Latest / Fierce Encouragement / Healing Power of Focus

Transcript

Healing Power of Focus · Fierce Encouragement

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_00: Hey there, my name is Mark Walker, and this is the Fierce Encouragement Podcast.
• 0:06
  SPEAKER_00: Now, this is part of a group of podcasts that I'm building out that talk about personal development and more pointedly about consulting and coaching and helping people become the best versions of themselves.
• 0:19
  SPEAKER_00: Fierce Encouragement specifically is about how we talk to, listen to ourselves, and how we can connect to that best version of ourselves and encourage ourselves instead of having that sour negative story kind of ever present in our mind.
• 0:35
  SPEAKER_00: Now, why do I talk about this?
• 0:37
  SPEAKER_00: Well, in the past few years, this is something I've noticed in myself, but also in connecting with others and supporting them, that a lot of people, from leaders all the way to new students and people coming into the career uh workplace, have a really difficult time in how they talk to themselves, how they connect to their deeper purpose, how they love themselves.
• 1:00
  SPEAKER_00: So that's what that's what this podcast is about.
• 1:03
  SPEAKER_00: That's what we're looking at.
• 1:04
  SPEAKER_00: I want to connect with other teachers and coaches and leaders too, talk about how they do it in a positive way, how it improves them, their teams.
• 1:13
  SPEAKER_00: And I really want to kind of get into the science and the subjective stories and some of the ancient wisdom uh that can help our lives get better every day with fierce encouragement.
• 1:24
  SPEAKER_00: And because, you know, why?
• 1:26
  SPEAKER_00: Because we hang out with ourselves every darn day.
• 1:29
  SPEAKER_00: If we can get along with ourselves better and we can change our mind little by little and think about the good we have to offer, we can start to feel a shift towards a feeling or a sense of flourishing in our lives, towards doing what we're made to do.
• 1:46
  SPEAKER_00: We'll be smiling more, we'll be loving better, we'll be learning, but we'll also be creating that balance in ourselves.
• 1:54
  SPEAKER_00: So, what did I want to talk about today?
• 1:57
  SPEAKER_00: Well, I wanted to talk about the healing power of focus.
• 2:05
  SPEAKER_00: And so, what do I mean by focus?
• 2:08
  SPEAKER_00: Um, we can kind of focus our attention and awareness.
• 2:12
  SPEAKER_00: We can also focus our energy.
• 2:15
  SPEAKER_00: We can share our attention and awareness outward with our family and friends and our loved ones.
• 2:23
  SPEAKER_00: But to begin with, I I want to talk about kind of like where it all starts, and that's focusing our attention and our awareness.
• 2:34
  SPEAKER_00: That is what I mean by focus, and I'm thinking of William James, who often talked about how a wandering attention is not a healthy or happy mind or a good place to be.
• 2:50
  SPEAKER_00: He even went so far to say that the root of a good education system should help us voluntarily bring back that wandering attention, and that'll help us bring in more character and judgment and balance and even that willpower into our life.
• 3:12
  SPEAKER_00: I found that very true in the past 10 to 12 years of my practicing more meditation and going deeper with meditation teachers and kind of exploring some of those deeper modes of practicing, or at least thinking and being educated on what the mind is and what the mind state.
• 3:36
  SPEAKER_00: So when we talk about focus, that's what my intention here is bringing back that wandering attention over and over and over again.
• 3:45
  SPEAKER_00: And so I guess it's it's a good place to start by identifying what focusing is, and then we can get into the healing.
• 3:52
  SPEAKER_00: So when we bring back our wandering attention over and over, sometimes that's a really hard place to start for people.
• 3:59
  SPEAKER_00: I know it was over a decade ago for me.
• 4:02
  SPEAKER_00: I spent a lot of my time ruminating, worrying, planning, remembering, feeling guilty, feeling spaced out, um, kind of going after those ecstasy or pleasure or those hedonistic things, right?
• 4:18
  SPEAKER_00: Trying to fill my day with the things I thought what were a good life.
• 4:25
  SPEAKER_00: And it's not to say that they were all bad, but my focus was scattered.
• 4:32
  SPEAKER_00: And it still is.
• 4:34
  SPEAKER_00: It really is.
• 4:34
  SPEAKER_00: You know, the mind is always moving and going.
• 4:37
  SPEAKER_00: But I believe that the habit of bringing back that wandering attention, coming to a point of focus and kind of working with that resistance that shows up there, that's the seed or the seat of a healthy mind.
• 4:56
  SPEAKER_00: And if we don't have kind of that base ability to bring back that wandering mind, to bring back that rumination or that kind of self-criticalness, it's really hard to practice fierce encouragement.
• 5:08
  SPEAKER_00: It's really hard to heal to any degree, and it's really difficult to kind of separate our thinking from our mind itself.
• 5:21
  SPEAKER_00: And perhaps if you've practiced any meditation, even small bits of it, you've noticed the space between one thought and another.
• 5:30
  SPEAKER_00: You've noticed the gap, as we talked about in the last episode, where our mind, if we can get good at resting and get good relaxation in the body and just notice the mindscape or the mind state, that we aren't necessarily the content of our thoughts, but maybe more of the awareness behind it, more of the mindfulness, if you will, kind of bringing back and being mindful of the body, being mindful of the feelings and sensations, being mindful of the mind, the thinking and the planning and the worrying, or the rumination and the concern about something that's already done and passed.
• 6:21
  SPEAKER_00: So when our purpose is tied up or tied to the idea of focusing, and we practice bringing our mind back again and again and again, having that ability literally helps us build up our character.
• 6:36
  SPEAKER_00: It builds up our judgment and our willpower to show up when the proverbial shit hits the fan in our lives.
• 6:45
  SPEAKER_00: So we practice in those small moments, moment to moment, on a meditation practice or on the cushion, or even in those three-minute mindset methods that I share on my website.
• 6:59
  SPEAKER_00: When we practice in those three-minute chunks, once, twice, three times a day, it really starts to give us the ability to notice our awareness, our thoughts.
• 7:10
  SPEAKER_00: We get more mindful of maybe the emotions that we have, maybe sensations in our body, or even the cognitive ability of the mind itself, kind of having this meta-awareness about your whole system.
• 7:26
  SPEAKER_00: When we practice in small moments like that, we do invite healing in.
• 7:31
  SPEAKER_00: And ancient wisdom and modern science is starting to agree more on things.
• 7:36
  SPEAKER_00: If our minds are jumping around and racing and ruminating on thoughts and plans and memories, we're just not training it well.
• 7:45
  SPEAKER_00: When we sit on our phones or on our computers and do long periods of work without rest and recovery and downtime, time for solitude.
• 7:56
  SPEAKER_00: When we don't do that, we're in an always-on state.
• 8:02
  SPEAKER_00: So healing is solitude.
• 8:09
  SPEAKER_00: Solitude is training the mind to return to an anchor or a focus like the breath or prayer for small periods of time.
• 8:23
  SPEAKER_00: And that healing happens through reacquainted or reoriented focus.
• 8:33
  SPEAKER_00: Healing comes through mindfulness of the body, the feelings, and being mindful of the mind, and perhaps being even more expansive, being mindful of our lives, temporality of it, um, how these days and months and years has fly by.
• 8:51
  SPEAKER_00: We've seen that or felt that with the change of the new year recently, at least when this podcast was recorded.
• 8:59
  SPEAKER_00: But we're always changing every day.
• 9:01
  SPEAKER_00: We can look at yesterday and last week.
• 9:04
  SPEAKER_00: We can plan for the future.
• 9:06
  SPEAKER_00: We can see those mind states that are out there in the future thinking about when it's going to happen.
• 9:13
  SPEAKER_00: Or we look backwards and wonder why it didn't happen, how I've gotten this old, and I'm still struggling with X or Y or Z.
• 9:27
  SPEAKER_00: Foundations of meditation and focusing aren't just the philosophical concepts, but they're to be experienced directly.
• 9:38
  SPEAKER_00: And so I had a good conversation with one of my clients recently talking about guided meditation.
• 9:45
  SPEAKER_00: And guided meditation is really good, especially for starting out with meditating.
• 9:51
  SPEAKER_00: It's also really important to create that solitude where those no inputs are coming in, no podcasts, no books, no screens, just taking that walk, or sitting in a quiet room by yourself for a few minutes, or kind of waiting in line at the grocery store without whipping out the phone.
• 10:12
  SPEAKER_00: Awareness and being mindful of our tendency to pull out our phone and kind of get that dopamine rush, right?
• 10:21
  SPEAKER_00: That's a literal fact of our phones.
• 10:23
  SPEAKER_00: Like they they've created these things to pull in our attention and awareness.
• 10:28
  SPEAKER_00: It's the attention economy.
• 10:32
  SPEAKER_00: They're literally coming after our time to reflect and to kind of downstate.
• 10:38
  SPEAKER_00: And I guess this is where I'll get into the healing portion, but when we make solitude, we literally give our neurobiology time to incorporate what we've ingested or what we've cataloged from our day or from our week.
• 10:55
  SPEAKER_00: When we give ourselves time away from the computers and the phones and the constant barrage of inputs that comes into our mind, we start to cultivate and integrate and assemble what we've learned into our greater cognition to use it better to help and support after the fact.
• 11:21
  SPEAKER_00: So I believe that that's very foundational to our being.
• 11:26
  SPEAKER_00: We didn't have the constant 24-7 on that we have now, uh, the always-on internet phone culture of kind of waking up right away and going to our phones and then staying plugged in all day to the point at night where we're doom scrolling right before sleep, and then we have trouble sleeping, and then we, you know, wake up with poor sleep and kind of start the process over again, kind of plugging in our minds to that attention that might be our social media or even our email or other habits that we have online.
• 12:02
  SPEAKER_00: So awareness starts with that.
• 12:04
  SPEAKER_00: The healing power of focus, concentrated in our ability to return in those moments, those moment-to-moment beingness.
• 12:15
  SPEAKER_00: So to kind of bring it all back, focus is our ability to bring back a wandering mind or wandering attention.
• 12:27
  SPEAKER_00: We rein this in, we can literally literally change and shift our lives.
• 12:32
  SPEAKER_00: I know from my experience, having really up and down emotional days.
• 12:39
  SPEAKER_00: Even in one day, I would go from uh high uh feelings of ecstasy down into the depths of despair and kind of riding this emotional roller coaster and feeling very beat up and worn out and burnt out by the end of it.
• 12:55
  SPEAKER_00: I didn't have much of a chance to breathe, it felt like sometimes.
• 12:59
  SPEAKER_00: And I was working with meditation early on with my meditation experience at that time.
• 13:05
  SPEAKER_00: I didn't know how quite to explain myself, but here I am looking back five, six years, and I tell you, bringing back that wandering attention, even for a few minutes a day, it's really helped lay the foundation or the groundwork for the way I can travel and work with my mind now.
• 13:27
  SPEAKER_00: So see this as a pathway towards creating healing, and by healing, I mean creating those literal neural pathways towards this fierce encouragement and this openness and this open-hearted nature we need to carry with ourselves.
• 13:44
  SPEAKER_00: Because beating ourselves up and talking poorly about ourselves when we're with ourselves all day is a very negative way to be.
• 13:53
  SPEAKER_00: It's a hard way to exist without feeling exasperated and burned out.
• 13:57
  SPEAKER_00: Let's try the opposite, let's fiercely encourage ourselves.
• 14:01
  SPEAKER_00: And one way to do that is to practice focusing.
• 14:06
  SPEAKER_00: Sit and practice.
• 14:08
  SPEAKER_00: If you need help creating a meditation and focusing practice and want help, let me know.
• 14:17
  SPEAKER_00: I specialize in taking people from zero meditation practice to starting a few minutes a day.
• 14:25
  SPEAKER_00: So if you need help at all, please reach out.
• 14:28
  SPEAKER_00: I'd love to talk to you about how focus can help you heal, how you can be the activator in that story.
• 14:38
  SPEAKER_00: And why do I talk about this and want to connect with people on it?
• 14:42
  SPEAKER_00: Well, it's changed my life.
• 14:44
  SPEAKER_00: It's literally changed my relationships and my family.
• 14:47
  SPEAKER_00: It helped me transverse the death and sickness of my father, but also just go through the last 10 years and bring a better presence into my own life.
• 15:01
  SPEAKER_00: So this is Mark Walker.
• 15:03
  SPEAKER_00: This is Fierce Encouragement, my new podcast that I'm bringing to people to help them learn how to encourage themselves better, but also have better relationships with themselves, with the others, the people in their lives, and just bring more of that goodness into the world.
• 15:18
  SPEAKER_00: Let me know how I can support you.
• 15:20
  SPEAKER_00: Otherwise, I appreciate your time.
• 15:21
  SPEAKER_00: You have a great day wherever you're at.
• 15:24
  SPEAKER_00: Take care.