And our word of the week is current,
Current.
We were gifted this word.
So I had a poet come in on Thursday,
Rosemary Trommer,
And we did this beautiful event of poetry with Rosemary.
And what she,
At the end of the event,
I asked her,
What is the word that we should take?
For the month and for the week.
And she said,
Current.
And then the next morning,
She writes a word a day.
She's been writing a word,
I mean a poem a day.
She's been writing a poem a day for.
.
.
Almost like five years.
And the next morning I read in one of her poems she wrote about swimming in the Pacific Ocean.
And she wrote in her poem,
She wrote,
I decided that day I would no longer be that person who stays dry.
And I thought it was so great.
So our word is current.
And we can put our phones away.
So I hope we put our phones away.
And we put them on silent.
And because the The current that we are all in.
Sometimes pulls us away from being in the current together.
And the way that I've been thinking about current is that there's a current within us.
So there's a current of your own energy and where you want to be.
Putting your energy,
How you want to be focusing your energy.
And then there's the current of your thoughts.
That pull you away.
There's the current of your feelings that maybe.
.
.
Pull you under.
There's the current of motivation and maybe getting an unclarity,
Lack of clarity,
And you're like,
Why am I doing this?
So there's a current within you,
And each and every one of us has a current within us.
And then there's a current between us.
So the energy of being in a space together,
Or the energy of creating poetry together,
Or the energy of playing tennis.
Who was playing tennis?
Two of you playing tennis this morning,
Right?
There's a current of between you,
Back and forth between you and the other person that we're impacting each other.
And then there's the current the times.
That we're in.
Which is a strong.
Current that we all feel.
When um After Rosemary Trommer came,
We went to a dinner afterwards.
And I hosted a Jeffersonian dinner.
I learned this from Dan Siegel when he came.
So a Jeffersonian dinner is where you have one question.
At the table for the whole evening.
And that one question is passed.
From person to person to person,
And you can spend as much time as you want answering the question.
And the first part of the dinner was us deciding on what is the question that we're going to ask.
And I threw out all these psychology ones like,
If you only had a year to live.
You know,
The boring ones,
Right?
And then at one point,
Daniel,
Who was there,
Said,
Wait a minute.
During Jeffersonian times.
Is that what they would be asking?
I think they would be asking a bigger question.
Like,
Are we doomed?
And then Rosemary said,
I forgot my Sharpie.
I was going to edit it.
Rosemary said.
How about,
Why are we not doomed?
How about that's the question we answer this evening.
OK,
So all of a sudden,
The current collectively shifts.
Why are we not?
Doomed.
So I'm going to give a little bit of talk on why we're not doomed,
How to not be doomed collectively,
Individually,
And then we'll do a meditation together.
And this word,
This word current,
Hopefully will both be practiced here,
But also be something that inspires you.
For the week or for the month and you start to think and reflect on this concept of current.
Current in our current times.
Going to be infused in everything that you do,
Hopefully.
Okay,
So there's this river of current.
And there's two things that can happen with current.
The first one is eddies.
You ever been kayaking?
Do you know about eddies?
Eddies serve two purposes.
One,
When there's a big whitewater ahead,
There's something big ahead,
You can pull off into the eddy.
And let's think about this.
How are we going to approach this next?
Big venture.
But then eddies are also things that you can get stuck in.
And when you get stuck in an eddy,
You go around and around and around and around.
I lead this group of therapists this morning.
This morning I had this group of therapists from all over the country.
And we were talking about sort of the currents that they're stuck in.
And they were saying things like,
I feel like I'm saying the exact same thing in this group that I was saying a month ago and a month ago.
And I feel like my clients are saying the exact same thing to me.
That when you are caught in an eddy,
Your own eddy,
You are caught in rumination.
You're caught in going over the same problem over and over again and not able to get out.
Many circles around the reservoir with Christy and in Eddie.
For like months,
I'd meet her,
Like,
Can we meet at five?
And I swear,
It was the same thing.
So what do we do when we're,
How do we pull off and maybe we need to be in an eddy,
But also what do we do when we're caught in an eddy?
And one of the things that shows up in psychology why we are not doomed.
Is that even when you're in an eddy,
Which you may be in right now,
All of us are in some form an Eddie usually.
Even when you're an Eddie,
How you talk to yourself and how you relate to yourself matters in your ability to move through.
And now to the Yeti.
And one of the key things that you will practice in meditation,
But a key thing.
Is to Speak to yourself and see yourself in the mirror.
From a perspective outside of yourself.
So in an experiment,
Ethan Cross did this series of seven experiments in 2014.
And what he looked at was he had people have to make a good first impression.
So he gave them an assignment,
We're going to rate you,
You're going to come in,
You're going to give a speech,
And you need to make a good first impression.
And half of the people beforehand were assigned to say,
I'm anxious.
And the other half were assigned to say their own name.
And say they're anxious.
Is a little scared right now.
Versus I'm scared right now.
So you think about that like for yourself,
Something like a feeling that you're having,
Say it in your head,
I'm blah,
Blah,
Blah in your head.
Now say it with your name.
In your head.
See how it shifts it.
So how you talk to yourself,
Starting to see yourself from another perspective,
And how you talk to yourself as an encourager.
Rather than a sucker into the adding.
And sometimes that's just being a witness to your own experience.
You're in an eddy right now.
Diana's in an eddy.
Susan's in an Eddie.
We all get into Eddies.
And the same thing that happens with between,
Right?
So when we're in relationship and we see that someone we love is in an eddy or a relationship is in an eddy in some form,
We're like,
I woke up this morning and there was.
.
.
I'm not kidding you.
There was a popsicle.
That was half eaten and left on my new couch and then on the ground.
That were stepped in whatever they are,
Cheese crackers.
Okay,
So I could get into an Eddie really quick with how I wake up.
My son.
Am I going to choose to go into that eddy or am I just going to observe and focus on what's important?
So notice how you're talking to yourself and how you're talking to others in terms of Um.
.
.
Why we are not doomed.
That your language can help you become less doomed.
Hi,
So welcome to have you.
Last time we were holding hands,
Chanting it.
It's not encore.
OK.
The second thing when we're thinking about this current of why we are not doomed is actually some of the messaging around currents themselves.
When I was a kid,
My mom used to always warn me about under toes.
Did your mom worry about that here in Santa Barbara?
And I actually had a vision that somebody was going to grab me by the toes.
And pull me under,
Like I thought that's what an undertow was,
Right?
And what the current of an undertow is,
Is actually it's not that you're pulled under.
What lifeguards worry about,
And a lot of people,
Like 80% of beach rescues are because of this,
Because of currents.
What they worry about is people that float out to sea.
And don't even know that they flowed out that far.
And then when they're out at sea,
They start swimming against the current and then they exhaust themselves and drown.
So within,
Between,
Around us,
There are so many things that are pulling us out to sea.
And we can get out to sea with AI.
It was very helpful,
And then all of a sudden,
Like,
Wow,
You're in this,
Like,
Whoa vortex of out to sea in this system,
And then you're not in the current.
Of what's here.
Or we're out to sea with just the task.
Of daily living.
Your lives were so,
It was so busy for you to get here.
It was almost nearly impossible.
For you to make this happen.
How is it almost nearly impossible?
You know,
The current.
And then we wake up to the fact that we're out to sea,
And then the things that we do to scramble,
That we just make it worse.
And what they found in the current research,
Like I kind of dove down this,
So what are the suggestions if you're out at sea in an undertow?
What they recommend is two things.
And it's not always guaranteed which one will work,
So you kind of have to try both.
One recommendation.
Is to find the shoreline.
And swim with it.
So these may be people in your life.
You find their current,
And I'm gonna swim.
.
.
Alongside them.
It may be a shoreline of some kind of practice that keeps you.
Like,
As long as I keep doing this,
I know I may not be getting into shore,
But at least I'm not going further out.
This practice.
And then the other recommendation is based on they actually put little GPSs on people.
That were out,
They put people out at sea and they put GPS's and put them into the rip current and then watched what happened if they floated.
And after a period of time,
They floated,
Floated,
Floated,
Floated,
Floated.
All the way back into shore.
They need do nothing.
To come back.
And that's really reassuring too.
So sometimes you just need to float through it.
You know?
And then sometimes you need to find your person that you're going to be or your thing that's going to be your horizon that you're going to stay aligned with.
Like who are the people in your life whose current you need to stay in.
A lot of those people are in this room for me.
I need to stay in their current because they're going to help me.
So don't fight the current.
And then we won't be so doomed,
Right?
And then this third one has to do with,
You know,
I'm very resistant to like,
Instagram psychology and all the influencers that this whole like go with the flow Because some of my clients,
I'm like,
You need to actually,
You need to do some work.
You need to swim.
You need to have some skills.
You need to develop some expertise.
And we all need to develop some expertise.
Don't go with the flow with your mind all the time.
You need to develop some expertise with your emotions,
With your mind,
With your sense of self.
And actually the state of flow when they've studied the state of flow.
And people like jazz musicians.
That can improvise at such a high level.
When they put EEGs on their brains and they study their flow states,
What they find is that two things happen.
One is that the frontal lobe disengages so that the brain can actually get into the space of just doing the creative work,
But only if they're experts.
So we can let go of our frontal lobe when we've practiced something enough that then we can improvise.
Rosemary and I on Thursday this last week,
We were just like full on.
Improvising and that's only and she can only improvise in the place of poetry because she's been writing a poem a day for over five years so she's just like going with the flow,
She's so comfortable,
And then I can improvise in a place of interacting with humans,
Because I've interacted with humans so many hours of my life over the past 20 years,
I know how to improvise in the human space.
And so for you to be able to go with the flow of current,
You need to both be simultaneously building your expertise.
And releasing.
And that's also what meditation is.
So as we meditate in here today,
We will be building the expertise of how to focus the mind,
How to come back to the present.
Don't just go with the flow.
Don't be thinking about what's out there,
Sitting here.
We're going to focus the mind,
And then we're also going to be releasing.
It's both.
Last two.
Before we sit.
That's my phone for time.
Sync up and engage.
So now we move into.
.
.
The current of between.
It's bright orange.
For a reason.
The current of the tween.
So sync up and engage.
There's people you don't know in here.
They're strangers.
That you haven't met.
And there is something that happens when we are in human form with each other.
That I think is necessary more now than ever has been necessary in any time.
And when you are present with another person,
Like when they've studied strangers who registered together for five minutes,
What starts to happen,
They put them in these,
There's this new way of studying brains called FNIRS.
So functional,
Near,
Infrared.
Spectrometry.
And what they do is they can actually study your brain while you're engaging with another human.
And what they find over the course of just five minutes.
Is that your brain.
.
.
Starts to sync up with the other person's brain.
And as that happens,
You feel closer to that person.
And as that happens,
You also start to make gestures and movements that mirror each other.
This is very important for our human connection and our human survival.
And as we create a second species of AI,
We need to be able to do the human interactions while we're using the AI as we are.
The community is going to be our most essential resource in person.
Community like this.
So sync up and engage.
And then,
So that you are in the current,
And you don't get into the undertow,
And you don't get off into some eddy.
And then finally,
Gutting currents.
Which is getting.
Presence.
Being in the here and now.
So at that dinner that we had.
We.
.
.
We started to answer that question,
Why are we not doomed?
And some of us spoke about how we felt doomed over the past year.
And then at some point in time,
We started to realize that were not doomed.
Because we're having this dinner together,
Having this conversation.
And all of the small things that remind us that we're not doomed.
Like beautiful art.
The fact that we're talking about current.
Under an ocean,
A whole theme is ocean,
Right?
And why we're not doomed,
If you think about for yourself,
Why are we not doomed?
That there's constantly messaging showing us over and over and over again that we're not doomed.
Okay,
So those are my thoughts on my gifted word,
Current,
From Rosemary,
And we went swing.
The day after that.
That dinner.
I took her out to our beach.
Do you know where that is?
Took her to our beach and we went swimming out there.
It was just the two of us out in the water in this beautiful Pelicans flew over us and she's like a Colorado girl.
I mean,
This is all You know amazing,
Right?
So this this beautiful Configuration of pelicans flew over us and we're like,
This is why we're not doomed It's obvious.
All you have to do is look up or look out.
