As you're growing up,
When you were a baby,
You came into this world with a mind that was completely clear.
And then the society,
The church,
The mosque,
The school teachers,
Your parents,
They started teaching you things.
And what you learned from them was mixed in with their ideas,
Their perspectives,
Their emotions,
And their habits.
So then you got conditioned.
By the time you're this age,
You have a subconscious mind that has conditioning.
In other words,
You have preferences.
Preferences about your body weight,
How much money you have in the bank,
What kind of people you date,
The stock market,
The weather.
That preferential mind brings you a lot of pain because nature doesn't care about your preferences.
You know,
Sometimes I give the example of you buy the airline ticket,
You want to go to South Florida to do a week of swimming,
And then there's a week of clouds and rain,
And your preferential,
Your personal mind gets very upset.
If you think about it,
It's utter craziness for you to walk into nature and want to superimpose your personal preferences on how the day goes.
So somebody listening to this talk will say,
Well,
I'm an active person.
I'm quite successful.
I'm a leader.
Why shouldn't I form the day around me?
And I'm saying no matter how powerful you are,
You cannot drive nature.
You buy a brand new car,
You drive it to the supermarket.
Somebody forgets to park their shopping cart,
It rolls downhill,
And it hits your brand new car,
And there's a dent.
That happens in nature.
When that shopping cart hits your car,
You have two choices.
If you approach that incident with your personal mind,
The personal mind may say,
Ever since my parents got divorced at the age of 16,
I'm just the unluckiest woman in Miami.
That's the personal mind.
It's superimposing your past history on the shopping cart hitting your car.
Your other choice is to face that moment of the shopping cart hitting your car while you're breathing.
As you follow the breath,
You're going to be here.
You're going to be mindful,
And you're going to approach that incident through mindfulness.
If you do,
Then you're acting instead of reacting,
And you'll be a lot happier.
So the fact that the shopping cart hit your car is not good.
I mean,
It's not great,
But you can face that circumstance through one of two minds.
If you face it through your conditioned mind,
All of your buttons are going to be pushed.
Why?
Because if the subconscious mind absorbed some trauma when you were much younger,
And then something happens today to push the buttons of your past trauma,
You're going to go crazy.
So let's say you were in a restaurant in the college cafeteria when your fiancé broke up with you,
And there was a particular song playing as your fiancé was breaking up.
Twenty years later,
When you hear that song,
You lose your emotional equilibrium because your buttons are being pushed.
So listening to this talk,
You have two choices.
Here's the choice.
An incident happens.
As soon as the incident happens,
You can face it through one of two minds.
One mind is programmed.
It has past memories.
It has preferences.
It has bias,
Prejudice,
Trauma,
And its buttons get pushed.
The second mind is your mindful mind.
So you come out of the car.
The car has been scratched.
You immediately go on the breath.
You're following the breath.
You're becoming mindful of how angry you are.
And if you continue breathing,
If you shine the light of mindfulness on your anger,
You will act instead of reacting.
So that's a better way of living.
I would say the more preferences you have,
The more personal preferences you have as you go about your day,
The more you will suffer because Miami weather is not going to obey your preferences.
You can change towns because you like sunny weather.
But if you start to manage your life based on baggage,
The buttons that are being pushed,
Then what's happening is your old wounds,
Your personal preferences,
Your likes and dislikes are driving your life instead of life driving your life.
So you can change towns.
You can change girlfriends.
But as long as you have the sensitivities in your subconscious mind,
You are dancing around your old wounds,
Your baggage,
Your preferences,
Your prejudice,
Your sensitivities.
