[APPLAUSE]
[MUSIC]
So mindfulness is a way to train your attention using your ordinary senses and
perceptions. Maybe you've heard about it. There's this explosion of research
that's validating its many benefits--the way it helps people manage stress,
reduce their anxiety, and even sleep better. I was
skeptical about these claims, because I have kind of a natural talent for stress.
One time I was stressed out on vacation after a massage...
>> [LAUGHTER] >> At a hot springs spa resort...
And I kept thinking how I wanted to take a picture of this place. Because it
would help me relax when I got back to the job I was dreading returning to.
So that gives you an idea of what I was up against. But I decided, I'm going to
give this mindfulness a try. So I've been practicing every day for 13 years.
And I noticed that it started to quietly
transform the way I was living my life,
when I stopped trying to get the outcomes I was hoping for, and
instead put my attention on doing the exercises required to get there.
It reminded me what I already knew about physical fitness.
If you take the stairs and
you notice your heart starts to beat faster, maybe your legs start to burn,
you don't say to yourself, oh, I must be taking the stairs wrong, right?
>> [LAUGHTER] >> You say,
this is what taking the stairs feels like. And
if we always take the elevator in order to save time and avoid discomfort,
we just miss opportunities for developing our physical health.
And it's the same thing, it works the same way. So many people try mindfulness and
they're convinced they're doing it wrong, so they give up. And
they miss an opportunity to change their relationship with discomfort.
And if you expect your everyday life to be free of discomfort and
confusion, you're going to spend all your energy worrying,
trying not to feel what you feel, and saying,
this messy life is not my real life. So what keeps us holding out for
these perfect, comfortable lives that we imagine? And
how can training your attention help address these habits?
There's an underlying story problem built into the way we relate to our lives.
It feels like I'm a character navigating all these challenges in order to
get somewhere. And this narrative structure is incredibly useful.
It helps me decide what's important. It makes it possible to work towards and
achieve goals--but there's a problem. My obstacles
don't seem to be part of what I consider my actual life.
They feel like temporary annoyances that I have to push through in order to get to
what's on the other side. But very often it turns out what's
on the other side of my obstacles ends up not being the relief I'm hoping for.
Am I the only one? It ends up being another obstacle, and
I have a spoiler alert here... This pattern keeps repeating and
repeating, and we end up waiting for,
habitually waiting for what's ever happening to pass. And
this dilemma scales all the way down to the moment-by-moment experience--all
these little looping stories of waking up on time, and trying to get to work, and
going to meeting, and dealing with difficult people, deciding what to eat...
And maybe the best we can do is sometimes comfort ourselves with the idea
of evenings and weekends and vacations, right? But
it's at this moment-by-moment scale where the work of mindfulness occurs,
all these little places where we distract ourselves and go onto autopilot.
But mindfulness isn't a solution to your story problem, so
don't cancel your therapy appointment. It's not a narrative solution at all.
It's actually a solution for
the problem of living within these narrative constraints.
And any time that you habitually check out,
starts to become an opportunity for checking in.
So let me give you a little exercise that you can use in any situation.
All you have to do is pause to notice some sensory detail of
your current experience. Let's give this a quick spin. For
just a few seconds, what's it like to see? It's easy.
What's it like to hear? What's it like to notice some sensation in your body?
So that's probably the shortest exercise workout I've ever led,
but...what I'm hoping you'll do is compare it to what you already know
about physical fitness. One push-up is not very impressive, it seems kind of trivial.
But we know that if we make a habit and we do several push-ups a day,
over weeks we're going to start noticing more strength in our upper body. So
instead of trying to be mindful,
what if you tried to notice what's happening? Every time you stop and
pay close attention to what's happening, you disrupt that narrative,
that narrative of your life from inside your story.
Instead of trying to live in the moment, what if you just started to sneak
this kind of noticing into your routine? When you take a shower,
what would it be like to actually feel the water hitting your body or
smell the shampoo? What would it be like to taste your coffee?
What if you notice what it looks like to see the screen in your hand and,
once in a while, look up and see what's right in front of you,
right? Any activity that doesn't require much thinking will work for this. And
it turns out there's a lot more of them than you realize once you start looking.
And nobody needs to know that you're doing this.
In fact, I recommend you kind of keep it to yourself.
>> [LAUGHTER] >> I've kind of learned from experience that nobody wants to
hear about the relaxation you're savoring in your legs during a meeting.
>> [LAUGHTER] >> And
the details you notice don't need to be pleasant.
What's it like to run late? What's it like to be standing in
the slowest line in the grocery store? What's it like to watch your windshield
wipers as you're waiting for the light to turn green? Your strategy for
living in the present will go a lot better when you accept how frequently the present
sucks. >> [LAUGHTER]
[APPLAUSE]
>> So I've been describing a way to pay attention in the midst of ordinary life.
But there's also a formal version of the practice you might be familiar,
where you pick something to notice over and over again for a set amount of time.
So maybe 10 or 15 minutes, you notice what it feels like to breathe.
You might notice what it's like to hear sounds around you. And
whenever you realize that you've completely lost contact with that,
you just gently bring your attention back. This timed practice is what everybody
thinks is the only thing that counts, and I want to challenge this assumption.
The timed practice is intended, it's like going to the gym.
It supports your ability to be attentive throughout out the rest of the day.
So you might notice relaxation during your timed practice, and
then check in throughout the day to see if there's something restful at all that you
can detect and savor. So, one time I was teaching a class,
and it wasn't a mindfulness class, but it was the first night.
I get a phone call and I had the start time wrong, so I was late and
I didn't realize it. There's a classroom full of people waiting across town for
me. So I spent this whole evening toggling back and
forth between the course content and how rattled I felt. My senses were heightened,
my face was hot, my breath was shallow, I felt embarrassed. It was super-vulnerable.
And over the next three weeks, during my formal practice time, it became about
observing all the related feelings and thoughts. And then, throughout the day,
I would check in to notice, can I detect any of those flavors emotionally?
And they were always there, simmering on a back burner.
And I think people would be surprised to know that,
if you saw me sitting every morning for those three weeks, you would say, oh,
he looks so relaxed. He's not moving, I want some of what he's having.
But inside, it was a total shit storm. >> [LAUGHTER] >> And
I wasn't doing it wrong. This is what my embarrassment and
the reverberations felt like. I think people would also be surprised
to discover that the catharsis I felt during that time was worth every moment of
turning towards that icky garden-variety discomfort instead of pushing it away.
The narrative mode of attention wasn't always our default.
Louise Gluck says, We look at the world once, in childhood.
The rest is memory. Noticing that you're alive is a taste that adults
have to reacquire. People think they don't have time to practice paying attention in
the way I'm describing, but I think what we really resist is being willing to
set aside our unresolved story problems, even for a few seconds.
And I'm not advocating noticing every sensation, all the time.
Instead of trying to put your story aside for even 15 minutes a day,
what would it be like if you limited your worrying, and
your numbing, and your unconsciousness to 23 hours and 45 minutes?
You don't have to try to be mindful, you don't have to be relaxed.
Just by remembering to notice again and again that this messy life,
with its one obstacle after another, really is your life.
And that it's possible to train your attention so that you feel more at home,
both in your story and in the direct experience of living. Thank you.
>> [APPLAUSE]