much suffering?  
[00:19:34] So much difficulty and distraction?  
[00:19:37] How does that actually happen for you?  
[00:19:41] How does that occur?  
[00:19:43] Even though I think I let off this seminar kind of like a little blurb about it was,  
[00:19:48] we have really very fortunate lives.  
[00:19:52] Probably everybody in this room has a fortunate life.  
[00:19:57] I mean, we live in a country that's not torn by war and poverty, right?  
[00:20:02] And by strife.  
[00:20:04] And we generally have enough food to eat, right?  
[00:20:07] We have a roof over our head.  
[00:20:09] And there's some kind of stability to the day-to-day routine of life.  
[00:20:14] Most of us are probably not worried about how we're going to survive for the next 24 hours.  
[00:20:21] And we probably have jobs that we like to one degree or another, right?  
[00:20:26] And compared to the rest of the world, we seem really quite fortunate.  
[00:20:32] And yet...  
[00:20:34] To continue with that...  
[00:20:36] So, perhaps everyone in this room is of average or above average or even genius level intelligence.  
[00:20:43] Perhaps you have all the capabilities it takes to really learn to work with your mind.  
[00:20:48] To really learn to make progress on some kind of more sophisticated level, spiritually or psychologically.  
[00:20:55] You have the teachers available to you.  
[00:20:57] You have the time.  
[00:20:59] You have the inclination to do all of that.  
[00:21:04] So you have fortune on several different levels here.  
[00:21:09] And yet, we kind of walk around feeling pretty dissatisfied a lot of the time.  
[00:21:16] Maybe sometimes it's just very subtle.  
[00:21:20] But it's not uncommon for men who reach my age.  
[00:21:23] I'm going to be 41 in three days or something.  
[00:21:29] So, when you reach my age, it's like half of it's over.  
[00:21:34] If you're going to look at the statistical rate at which white males die in the United States,  
[00:21:39] I'm halfway done at this point.  
[00:21:43] So half is ahead of me, half is behind me.  
[00:21:46] That's a usual kind of traditional existential stopping place for a lot of people.  
[00:21:53] And it's like you start to evaluate.  
[00:21:55] And the evaluation is never very kind, really.  
[00:22:00] It's all about what you could have done, what you should have done, blah, blah.  
[00:22:04] You can invest that with a lot of reality.  
[00:22:08] Then you can start freaking out.  
[00:22:12] And it's like you kind of get to this point in life, sometimes not just this point in life,  
[00:22:16] but many different points in life where you ask, is this all there is?  
[00:22:22] Is this really what it's all about?  
[00:22:24] Like, it's not what I thought it would be, you know?  
[00:22:27] That kind of thing.  
[00:22:29] And we just kind of walk around with that unsubtle or gross level a lot of the time.  
[00:22:36] We're just dissatisfied.  
[00:22:38] It kind of makes us want to disconnect sometimes.  
[00:22:42] It makes us want to be apathetic.  
[00:22:44] Maybe apathy is a reasonable alternative to just feeling that dissatisfaction routinely.  
[00:22:51] That's not to say we don't have small moments of happiness and joy and pleasure  
[00:22:59] and laughter and humor and all that stuff.  
[00:23:04] It's just to say we also have the dissatisfaction.  
[00:23:09] And what are you supposed to do with that?  
[00:23:12] And then a lot of people feel guilty because, like we said in the beginning,  
[00:23:16] our lives are so much better than 90% of the people on the planet.  
[00:23:20] And who are we to feel bad for ourselves?  
[00:23:23] And then we're off to the races, right?  
[00:23:27] So how do we get into this mess?  
[00:23:30] Well, so mindfulness gives you this opportunity to begin to kind of slow down.  
[00:23:36] To just start taking some deep breaths.  
[00:23:39] And instead of the object being a bottle of water, the object is, in the beginning of it,  
[00:23:46] when we begin settling the body in its natural state,  
[00:23:49] the object is the tactile sensations of the body as a whole.  
[00:23:54] Tactile sensations of the body.  
[00:23:56] So everything that you can feel in a tactile sense.  
[00:24:00] So it would be, you know, I sit when I meditate.  
[00:24:04] So it would be the feeling of my backside against the cushion.  
[00:24:08] The clothes against my skin.  
[00:24:10] The air moving across the hair on my arms.  
[00:24:12] The feeling of respiration.  
[00:24:15] So I respire, in and out, in my abdomen, up through my chest, my throat.  
[00:24:20] The apertures of my nose, my mouth.  
[00:24:23] The feeling of my hands resting on my thighs.
[00:24:27] Even the feeling of my heart beating and the blood moving through my veins and arteries.  
[00:24:32] Pulsing through.  
[00:24:34] All the tactile sensations of the body as a whole.  
[00:24:37] That becomes the first object in formal mindfulness training.  
[00:24:42] Tactile sensations of the body as a whole.  
[00:24:44] Which means we become disinterested in listening, in seeing, in tasting.  
[00:24:52] We become disinterested in all the other senses.  
[00:24:55] We become disinterested in thinking.  
[00:24:58] Like what the Buddhists call the sixth sense.  
[00:25:01] Which was mind. This is one Aristotle missed.  
[00:25:05] He didn't include it as one of our senses.  
[00:25:09] Buddhist psychology includes it as one of the senses.  
[00:25:12] Mind.  
[00:25:13] It's like what would be left if you were placed in a sensory deprivation tank.  
[00:25:18] I just put you in there and there was no sight, there was no sound, there's no taste, there's no touch, there's no smell.  
[00:25:26] And I just left you in there long enough, which doesn't take long.  
[00:25:30] I left you in there long enough that you disconnected from all of your physical senses.  
[00:25:35] Most people it takes about 20 minutes.  
[00:25:37] They feel like they've been in there a couple of hours, by the way.  
[00:25:40] Most people it takes about 20 minutes to become totally disconnected from all sensual input.  
[00:25:46] All sensory input becomes disconnected.  
[00:25:49] Well, what's left?  
[00:25:52] I mean, what would you be doing in that tank?  
[00:25:56] Thinking? Feeling? Creating like judgments, opinions, beliefs, fantasies, memories, dreams?  
[00:26:04] You would be doing all of that.  
[00:26:06] Well, that's the mind, right? So that's the sixth sense.  
[00:26:09] So you become disinterested in that as well.  
[00:26:12] All that stuff becomes uninteresting.  
[00:26:15] And you just let your awareness, your attention rest on the tactile sensations of the body as a whole.  
[00:26:21] Which is easier said than done.  
[00:26:24] Really is.  
[00:26:26] A lot of times we want to get very caught up in one tactile sensation.  
[00:26:30] That usually happens when we get an itch.  
[00:26:33] The first time you get an itch in meditation, you might find that to be pretty interesting.  
[00:26:38] You might see all of your attention kind of gravitate to wherever that itch is.  
[00:26:42] Kind of focus there.  
[00:26:44] You might feel this kind of impulse to scratch it.  
[00:26:49] And you might notice something very interesting if you choose to return and make your attention diffuse again.  
[00:26:57] To the body as a whole, tactile sensations of the body as a whole.  
[00:27:00] What do you think happens to the itch?  
[00:27:03] Any guesses?  
[00:27:07] Yeah, it disappears.  
[00:27:09] Back to wherever it came from.  
[00:27:11] Wherever that was.  
[00:27:13] Just goes.  
[00:27:14] And so does the impulsivity.  
[00:27:17] To respond to it in some way.  
[00:27:20] Yeah, it's interesting.  
[00:27:21] So you get pulled off to all kinds of different stuff.  
[00:27:25] Thoughts and feelings and judgments and opinions and an itch on your toe.  
[00:27:28] And somebody walking in the hallway out there.  
[00:27:31] So you get pulled off into all kinds of stuff.  
[00:27:34] And it will happen really routinely.  
[00:27:36] And when you begin this process, that will happen all the time.  
[00:27:39] You might spend entire sessions totally just lost in thinking and feeling and listening and seeing.  
[00:27:49] If you're anything like me, you spend whole sessions just lost in thought.  
[00:27:54] And you were supposed to be on the object and now it's another piece of data about how big of a failure you are.  
[00:28:02] And you spin off into all these places with it.  
[00:28:05] And at some point you might catch yourself spinning off into all these places.  
[00:28:10] And that would be a good moment.  
[00:28:13] Because then you can actually come back and you can start to see how this works.  
[00:28:17] You can start to see how you get caught up in all the things you think and feel.  
[00:28:22] It's just habitual for us.  
[00:28:24] We grasp at it and we cling to it.  
[00:28:27] And we hold it so tightly.  
[00:28:29] And then there's a whole other group category of stuff that we just can't stand.  
[00:28:34] I can't stand that stuff.  
[00:28:37] I can't tolerate sadness.  
[00:28:40] I can't tolerate grief.  
[00:28:42] I can't tolerate loss.  
[00:28:44] Loneliness.  
[00:28:45] I can't stand it.  
[00:28:47] There are certain things I can't think about.  
[00:28:49] I don't want to think about them.  
[00:28:51] I keep all of that crap as far from me as I possibly can.  
[00:28:55] There's a whole other class of stuff I cling to so tightly.  
[00:29:00] And you can kind of see from the descriptors here where this kind of mind is going to go.  
[00:29:07] You don't really need a PhD for that or anything.  
[00:29:10] It's probably not going to work out well.  
[00:29:14] Whereas if you could attend to things evenly, with some sense of equanimity,  
[00:29:19] not really needing to cling onto something or shove something else away,  
[00:29:24] insisting that it's poison,  
[00:29:27] and you cease to be so reactive to the things you think and feel,  
[00:29:32] that might work out better.  
[00:29:34] That might be kind of like a break.  
[00:29:36] That might be kind of relaxing.  
[00:29:40] Okay, so that's where we start.  
[00:29:43] What we do, just settling the body in its natural state,  
[00:29:48] is the formal name for it, from Buddhist methodology.  
[00:29:53] All this stuff that we're doing in clinical psych, by the way,  
[00:29:59] and cognitive neuroscience, it's all stuff we stole from the Buddha.  
[00:30:06] We just finally got around to looking at this stuff.  
[00:30:10] It's kind of funny.  
[00:30:12] We've been doing this for a hundred years or so, a little more than a century now,  
[00:30:16] trying to figure it out.  
[00:30:17] And we started on the medical model and pathology,  
[00:30:20] because Freud was an MD and he was a neurologist and all this stuff.  
[00:30:24] And the medical model is all about, if something's wrong,  
[00:30:26] if there's pathology in your body, you know what that is,  
[00:30:30] because you've seen what the body looks like without pathology.  
[00:30:34] You have a frame of reference.  
[00:30:36] And to get rid of pathology, you usually cut it out,  
[00:30:41] or you take some other thing outside of you and you ingest it,  
[00:30:45] and it somehow helps the body heal.  
[00:30:49] But it's like a forceful model.  
[00:30:51] And in the beginning of medicine, the patient was not required to be involved.  
[00:30:56] The surgeon doesn't need your immediate involvement  
[00:30:59] in what he's doing to have this work.  
[00:31:02] In fact, you're totally unconscious and that's fine with them, right?  
[00:31:07] So he can do his job even easier if you're not involved, maybe.  
[00:31:11] But that's not how it works with the mind.  
[00:31:15] That's not how it works.  
[00:31:17] It's not kind of like a mechanic fixing a car or something.  
[00:31:23] It doesn't work like that.  
[00:31:25] You have to be involved with this stuff.  
[00:31:27] And so we started out with this kind of model.  
[00:31:31] And so we were looking at pathology pretty much consistently for the last century.  
[00:31:36] Never really slowing down long enough to even notice  
[00:31:39] that we haven't really asked the question,  
[00:31:42] well, what is mental health?  
[00:31:45] What does that look like?  
[00:31:47] It has to look a century later.  
[00:31:49] Like, what's the frame of reference?  
[00:31:53] I mean, what's the idea we should be shooting for?  
[00:31:57] How does mental health look?  
[00:31:58] We don't know.  
[00:32:00] We really don't know.  
[00:32:01] For the last 15 years, guys like Seligman and some other guys in positive psychology  
[00:32:05] have been doing some research around this.  
[00:32:07] And we found out some very interesting things.  
[00:32:09] But we don't know nearly enough.  
[00:32:11] We really don't have any idea what mental health really looks like.  
[00:32:17] And some of the stuff we found out about mental health and happiness  
[00:32:20] and psychological flourishing and well-being is kind of scary.  
[00:32:24] It goes against our cultural values.  
[00:32:27] And it's kind of like freaking some people out.  
[00:32:33] So we never really asked the question in any serious way  
[00:32:36] until like the last decade, 15 years or so.  
[00:32:40] What is mental health?  
[00:32:41] So we really don't know.  
[00:32:43] We have no real idea.  
[00:32:45] We can tell you with...  
[00:32:47] I could lecture for the next two weeks on pathology.  
[00:32:51] I mean, I teach classes where the subject is pathology  
[00:32:56] and I talk for 40 hours and not really cover it.  
[00:33:00] So we know a lot about pathology.  
[00:33:02] But mental health, not so much.  
[00:33:05] We don't really know all that much about it.  
[00:33:09] So it's kind of interesting.  
[00:33:12] But we're starting to see that this mindfulness stuff  
[00:33:15] seems to be moving in a direction away from pathology.  
[00:33:19] It seems to be actually cultivating some sense of well-being in people.  
[00:33:25] And all the way up to chronic pain, post-operative pain,  
[00:33:30] chronic non-responsive pain in the body for various reasons,  
[00:33:35] heart conditions, hypertension,  
[00:33:38] and of course around depression and anxiety and addiction  
[00:33:41] and all of these things too.  
[00:33:43] We're starting to see it's very, very effective  
[00:33:47] in so many different areas.  
[00:33:50] And independent research is like verifying more and more of this all the time  
[00:33:54] and we don't really know what to make of all that.  
[00:33:58] Or where it's going.  
[00:34:00] It's kind of interesting.  
[00:34:03] Okay, so maybe we'll do a session.  
[00:34:08] So maybe we'll sit and we'll do settling the body in its natural state.  
[00:34:12] So the way we'll begin is...  
[00:34:15] So let's begin first just talking about posture a little bit.  
[00:34:19] When you meditate, there are some ways that you can do it  
[00:34:22] that are effective.  
[00:34:24] You can stand if you choose to.  
[00:34:27] You can sit on the floor like I usually do.  
[00:34:30] You can lie prone.  
[00:34:34] Any of these are fine.  
[00:34:37] And so you would sit in a comfortable position.  
[00:34:42] So if you're going to sit in a chair,  
[00:34:44] then your feet are going to be flat on the floor.  
[00:34:47] Okay, your body's not going to be like extending itself  
[00:34:50] or stressing itself in any unusual way.  
[00:34:53] You want to kind of rest your hands on your thighs  
[00:34:56] in some kind of comfortable sense.  
[00:34:58] Not so it's pulling down your shoulders really,  
[00:35:01] but just so that they're resting.  
[00:35:05] And you would want to have your eyes hooded if you can.  
[00:35:09] Hooded means that they're maybe like one-eighth open.  
[00:35:14] This helps guard against drowsiness.  
[00:35:17] Now some people get really caught up  
[00:35:19] because having your eyes hooded takes a little practice usually.  
[00:35:23] And so there's tension in your eyelids  
[00:35:26] and your eyes start to flutter a little bit  
[00:35:28] and you can get really distracted with that.  
[00:35:30] So if that starts to happen and you don't want to work with that,  
[00:35:33] just close your eyes.  
[00:35:36] Okay, so you can close your eyes.  
[00:35:38] Try and have your gaze kind of like a 45-degree downward angle.  
[00:35:42] And you would sit kind of with this idea  
[00:35:44] of like someone had tied a string to the base of your neck  
[00:35:49] and was just kind of gently pulling up.  
[00:35:52] So it's not a rigid, overly puffed-out back,  
[00:35:56] nor is it slouching in any way.  
[00:35:59] It's kind of in between those two.  
[00:36:01] So just kind of a stable posture.  
[00:36:05] And you can breathe through your mouth and your nose,  
[00:36:09] or either one.  
[00:36:11] If you choose just to breathe through your nose, it's fine.
[00:36:14] So that's the basic posture that you would use.  
[00:36:17] And then we're going to go to...  
[00:36:22] So we're going to start just by doing like three very slow, deep in-breaths  
[00:36:26] into any overt tension or stress in your body.  
[00:36:30] Look for places that you normally carry your tension and stress.  
[00:36:34] For me, it's like my neck, my forehead, and my thighs.  
[00:36:38] I carry a lot of stress in those areas.  
[00:36:41] So those are the places I immediately look.  
[00:36:44] And I usually find tension and stress there.  
[00:36:46] So I would breathe into that.  
[00:36:48] And I would breathe in relaxation  
[00:36:51] and feel it kind of like transforming the stress and tension into relaxation.  
[00:36:56] And I would breathe out the tension and stress.  
[00:36:59] So you breathe in relaxation, breathe out the tension.  
[00:37:02] Just do that three times.  
[00:37:04] Then we're going to move to a body scan.  
[00:37:06] A body scan is a very simple technique.  
[00:37:09] You kind of just start at the very top of your scalp.  
[00:37:13] And you're just going to systematically, slowly move down.  
[00:37:16] Almost like you were in a CAT scan.  
[00:37:19] You're just going to slowly, systematically move down the body.  
[00:37:22] And everywhere the scan touches, there's relaxation.  
[00:37:28] And true relaxation is not sleepy.  
[00:37:32] It's not drowsy.  
[00:37:33] It's not like drifting into la-la land.  
[00:37:36] That's not relaxation.  
[00:37:37] That's drifting into la-la land.  
[00:37:40] Relaxation is attentive.  
[00:37:42] It's awake.  
[00:37:43] It's present.  
[00:37:44] And not stressed.  
[00:37:46] Calm.  
[00:37:47] Stable.  
[00:37:49] It's like a stable, awake quality.  
[00:37:53] So you want to bring that into your body.  
[00:37:56] So everywhere the scan touches, it brings relaxation.  
[00:38:00] True, kind of attentive relaxation.  
[00:38:03] And you move down the length of the body.  
[00:38:05] And anywhere you find tension or stress, it becomes relieved.  
[00:38:10] It becomes relaxed.  
[00:38:12] Then you'll check the quality of your mind.  
[00:38:14] I'll guide you through all of this while we're meditating.  
[00:38:17] So you don't have to remember this off the top of your head right now.  
[00:38:21] Eventually you should get to the point where you've memorized the methodology.  
[00:38:25] And it's just like you don't even have to think about it anymore.  
[00:38:28] It's second nature.  
[00:38:31] At that point, you really can start meditating.  
[00:38:35] Because you no longer have to divert significant amounts of energy  
[00:38:39] to remembering and recalling the methodology.  
[00:38:42] Okay, but for now, and over the course of this seminar,  
[00:38:45] I'll guide the meditations.  
[00:38:47] So you would begin just checking the quality of your mind next.  
[00:38:52] Where is your mind actually right now?  
[00:38:54] What is its overall quality?  
[00:38:57] Is it excited, fragmented, kind of racing?  
[00:39:00] Or is it sleepy, lethargic, kind of like beginning to doze a little bit?  
[00:39:07] Okay, now wherever you find your mind in one of these extremes or another,  
[00:39:11] you balance it.  
[00:39:13] You breathe in the remedy.  
[00:39:15] So if your mind is excited, racing, fragmented,  
[00:39:18] you would breathe in stability.  
[00:39:20] You would breathe in relaxation.  
[00:39:25] If your mind is sleepy and kind of lax,  
[00:39:29] you would breathe in awakeness, attention.  
[00:39:33] So you actually feel your mind come to balance.  
[00:39:37] So it becomes not sleepy anymore.  
[00:39:39] It starts to wake up and to be present.  
[00:39:43] Nor is it fragmented and kind of racing and out of control.  
[00:39:47] It starts to calm down and settle and become attentive.  
[00:39:51] So then at that point, with body and mind balanced,  
[00:39:54] you would move into the meditation itself.  
[00:39:57] That's all prep for the meditation.  
[00:40:00] Now it took me like five, six minutes to explain all that.  
[00:40:05] In actual practice, once you kind of get into it,  
[00:40:08] that whole thing may take you 45 seconds, 60 seconds to do all of that.  
[00:40:15] Now you can stay in the body scan as long as you want in your own practice.  
[00:40:20] Some people have that as their whole practice.  
[00:40:22] They just do body scan.  
[00:40:25] But for our purposes, we'll move into settling the body in its natural state.  
[00:40:30] So then you will bring your awareness, your attention,  
[00:40:34] to the tactile sensations of the body as a whole.  
[00:40:37] And you will let your attention diffusely rest on all of these sensations.  
[00:40:45] And it will be hard at first,  
[00:40:47] because you are not familiar with doing it maybe.  
[00:40:51] So you'll need some practice, and you'll be out of balance.  
[00:40:55] And you'll get distracted really easily with all kinds of things.  
[00:40:59] The usual distractions are,  
[00:41:01] "Am I doing this right?"  
[00:41:03] Or, "I'm not doing this right."  
[00:41:06] Or boredom.  
[00:41:07] Or, "What is the point of this?"  
[00:41:10] All these thoughts will start to come in,  
[00:41:12] and you might have feelings about the thoughts you're having.  
[00:41:15] At that point, you're distracted.  
[00:41:19] So then you would bring it back again and try again.  
[00:41:21] So you would release those thoughts,  
[00:41:23] that normally maybe you might get totally caught up in and identify with.  
[00:41:27] You would learn to release them,  
[00:41:29] and return instead to the object.  
[00:41:31] Return again to the tactile sensations.  
[00:41:34] If you see yourself getting too specific,  
[00:41:37] like just focusing on how your legs feel maybe,  
[00:41:40] or just focusing on how your hands feel,  
[00:41:43] it's similar that you're distracted.  
[00:41:46] So again, make the attention diffuse across the body as a whole.  
[00:41:50] All the tactile sensations of the body as a whole.  
[00:41:57] From that point, you would move into settling the speech.  
[00:42:01] Settling the speech is just about making the object subtler, smaller.  
[00:42:10] So the next object in this progression becomes smaller.  
[00:42:15] Just the tactile sensations in the abdomen as you breathe.  
[00:42:18] Just that.  
[00:42:21] Then it becomes smaller still.  
[00:42:23] Just the tactile sensations around the apertures of the nose.  
[00:42:26] Just around the nostrils.  
[00:42:28] Which is really quite subtle.  
[00:42:31] So you would breathe in.  
[00:42:34] To find out where this is, you can close your mouth,  
[00:42:37] and just breathe in around there to help your mind get grounded there.  
[00:42:43] That is your object. You would attend to that subtle object.  
[00:42:47] And then the next level of subtlety is actually settling the mind in its natural state,  
[00:42:53] which I don't teach because people need to be really quite subtle at that point.  
[00:42:59] That's where you attend to the space of the mind itself.  
[00:43:03] So now the object is completely non-physical.  
[00:43:07] Now you're just attending to this first-person subjective space  
[00:43:11] that has no physical reality to it.  
[00:43:14] And that's pretty tough to do.  
[00:43:17] So we get kind of grounded in gross objects, the body as a whole.  
[00:43:22] Then subtler objects.  
[00:43:24] Abdomen tactile sensations in the abdomen as you breathe.  
[00:43:27] Subtler still.  
[00:43:29] Tactile sensations around the apertures of the nose.  
[00:43:32] And once you're able to stay kind of grounded in these places,  
[00:43:37] then you can move on to subtler things.  
[00:43:40] Why would this be useful in something like psychotherapy?  
[00:43:43] Because psychotherapy is about insight and awareness.  
[00:43:47] And to the extent you cannot concentrate and you're not mindful,  
[00:43:52] you can have neither one.  
[00:43:55] So it's useful there.  
[00:43:58] You can gain insight into your own mind  
[00:44:01] from such a position of concentration and mindfulness.  
[00:44:05] And from that position of concentration, you can cultivate great mindfulness.  
[00:44:10] So the way I've explained it now is just concentration methodology.  
[00:44:15] If you wanted to make it mindful methodology,  
[00:44:18] all you would have to do is become interested in the distractions themselves.  
[00:44:23] And again, tending mindfully just to the distractions.  
[00:44:29] So the distractions become the object of meditation.  
[00:44:33] So you start to want to understand the nature of them.  
[00:44:38] But that's a little bit different.  
[00:44:40] So first we'll get concentrated.  
[00:44:44] So when we go from settling the body to settling the speech,  
[00:44:48] we'll move from the tactile sensations of the body as a whole  
[00:44:52] to just the tactile sensations of the abdomen as we breathe.  
[00:44:57] You should breathe naturally as you do when you're asleep,  
[00:45:01] as you did when you were a child.  
[00:45:03] Does anyone have children, small children here?  
[00:45:06] Or has had small children?  
[00:45:08] Okay, so when you see them and you're watching them sleep and breathe,  
[00:45:12] how do they breathe?  
[00:45:15] Do they do it the way we usually do?  
[00:45:18] Like you're in a movie or something, you know?  
[00:45:22] Yeah, it's all right here.  
[00:45:24] And on the in-breath, abdomen expands.  
[00:45:27] On the out-breath, it contracts.  
[00:45:29] That's the natural breath.  
[00:45:32] So that's the way you breathe in meditation.  
[00:45:35] So there's like no tension in the muscles here.  
[00:45:38] So on the in-breath, abdomen expands.  
[00:45:40] Out-breath, it contracts.  
[00:45:42] Nor are you interested in controlling your breathing,  
[00:45:45] which is also easier said than done.  
[00:45:47] There are very few things in our body we have control over.  
[00:45:51] Breathing, the rate of breathing, is one of them.  
[00:45:54] And so to try not to control that  
[00:45:56] sometimes becomes a big distraction for people.  
[00:46:00] But you just let the body breathe.  
[00:46:02] This idea that the body knows how to breathe better than your mind does.  
[00:46:06] So you just let the body breathe.  
[00:46:09] And you're just attending to the tactile sensations in the abdomen as you breathe.  
[00:46:14] And that's the object.  
[00:46:16] And again, you get pulled off.  
[00:46:18] And the thing that can help is to count into the breath.  
[00:46:21] That can help the mind kind of get settled a little bit.  
[00:46:25] So you can begin like when we get to this place.  
[00:46:28] You can begin just on the in-breath.  
[00:46:30] One.  
[00:46:32] Next in-breath.  
[00:46:33] Two.  
[00:46:34] Next in-breath.  
[00:46:35] Three.  
[00:46:37] If you can make it all the way to 21  
[00:46:39] without becoming so distracted that you lose your place in the count,  
[00:46:44] then you're making some small progress.  
[00:46:47] Usually.  
[00:46:50] So people who haven't meditated for any length of time,  
[00:46:54] the usual thing is like you'll make it to 3, 4, 5,  
[00:46:57] and then you're caught up in some thought or emotion or judgment or opinion or belief that you're having or whatever.  
[00:47:03] And you're totally distracted.  
[00:47:07] So the task, again, is just to recognize that you've become distracted,  
[00:47:11] return to the object.  
[00:47:13] Once you can get grounded here,  
[00:47:15] again, starting from the gross object, tactile sensations of the body as a whole,  
[00:47:19] just to the abdomen, tactile sensations of the abdomen as you breathe,  
[00:47:23] then subtler still, tactile sensations around the apertures of the nose as you breathe.  
[00:47:29] Once you can become quite stable here,  
[00:47:32] stable meaning perhaps you can attend to the object in an undistracted fashion for 30 seconds,  
[00:47:39] and then maybe a small distraction comes in and you get pulled out.  
[00:47:43] Then you can come back.  
[00:47:45] Then you're doing pretty well.  
[00:47:48] When you can stay here for minutes at a time, in an undistracted way,  
[00:47:54] you might find yourself becoming absorbed.
[00:47:57] And absorption into the object is very interesting when that occurs.  
[00:48:03] That becomes very interesting.  
[00:48:07] Then you start to see what your mind might really be capable of.  
[00:48:11] So that state of absorption into the object is associated with luminescence, stability,  
[00:48:19] deep relaxation, clarity, vividness, a sense of bliss, absorption, and that occurs.  
[00:48:27] Your mind is perfectly still.  
[00:48:30] You become absorbed in an object.  
[00:48:34] Nor are you totally identified with the luminescence and the bliss and the relaxation and the stability and the clarity.  
[00:48:41] There's still an awareness observing all of that.  
[00:48:47] It's interesting.  
[00:48:49] So when you get past this gross kind of fragmented mind,  
[00:48:52] and you get to this point where you can actually see what might be going on underneath the surface,  
[00:48:57] it becomes really interesting.  
[00:49:01] So should we try some of that?  
[00:49:03] Do you guys have questions about the methodology?  
[00:49:06] Do you want to take a quick break before we try it?  
[00:49:09] What do you want to do?  
[00:49:12] No questions? Everyone's clear on the methodology?  
[00:49:15] Okay. Let's try it.