Transcript

Mindfulness · Wanzology

Mindfulness Yo, yo, yo, yo, yo, yo!! Hey, how are you? Welcome to another episode of WANZOLOGY!!! I am your host, The Wanz, and yes, it's Wednesday, so you know what that means. First, I wanna make sure to greet you properly. I hope that you and yours, I hope you and yours are doing well in these very, very challenging times. Challenging doesn't quite describe it, now does it? It's crazy! In the '90s they used to say, "It's getting hectic. It's getting wild. It's getting hectic. It's getting wild." Man, they had no idea what they were talking about, it is hectic, and it is wild. Every day a new crisis, a new whatever. So how do you deal with that? Do you get kinda worked up about it? Nervous, maybe anxious? Do you not care? Do you worry that your family and friends are negatively affected by what's going on? How about your kids? Do your kids notice that maybe their parents are slightly more on edge than usual, worrying about how to make ends meet comfortably, providing for the greater good of the household? Maybe one of your parents has been laid off. Maybe you're taking care of one or both of your parents because they've reached that stage of life where they're not exactly able to take care of themselves anymore. There are a lot of challenges that are going on. I'm sympathetic to all of them, because we, as children, we depended on our parents, and now our parents are depending on us. They taught us everything that we started to know, and then we learned how to learn stuff on our own, but the basis of who we are, the root, the foundation, is what they instilled in us, one or both of them. So now when the tables have turned and the child is starting to take care of the parent, isn't it kind of odd that some parents just don't wanna listen? Like when you were a kid and you didn't wanna listen. Turnabout is fair play., but I digress. Again, I wanna stress everything is temporary And what we're going through as a nation, as a planet, is temporary. How do you deal with it? How do you get through it without losing your ever-loving mind? How do you go from day to day without totally spinning off the axis of the planet in your head? I don't know how some people do it, but what I'm proposing is take a look at something called mindfulness. Mindfulness is something that I've been goofing around with now for about a month, and the practice is actually fairly simple. You focus on whatever you want to, but it is suggested that you start out by focusing on your breath, the in and out, and all the little things you can feel or notice about just the practice of breathing. I've been told by the audiobook that I'm working with, your mind is gonna wander, that's what it does. There are a lot of people who I guess never feel like they're actually doing meditation correctly because their mind wanders off and then they lose interest. But your mind will go where it wants to, and you have to be conscious that it's left so that you can bring it back to focus on the breath. In, out, in, out. The mechanics of that, the science of that. How do you feel when you inhale? How do you feel when you exhale? What parts of your body do you notice when you're going through a cycle of breathing in and out? Now, all of those things are happening in the moment. It's challenging for me to understand that whole in the moment thing because I'm too much a child of Spock. I'm logical. A human being can't live in the moment because you can't live in a future moment, it's not here yet, and as soon as you recognize the moment that you're in, it becomes the past. So you're trying to find that space between the future and the past, which is now. Now. Now, or how about now? You get it? The challenge of living in the moment for me is daunting. It seems like it's a lot of work. But what I remember is what I figured out a couple years ago, time is a human constraint. It is created by humans. Humans are the only creature on the planet that worry about time. They are cognizant of their future and their past. Most animals, in fact, I'd say ninety-nine percent of all the other animals on the planet have no concept of now, later, then. None. None. My favorite thing on the planet is to watch toddlers and puppies. Toddlers and puppies have no concept of time. Everything is happening now and once it's happened, they really don't worry about it, they really don't worry about it. So the mindfulness practice is just that, it's practice. Practicing how to elongate time so that you can recognize what you are feeling in the moment. Now they say if you're anxious, you're in the future, and if you're guilty or you feel sad, you're in the past. So the only thing that's left is being in that space in the middle where you're just noticing things. And so far, the book has challenged me to notice things without judgment. How do you do that? Your mind, if your mind is like mine, always has an opinion. It always thinks about what is, isn't, should be, could be, wouldn't be, it goes round and round in circles all the time. So to get it to simplify is hard. It's really hard for me anyway. Your results may vary. I would encourage you, if you wanna try to get a taste of what this is like, after this podcast is over, set the stopwatch on your phone for two minutes. Make sure that when you start the clock, you put the phone down and there's nothing else. There's no radio or TV or any kind of interference or anything. Close your eyes and then just think about breathing in, breathing out, breathing in, breathing out, and how you feel when you breathe in and then when you breathe out. Notice what's going on in your body. Where are your hands? What do you feel under your feet? Is the chair or are you sitting on a bed? Is the chair hard? Does it have a cushion? Does it have a high back, a medium back? All these things are happening in the moment while you're breathing, and that is how mindfulness works. You're looking at all the things that are happening while you are engaged in an activity that you center your concentration around. If you can get good at it, and this is my goal, then you can call upon this anytime you're feeling a little sideways. Like I said earlier, if you're anxious, you're probably thinking about the future. If you can realize that you're in the future, you can bring yourself back to this moment when you start concentrating on your breathing. And then all of a sudden, you're not worried about what's going to happen because you're thinking about what's happening. If you're really, really sad and you're pretty sure that whatever's gonna happen is not gonna be good, same thing. You bring yourself out of that state of mind to the present state of mind centered around inhale, exhale, inhale, exhale, and all the other things that that affects. With an A, not E. Affects. Breathing is necessary, right? I say it all the time. I haven't got any problems until I stop breathing. If I stop breathing, then I have a problem. Everything else is just a challenge. And how do you get through a challenge? You get through it. You don't stop, look for a postcard or something, you get through it. Mindfulness seems like a tool that if I could get very good at it, it would help me get better at regulating my emotions. I know my-self (two words), can generate its own freaking weather when it comes to stress and reaction. I don't want to react. I want to respond. I want to take the time to understand what is happening around me rather than just react to what's happening around me and mindfulness seems to be the gateway to being able to do that. Feeling stressed out? Worried about this, that, or whatever? There are hundreds of relaxation techniques. Mindfulness is just one of them. But to me, it seems the most interesting because we have control over the perception of our own bodies. We don't regulate our breathing very much, but if we're thinking about it, well, then it becomes a priority. How long are you breathing in? How long are you breathing out? How long is the space between all the breath being gone from your lungs and your lungs being full? There's a technique called box breathing. You breathe in for a certain amount of seconds, and you hold it for a certain amount of seconds, and then you exhale for the same amount of seconds. And when you're done exhaling, then you hold the same amount of seconds. Then you repeat this cycle. In, hold, out, hold. In, hold, out, hold. Now, I found it really, really challenging to be able to do that for thirty seconds. Imagine doing it for like three minutes. You think you're gonna be focusing on what's going on in the world around you when you're trying to keep track of time and how much breath you've taken in and how much breath you're pushing out and how long it's taking to do either one of those things? More than likely not, and that's the point. Instead of worrying or concerning yourself with the things that are happening outside of your body, you're looking at what's happening inside your body. It's that inside of your body that drives your emotions, your thoughts, feelings, all those things. If you can harness an awareness of where you're at from toes to head at any given time, then the odds of you getting twisted around the axle decrease greatly, and this is why mindfulness has become very attractive to me. Again, mindfulness is nothing more than a meditation technique that focuses on the immediacy of what's going on in your body, using the breath as a focus point. In, out, in, out, and so on. First, you concentrate on just how the breath works. In, out, what happens? Things move, right? Things move, and you feel some sort of way. You can feel it physically when you're breathing. So when you're aware of that, what else can you be aware of? How do your fingertips feel? How do your elbows feel? How do your ears feel? These are the things that you can kind of take into consideration while you're breathing. That is the cornerstone of mindfulness. Like I said before, the goal is to help control the time it takes to react. I've been told that the difference between a reaction and a response is time. Some of us don't take that time. Fly off the handle at the drop of a hat. Been in traffic, somebody cuts you off, and it's like, "Rah, rah, rah, rah, rah," and you're just cussing your ass off. Somebody steps on your toe while you're waiting in line in the grocery, and you turn and look at them like you're gonna punch them in the face. But you hold, and you smile, and they say, "I'm sorry." And you say, "It's all right." And then life goes on. Reactions are immediate. That is our amygdala, our lizard brain protecting us. But a response requires thought. The thinking part of the brain, that frontal cortex, it takes it a bit to engage. Hence the whole breathing thing. When you think about your breathing, you're not just reacting, you're thinking about something which engages your frontal cortex. Now, in the moment when you're doing that, that's mindfulness. That's mindfulness. You're concentrating on what's happening right now inside of me. Not outside, inside. Life's an inside job, remember? That four inches between your ears is still the most dangerous place on the planet, and the more that you learn about it, the better your quality of life will be, it's that simple. Mindfulness. Let's, uh, end the podcast right here, and then I want you to go out and set a stopwatch on your phone for two minutes. Make sure nothing else is on. Start the timer, close your eyes, and breathe. Just think about the mechanics, the science of breathing. See if you can do that for two minutes. I hope it goes well for you. Thanks again for, uh, putting up with me. This has been another episode of WANZOLOGY! I am The Wanz, bidding you, adieu!!