[Music] mindfulness is actually a way of connecting with your life uh and it's something that uh doesn't involve a lot of energy it involves uh kind of uh cultivating attention in a particular way so what the way I Define it is it's paying attention on purpose in the present moment non-judging mentally and then I like to add sometimes as if your life depended on it because it does uh attention is the faculty that allows us to navigate our lives in one way or another and to actually know what's happening or know that we don't know what's happening and find ways to be in U a wiser relationship to things that are going on in our lives than than being at the mercy say of our own emotional reactions and crazy thoughts and uh fears and so forth so uh it's paying attention on purpose in the present moment non-judgmentally uh as if your life dependent on it so paying attention to what you might ask well it doesn't actually matter it's paying it's the attending itself that's important more important than what it is that you're paying attention to but that said um if you start to pay attention to how much attention we pay to anything you begin to notice that the mind is all over the place it never sits still it's got this idea and that opinion and this reaction and we spend a huge amount of time um planning and worrying about the future and a huge amount of time reminiscing about the past and who did what to whom or why it worked out this way or why it didn't work out this way and the present moment which is the only time that we're ever alive in the only time we could learn anything express any kind of love or emotion the only time we could be in our own body the only time we can see or hear or smell or taste or touch or uh communicate is now and yet the present moment gets completely squeezed out by all of our preoccupation with the future and the past when we start to pay attention to our own mind and our own body it's like reclaiming your life mindfulness is not a technique uh although there are many many different ways to cultivate mindfulness it's actually a way of being being embodied being in some sense in equilibrium with the comings and goings of the outer world and even the comings and goings and the ups and downs of having a body which of course has its wonders and is also at sometimes seriously problematic when we're dealing with health problems of one kind or another or uh things that can happen to the body and as long as we have this capacity for awareness why not develop it much of the time if you think about our educational system and how we grow up we are trained more and more and more to get into thinking and thinking is wonderful stuff very powerful uh some of the you know greatest uh achievements of humanity come out of thought uh and out of imagination and out of creativity but the other piece of it that's equally as powerful uh as the capacity for thought is the capacity for awareness but we get no training in awareness and attention huge amount of training in thought so a lot of the time when we get into bed at the end of a long day we can't deal with our thoughts then we can't sleep they just kind of perseverate over and over and over again the same thoughts we want to shut them out the more you try to shut them out the more they come in and pretty soon you don't get to sleep or you wind up with a you know basically chronic anxiety or some kind of condition or other uh depressive rumination can spiral you into uh depression uh a little bit of sadness and then that triggers this kind of perseverating constantly what's wrong with me why don't people like me why didn't she look at me whatever it is these are all thoughts I'm no good I'm too old I you know my life is it's all downhill from here all of those things they're only thoughts but most of the time we think of them as the truth so what mindfulness does in a way is it Embraces the actuality of the Mind the heart the body and our relationality with the outer world and gives us new degrees of freedom to navigate the ups and the downs and the ins and outs of our relationships with life with other people with uh our own aspirations and our own fears and also and most fundamentally with our own body now most of us don't want to go anywhere near our own body except under very specialized circumstances at particular times it seems like wow it's wonderful to have these bodily experiences but a lot of the time we're just pretty much up here thinking thinking thinking thinking and really be believing so many of these thoughts as the truth that we wind up in a very narrow band of what's actually possible for us in terms of our Human Experience [Music]