The Mind Is Not Your Enemy

Welcome to 2024!
On this episode we explore the "aha" moment of not making our minds our enemies. From how we're raised to view and judge ourselves naturally to even the language we sometimes hear on our spiritual paths, making the mind the enemy: putting it in its place or "controlling" it sometimes seems the ultimate goal. So today we work through the transformative possibility of making the mind our friend even during meditation.

*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.

And this is the first episode of 2024 and I can't believe we're already here.

Feels like 2023 went by so quickly.

So I want to start this year with one of those aha moments.

So this episode is called the mind is not your enemy and it came to be from a moment that I had in my own meditation practice right at the beginning of this year.

And I want to start just by saying I think I've said this in the podcast before that I think part of any mindfulness journey,

Any meditative journey,

This whole thing that is being human is filled with these aha moments,

These moments where some connection to an experience of wisdom happens within us or maybe it's imparted upon us.

But that moment really fundamentally changes either a paradigm or a belief system or the way we see ourselves or the world or how we operate in it.

And the thing that's pretty incredible that I've experienced about the journey of meditation is these aha moments often build on themselves.

So one thing I would say to anybody starting that journey or even deep in their own practice is there's really never an end point to our understanding.

So why do I say it this way?

Because this aha moment,

The mind is not your enemy,

Is a growing moment that really started probably about 10 years ago and I've been meditating now for,

Let's see,

I'm going to age myself,

But that's okay.

I've been meditating now for about 12 years.

And when I first started my journey of meditation,

Exploring Buddhism,

There was this feeling that we had to put the mind under control.

And I really remember hearing terminology like subjugate the mind,

Right?

Or in some way the feeling that our ego was bad and the root of all of our suffering.

And Buddhism talks a lot about what's the root of our suffering and I'm not going to dive into that because it's like seven more episodes.

But the reality for me was that as I started journeying into my own body and into my own mind and my own spiritual practice,

There was this feeling that in some way I had to get rid of my ego,

I had to get my mind under control.

And it wasn't until I took a class with an incredible human named Odette,

And thank you Tanisha Briggs for putting me in touch with her,

And it was an abundance class.

And at the very beginning of the class,

She spoke about the ego in a way I'd never heard before.

And she basically said,

Your ego is what gives you your richness in this human incarnation.

It's what tells you whether you like wine or beer,

And what flavors of food you like,

What colors are your favorite,

Where do you want to travel to?

It's all about the sensual experience of being human.

And without that,

We're just awareness,

Which of course is radical and incredible.

But it was the ego in her terminology that gave us this passionate,

Sensual experience of our humanity.

And it was the first time that I'd ever heard the ego talked about in a way that was positive.

And I felt this weight,

This relief,

This tearing down of a wall around my heart where it was like,

Oh shit,

I don't have to reject this part of myself.

And that moment was really profound.

So how I worked with myself and my ego from that day forward really fundamentally changed.

I started getting curious about what it was my ego was trying to tell me.

And I think,

This is kind of a caveat and a side note,

It's not really the mind is not your enemy.

I guess in a way,

It's nothing is your enemy.

But in a way,

It granted permission for my ego to be present.

And I think this is a thread and a theme that has woven through the evolution of my spiritual practice over the last 12 years.

And really,

Just in this moment,

At the beginning of 2024,

It's culminated in this,

Well,

Even the mind doesn't have to be our enemy.

So it's all about being in balance with ourselves.

The power of awareness is you can't change what you don't see.

And so when we're aware,

When we can see the interworkings of our ego in a moment,

We get to decide whether we allow that to flow freely,

Or whether we as the witness to our own egos can step in and say,

Man,

I think now from compassion,

This requires a different kind of engagement,

Right?

And it's from that seat of awareness that we have the space to actually make that choice.

So fast forward to last year,

Yet again,

I was put in touch with another incredible healer,

Nathan Simmons,

By my beautiful friend,

Rachel Sebastian,

Who's an incredible channeler and healer.

Rachel put me in touch with Nathan,

And Nathan does these absolutely wondrous hypnosis sessions.

And in the first session that I was blessed to participate in with Nathan,

We talked about the part of our mind that is our protector.

And he guided us on this incredible hypnotic journey of meeting that part of our mind,

That part of ourselves,

That's always trying to protect and,

You know,

Allowing the subconscious to generate an image of what that protector looked like,

And eventually sitting down in a space,

Almost like a boardroom,

And signing a contractual agreement with this part of ourselves that we're going to do this together from here forward.

And yet again,

This was another moment where I was given the gift of seeing myself and framing a part of myself in a completely new way.

And where this was really profound for me is that if you listen to the podcast,

Many of you will know that last year was a rough year.

And the anxious and ruminating thoughts that showed up in my mind quite frequently were persistent,

They were loud,

Definitely not very kind.

And after this session with Nathan,

It became a deep practice for me in those moments to pause and say to myself,

I see you,

I see you so powerfully trying to protect me.

Oh,

How grateful I am for you.

But today,

Let's try something different.

And kind of my mantra became,

My greatest protection is to be heart open.

And I really deeply believe that.

But not pushing away the protector in my mind,

Not telling those thoughts that they're bad or wrong,

But instead saying,

I see how this worked for the whole of my life.

I'm here sitting in this moment with the capacity to make a different choice,

To explore what it feels like to be in my life completely unguarded and with my heart exposed because of the journey I've been on up into this point,

Being protected in the way that came naturally.

And so it's really honoring that part of our mind and taking its hand and asking,

Can we try this new way together?

One thing that I definitely have felt in my own experience is it never really works to tell ourselves to shut the fuck up or to demand that our thoughts stop or go away.

And I've heard this a lot from meditation and mindfulness teachers as well,

Or the way people talk about becoming aware of our thoughts.

It's like when we become aware of our thoughts,

We're supposed to just cut it,

Right?

And that's to me is so harsh.

And it shows us that there's a right and a wrong.

And what I'm discovering more and more is that that's just not reality.

So this is kind of the second piece of this embracing all parts of us.

I'm sure there's more,

But the really big and profound ones for me.

And so now finally,

We're nine minutes in.

Let's get to the one that was just a few days ago and spurring this episode.

I was sitting in meditation and I found myself in a moment having wandered away into thoughts.

And without any conscious control,

When I noticed that I had been lost in thought,

Something inside of me and likely kind of the voice of the practice I just described surfaced in my heart and in my mind to say,

Thank you so much for trying to protect me,

But let's stay here for this moment.

And what arose immediately in me,

And I can feel it now,

Was just this profound sense of gratitude and sweetness that I felt like I was being held in.

And immediately what I recognized is,

At least in my own meditative journey,

I'd never been taught when we work in meditation with our thoughts,

Or when we work off the cushion with our thoughts,

That there can be and really should be this sense of tenderness.

Now,

I want to applaud so many of my teachers for the language that they used when guiding meditations.

And this is something I say for me,

You know,

To myself as a meditation teacher and facilitator,

That it's about planting seeds.

You know,

I'm not trying to guide anybody's journey because we're each unique and what these aha moments are for each one of us is so unique and so varied and vast that the best I can hope to do is really,

As I see it,

Give language to your felt and lived experience in such a way that when you have an experience,

You go,

Oh shit,

That's what that means,

Right?

And so what I want to point to is you hear language or I heard language throughout my own practice and learning with other teachers of watching the thoughts when we notice them returning to whatever we're paying attention to or bringing our awareness back to the present moment.

I heard kind words like the moment that we notice we're lost in thought,

We're actually already back in awareness.

And so that's a moment to be celebrated,

Right?

We're celebrating because ha ha,

I did it,

I caught myself.

Now,

The interesting part of that,

And I can feel it even in the way those words came out of my mouth,

Aha,

I caught myself.

It's as though we subtly and with connotation paint the picture or the feeling tone that to be lost in thought is bad,

That the whimsical nature of the mind to generate thoughts and to take us off somewhere is not what we want to be doing.

Now,

Again,

I want to applaud an incredible human being and a beautiful mindfulness teacher,

Stephanie Swan.

She taught my first MBSR,

Mindfulness-based stress reduction class that was incredibly transformative.

For anybody living in Atlanta,

Stephanie's an incredible,

Profound,

Beautiful human being,

But also an incredible teacher.

And it was Stephanie that used the words the first time for me of watching our thoughts,

And she described how many years it took her to have the visceral,

Actual,

Actual,

You guys,

Actual fucking experience of watching your thoughts.

And to applaud Stephanie,

Yes,

This took me years to understand and have my own lived experience with,

Too.

And my experience was something like being so present and aware to everything that was happening,

You know,

Touch sensations,

Sounds,

The play of light behind your eyes,

Feeling tones in the body,

That there was this amazing feeling of being able to feel a thought starting to come up before it actually even had language and form.

It was like watching the energy of this human mind to naturally generate thought without it even having an idea set yet.

And it was honestly a really fucking cool experience.

But circling back,

That was one of the ways in which I feel like we embrace the mind.

And that's really the purpose of this episode is getting really deeply curious about,

For those of you that already have a meditation practice,

Or you're beginning your own meditative journey,

The playfulness is we don't have to reject any part of ourselves.

And that includes this beautiful human brain,

This three pounds of tissue that has more neurons than there are stars in the Milky Way galaxy.

It is constantly growing and changing and learning based on what you choose to pay attention to.

We have given our minds,

And this is my kind of personal belief,

But we've given our minds this unattainable task of protecting us.

I think the greatest thing we fear is pain,

Period.

And throughout our lives,

What we define as the possible sources of our pain is what creates our anxiety,

Keeping our job,

Losing our job,

Keeping our partners,

Losing our partners,

Being financially stable or not being financially stable.

Everything we fear is really about fearing the pain that we're going to experience as a result of whatever it is.

We're not scared of the thing,

We're scared of the hurt.

And it's our mind that we've given this untenable task of protecting us from all of it,

And it's impossible.

So no wonder our mind is constantly playing out scenarios,

Planning,

Ruminating,

Going over our mistakes,

Trying to make sure that we don't make them again,

Self-referentially processing,

How do I fit into the world to make sure that we have a sense of in-group where we fit in and belong.

And it's an incessant task because life is always changing and evolving.

And so all of this really is to say if any part of ourselves really deserves our love,

Well,

It's all of it.

Because as soon as I said that,

My mind was like,

Well,

What about your body?

So true.

But we tend to reject,

Well,

Both our body and our mind.

How sad you guys,

We're really not nice to ourselves.

Let me say that a different way.

How sad you guys,

It's taken so many years for me to recognize how unkind I've been to my body and to my mind and to my ego,

To my ability to love,

To all the ways we judge ourselves.

But for the purpose of today,

For the purpose of the mind is not our enemy,

What I want to circle back around to is meditation is the formal practice of being exactly who we want to be moment by moment.

And what we practice grows stronger.

Think of every single moment in meditation like a rep in the gym.

You are either bicep curling the characteristics and the qualities and the traits that you want to carry with you moment by moment and day by day.

Or you're unconsciously or maybe even consciously practicing the things that actually inevitably cause us pain.

So when we judge ourselves for getting lost in thought,

When we're upset with the mind for what it's thinking about,

Any of these natural,

Really natural ways that we reject our own mental experience,

What we are practicing is rejection.

Rejection of fundamentally ourselves and also that moment of living.

And it is,

You know,

The most subtle experience of sadness and pain.

And I say that as an invitation to get curious about that for yourselves.

I think it's a really subtle energy experience.

It's not surface level,

But I would invite you to get curious about that when we reject ourselves,

When we push away our thoughts,

When we tell ourselves to stop or no or absolutely not go away,

Like what that actually feels like in your own heart or in your own body.

So today,

What I want to invite us to is this playfulness of welcoming and not even just welcoming,

But really appreciating your mind for how hard it works every single moment and every single day to take care of you.

And we can really deeply practice this in meditation.

And I'm so grateful,

Again,

Stephanie once said that we practice meditation for the moment when we don't have it.

We're not able to be in practice ourselves.

And the hopefulness is that our practice in that moment shows up for us.

And for me,

I think that's exactly what happened in this moment of meditation that my practice showed up for me.

And what I want to do is turn that around,

You know,

Turn it on its head and make it an offering to any of you who are listening that when you sit down in meditation,

It can be a beautiful time to practice welcoming,

Loving,

Appreciating,

And really embracing with this softness and this warmth every single part of you.

And that includes your mind.

So often in meditation and mindfulness,

We say,

Name it to tame it.

As you begin a meditation journey,

When you notice that you're lost in thought,

You might say planning,

Or thinking about the past or proliferating into the future,

Thinking about myself,

Anxiety,

You know,

Just name it to tame it,

Whatever mental experience you're having,

Name it and let it go.

What I want to invite today is,

It's a moment where we're bringing some power of the mind and consciousness to our meditative experience.

When you notice you've been lost in thought,

Instead of just coming back to the present moment,

Which you actually already have,

Or name it to tame it,

Instead,

Get that moment of curiosity,

What is my mind doing?

And then find some way to appreciate it.

And that might look like what came up for me.

Thank you for working so hard to protect me.

I think a lot of it's going to be protection.

For me,

I see even planning and like thinking about the emails I need to get to or the projects I have to work on at work.

That's protecting me,

Right?

It might be,

Thank you for working so hard to support me,

Right?

Thank you for working so hard to make sure that I thrive and I'm abundant.

Whatever feels real and true for you,

Can we start generating a language of appreciation for our mind,

But also that energy of,

And now we're here.

And so it's an invitation again,

To come back together into this beautiful handheld relationship of,

We're going to try it this way now.

And this way is really embedded and rooted in a sense of trust.

I fundamentally trust myself to handle whatever comes,

To be strong and resilient,

To be intelligent and creative,

To be present enough to engage with whatever free flows into my experience of living in a way that creates goodness,

Richness,

Abundance,

And that I don't need to pre-formulate,

If you will,

How that's going to go.

So this is the playfulness that I hope to offer to all of you today.

And the most large scale,

It is embracing every single part of ourselves with love and tenderness and appreciation.

But for this particular episode,

It's recognizing that even the mind is not our enemy and instead can be the most beautiful of friends.

Thank you so much for taking the time to be here with me today.

It's such a pleasure to welcome in a new year with all of you.

And I look forward to the continued aha explorations and this collective wild human journey.