Sufficient Unto Itself

We spend our whole lives doing. Nevermind that we are called human BEINGS, for most of us, all day, every day is do, do, do. But WHY do we do anything at all? This episode explores the often elusive, subtle nature of our doing that can bring us to an utter sense of peace and contentment: doing because the act itself is sufficient unto itself.

*This track contains explicit language that may be offensive to some listeners. My hope in remaining authentic to myself with my speech is to be inclusive of people who may feel shamed or isolated by the meditation and mindfulness resources that currently exist. As well, I do see our journey as welcoming ALL parts of ourselves, not shaming our humanness or that of others. This is my intention, but I recognize the language may not be in service of all.*

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.

Hello and welcome to this episode of the Wake the Fuck Up podcast.

My name is Tiffany Andres and I'm your host.

It's been a little while so it feels good to be inspired and back with you today.

The topic of today's inspiration or today's episode is what I'm going to call sufficient unto itself.

I think that's really going to be the title of the episode but the curiosity is why do we really do anything that we do?

We've certainly talked about this in different episodes on the podcast before and I'll say maybe it's from a different lens that we approach it today.

Today I really want to lean into the underlying motivation for anything that we do.

When we've talked about this in the past,

It's in some way like the title of the book Man's Search for Meaning.

It's been about our drive for success and perhaps our confusion around what we're really aiming for,

Having that be success or happiness or contentment.

For me,

What has now come to evolve even more,

The recognition that I really think it's about finding love.

Maybe happiness is just an emanation of the energy of love that's experienced as a momentary joy.

But this episode is not so much about our quest for meaning.

It's not so much about what we're aiming for in the 10,

000 foot view of our lives but more the day-to-day grind.

Why do we do anything that we do?

What are we hoping to get out of things?

What drives our sense of desire to do,

To be,

To act,

To be still,

Whatever it is?

The real reason behind this episode is I think unless you are someone's kind of extraordinary in the sense that you're very different than most of us living today,

Our day-to-day has a lot of repeating factors,

Right?

For myself,

I work at a fantastic job that really calls to my heart and my purpose and my intention what I feel like I'm here to do on this earth.

It has a lot of meaning and value in my life.

And I spend 80 to 90% of my workday in front of a computer.

And it can be incredibly disconnecting,

The work that I do.

My purpose is to be in service of other human beings.

So sitting at a computer is very disconnected and disjointed from the intention that my work is serving.

And for sure,

I can talk all day long about taking the time throughout our days to remember our intention,

Our larger purpose,

And I think that's really powerful.

But today's episode,

Quote,

Unquote,

Air quotes here,

Sufficient unto itself,

Is really about the act itself being the gift,

Being the joy,

Being the purpose.

Intention serves us in this creation of meaning for what we're doing,

But sufficient unto itself is the power and the beauty that lies in every single moment and every single action and every single experience being this raw,

Visceral,

Real experience of being human.

So yes,

While sitting in front of the computer for 7,

8,

Sometimes 10 hours a day can feel tiring and draining,

When I take a step back and take a deeper breath and remember that this is a moment of lived experience and allow it to be such,

All of a sudden,

It naturally becomes alive.

And I think this is the power of sufficient unto itself.

It's the power of the purpose is the practice,

The purpose is the experience,

The purpose is life,

It's living.

One of the incredible powers of meditation is that I think it really teaches us this in such a visceral way,

Right?

To sit down and become still and to be doing absolutely nothing,

Which is so anti-American.

How can we be good enough if we're doing nothing?

But to sit down and to quote-unquote do nothing and to be in practice with our ability to just be,

To let all the preconceived notions go and to fall into this space of total openness to experience.

And let me backtrack a little bit here.

What really spurred the energy of today or this week's episode is I've been listening to a lot of talks by Alan Watts.

And for anyone who's interested,

Alan Watts has really blown up again in recent years.

He became famous for a radio show that he led where he discussed philosophy and Eastern wisdom traditions.

For me,

Alan Watts is an incredible thinker and experiencer and just the way he languages really complex ideas just hit my heart and hit home for me.

For anyone who's interested,

There are really beautiful videos on YouTube that are about 10 minutes long.

I actually watch or listen to one almost every single morning.

And they're just different clips from Alan's radio show.

And the one that I listened to yesterday reminded me of this energy of sufficient unto itself.

And he talks about the need to stop talking in order to hear what others have to say.

And in the same way,

The need to stop thinking in order to experience the richness of what life has to offer in every single moment.

And there's actually a music artist,

Closey,

Who I adore,

Who's made a song out of a piece of this clip that we have to stop thinking in order to really experience the beauty of what's here in every single moment.

And he talks in depth about the way life comes alive when we become still.

And I've talked about this before.

One of my favorite quotes is,

The extraordinary is waiting just beneath the skin of everything that is ordinary.

And that's Mark Nepo.

But I think that quote and this idea are speaking to the same thing,

Which is when we move through our days at an ever-quickening pace,

Which it really seems to be so much of the time,

All we see are the large,

The gross,

The things that grab our attention.

We don't see the subtle.

We don't feel the subtle.

We don't often even experience smells or tastes,

Sensations in our body.

This beautiful human body is so alive in every moment.

There are sensations,

There is energy flowing through your body at all times.

But when we're super engrossed in typing on a computer or in thought and thinking,

Even the process of attempting to be creative can be such a process where we are narrowly focused on the task at hand that we lose the sensation of everything around us.

And I feel like what this really comes down to is being cut off from our senses and in a way from the world around us.

We become so trapped in the process in the mind.

And in a really beautiful way,

Our bodies and our minds can be so in service of that that,

You know,

Like for me,

Working on the computer,

I can be very caught in the mental process of my task at hand and my body just beautifully executes what I need it to execute in order to accomplish or succeed at that task to complete it,

Right?

And I'm actually physically marking it off my to-do list,

Right?

And how amazing that I have this body that can just do its own thing in response to what my mind is telling it to do so that I can check this thing off my to-do list.

However,

It often becomes a process that is incredibly disconnected from every other sense organ and from the awareness really even of time and space,

From the awareness of having a body,

From the sensations in my body,

To the sounds in the environment,

To the feeling of the movement of air at the surface of my skin,

To smells and tastes.

Maybe those of you listening have experienced this as not even drinking a sip of water throughout the day.

Maybe we forget to eat lunch.

Maybe we get up to go to the bathroom once in an eight-hour period when we can become completely overwhelmed by the need to go.

And in this way,

We can really sense and feel just how disconnected we can become from the senses that really show us moment by moment that we're alive.

I'm going to go back to checking things off of the to-do list because there is a really rich feeling for me in going to Wrike,

Which is my task manager,

And checking things off my Wrike tasks,

Right?

The sense of accomplishment and having done something with my day is really phenomenal.

To be fully open and transparent,

It is 4.

09 p.

M.

On a Wednesday,

And I've actually closed my computer for the day today because I feel like I've accomplished enough,

And so here I am recording this episode for you.

I think what really drove me to say,

Wow,

Okay,

Today,

This was enough,

And to not keep working is that everything today was an experience of being sufficient unto itself,

Where I took the time today to step outside,

To sit at the dining table I have outside,

To open the umbrella so that I'm actually able to be out there all day long without my computer overheating in the sun,

And to really let my skin feel alive to the breeze that happened all day long,

To the sounds of the wind in the trees.

Yes,

I'm currently in New York City,

So even the sounds of the construction happening in the background and the sirens.

I have consumed more water today than I probably have in the last three days combined,

And my body is warm from the reflection of the sun off of the sliding glass doors behind me,

And I share all of this to say,

I don't know,

Maybe I accomplished a good bit today,

And I feel like this is the struggle for so many of us,

If not all of us,

As Americans,

And unfortunately,

The way American culture has infiltrated many other spaces,

I'm going to say for us as Americans and beyond,

That so much of our sense of enoughness comes from our sense of accomplishment throughout the day,

But today,

The sense of enoughness,

Though I accomplished a lot,

I'm going to pat myself on the back,

So many other days this week,

Last week,

Over the last month,

Over the last six months,

I would have kept working,

Right?

And it's not because I needed to achieve more,

It's not because the work should not have been sufficient unto itself,

With the beautiful intention and the time and the energy that I put into it,

But because it wasn't rich and alive as a visceral living experience,

So today,

What was different is that the work was its own experience,

Working was a feeling and an embodiment of being alive,

Life and living,

And you know,

There's a quote that if you love what you do,

You never work a day in your life,

And while I think that is the most fantastic thing to aspire to,

I also think it's absolute bullshit,

Because the reality is that for all of us,

At some point,

Work becomes mundane.

Our day-to-day is so similar and becomes so natural and we get into the groove of things that we can operate our entire businesses,

Our entire days,

Our entire jobs almost completely on autopilot.

If any part of your job revolves around answering emails,

There is no fucking escape for the fact that at some point,

Emails feel like work.

You can love what you do,

But checking your emails,

I think now the statistic is we check emails something like 74 times a day,

That's absolutely insane.

The compulsion speaks to itself,

Right,

That this is a compulsion to check email,

It's a compulsion to check our phones,

It's an autopilot compulsion,

The way that we move through our days,

And so the question that I ask you today is,

Why do you do it?

Is it because you need the paycheck?

Is it the reward at the end of the day for feeling accomplished or finally feeling enough?

How much work do we have to accomplish in a day to feel like we're enough?

Is it ever enough?

Is the paycheck enough?

Is our vacation time enough?

What drives us to get up in the morning to put on whatever outfit,

Whatever mask we wear for work,

And maybe you don't have to,

And I hope we don't have to,

I really hope our society is moving away from that,

Truly,

But what if instead we found a way to make the experience of work and working an actual experience of love and loving,

Where it doesn't even have to be about the intention,

And I think this is why this feeling feels so alive for me,

Is up until this point,

If you will,

The way that I could coax myself into sitting at a computer for eight to ten hours a day is like,

Okay,

Tiffany,

Remember what you're doing here,

Right?

This thing that you're building on the computer is going to go out to thousands upon thousands of law enforcement and corrections officers,

And hopefully,

Oh,

With the deepest wish and intention in my heart,

It's going to mean something to them.

They're going to go home happier,

Healthier,

More regulated,

More able to show up for their children and their husbands and their wives and for themselves,

And,

You know,

We're going to change the statistic around officer suicide and the number of years they make it after retirement,

And that,

It was that,

And it still is that that drives me,

Right?

Today has been such a lived experience that,

Fuck yeah,

The intention matters,

But what if everything we do can be an expression of love itself,

Can be the feeling of rubbing my hands over the keys on my keyboard and feeling the aliveness in my body of hearing the sounds of the wind and the leaves and the construction that's not just construction,

But it's human beings down the street making a living,

Sitting on the sidewalk,

Eating their lunch,

Building a building that is going to house hundreds if not thousands more people around the corner from where my family lives that are going to interact with each other and engage with each other,

And the way we breathe and the way we move impacts the energy of our hearts and the energy of every person that we engage with.

It's the willingness to see that the purpose of sitting and listening to a symphony is not to get to the end,

But to experience every single note.

It's not to check off of our to-do list that we went to the symphony or,

You know,

To have our wish list of things to do that we get to check off symphony.

Like,

How sad would it be if we missed the entire symphony because our whole point was just to say that we did it,

And sadly and honestly,

I think so much of our culture and society actually is that these days.

Living in New York has been such an interesting experience of seeing tourists and going places and sitting in places and watching people like walk up to a beautiful view of the Brooklyn Bridge and take 42 pictures and I don't even know if they saw it,

And it's like you don't even see it until you go back and post your pictures later.

This idea that so much of what we do these days is just to say we did it,

And so the question and the curiosity is,

With that mindset,

How much of our life are we missing?

And if we are working five days a week and we're working,

Most of us,

Eight to ten to twelve hours a day,

How much of our life are we missing if our point is just to get to the end of what we're doing?

And instead,

What does life feel like if every single thing we do,

We do it just because it's sufficient unto itself?

Love,

Love is sufficient unto itself.

The acts of generosity,

Of giving,

Of kindness,

Of breathing,

It's sufficient unto itself.

A truly generous act,

An act of kindness,

Is defined by the fact that what we receive in return is the feeling of getting to be generous,

Of the love that we feel to love on someone else.

I know I've said this before,

But I truly and deeply believe the one thing that really hasn't changed in my 12,

13 years of being in this practice is I deeply believe that the greatest thing we feel as human beings is the feeling of loving,

Of being in love with ourselves,

With life,

With another person,

Whatever it is,

It's loving,

Not being loved,

But love,

Being filled with it,

Right?

So what would it be like to be filled with love for everything that we do?

Not because of what we're going to get out of it later,

Not because of checking it off of a box,

Not because we say that we did,

But because every single moment is a moment of our life.

Every single moment is an experience of living,

And therefore,

If we let it come alive through our senses,

If we smell it,

If we taste it,

If we feel it,

It becomes so rich,

It becomes so alive,

It becomes sufficient unto itself.

So that's the offering for today,

And I feel like I want to end by saying it's not fair to ourselves to expect that we can live this way in every moment.

I think this is a way,

I was unkind to myself for many years,

We have these,

Oh,

So ecstatic experiences of life and living,

Of joy,

Of happiness,

Of connection,

Of contentment,

Of satisfaction,

Of peace,

That we feel less than or insufficient when we're not in that space.

It can become very easy to judge ourselves or judge our lives as not enough because we're not in that place of pure bliss or ecstasy all of the time.

And my loves,

This is just not human,

Right?

So even the moments where it feels fucking impossible to connect to sufficient unto itself,

The curiosity is,

Can even that be sufficient unto itself?

Thank you so much for listening,

For being here with me today.

It's an honor and a privilege for any of you still listening.

I know the podcast is sporadic,

And it's the only way that I actually keep doing it is to just give myself permission for even this to be imperfect.

So thank you,

For those of you that are listening,

For being here with me.

I would love to hear from you,

To learn from you,

And to know how this impacted you.

Enjoy your beautiful day.

I hope that you feel the tenderness,

The aliveness,

And the joy of it being good enough,

Just as it is.

Reviews

Hi Tiffany, Important words and thoughts to remember. So much of my time is consumed by the drive to complete the objective. But occasionally I remind myself that the path is the reward and integral to the the overarching “project “. I guess I need to remind myself to treat each thought and action as a string of thoughtful moments that make up the journey. And it is fine that I may not always see it as perfect, but it’s good enough if I am in the moment and living it. 🙏