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.
Hello,
My dears,
And welcome to this episode of the Wake the Fuck Up podcast.
I am your host,
Tiffany Andres Myers,
And today I want to dive a little deeper into the practice of meditation.
And I've already said in a past podcast that I absolutely love and adore that meditation is called a practice,
Right?
Because it doesn't really matter whether we sit down and we're super peaceful and super zen every time we meditate,
If we stand up and we're the exact same people that we were before,
We're kind of missing the point,
Right?
In essence,
Meditation is our opportunity to practice,
To learn,
To play with the skill sets and the mind states that help us to change the way we engage with each and every moment that we're not on our cushion.
And so from this perspective,
I've begun to think,
Really a few years ago,
But it's being even more hardwired for me now,
I think,
In this time and space that meditation is more a practice of undoing than an actual doing itself.
I would venture to guess that most of us live pretty hectic lives,
Right?
Between demanding jobs,
Taking care of ourselves,
Our homes,
And our families,
And the myriad of small mundane tasks like grocery store trips,
Emails,
Car registrations.
I'll add that my car was supposed to have its emissions done in February and here I am recording this in March,
So for what it is,
Right?
Some things fall to the wayside.
But all of these things,
You know,
These tasks that we do all the time that are just expected,
Dishes,
Laundry,
So on and so forth,
All of them really fill our days and it can sometimes seem daunting to have something else to quote unquote do.
And I think this is the very reason that it takes so many of us years to build a meditation practice into a habit,
A permanent quote unquote,
If you will,
Experience of our day to day lives.
And I try as often as I can to encourage people to practice by remembering that it's our minds that determine how we feel about every single moment of our lives.
It's like the training people undertake before running a marathon,
You know,
Meditation prepares us to experience with joy each and every moment that we're alive.
And if this is true,
My dears,
We really don't have time not to be doing this,
Not to practice,
Not to form this loving,
Powerful relationship with our minds.
But a few years ago,
This idea of meditation and mindfulness as a practice of undoing has really grown to be at the forefront of my experience and maybe I'll say it's even an undoing through the process of just being,
You know,
And in a way even that idea is contrary to this idea of something to do.
In this way,
I'd like to intentionally imply that as we practice meditation,
We're not doing at all,
Rather we are undoing in order to find peace in simply being.
So I want to explore this a little and maybe you'll give me permission to be a little bit playful and curious here together.
So from the very first moment we enter the world from our mother's wombs,
We or rather our minds begin to learn.
Largely unconsciously,
We spend our youth and even our adult years formulating habits and patterns of beliefs that frame our realities.
We are conditioned by our culture,
Our families and the repetitive experiences throughout our lives that train our minds to have certain expectations of outcomes based on whatever gets input to our system via experience.
In a less arbitrary way,
As infants a certain body sensation causes us to cry.
Mom provides milk and that sensation goes away.
As we age,
This becomes a knowing of hunger,
Right?
Pretty easy.
For some of us in our younger years,
We may have cried when we felt sad or hurt,
Only to be told to close it up,
Stop crying,
Pull it together.
If this was your experience,
We learned crying wasn't okay or safe and so as adults we might feel shame if the desire to cry arises in our body.
This quickly becomes a habit of shutting down when we're hurt or becoming angry.
In essence,
We learn throughout our lives how to defend and protect ourselves from hurt and suffering.
And I think if we really dig into what this means for how we operate in our lives,
It often means being disconnected and unfeeling.
We're hiding ourselves,
This idea of a protection bubble.
But if we're really willing to look,
What are we protecting ourselves from?
And I think the truth is we're protecting ourselves from the full experience of our humanity,
From deeply feeling,
Yes my dears,
Even when it hurts.
So I watched this video a number of years ago that I absolutely loved because I think it speaks to exactly this idea of being conditioned to protect ourselves and what that means for us as we move through our lives.
The minute a man with long red hair in a ponytail begins by saying,
Underneath all your clothes,
You're all just a bunch of naked weirdos.
If you haven't seen this,
I highly encourage you to look it up.
And as he goes on,
He describes how as a child,
Every time he expressed his weirdness,
He was invariably ridiculed and made to feel shame.
He learned that to be authentically himself meant he would suffer.
So instead,
He learned to please people.
How do we do this,
He argued?
Largely by being like them.
Towards the end of the video,
He made the statement that normalcy is an epidemic disease in our country.
And the more I sat with this,
The more I think he's right.
So if you look at our society at large,
We pretty much see cookie cutter people working in cookie cutter jobs,
Living in cookie cutter houses,
Going on cookie cutter vacations,
Etc.
Now,
If you find this to be true of you,
Please understand,
I find this to be true of me as well.
This is not a shot at any of us,
Right?
Because what I want to point to here is we're actually acknowledging what I think is kind of a huge failure in our system.
As a mother,
I'm watching my son in this time of the pandemic go through school where he is forced to engage in a certain way,
He's forced to learn in a certain context,
He's forced to output very particular ways of expressing that he understands the material,
All the way down to he's getting in trouble for using a whiteboard and a whiteboard marker instead of paper and pencil in his math class.
Like his math teacher actually said,
The weight of a pencil is different in your hand than the weight of a whiteboard marker.
Sure.
But while I agree with this,
How cookie cutter are we trying to make absolutely every person that comes out of our education system?
In essence,
I think we're getting trained from the time that we're born to be really good at being overworked and underappreciated and underpaid and tired and just fucking over it.
So this is what I mean by cookie cutter,
But for anyone that's listening,
Maybe this jives with you as it jives with me because this was my life,
Right?
In essence,
Because the pain we experienced as kids for being different than everyone else,
This taught us how to effectively hide in our own skins.
I see this all the time with my son and I'm so proud that he continues to grow his hair,
Which is longer than his shoulders despite being made fun of at school,
But I'll never forget the day he decided to wear his hair in a ponytail because it was also the last as he expressed when he came home,
I'm never wearing my hair like that again and I don't want to talk about it.
Maybe he'll remember that experience or maybe he won't,
But more than likely when he's an adult he'll know he doesn't like his hair in a ponytail even if he has no idea why.
This is one example of the way we build habits,
Expectations,
And ideas of who we are from the moment we're born and as always this is another reason I think mindfulness through the practice of meditation is just really fucking cool and can be fundamentally life changing.
Mindfulness gives us the power moment by moment to see our own conditioning,
To look at how we are responding and interacting with an experience,
And to question not only our own thoughts and ideas,
But where we want to go from here.
We can do this in small ways like ordering food,
Folding clothes,
Doing dishes in a certain way,
To much bigger ideas like whether we believe certain stories about who we are,
What we like,
And how we feel.
For me probably one of the biggest stories that I'm still working to change but I no longer buy into is I'm just not enough as who I am.
And I think this is one that's pretty ubiquitous in our culture and society,
This feeling that we're constantly having to prove ourselves because there's a subtle undertone that we're just not good enough the way we are,
Right?
And the day that I saw this it's not that I snapped my fingers and it instantaneously changed and aha now I'm living from the space of being the tits.
But I know that that story that I'm not enough is not true and I can see how many places and how many ways it affects the choices I make and how I engage in the world.
You know in essence our practice on our cushions,
Our meditation practice becomes the safe space to explore,
Tearing down all the walls we've built to shield our authentic selves and see what it's like to just be a naked weirdo.
Brené Brown is a researcher and self-described storyteller who spent her career studying what makes people happy and invariably therefore what doesn't.
She gave a TED talk years ago in which she described how the absolute one thing that crossed all cultural,
Ethnic,
Socioeconomic barriers to create lasting happiness in people is,
Wait for it,
Vulnerability.
Ooh!
I remember having a conversation with a family member once where I was talking to her about an experience in therapy and the therapist said,
You should come back,
This will make you more vulnerable.
And her response is,
Why in the world would I want that?
Vulnerability is the willingness as often as possible to be open,
Authentic,
And yes sometimes painfully raw.
Seems like being the first one to say I love you in a new relationship.
So scary,
Right?
But through her research,
Brené has discovered that it's those people who are willing to throw themselves in the fire of vulnerability over and over again that are consistently the most happy.
And what's the one thing she found that most powerfully inhibits vulnerability?
The painful experience of shame.
This is why I believe meditation to be a practice of undoing.
We have spent our whole lives doing,
Learning how to cover ourselves up in order to prevent the feeling of shame.
We've learned how to be socially acceptable rather than how to be authentically connected.
We've learned how to ignore the feelings in our hearts in order to maintain control in our lives.
This is perhaps why coming to the cushion is so fucking scary for some people.
And I want to say that if this is the experience that you ever have or encounter,
It's absolutely normal and okay.
It can and often is quite scary to begin to see ourselves.
Raw and uninhibited perhaps for the first time.
To begin deeply feeling your own body,
To see your thoughts and your ideas as they arise and wonder whether or not you actually believe them.
Who the fuck planted that thought in your head?
Who are we,
My dears,
If everything we've told ourselves is the truth of reality might all just be a story?
I'll offer however that we are not and never have we actually ever been me,
I or this is who I am.
For anyone that hasn't listened,
We played with this idea of selfhood in a previous episode so maybe if you've listened to that one you have that sense of the difference between what it is to be and be connected in a moment and the difference between that and the story of me.
Who thinks perhaps that you're the exact same person that you were in high school?
How about just a year ago?
Right,
So we all know that we're changing,
Changeable and even unconsciously we're changing all the time,
Right?
So hopefully this takes a little of the pressure and the fear out of the idea that becoming vulnerable has to be scary and instead it begins to open us to the possibility that that kid buried deep inside of us with the love and vigor for life and open heart and an undying sense of passion and desire for connection is just waiting for us to let them out of the cage of our conditioning.
I have found in my own life that my meditation practice was the first place I ever really allowed myself to feel safe enough to take off all the masks I wear.
Jack Kornfield calls it the sanctuary of you and I find this to be poignantly perfect.
If we allow ourselves to be a temple of our own exploration and experience then we grant ourselves permission to be completely exposed moment by moment,
To feel whatever comes up to hear the stories and the thoughts generated in our minds and to be curious about what they're really like and even how we are and maybe want to relate to them.
As we explore being vulnerable with ourselves on our cushions we find over and over again that we are safe and okay without the masks and barriers.
We teach ourselves a new habit of finding comfort in being open and connected.
Our practice becomes the space of undoing,
Unlearning and relearning all at once but this time as we learn we do so consciously and guided by the willingness to love and accept ourselves and others for who we are.
I'll give you an example of this in my own experience,
One day I came to my cushion and as I sat I became enraged.
A thought about a previous experience throughout the day came into my mind and I was filled with anger and just to be clear this is probably the emotion that I dislike the most.
I feel like anger washes through my whole body,
It feels tense and tight,
That experience of rage it's just overwhelming,
It takes my breath away and to be open I feel probably the ugliest when I feel anger as well.
And I was gifted you know maybe by this unconditioned space of whatever you want to call it,
Buddha nature,
True nature,
Higher self,
Chose in that moment to be able to turn around and look at myself and all of my ugliness or what it felt like and to say Tiffany I see you just as you are in this moment without any need of change I love you.
And maybe that sounds ridiculous,
Maybe it sounds empowering but my dears I cannot tell you the profound impact that that has had on me to truly understand that I can love myself in the ugliest of moments,
What that has meant for me in terms of deserving love.
In that single instance I undid all of my conditioning that taught me I was unworthy of love when I was angry or in any negative state of emotion and I relearned in that moment it is possible to be loved even when we're at our worst and yes it's still a practice but the first thread began to unweave and reweave into something beautiful.
I don't know but maybe it's an odd goal but I think I've learned that what I'm really doing here through this practice of mindfulness is allowing myself to become more and more the naked weirdo that the kid in me would be proud to know.
The beautiful thing is my dears that when we give ourselves permission to be vulnerable we also make space for others to do the same showing the world through our presence and openness that it's not just safe but also exquisitely delicious to be yourself.
Thank you all so much for spending this time with me today.
May your practice both on your cushion and out in the world be one of undoing anything that no longer belongs to you.
Let it belong to our culture,
Let it belong to our society,
Let it belong to your parents but choose from here from this moment forward what you desire to belong to you.
Thank you so much.
I look forward to seeing you in the next episode.
Peace.
