Coming Together: Seeing Past Beliefs To Shared Humanity

Welcome to Wake The F*ck Up: the podcast that mingles mindfulness, Buddhism, brain science, evolutionary biology, and real, authentic human experience to wake us up from our trance of unworthiness and into the beauty, love, and connection that surround us in every moment.
In this episode, we explore what may help us move away from this collective experience of divisiveness and difference. By looking at what connects us, at our shared humanity, we can come together in mutual respect and compassion.

Transcript

Wake the Fuck Up.

The podcast that mingles mindfulness,

Buddhism,

Brain science,

Evolutionary biology,

And real authentic human experience.

Welcome to Wake the Fuck Up.

My name is Tiffany Andres Myers.

I'm your host for this podcast,

At least for most of you.

And today I actually decided to change the topic of our first ever episode based on the experience in which we are all currently living.

So hopefully this will get out to you in a very quick and prompt period of time,

But as it's being recorded,

We are right in the midst of the end of the presidential election here in the United States.

And I was inspired after listening to Joe Biden's acceptance speech to change the topic of our podcast and to talk today about something he said.

And so I want to begin by quoting Joe.

So Joe,

If you're listening,

Thank you for this moment.

I was brought to tears.

My beautiful 12 year old son pointed and laughed at me as I cried in joy and the possibility of what's to come for our country.

But in his acceptance speech,

The soon to be President Biden said that this is a time to see each other again,

To listen to each other again,

To make progress.

We must stop treating our opponents as our enemy.

We are not enemies.

We are Americans.

I want to take this beautiful expression,

Maybe an extra step and say that beyond Americans,

We're all humans.

We're here living and existing on this earth together as human beings.

And what I want to talk about today is maybe what it takes to acknowledge one another to be willing to see each other as human beings is to see beyond our conceptions,

Our ideas,

Our conditioning,

Beyond our beliefs,

Beyond religion,

Politics,

Race,

Gender,

Sexuality,

All these concepts that we use to divide ourselves to form in groups and out groups to say you're like me,

You're unlike me,

You're acceptable,

You're unacceptable.

And instead,

To see our humanness,

Our connection points in order to be willing to come together.

And I think the strongest foundation that we can use to acknowledge our humanness,

To see our sameness amongst our differences,

Is maybe to start by acknowledging what really makes us human.

What is it that drives every single action we take,

Every single choice we make,

Every step we take in our lives?

And you might start out disagreeing with me.

I'm kind of hoping that you do.

But I would argue that what drives any of us,

All of us,

In every single moment is the simple,

Innate desire to be happy.

And maybe I'll invite us all in a collective pause for just a moment.

Think about your life.

Think about the choices that you've made.

Think about your path to success,

Your being in school,

Your journey,

Whatever your life looks like up until this point.

And think about the places where you had a choice.

Why have you made the choices you've made?

Do you agree that what drives you is the simple desire to be happy?

Maybe.

Maybe you agree,

Maybe you don't.

Let's talk about this just for a moment.

Let's dig into it.

Because I think the reality is that we get lost in the shuffle.

I often reference it as existing in a state of autopilot.

We do what we are expected to do,

What we think we're supposed to do.

And I think there's an undertone of supposed to do in order to be happy.

But I actually think that the desire to be happy,

That being our purpose,

Our meaningfulness in life,

Really gets lost in the day-to-day grind of what comes naturally.

And I might take a little caveat here to say that this is actually what brought me here,

To be here with you to this path of mindfulness and meditation.

I grew up kind of believing in the American dream.

I was told and taught that if I worked hard,

If I did well in school,

I would get a great job and make lots of money and have a house with the white picket fence and get married and have a family and everything would be Pleasantville.

Cue kicking heels together with a big old smile.

And the reality is that when I was in graduate school,

I woke up one day and realized that I kind of had all of those proverbial success boxes checked off.

I graduated top of my class in high school.

I got into Georgia Tech,

Got my undergrad degree and in having this,

What I like to call,

My quarter life crisis moment,

My thesis research had been published on the cover of a scientific journal.

I was dating someone,

We were living together,

We'd adopted a dog.

And I woke up to realize that I was absolutely no happier than I had been before I had achieved any of those markers of success.

The reality was that every success I achieved left me happy for a moment and then left this gaping hole of unhappiness that I needed a new success in order to fill.

I was incredibly lucky.

And in the moment of waking up to this reality,

I called my Buddhist nun grandmother who promptly invited me to spend a month at a monastery.

What I discovered in my time there was that happiness really doesn't come from outside of ourselves,

But from inside of ourselves.

And what I think I didn't realize in that hustle and that grind was that the thing that drove all of it was an overarching sense of being unworthy,

Unlovable,

Not enough,

That I needed the outside success in order for me to be okay.

And once I was okay,

Life could be okay.

So what I took away from my time at the monastery was a reminder that happiness is the goal.

It's the purpose.

It's what makes life meaningful.

It's not the destination or what we're hoping for through everything that we're doing and achieving,

But happiness is actually what's driving us.

It can be the thing that gets us to the success instead of the thing that the success gets us to.

And if we can remember and agree that fundamentally this is what's driving all of us,

Then there's something that connects us to every single person regardless of who they are,

What they look like,

What they believe in,

Their thoughts,

Their feelings,

Their emotions.

I think it's often really challenging to be willing to see another person as an equal and as a fellow human being on this life journey when we feel like they're against us or in some way stand against who we are,

Especially in the moment where they're actually angry at you or speaking angrily to you or there's actually a disagreement in a moment.

And one thing I want to point to here is that as we explore this idea that everybody acts from the desire to be happy,

We have to be willing to acknowledge that in a moment where somebody's angry or frustrated or rageful or wrathful,

When they're upset,

Hurting,

Sad,

Even when it's pointed at you,

Nobody makes a decision on an action or a belief because they think,

Hey,

This is going to make me feel like shit.

I think I'll follow that path.

Even if they're incredibly unskillful in a moment,

Every choice we make,

We make because we actually believe it's going to make us happier because we really trust that somewhere in there through this course of action we're going to find goodness for ourselves.

And I love this word unskillful because we're all unskillful in moments.

We might be acting from this desire to be happy,

But we might be doing a really bad job at doing it,

Right?

And we can probably all point to some experience in a relationship with a person we love,

Whether it's a family member or a spouse,

Someone that we obviously want to be connected to,

And think back to a moment where we were angry,

Where we said things we shouldn't have said,

And that's a beautiful,

Perfect example of what it means to be unskillful.

But there's absolutely no way you thought to yourself,

This is going to create massive disconnection.

Let's do it.

We're acting,

All of us,

In every single moment from the most possible resources and skills that we have,

And sometimes it's just not good choices.

But I say that to say we tend to look at another human being,

Often one that we don't actually know that well,

And based on a momentary experience of how they're self-expressing or what they're saying or what we believe their belief systems to be,

We deem them inherently to be valuable or worthy as a human being,

Right?

You're worth my time or you're valuable as a member of society because what?

You believe the same way I do or because you're kind and compassionate in this moment?

Does that mean that in a moment where you're not kind and not compassionate that you're not valuable?

And one of the transitions that I want to make here is that often the way we treat another person tends to be the way that we treat ourselves.

So as we look at other people in society who feel differently than us,

Who believe differently or self-express differently,

When we say to them,

You're not valuable or you're not worthy because in this moment you're not good or you're not good enough,

We have to be willing to acknowledge that that's the same story we tell ourselves about ourselves in our own moments of pain,

Hurt,

Or unskillfulness.

As a human being,

This life is definitely a rollercoaster ride.

There are ups and sometimes the ups are really beautiful and there are definitely downs and sometimes those downs are ugly,

They're dirty,

They're painful,

They're dark.

And I think the truth for most of us is that when we find ourselves in those moments of lows of ugliness,

And I use ugliness intentionally here and maybe this can be a moment of vulnerability because for me when I find myself in a moment of anger,

Frustration,

Jealousy,

It feels ugly.

I see this darkness on the inside of my own body,

I feel it and it feels nasty.

Right?

So in these moments when we have the capacity to see ourselves at our lowest,

It comes naturally to treat ourselves the same way that we treat people outside of us.

It comes naturally to look at ourselves and say you're unworthy,

You're not valuable,

You're not enough.

And I think this is one of the painful drivers of our separation,

Not just from each other but also from ourselves,

That we live amongst a story of our not enoughness,

Of our unwholeness,

Of our broken nature,

Of our just not being okay.

We live in a society that tells us we need things outside of us in order to be valuable.

We need success,

We need money,

We need items to adorn ourselves with to prove to other people that we're worthy.

And I think we really take this in,

We really believe that it's true.

And so in the moments where we're unskillful,

When we're hurt,

When we're in pain,

It comes naturally to see ourselves as broken,

As not enough or as unworthy.

And so of course we reflect this outside of ourselves.

Of course we see other people being unskillful,

Other people with different beliefs and ideas,

With different religion and politics,

Of different race and gender and sexuality.

And of course it comes natural to say you're not worthy,

You're not valuable because this is the way we treat ourselves.

There's a beautiful woman named Shauna Shapiro who's radically changed my life and my own practice with the simple phrase,

What we practice grows stronger.

And as a meditation and mindfulness teacher and facilitator I use this phrase all the time because I think it's so important to acknowledge that every single moment of our life is a moment of practice.

And we are either practicing unconsciously,

Everything that we were conditioned to without our choice,

All the beliefs that our parents and our environment gave to us without our conscious choice and decision making,

Or we have the capacity to practice consciously.

To know who we want to be and how we want to engage in the world,

The energy with which we want to move through our lives and we have the ability to make every moment a moment of practice.

So I think I want to end our time together today with an idea that might be somewhat radical.

This idea of self-love,

Self-acceptance,

And self-compassion as a practice and a radical act of connectedness with all human beings.

Because the truth is when we're willing to see ourselves at our most ugly,

Our most painful,

Our most wrought with suffering and say I love you,

I see you,

You are worthy,

You are valuable,

To hold ourselves with the same love and compassion that we would offer freely to someone that we do deem worthy.

We practice being able to sit across the table from someone else that we might see as ugly because of their beliefs or their values or their ideas and say you know what,

There is a human being beyond those beliefs and even if your beliefs or your ideas or your thoughts aren't valuable it doesn't change the value of you as a human being.

So let us end our time together today with a commitment to practice self-love,

To care for ourselves radically,

To in our own moments of unskillfulness pause and take a breath and acknowledge our common humanity with every other person on this earth who desperately wants to be happy.

Thank you all for your time today.

I look forward to hearing you,

Seeing you in the next episode.

Reach out with thoughts,

Questions,

Any topic that you want to hear on the podcast.

That's all I got.

Reviews

Hi Tiffany, Such a good message. It really all starts with being OK with who we are. Thanks , Your friend Don