Hello, I'm The ASMR Psychologist. Welcome to my channel.
Today, I'm going to be reading to you from one of my favourite books about mindfulness—this
book, here, ‘Full Catastrophe Living: How to cope with stress, pain and illness using
mindfulness meditation', by Jon Kabat-Zinn. Now, if you've missed my previous readings
from this book, you can watch them, here—they should pop up on the screen.
Now, I'm not reading the whole of this book, but what I'm doing is I'm picking out the
seven attitudes to mindfulness, and these are, basically, approaches to life that you
can adopt, even if you aren't ready to take on a formal mindfulness practice. They can
help you to, I suppose, focus on what is important, they can keep you present, and allow you,
or enable you, to get the most that you possibly can out of your life.
So, so far, I've read to you about ‘non-judging, ‘patience’, and ‘beginner's mind’.
Today, I'm going to be reading to you about 'trust'.
Just remove my bookmark there. Okay, so, if you're sitting comfortably,
I will begin.
Developing a basic trust in yourself and your
feelings is an integral part of meditation training. It is far better to trust in your
intuition and your own authority—even if you make 'mistakes' along the way—than always
to look outside of yourself for guidance. If at any time something doesn’t feel right
to you, why not honour your feelings? Why should you discount them or write them off
as invalid because some authority or some group of people think or say differently?
This attitude of trusting yourself and your own basic wisdom and goodness is very important
in all aspects of meditation practice. It can be particularly useful in yoga. When
practising yoga, you will have to honour your own feelings when your body tells you to stop
or to back off in a particular stretch. If you don’t listen, you might injure yourself.
Some people who get involved in meditation get so caught up in the reputation and authority
of their teachers that they don’t honour their own feelings and intuition. They believe
that their teacher must be much wiser and a more advanced person, so they think they
should imitate him and do what he says without question, and venerate him as a model of perfect
wisdom. This attitude is completely contrary to the spirit of meditation, which emphasises
being your own person and understanding what it means to be yourself. Anybody who is imitating
somebody else, no matter who it is, is heading in the wrong direction.
It is impossible to become like somebody else. Your only hope is to become more fully yourself.
That is the reason for practising meditation in the first place. Teachers and books and
tapes can only be guides—signposts. It is important to be open and receptive to what
you learn from other sources, but, ultimately, you still have to live your own life—every
moment of it. In practising mindfulness, you are practising taking responsibility for being
yourself and learning to listen to and trust your own being. The more you cultivate this
trust in your own being, the easier you will find it to be to trust other people more and
to see their basic goodness as well.
Okay. Now, obviously, there, Jon Kabat Zinn
was talking very much about trust in relation to meditation practice, but I think that we
can take this idea and use it just in our day-to-day lives. Even if we're not going
anywhere near a meditation practice, just carrying that idea with you, turning it around
in your mind, is really powerful. You don't need to do anything more than that. Think
about it, hold it in your mind, and you will notice that it starts to influence how you
think, how you feel, and what you do, and it will strengthen your self-belief and your
confidence—ultimately, your happiness. Okay, so, that was a slightly shorter video,
today, but I hope that it was still interesting and enjoyable.
If you like this type of video, this ASMR mindfulness, then let me know by giving the
video an up thumb, so that I know to make more of them. And if you would like to support
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Okay, so, I hope you enjoy the rest of your day.
Thank you for watching, and I will, hopefully, see you very soon.
Bye-bye.