When You Look Inside by Zachary Phillips When you look inside,
Where does your attention go?
An internal energy,
A power,
A flow.
When you observe the breath,
What do you now see?
A play of consciousness,
A freedom,
Serenity.
When you move the body,
What do you feel?
A sense of freedom,
A space,
An ideal.
A major component of our meditative practice is introspection.
And I believe that this is where a lot of the benefits in the real world come from.
When we are able to turn the camera inwards and look at ourselves,
We start to notice our little foibles,
Our little sort of intricacies,
Our thinking patterns,
And the way we start responding to the world and to people in it.
Once we start to know ourselves and start to see how we're responding to the world,
We can better take action,
Either by letting the world know what we're like,
Or by starting to make proactive choices to address it.
If you know that you have a tendency to be angry,
Or abrupt,
Or rude,
Or fall to addictions,
Or potentially to ruminate in anxiety,
Or wallow in depression,
Or whatever that thing is,
If you know what you're like,
If you know how you are,
You can choose to take action from there.
Self-awareness is key.
But the question then becomes,
Well,
How do we actually start this process?
How do we hone the skill of self-awareness,
Of introspection?
And I would argue that you hone it by listening to meditations and poetry and things like this right now.
You hone it through your meditative practice,
And you hone it through intention.
And that's an important word to drive down upon.
Your intention to look inwards,
To see the darkness inside,
And to embrace it,
To turn towards it,
Not away from it.
One of the most therapeutic things that I've done for myself is to turn and face the negativity of my mind.
When something pops up,
Rather than run from it,
Or turn and look at it,
What does anger feel like?
What does jealousy feel like?
What does fear and hatred and worry and all of that negativity actually feel like?
How big is it?
Is it strong or is it weak?
Is it insidious?
Does it have a physical component?
Are memories overlaid?
By turning and facing what I'm actually feeling,
I get to see it for what it is.
And what that does is it sort of takes the teeth out of the emotionality and just shows me that it's a collection of internal mental and physical phenomena.
Now yes,
It might be unpleasant,
But when you break it down into its component parts,
And when you look at it,
It takes away that power.
And the more I find myself looking at it,
Not only do those sort of negative thoughts or all thoughts really start to dissipate,
But it also allows me to develop a little catalogue in my mind,
A little idea of what's going on.
This is what it feels like to have these thoughts in this moment.
Now over time,
You start to develop some mental clarity.
You start to develop some space between you and your thoughts.
And then you can start turning the lens upon your attention,
Upon you at your core,
Itself.
Or at least you can start searching for it.
So you start with the outer layer,
The thoughts,
The emotions,
The ruminations,
The things buzzing around in the storm of your mind.
But through mindfulness meditation,
Through sitting in silence,
Those thoughts start to dissipate,
Or at least you start to get a grounding sensation.
And then you start to start to observe what it's like to observe.
You know,
What is it like to pay attention to things?
What is it like to witness the flow of your mind?
And over time,
You'll start to do this in real time.
When you communicate with someone,
It's like,
Hey,
Okay,
This person is stirring up,
And they're like,
Oh,
I'm going to do this.
And then you start to see what's going on.
And then you start to see,
Hey,
Okay,
This person is stirring up these emotions in me.
What does that mean?
How am I feeling right now?
Oh,
That was interesting that I acted and responded like that.
How interesting.
You sort of become curious about yourself.
And over time,
You're developing this catalog,
This idea,
This conception of who and what you are.
And you start to see that you're not really a thing.
You're a process,
A change,
A flow.
All that I am is me in this moment right now.
Because once I've finished this recording,
I'm onto the next thing,
And then the next,
And then the next.
I'm no longer this person.
And likewise,
After you've listened to this recording,
You're no longer that person.
You'll be the next thing and the next.
Now,
Yes,
There's a continual sense of self,
But that sort of sits separately to the thing that you are.
And one of the interesting things you can do is to start looking into and searching for that sense of self.
And at least in my experience,
You'll struggle to find it.
Try and pin down where you're located.
Where are you?
Can you find yourself?
Because when I look,
I see a collection of thoughts and emotions and feelings and life-changing events and stuff happening,
But the meanness,
The part that's me,
The zachness is different.
You know,
Depending on my mood,
I feel like a different creature.
Depending on my other moods,
When I'm happy,
When I'm anxious,
When I'm jealous,
When I'm sad,
When I'm happy,
When I'm angry,
I'm a different thing.
Depending on the activity I'm doing,
I'm a different thing.
And beyond that,
When different people look at me in different contexts,
They see a different thing.
So what am I?
I'm ever-changing.
I'm growing.
I'm that state of flow.
So I encourage you to sit with this concept of who am I?
What am I?
Where am I?
Turn the camera inwards and start looking.
And note down what you see when you look inside.
And just that reminder of you may find darkness,
But that's okay.
You're the thing that's observing that,
And that darkness is not you.
It might be a part of you,
Or you might be experiencing it,
But you are more than it.
And the fact that you are the thing looking at it proves that to you.
There's the object,
In this case the darkness,
And then there's you watching that object.
And the fact that those things are different suggests that they are different,
That they're not the same thing.
One might be a part of the other,
But that's up for debate and discovery.
But rather the fact that you can observe it from a separate place from it suggests that you are indeed separate from it.
And when those thoughts and emotions and moods and feelings become overwhelming,
You can think back to this and you know that it's like,
Okay,
These are just stronger versions of what I was experiencing before.
So I strongly encourage you practice mindfulness meditation daily.
And every so often just ask yourself,
What do you see when you look inside?
When you look inside,
Where does your attention go?
An internal energy,
A power,
A flow.
When you observe the breath,
What do you see?
A play of consciousness,
A freedom,
Serenity,
A sense of freedom,
A space,
An ideal.
