Life Through The Lens Of Understanding.

This, Phil's first Insight Timer talk, is an introduction to what it is that he's 'up to' as a teacher on this wonderful platform. So take out some time to sit back and relax as Phil explains what's so important about the words in the title. What does he mean by 'life' 'lens' and 'understanding.'

The music is by Music by Piotr Witowski from Pixabay. "Shades of Passing."

Transcript

Hello Insight Timers,

I'm Phil Hathaway,

A London-based life coach,

Self-published author and self-confessed lover of life.

Welcome to this series of talks that I hope you'll find sometimes entertaining,

Often insightful,

But always interesting.

Now,

While I'm talking,

I hope you've managed to find the space and the time to relax so that you can hear me and listen to me with ease from a quieter place with nothing on your mind other than this present moment.

So take some time out while I explain to you what it is that I'm up to,

And more important at this stage,

What it is that I hope for you as you engage with this,

My first Insight Timer series of talks.

So allow me to begin with what it is that I want for you.

In a nutshell,

I want you to be free.

I want you to live a life that's thriving.

I want you to be living a life with ease.

A life where you know who you are at your core,

And how it is that experience works,

How experience of life really works,

And that ultimately knowing that you're okay no matter what's going on in your life.

The deeper you understand who you are,

How experience works,

The freer you find yourself no matter what's going on in your life.

Now that's not to say that there are not bumps and humps in life.

There always has been,

And there always will be.

But the more you understand how life truly works,

We can ride those humps and those bumps and those problems and issues with grace and with ease.

Now the overriding title that I've given to this series of talks is Life Through the Lens of Understanding.

Life Through the Lens of Understanding.

And later I'm going to explain what I mean by that.

But before I do,

I wanted to present you with a very simple analogy.

Something that I believe brings to light or encapsulates what it is that I'm pointing to.

And the analogy that I like is,

I'm sure we've all seen either online or on a TV documentary where they show a flower that starts off in very very tight bud,

And then it very quickly grows into a flower using time-lapse photography.

And over a matter of seconds you see this tight bud evolve and grow and change into this amazing beautiful fully formed flower.

Now as I watch those sort of films,

It often occurs to me in that moment,

Isn't it amazing that everything that the flower becomes,

It already was.

Everything that the flower needs,

It already has.

It's in this tightly closed bud and then within the film,

Within seconds,

This beautiful flower emerges.

Everything that it needs to become a beautiful flower,

It already has.

And after 20 years of working with clients,

I've come to see,

To understand to my core,

That everybody has everything that they need to lead a wonderful well-lived life.

Just in the same way as a flower emerging from a bud,

We all have everything within us already.

Now I'm well aware that if you're listening to this and you're suffering with stress or anxiety or worries,

That that might seem like a trite statement,

That you have everything that you need already.

And the reason that I know that this might be uncomfortable for you at this stage,

Is because I've been there too.

I won't go into detail but many many years ago,

For a period of about seven years,

I had to deal with my own stresses and anxieties.

So I do understand,

Wise words from another can just fall on stony ground.

And that has to be okay.

And I've come to see through,

Through life and through years of working with those who struggled with life,

That a fertile soil is just one thought.

So going back to what I'm fundamentally up to on these talks,

I'm inviting you to awaken to a life well-lived.

Now I'm well aware that there are many who use Insight Timer because of meditation.

So I looked up the word meditation and the original Latin word for meditation was meditatum,

Which actually means to ponder.

And the root of that word,

Meditare,

Means thoughtful contemplation.

In essence,

That's what I'm inviting you to do here.

To listen,

To ponder,

To have thoughtful contemplation,

So that you have fresh insight,

You have fresh thought for yourself,

So that you awaken to a wonderful life from your own insight,

Not from Phil's insight,

Not from Phil's wisdom,

But your own.

One of the things that I love about being a human being is our capacity for insight,

For fresh thinking and for curiosity.

I think that one of the most amazing aspects of being a human being is our capacity to be curious.

I mean,

When you think about it,

Animals are curious too.

If you've ever owned a dog or a cat or you've watched the birds play in the garden,

They're all curious creatures.

But human beings are curious to our core.

When we meet somebody new,

We're curious about who they are,

What they're like and their past.

If we're in the countryside and we see a mountain,

We're often curious about what's on the top of the mountain,

What's on the other side of the mountain.

It's this capacity for curiosity that has allowed us to grow over the years.

So I'm inviting you again here to be curious about the things I'm pointing to.

I'm inviting you to listen out of or with curiosity.

Now in a moment I'm going to whisper something and I want you to see if you can hear it.

So on the count of three.

One,

Two,

Three.

Now I'm hoping that you didn't hear anything because I didn't say anything.

But what I would like you to notice is how you turned your attention to hear that word.

We don't have volume control on our ears.

You just turned your attention to hear something.

And while I'm talking throughout all of these talks that I'm going to be loaded onto Insight Timer,

Again that's what I'm inviting you to do.

To turn your attention.

Because where our attention goes,

Our consciousness goes.

When you're walking along the street and the street may be busy with traffic and people and noise and you have a thought about something that happened yesterday,

That's where your attention goes and that's where your consciousness goes and that's what you're involved with.

You no longer see the traffic,

You no longer see the people,

You no longer see the street.

You are where your attention goes.

So to summarize this opening few statements,

I've invited you to awaken.

I've invited you to be like the flower that's blooming in time-lapse.

I've invited you to ponder through thoughtful contemplation.

To be curious and to turn your attention without effort towards the things that I'm pointing towards.

Now at the start of this conversation I highlighted the title of this talk.

Life through the lens of understanding.

Now there are three words in that statement that stand out.

Life,

Lens and understanding.

But what do I mean by life What am I pointing towards?

Well it certainly doesn't mean life in the outside world.

It doesn't mean your local environment.

I'm not talking about your family and your relationships.

I'm not even talking about your personality.

I'm talking about something just like the flower.

I'm talking about something that is within you already.

That you were born with,

You will go through life with and you will die with.

So the life that I'm talking about here is the life within us that's innate.

We're born with well-being and out of that well-being,

Out of that well of being,

We have presence of mind,

Peace of mind,

Resilience,

Clarity of mind,

Kindness,

Creativity,

Our capacity for connection,

Love.

All of these beautiful attributes that exist within everybody.

Everybody on the planet that has ever lived and will ever live.

And these things can't be taken away from us.

They can't be damaged because these things are before the form of us.

They're before our personality.

They're who we are before the thought of us.

But sadly as we go through life,

Essentially we build habitual ways of thinking that don't take away,

That don't damage or destroy those innate qualities.

But they convince us that they're not there and that's where people get lost.

Because if you don't think that you have clarity of mind,

If you don't think that you're capable of love or to be loved,

If you don't think that you have peace of mind and resilience and the capacity to be kind and to connect with people,

Then you go on a lifetime search looking to create them or to try to fix yourself so that you can create them.

And that is a lifetime's journey of self-help,

Beating yourself up and looking outside of yourself for something that is already there from birth.

That is already there and has been untouchable but it's become covered over.

This is the life that I'm talking about.

Life through the lens of understanding and I promise you the more that you see these things are true that you have all of these things already and like the flower you can bloom in your full glory when you know this.

And then you can go out into the world and create and show the world who you are or what you have to offer from a place of clarity and love and peace of mind and confidence and creativity and connection.

You can achieve what you want to achieve or you can sit on the sofa eating crisps.

It doesn't matter.

The point of these conversations is not to tell you what you should be doing with your life but waking you up to the possibility of what you can do with your life when you understand what's truly going on.

So again that is what I mean by life through the lens of understanding.

So then what do I mean by lens?

Life through the lens of understanding and the easiest way I can think of to explain this is I don't know about you but I've been to the optician many times or I've been to a store where they sell those cheap reading glasses and you can be presented with a card with writing on it and without the glasses you look and the words are blurred and that feels frustrating.

And then you put the right spectacles on and all of a sudden it's oh my god it's so clear.

Why isn't it always like this?

What a difference.

And that's what I'm pointing towards here.

The more we understand life,

The lenses metaphorically speaking that we're wearing,

That we're looking through to engage with this thing called life become clearer.

And it becomes oh when we're looking through a clear lens you would say we have a clear vision,

We have clarity.

And what I'm pointing towards is clarity of mind.

Crystal clear clarity.

And so it stands to reason if we have clarity of vision we see better.

If we have clarity of mind we can be in life.

So yes life is always unfolding and sometimes not in ways that we the way that we want it to be.

But the clearer the goggles we're wearing,

The clearer our vision of life,

The more we're engaged with life and the more we can fall back in love with this thing called life.

This one amazing miracle that we have in front of us.

And now the third word in the title.

Understanding.

What do I mean by understanding?

Well again the easiest way to talk about this is through metaphor and analogy.

I want you to imagine a world pre germ theory.

Apart from the horrors of what it must have been like to live in those times where you could cut yourself on a rose bush and who knows what you could die from because there was no understanding of germs.

But just think of the hundreds if not thousands of different theories that would have grown out of that misunderstanding.

There would have been all over the world different theories and different practices as to how to deal with illness.

It must have been a crazy world because there was no understanding of truth.

There was no understanding of what was really going on.

An example that I like is at the top of Everest which is five miles high there are fossilized prawns.

Now without an understanding of tectonic plates without an understanding that India for millions of years has been pushing towards China and has created these amazing mountains called the Himalayas and what is now five miles high used to be the seabed.

But without that understanding just think of the theories that would run amok when people come across prawns at the top of Everest.

They would conclude either that the sea used to be five miles deep,

The prawns fell from space or the prawns backpacked to the top.

There would be hundreds of different theories and none of them would be true.

It's the same with flight.

To understand how to build an airplane it's really very simple.

You need to understand four basic principles.

Lift,

Weight,

Throw thrust and drag.

When you understand those four basic principles it's much easier then to design an airplane that can fly.

But until that point you're playing with misunderstandings.

That's why there are lots of films that you can see online pre-understanding where people will be designing aeroplanes that had wings that flapped just like a bird because that was all that they understood.

It just took understanding for us to fly.

It took us understanding for us to go to the moon and that's what I'm talking about here.

An understanding of life so that misunderstandings,

Some of them that have been with us for thousands and thousands of years,

Can fall away because our mind is drawn towards understanding.

Our mind does not like untruths.

A silly example of this would be take children for example.

If you have children it's beautiful when they're young and they believe in Santa and then there becomes a point where they no longer believe in Santa.

As parents you don't worry that they're going to go back to start believing in Santa.

It's never an issue because once we've seen something that's true,

The untruth is uninteresting.

It falls away.

We're no longer looking in that direction.

So what I'm pointing to,

Life through the lens of understanding,

The deeper we understand what's really going on,

What's creating our experience,

Who we are,

What we are innately capable of,

What we're born with,

When we understand that,

We have clearer lenses.

We have clarity of mind to go out and live life from a place of the life that I'm talking about.

From clarity,

Love,

Peace of mind,

Presence of mind,

Resilience,

Kindness,

Confidence,

Creativity,

Connection.

And then we can thrive despite the circumstances,

Despite what we believe is going wrong in our life.

Things are always going to go right and things are always going to go wrong,

But the more we understand,

The more we have clarity,

The more we can sail through life with grace and with gratitude.

And that is what all of these talks are going to be about.

So it's taking me a long time to get to this point,

So I apologise if you've been hanging on for the conclusion,

But I thought it was important to lay the foundation of what it is that I'm up to here on Insight Timer.

I would love it if you could leave some comments.

I will promise if you leave a comment to get back to you as soon as possible.

Follow me if you have the inclination and I'd like to wish you well and hope you come back to listen to more of these talks.

Thank you very,

Very much for your time.