The One Thing That Grants Us True Freedom

Just about anyone who talks about mindfulness will inevitably talk about learning to hold ourselves. I, personally, have been talking about and teaching this for the last 10 years. But in recent years, the power and true meaning of this practice and concept has transformed into something deep and unexpected. In this episode, journey with me through the concept changes and evolution or REvolution of what it means to truly HOLD OURSELVES, and why it is the path to ultimate freedom.

*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,

Hello,

And welcome to this episode of the Wake the Fuck Up podcast.

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

Maybe more a host,

A journeyer of curiosity,

Of humanness,

And this podcast is really a place to share thoughts,

To express aha moments and pieces of wisdom that have really revolutionized and kind of transformed and changed my life in the hopes that it can mean something to those of you that are listening.

So maybe this is just a journal that we get to share together.

I always feel weird saying host,

So here we are.

Today's episode is probably one of the most important to me when it comes to what mindfulness is all about and I might even go so far as to say the one thing that I think radically transforms our experience of living from suffering and rejection into peace and love and tranquility and okayness no matter what's happening.

I want to be clear as we're diving into this that there's been the concept of this idea since the beginning of my own personal journey with mindfulness,

And I know I've said this in these recordings quite a bit,

That I don't think there's really ever an aha moment where that's the end of the story or we've figured it all out or it's the right answer,

However you want to say it.

I think our understandings and our aha moments,

Even with the same concepts,

Keep evolving.

So today our topic,

The concept that keeps evolving is holding ourselves.

How to really hold ourselves in our moments of beauty and of pain.

And I want to begin just by saying that as a mindfulness teacher and as a mindfulness facilitator and coach,

I think for all coaches really one of our greatest responsibilities is to help give language to people's felt experience that they might not have language for in the moment.

And I find with mindfulness,

And this is my own personal experience,

Right,

Having my own teachers and then my own practice,

That my teachers can say something in a moment and it means one thing.

And then whether it's the same day or six months or six years down the road,

I've found myself having experiences where all of a sudden the words that my teacher used come into my mind or into my heart and all of a sudden they make sense in a completely different way.

And I think this is true of so many of our concepts,

So much of our experiences.

You know,

You've probably heard people say and talk about the fact that you can't really understand until you've been in somebody else's shoes.

And I think that's so,

So very true.

From a Buddhist perspective,

From a mindfulness perspective,

I think the idea that we can have unwavering compassion for somebody else without needing to stand in their shoes is so very true.

But our humanness,

I think there's no way around the fact that it's only when we taste the flavor of somebody else's experience ourselves that we can really understand what that taste was like.

So for me,

The most vivid expression of this is in my own understanding of grief.

A number of years ago,

I was present with my now ex-wife when her father passed,

And being with her through her own experience of grief and grieving when I hadn't had a loss to that degree of my own,

It upwelled immense compassion.

And in the moment,

There were feelings of having a sense or a semblance of understanding because of how I knew it felt to me to hurt and to be sad and to suffer deeply and to want things that I could no longer have or never had.

But it wasn't until maybe in an ironic turn of events,

The loss of my family and my home and the life that I had built and even my sense of self that had developed over the course of that relationship and those 10 years,

That I really deeply understood grief from standing in those shoes.

I share that to say,

When we circle back around to this idea of holding ourselves,

That from the very beginning of my journey with meditation and mindfulness,

My wondrous and fabulous teachers talked about the fact that meditation is a practice of learning to hold ourselves.

When we make the commitment to sit down and be still,

And I recognize and acknowledge that in our culture today and even in traditional wisdom places and practices,

We might not,

When we first begin meditating,

Sit down and make the commitment to truly not move,

Right?

Like your legs fall asleep,

It's uncomfortable,

You get an itch,

You want to move your body,

Whatever it might be,

A lot of times when we first begin,

We give ourselves the space and the graciousness to move if we need to move,

To adjust our posture if we need to adjust our posture,

To scratch that itch,

To move our feet,

Whatever it might be.

But as I was taught,

Leaning into a practice of being truly still and feeling that itch and not scratching it,

And watching your legs fall asleep and not moving,

Or feeling the energy of anxiety coursing through your body and through your mind and making the choice to stay,

Ultimately,

This is a practice in learning to hold ourselves in our discomfort.

And so I want to walk you a bit through my own journey with this language and why I think of everything that we learn through our practice of self-awareness and emotional intelligence and ultimately,

For me,

Mindfulness and our practice of meditation and becoming whole and home to our true selves,

It's that to learn to truly and profoundly hold ourselves,

No matter what we're experiencing,

It grants the ultimate freedom.

Because then there's no longer anything in life to fear.

And I say that full transparency with having things in life that I still fear,

Of course,

Because we're human,

Right?

But when I sit down and I become still and I tap into my own ability to truly hold myself,

I remember,

Not from a mental perspective,

As my friend Melissa says,

Not cerebrally,

But I remember from an embodied space,

What it feels like to really have myself,

Right?

To know I've got you and I'll be here no matter what.

So to take a couple steps back,

As I said at the beginning of my own meditation journey,

This was the language or the idea that when we sit in meditation,

We're practicing holding ourselves,

Right?

And hopefully,

If you come up with,

Is what I was going to say,

If you start your own meditation practice,

I hope that you take the time to sit when you feel like crap,

That you sit when you're sick or you sit when you're angry or you sit when you just don't want to fucking sit.

And that was the hardest thing for me.

I remember having a conversation with my grandmother and saying,

I know I want to be sitting every day.

I can see myself not sitting every day and every time I sit,

I know how meaningful and beneficial it is to me.

It changes the whole course of my day,

But there are times where I just can't convince myself to do it.

And my sweet,

Sweet grandmother offered me something that has stuck with me for the last 13 years and that is,

Sweetheart,

Everything is the path.

So for me here now,

Being in practice every single day,

I recognized that I needed to take that path of not sitting to find the conviction and the remembrance,

Again,

I can feel it in my chest,

In this really visceral way that even when my mind says I don't want to sit,

There's something in my heart that goes,

Baby,

Please just sit down.

And so it all works together,

Right?

But I hope you find the courage to sit when you don't want to.

And even if you want to and you sit down and then all of a sudden you're like,

Fuck,

I'm so anxious.

I just want to get up and accomplish the 400 other things I need to do today.

And you keep sitting.

That is such a raw,

Real,

Beautiful practice of learning to be with ourselves.

And the thing that has evolved for me over the years,

And I'm going to skip ahead,

Really,

To closer to the present.

There's a middle that maybe I'll get back to.

But what has deeply,

So deeply changed my visceral experiential understanding of what it means to hold myself is,

Again,

A moment with my grandmother.

A couple of years ago,

I was sharing an experience with her where I was talking about someone that I love and being worried about them and worried about the path that they were on and feeling so deeply that this person is such a wild,

Incredible,

Beautiful human being and that the path they were choosing,

I was so scared for their suffering,

Maybe not on the outside,

But deeply on the inside,

And wanting them to find their sense of self-love and wholeness and compassion and to know how fucking amazing they are.

And as I was recounting this,

My grandmother paused me and she said,

Sweetheart,

Do you recognize that it's you who's suffering in this moment?

And I was completely taken aback because here I am at the time,

You know,

11 years into my own meditation practice,

Into being able to label and identify and recognize my emotional state,

And it was almost as if I had been taught and had practiced too acutely being able to name and tame the emotional experience that I was having.

I could have told you in that moment that I was worried,

I was fearful,

I was anxious,

I was concerned,

All of the labels that we give to these emotional experiences,

But what I hadn't done ever was take a step back and just go,

Oh baby,

This is a moment where I'm suffering,

I'm hurting right now,

Whether it's fear or anger or sadness or angst or depression or worry or frustration,

All of that can be bundled up into the simple understanding that this is a moment that we're suffering,

That we're hurting,

We're in discomfort,

We're in dis-ease,

We're in pain.

And hearing those words and taking that step back all of a sudden became a moment where I was opened to the possibility of being with myself.

And this is,

I think,

The thing that has radicalized and profoundly changed my own understanding of holding ourselves in our moments of pain and suffering is the capacity to simply take a step back and no matter what we're experiencing that's difficult,

To recognize that in that moment we are suffering gives us the ability to take a breath and step into that space of like,

Oh,

I'm putting my hands on my heart as I say this,

Like my love,

I'm so sorry,

I'm here for you.

And it comes so naturally for us in so many moments to want to wrap our arms around the people that we love when we know that they're hurting.

And I think it's true for many of us in our humanness,

If somebody is screaming at us,

It's harder to want to just hold them,

Right?

Maybe if it's your child,

That's still readily accessible,

But somebody driving down the street and they lay on their horn and yell at you out the window,

You're probably going to feel a little bit different than if you're driving down the street and somebody zooms past you and you happen to catch a glimpse of them and they're sobbing,

Right?

But we get the powerful experience of seeing our own emotions from the inside out.

And sometimes that makes it so much harder to be with ourselves because we're the person laying on the horn and screaming silently inside.

And sometimes we're the person sobbing,

Right?

And I'll share with you,

This is kind of going back to the middle of my journey when it comes to holding myself.

I remember one of the most profound experiences that I had in my own personal meditation was a moment where I was sitting and I was angry and I can't for the life of me tell you why I was angry.

But I remember which home I was in and the fact that I was sitting in front of my altar and doing my meditation practice and that I was so,

So angry in the moment.

And like a blessing from the ether,

And I'm reminded of a teacher,

Stephanie Swan,

Who once languished that she was in a particular state in her life where she wasn't really sitting,

Which was insane to imagine.

The way she described that was that this is the first time that she couldn't show up for her practice.

And so instead what she was experiencing was that her practice was showing up for her.

And so I think this moment was a moment of that,

Where it's the fruits of our labor,

It's the trust that in unexpected moments our practice is going to show up when we can't show up for our practice,

Or even when we're showing up,

But here it is in an unexpected way.

And for me,

It was this moment of being so,

So angry and sitting in meditation.

And I felt as though I was all of a sudden plucked from my own eyes and mind,

I took a step out of myself and turned around and I could see me sitting here.

Sitting here with the hope that I could feel better,

That I could stand up from this meditation and go interact with the partner in my home in a way that was kind and compassionate and loving,

That I didn't want to hurt and that this anger really was pain.

And in a way I felt very ugly for the anger that I could feel inside of me.

It was like seeing myself as the person driving down the street,

Honking the horn and screaming out the window.

It didn't feel pretty,

Right?

But the words that came into my heart and into my body were,

I see you and I love you exactly as you are.

And I think that was one of the first deep,

Deep experiences that I had of being and feeling held by my own presence,

Right?

Where the anger didn't need to go away,

I didn't need to make it change,

I wasn't telling myself I was bad or wrong,

There wasn't even a sense of I or other,

Instead there was just this felt and lived experience of seeing my own suffering as anger and not in that moment having the language of like,

Oh,

This is a moment of suffering because that came much later,

But just feeling it from the inside out and having this upwelling of compassion.

And so this visceral lived experience,

The evolution of holding ourselves,

One of the first ways that this was languaged for me by a teacher that really struck me and meant something and this was my mindfulness certification teacher,

Fleet Mall with Engaged Mindfulness Institute led a guided meditation practice in one of our retreats where he invited us to ask ourselves the question,

What's here and can I be with this?

And for me the language,

Can I be with this,

Was like this invitation to grow wider,

Wider than these emotions,

Than this breath,

Than these feelings,

Than these thoughts,

Even wider than this body where all of a sudden I have the capacity to wrap my arms around the whole of my experience and hold it because I can be with it instead of being it or being inside of it or defined by it.

And so this language,

I still use this today,

What's here and can I be with this,

Was the first time I really felt this expansiveness beyond the way we tend to ingrain ourselves inside of our experiences and instead felt this capacity to hold,

Right?

Now why I think that that's not the end of the story is that being with doesn't necessarily invite or imbue the energy of love and tenderness and compassion,

But the idea of holding ourselves in our moments of suffering,

It might not be something that comes to us right away.

And in all likelihood,

My loves,

It's absolutely not.

For me,

Here I am,

I've been practicing intentionally meditation and mindfulness for 13 years.

I've been teaching for seven or eight and I've had an incredible grandmother in my life who's been a meditator since I was five,

Maybe younger,

But I began sitting with her at five.

So the Dharma has been in my life truly since birth,

Such a blessing.

And so I share this to say,

You know,

There was a moment when I was really,

Really in my own grief a number of years ago,

Trying to relearn what it meant to be me in this new place and to live disconnected from what was my family and what was my friends and what was my home and what was my business and having this moment of profound and deep compassion for myself.

And the voice popped into my head,

You know,

Why didn't I figure this out earlier?

And maybe the answer is because this was the moment I really needed it.

You know,

I've heard before that all awakening happens through suffering and I don't know that I fully buy that.

But certainly the revolutionizing of my understanding of how to hold myself and the invitation that I hope to offer to you here today in this recording of how to hold yourselves truly came through the greatest experience of suffering I've ever had.

So maybe I don't wish it for you right away,

Or maybe you deeply understand what I'm saying because you've already had this experience for yourself.

But ultimately I think our path and our process and the reason I'm the freaking mindfulness lady is because we don't have the chance to be with ourselves at all if we can't identify and be present with what's happening.

And so just our capacity to see,

Just our capacity to feel and to take a step back and to say what's here and can I be with this and to even do it in the different way that is evolved where what's here,

The new language becomes,

Oh,

It's a moment of suffering.

I'm hurting.

I need my own love.

I need my own tenderness.

And the thing that's wild here,

And I think I want to end with this,

Is what we're really stepping into and the source of true freedom is that when we find our capacity to hold ourselves,

What shows up is love,

Grace,

Spaciousness,

Gentleness,

Tenderness,

And a sense that no matter what is here,

No matter what we're holding ourselves in,

No matter what label or concept we put on the suffering itself,

What's present around it in the space and the spaciousness that holds us is love.

And everything from a place of love is already okay.

So again,

I think,

Oh,

This is the thing that has changed my life completely.

There are absolutely things that I'm afraid of,

Whether it's kind of a large philosophical question or,

You know,

Smaller human moments of wanting to keep things in my life in the way that they are,

You know,

The fear of aging,

Of losing my body,

Of losing my mind.

Those are big things that I'm truly afraid of because they make me feel out of control.

But again,

And we talked about this in the episode with Ash,

Gary,

My brother-in-law,

The episode on navigating fear,

That when we really look at what we're afraid of,

We're afraid of the pain and the power,

The immense power and freedom in learning to hold ourselves and learning to take a step back from our need to constantly conceptualize and label and put in a box our experience and just to be able to say,

Fuck,

This is a moment of suffering.

The power and the freedom in that is that no matter what we label it,

If we can hold ourselves,

If we can become spacious and drip open into the love that is the net that we're floating in in every moment and hold ourselves,

Then there's no pain we can ever really be afraid of because it's love that becomes our home.

So thank you so much for listening with me today.

In full openness,

This episode is flowing from my heart because today is a moment of grief.

Today is a moment that I miss my son,

That everything inside of me wants to reach for him and it's a moment where I have to lean instead into this emptiness and this sadness and this pain.

And as I speak,

I hear my voice changing.

The sadness is here,

The grief is here,

But there's also love,

So much love.

And so I'm in deep gratitude and appreciation for this day and for this opportunity,

This moment to feel,

For this moment to reflect on the beauty of what was.

Grief really is a mirror of love,

Right?

And so I'm in such gratitude and gratitude again to be able to offer this episode to you.

It's a little bit longer than normal,

So if you've made it this far,

Oh my love,

Thank you for being here and for listening.

May these words touch your heart,

Shift open your experience and lean you into peace,

Love and freedom.

Until next time.

Reviews

Tiffany, it’s been awhile since I listened to one of your talks. I was reminded how much your messages go straight to my heart. Trying to be my own best friend and allowing all the feelings to be met with love and understanding. Thank you my friend for the reminder 🙏

Hell yeah.
Thank you. At the end you mentioned losing your son. I lost my son Mar 23,2023. Do you have podcasts where you talk about this?