Welcome everyone.
This is Dr.
Tia Ho with Finding Mindful Now.
Guiding you out of your head and into your life with applied mindfulness.
Finding Mindful Now is about starting with a mindfulness practice and then seeing the capacity for us to tune in and be present with life more of the time,
Whatever we're up to.
Today we're focusing on appreciation,
Specifically the living systems that support us and appreciating the life that we are,
The living system that we are.
So let's start with a quick arrival practice.
This is an invitation you can do right now at this time and you can modify it however works best for you.
So I'm just going to invite you to notice anything about your body that maybe you've taken for granted lately that's a sign of the living system that you are.
And just notice whatever it is about that that you feel appreciative of.
It might be that your heart's beating and you're not making that happen.
It might be the lungs that are in inflating and deflating as air is pulled in and out and released from your system.
It might be the feeling of your skin against wherever you are sitting or against your clothing.
And if feeling if noticing the body feels a little beyond where you are right now then I just invite you to look out a window or look at a houseplant even even an insect flying nearby and just consider anything you appreciate about life moving through the leaves or bringing motion animation through our insect friends.
And if it's sunny where you are you might notice the Sun.
If it's rainy or cloudy or breezy you might notice all of those natural states too.
They're just like our emotional states changing.
I'm gonna take a deep breath as a completion of that appreciation.
I am deeply appreciating the heartbeat happening right now.
Thank you heart for beating.
Thank you life for animating the system.
So appreciation to me is intentionally directing our present moment awareness to a sense of gratitude,
Of ease,
Sometimes of connection.
What appreciation or gratitude really is for me is exercising our capacity to notice what strengthens us.
There's a deep disconnect I've noticed in modern society that shows up as a lack of care and respect for people,
For our environments,
Even for our systems and all that lives within all of them.
We've been seeing this for hundreds of years.
Most recently it can show itself up as blazing wildfires,
Injustice,
Climate change,
Maybe even people in power being unwilling to change economic systems to protect the people that we care about.
This deep disconnect I believe is a byproduct of a forgotten understanding that humans are part of life.
We are life.
Life is moving through us continually.
We are not above nor below anything else despite what a history of nation-states taking over land and genocide of its people might convey.
We have inherent value too just for being,
Just for existing,
Even when society may marginalize us because of circumstances such as skin color,
Body shape or size,
Disabilities,
Faith practice,
Who or how we love to name a few.
And that marginalization is related to a lack of connection.
So in a series of articles in 2018 I was exploring healing and resiliency and it was to help me understand how people can come back to alignment with who they really are inside.
That living wisdom that can be forgotten,
Buried or pummeled over with insecure thinking that can morph,
Kind of en masse and go beyond the one person to become oppressive social norms at the societal level.
And I believe that we all sometimes remember it shows up when we enter,
Re-enter a flow state.
We remember this life that we are or rather the life that we are emerges through the noise of the mind.
That flow might be when we're working in the yard or sitting in awe of a tree,
Creating with our hands,
Feeling the beat of music.
We can go beyond that moment and integrate the understanding further.
So research has attempted to describe neurologically what happens in the flow state.
And a really tiny synopsis of that is that your brain enters a state of activity somewhere between being asleep and being awake.
And your brainwave activity between the two hemispheres of your brain starts to sync up.
And what corresponds with that is the self-referential portion of the mind,
That self-talk that we hear in our minds about so-and-so's doing this or I should do that or that attempt to control that shows up with what I call the chatty part of the mind.
When those two halves of the hemisphere of the brain go into sync with brainwave activity,
For whatever reason that chatty mind lets go a little bit.
Flow state is it's just a natural place for us and it's just as natural.
I know this isn't a favorite but it's just as natural as experiencing anxiety,
Experiencing fear,
Experiencing laughter.
All of these are natural states,
Natural place to be to arise within awareness.
The difference to me about anxiety is that what we're feeling in that moment,
That awareness that we're feeling are these thoughts about some future or some past and we start to feel fear of that future or the consequences of that past.
There's a great coach out there Dr.
Amy Johnson and she likes to talk about anxiety as feeling fear of fear.
Flow is a state of not thinking,
Of being in action or present presence.
Emotions to me are like feeling the shadow of our conscious or unconscious thought.
I like to talk about these as thought feels.
What I'm just going to invite you to do for the rest of today is just find ways to express gratitude.
Notice where appreciation arises for the living systems that support you.
Maybe it's your system that's moving you around.
It might have a lot of challenges.
I definitely have mental and physical challenges from time to time,
Almost daily really.
Yet the body keeps going until something intervenes.
Our natural systems keep going too.
I'm just going to invite you to offer some gratitude for the living systems that support you today in a way that's meaningful to you.
I'd love to hear what you notice.
