This is not the only thing daily episode 1649. Why does being present matter? And do you take things personally? Both identity of Douglas with Woopa.com.
And it doesn't matter. The guy that reads every single day of the year, including weekends and holidays, people who are meaningful in positive life, two post-adables from Woopa.com. So let's get right to them as we optimize your life. Why does being present matter?
By gender be Douglas with Woopa.com? Be in the now. He said for about the 16 times this class, that he led us into a wide-legged forward bend. Be in the now.
OK. Focus on my 15 hamstrings. Now somewhere between a dull ache and a foaming burning feeling. I'm not sure what's so fantastic about this now.
Definitely not enjoying this. So I just run into my eyes. You. When we go to change poses, I really need to bend my knees.
I might be close to tearing a muscle. I might still in the now. I guess I'm frustrated. That's the now for me.
That's what I really want to be thinking. This is just a snippet of my crazy thought during the interview cycle of yoga class, which I was struggling to be mindful. Be in the now or be mindful or staying in the present are all phrases that I'd be going to lose their meaning for me. So let's refresh them.
Why? Be in the present. There's abundance of research forming around the benefits of meditation practice. Much a bit around mindfulness meditation, usually defined as paying attention in the present moment, non-judgmentally.
Here's just a light round up of a few of these findings. We stress worry, anxiety, depression, and anger, sense of greater well being even when mindful for just a moment, an increase of joy, hope, vitality, contentment, and inspiration, better ability to control emotional reactions, increase self-awareness, and improve the means of function. So how does mindfulness work? A Buddhist model mindfulness created by British Columbia researchers theorizes that every sensation we experience carries a feeling tone of pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral.
We experience thousands of sensations in the space of a second. So we usually don't even notice this feeling tone, but it's the subtle pleasantness that creates desire and the subtle unpleasantness creates aversion. For example, the uncomfortable tightness just below the ribs that indicates what we label hunger, creates a desire for food. Because there are some sensations passing so quickly, it's easy for our desires and versions to become habit and then identity.
As a result, we think we love chocolate or we don't like our mother-in-law or we need coffee every morning. Mindfulness allows us to break habits. Happies in the way we think, feel, and behave. It's not the thought that counts.
One most common way we can meditate is by focusing on your breath. You see, you can bring your entire attention without dividing it to your breath. Maybe the way it feels going in and out of your nose. Maybe the sense that some hairs are wiggling without one nostrils a little more restricted or whether the breath is smooth or jagged as it goes in and out.
But doing this alone is not necessarily a mindfulness practice. It's a concentration practice. During your concentration practice, thoughts and feelings are bound to float into your focus. The mindfulness comes in according to our mindfulness teacher, not the concentration.
This is where the opportunity to be different. She says, you can decide to let go of the thought and go back to the breath. You can decide not to judge yourself or your experiences. I was doing a lot of judging in my yoga class, I didn't like holding the pose or the sensation in my handstrings.
These are both judgments that I made about my experience. From those judgments came desire and desire to get out of the pose. As meditation teacher James Moroz points out, once you are noticing, you're no longer busy judging. Your attention is no longer bound up in liking or disliking because it's busy observing.
Just by noticing what you're desiring or what you have in version two, you're often freed from that desire or a version. Don't be put off by the formal practice. Noticing what you are aware of doesn't need to involve sitting cross-legged on a special pillow. The reason that you sit down and practice in quiet places is so that you can do it more easily during more distracting times.
Like when your yoga class in sweat is dripping into your eye. Noticing is key in breaking habits and forming new ones. It gives you space to shape your life. Do you take things personally?
I'm Genevieve Douglas with Woopaw.com. I was doing CrossFit for maybe the third time in my life, seeing that my yoga practice wasn't necessarily giving me enough strengthening or cardio. I've got a background as a yoga teacher and I've taken some anatomy classes. So I felt these things would give me a leg up on understanding proper form for weightlifting.
I haven't been there with a friend or a friend, Jack, who's been doing CrossFit for quite a while over a year at least. Anyway, Jack was holding his breath while lifting heavy weight and seemed to be struggling. So I pulled in that exhaling, we give him more muscle support in his core. Though I know you heard me just silently looked ahead and continued on holding his breath.
He seemed really uncomfortable and was clearly not following my suggestion. Then I became uncomfortable. I fixated on this peculiar interaction wondering why he wouldn't listen to me. After all, I have some background in fitness and he doesn't.
Why do you think he knows better than I do? Why isn't he respecting my thoughts? It took me longer than I'd like to admit to notice that I was being really protective of my identity as a yoga teacher. I focused narrowly on myself.
Later, I found out that he had specifically been taught to hold his breath by the gym where he first learned looking from. So this is what he knew to be correct. It took her to me that maybe he was drawing on some other information he had. I mean, assumption that he was actively disagreeing with me specifically and that took things personally.
I think there are a lot of things I could pull out of this interaction, the self-focused spiral, the ruminating, the implications of respect. But what's not most of me, after reflecting on it, was how much I'd call him to my yoga teacher identity. I recently been attending Buddhist dormitog at various places and the concept of identity is covered in an audit or not self. The notion of not self is not that you don't have a self, but that no one thing is yourself.
It says that no one thing defines you and you are always changing. For example, I'm not a yoga teacher, but someone who sometimes teaches yoga. I'm not a writer, but I sometimes write. What's the benefit of thinking about it this way?
It puts space between you and one particular identity. It helps in moments like the one with Jack allowing me to step back and listen to him without any expectation one way or another. I don't need to know everything about the subject and I don't need to see it as offensive if someone doesn't take my suggestions. Instead, thinking of myself as not that is me afraid to be whatever I need to be in any situation.
If I'd been looking at the situation without clinging so much to this identity, I could have seen that Jack didn't mean it personally. He just had his own technique. He just listened to the post titled, Why Does Being Present Matter? And do you think personally?
Both by Genevievedugles with Wupa.com. Now, to do it for today, have a great rest of your day and we back tomorrow as usual. We're optimal life. Thank you.