#413 - Cory Allen - How To Use Mindfulness In Daily Life

we are in nature and we're a part of nature so the idea of saying well i'm not going to respond to my environment like you are the environment the way of looking at reality is as if you can just create this wall between reacting completely to what's happening out there it's like you're out there too you know it's like someone that's in traffic and that guy hate all this traffic it's like your traffic yeah and so that way of thinking to me is unrealistic and doesn't really fall through all the way cory allen welcome yes sir thank you thank you for having me in your city it's my absolute pleasure thank you for coming to the city i know man it's been very good it's been a shame we haven't seen each other until now for professional purposes but we've made it work we've spoken previously a lot about mindfulness you've got still my favorite ever guided meditation course and i wanted to try and have a discussion today where we can help people who are into mindfulness who practice it when they can or practice it regularly to try and take their theory and the work that they do during their mindfulness practice off the cushion so to speak into the real world trying to get some practices some triggers some examples of how people can stay mindful and create the mindfulness gap in their everyday lives whether that be with family when emotions arise during situations to help them feel more present and mindful and live a life which is richer and also to be able to distance themselves from their emotions to stop themselves from identifying with things so where would you start let's say someone comes to you and says glory i want to try and take my practice off the cushion where would someone even begin yeah um well i think that the first place someone would start would just be focusing on their actions like their physical actions more uh with more attention right so just paying a bit more attention to as you're going throughout the day like not just letting your hands do something sort of by itself actually as you're going to pick up your coffee mug or whatever just notice the fact that it's happening just notice it having and notice the feel of the cup and tap more into the sensory experience of your experience more often you know and by doing that even of course you're doing your own breath during throughout the day um even when you're walking just note the fact in your mind i'm walking i'm walking there's a foot you know planting planting planting interesting you can whenever you start by doing that what you're doing is basically tuning yourself in to the sensations within your sense doors you know all your your five senses and then the plus one which is consciousness you know in buddhism there's they add that as a sixth sense there's mental formations and for a good reason i can share later um but essentially getting tuned into how you're you know just being in a body in the world and being aware of what you're experiencing when you're experiencing it that would be step number one because even focusing on that alone that simple thing like make it completely secular take away all of the all the other stuff that meditation mindfulness may have to offer and even take away all the insights pluck some random person off the street and say hey try this as an experiment pay a little bit more attention to just your sensory navigation of your day and just see what happens and what happens is that a person can't help but not you the mind begins to train begins to focus more on that as opposed to being caught in this this what most people are calling to live an unexamined life or this automatic causal type of repercussion momentum of of life where they have all their their programming the chance of their life the happenstance of where they were born who their parents are the experiences that they've had and so forth and so forth and what happens is that in all that conditioning you know the conditioning of what you should think who you should be how you should whatever um you just go along kind of reacting to everything that you experience and in that um people spend a lot of time unfocused in their their mental area just their general conceptual view and connection with their present moment of experience and because of that because there's no focus on this it's all kind of this drifting sort of um mental kind of junkyard of stuff that's happening up there just lack of focus yeah one thing that i find quite interesting it's nicely touched on touch is the first one you know one of those days where you you notice yourself being lost in your own thoughts it's almost like you're walking through your own dream in a weird way and you're very much just on automatic mode one of the things i do i think it happens sometimes when i'm driving in the car is trying to grip the steering wheel and feel it's got little perforations under the steering wheel and just really really try and get very very clear about how that feels underneath my hands it's so strange that that seems to pull me out of it but john bevakey guy canadian psychologist guy has some really nice experiments you can do around this so everybody most people that are listening are wearing clothes right um but you don't feel the sensation of the clothes on your skin unless you focus on them let's say that you've got a pair of shoes on you don't feel the pressure of the shoe around your foot you don't feel the seat underneath your bum you don't feel the ground underneath your feet you don't feel the wind on your skin you don't feel the breath in your lungs all of these sensations are there at the forefront of consciousness ready for you to tap into ready for you to feel present look at how many layers there are and i've just named some clothes that people wear some items that are attached to their body you can feel the sensation of a t-shirt that's just pushing on the front and on the back of your body it's there all day how is it you don't notice it because you're not paying attention now would it do for you to spend your entire day lost in the world of your t-shirts pressure on your skin might be a suboptimal way to live your life however it shows that that is there for you at all times and that's such a cool practice i need to do that more yeah absolutely and really um you know we're kind of jumping out a little bit but the the focal point that one wants to get to after a period of mindfulness and meditation training is finding this this buoyancy between the macro view of self just kind of the overhead view of like oh i'm a person that's existing in a body and the highly focused view like as you mentioned like oh what's the sensation my t-shirt only the real sweet spot is between those things and continued practice makes it to where the transition between those two states is extremely not only natural and fluid but instinctual as well so if you read the actual original mechanical commentaries on your mindfulness training which is a very small part of a huge um dialogue a way to describe it is if you're looking at a tree in the distance you want to be as focused on the tree as you are in the field as well equal balance on the big picture and the individual thing and that as it's a truism but it's also as an analogy to as you go throughout the day you always want to try and be focused on the big picture to a degree in an equal balance with a focus precise point of attention and focus but allowing having the relationship between those two things be such that it shifts instinctually based upon what your response is into your current moment experience how can someone bring more of that into their life yeah well meditation certainly is a key a key way because first most people are stuck in um focus mind but it has no aim so they're sort of zeroing in on one little tidbit and another tidbit another tidbit another tidbit and that's what people feel like whenever someone says oh well my my mind is crazy i have too many thoughts going on i can't focus anything i think i'm add or whatever someone might say that's just because they're leaned way into this ultimately what it is is a panic state that's where most people are is because if no one if a person doesn't train themselves in whatever modality that they have to move the body over to a parasympathetic nervous system state then they spend all their time in the kind of amygdali fight or flight or fight or flight adjacent state and that's where most people are because being as i was saying earlier being in the state of conditioned awareness and conditioned mind of what you should experience what you should think how you should act to x y z or what someone says um that also goes to just the contents of life as well so people are continuously just reacting to everything all the time instead of engaging with it with a sense of self-awareness and um ultimately whenever you you are in this panic state because there's so much stuff especially now with you know social media and just all the technology stuff there's so many things to focus on is people just going from one thing to the next thing the next thing and what happens is that's really just juicing the amygdala brain or part of the brain like an orange and so you're in this panic reactive state all the time that's like people that say oh well i'm an achiever i'm crushing all the time i'm doing i'm working like you know 4 a.m 10 p.m i have 9 000 meetings and all this stuff i'm doing all these things i'm really like feeling good and doing it's like no you're caught in a panic state because you're going from one thing to the next thing but you're mistaking the the um like serotonin release of constant low-level craving like basically taking a bunch of like a thousand little tiny hits of a drug over and over but you're not actually feeling you know really good you're just kind of like a rat hitting a feeder bar in a lab experiment right we spoke about this earlier we were talking about the fact that now the most important skill that you can have in the 21st century is to be able to filter information you don't need to be able to scavenge for more there is more information than we need the smartest people on the planet are the ones who are actually able to effectively discern noise and signal and spread those apart right that's what people need to be able to do and i suppose that on a personal level as well you need to work out okay what are the stimuli that i want to have in my life what are the things i want to continue to allow it one of the ones that i want to get off so we've got a somatic practice or a focus on the body what is it that i'm sensing doing that connecting with that i'm picking up this glass how does the food taste how does the fork taste and feel in my mouth etc etc what would be the next step yeah so then actually moving to some type of like sitting practice i think is really valuable um and i know you mentioned taking off the mat but in terms of what we're talking about here this is someone who has no mat at all right so let's say even if someone doesn't want to say well i want to start meditating as you mentioned just let's parse out some of the noise right so having a moment of time in your day that's scheduled in if you have to where you're shutting down the phone you're shutting down the computer you know in turning things off just having a space of quiet and stillness that you can exist in for you however long you can what would you prescribe for someone that is keen to do this people that are listening will be familiar with mindfulness practices yeah some people will have a semi-regular one that they wish was probably a bit more regular i would imagine that that's a big chunk of the audience so what would you say is your prescription to try and aim for how long how frequent yeah i if you can't at least half an hour i mean that's right because you think about like people think that sounds like a lot of stuff you know someone will sit down and watch a half hour episode of something on netflix or whatever and that's a half hour you know it's not that long and there's time that fits into the day it's just about dedicating that time to that we think about before bed or after like i know some people like people that they wake up the first half hour of their day is just reading or you know and so you can plug these things into life and really just having that time in there what it does is it just starts to desaturate the senses you know and it stops it takes away some kind of chewing gum that the intellect has always trying to focus on something because if you're always engaged with a phone or a social situation or some type of entertainment then what you're doing is you're really ignoring your inner self right because you're always just you're externally involved with something else it's a form of distraction and that's why people stay so intensely plugged into those things is because they're staying intentionally distracted oftentimes from something that they don't want to acknowledge or they don't want to feel you know so if i go if i go out six nights a week i never have to think about why i feel whatever whatever way i'll never forget i was in a relationship with a girl while i was at uni and we were breaking up it was my choice and uh she was upset and she was she said something to the effect of um i don't want to go back to having to go out all the time and that blew me away because implicit in that is if i'm not with someone i can't bear to not go out all the time right and that scared me and that really made me i mean one thing it said this was the right decision because if this person has if they struggle so much with being on their own with not having a sense of validation personally that they need to go and get it sort of publicly yeah that's a pretty malignant part of their life uh but it stuck with me man that was fucking 12 13 years ago just some random tiny little line i don't have to go back to going out all the time it's so crazy how stuff like that sticks with you know i always think about this think about all the stuff all the interactions that you've had with people on your podcast in meditation sessions or you've met somebody in the street and some throwaway fucking line that you just decide to say someone can keep with them for 60 years but no reason it might not be profound yeah that one was like a profound insight but it could just be a thing the funny way that you said fortune or whatever you know like just some random shit it's so mad how that happens we don't know the uh legacy that our interactions carry with them another reason why mindfulness is important because you're more aware of what you're saying when you're saying it and so you're not the chance of saying one of those things with a positive effect is much higher because you have this intentionality about what you're saying as opposed to just talking shit freely and you know maybe you get someone the wrong idea based off just something that you're carelessly saying and then they take that as a script to move forward with you know i was just recently reflecting on what this isn't really connected anything other than how those little kind of earworms get into your brains i was recently thinking about one of those um so probably like almost 20 it was 20 years ago at this point i was working at a bookstore and to find see if this bookstore had to take a book you find you look up in one system and there's like a 10-digit number and you type that into another system that would show you if you had or not so there's an older gentleman that was in there and i was you know like 19 or 20 or something and he said you have this and i looked and i got a pen and paper because i found that number i wanted to write down and he goes oh i gotta write this down so i can put it in there they said no no you can you can do that like let's think for a second like it's 10 numbers or whatever like look at them what are they like remember them you've got you know five seven nine whatever and he said we can totally do this and i was like okay and i remember i did it and then i remember them repeated them in my mind and then typed them in and like boom got it right and for whatever reason that just stuck with me where i was like hold on a second like i shouldn't default to just not engaging with my intellect in my brain in moments because i either think it's not possible or you're just oh we should have been in favor why it's one of those conditioning things it's like because as a group in society it's something that people default to saying you should grab a piece of pen in favor instead of um just you know kind of leveling up a little bit and engaging and saying actually i'm gonna apply my mind to this life needs to be lived by design not default because so many of the default settings that we've got are horseshit they're so bad and i don't know whether you did it i imagine you probably do um did you ever as a kid make little games for yourself about how quick you get up the stairs oh if i can get up the stairs this quickly or maybe if i can jump over if i can go up in twos or whatever it might be oh yeah just those those little things kind of like that i do that as well i try and come up with dumb dumb little tests yeah for something you know i've got to remember a string of numbers for somebody's phone number and i'll go out of my way to make it not a big deal kind of like a little a little challenge for myself but that's the same compulsion that i had as a kid while i was saying what if i if i throw this basketball in on the next three goals and i'm gonna become a millionaire whatever it might be you know that's like dumb stuff yeah yeah definitely i used to this sounds weird saying out loud but that's why i'm sharing so i was a little kid you play with your toys in the bathtub perhaps um if you're lucky enough to have such a thing and uh as a look at i would get um like ziploc bags you know like these plastic bags and i'd get like a toy and i would put it in there and i would put food coloring in there and i would get packaging tape and a swiss army knife and i would play surgery so if i could cut the bag open and extract the toy with like not leaking a certain amount of red colored you know water and then take the clothes all underwater then i was like a successful surgeon look at you now a successful surgeon successful surgeon yeah if you have anything you need to take care of all that preparation is really done well all right so we've got the somatic practice we've got making sure that we've got intentionality when we're doing things when we're actually engaging with our minds yeah we've got a seated practice which you said for about half an hour i think personally for me half an hour really pushes the limit i think that i worked up from 10 to 15 and then 15 to 20 and as i start to go over 20 i'm like wow this is a that goes from it being a something that my compliance is high to something my compliance is that's even just like sitting like laying in bed without anything okay yeah just just yeah just stillness just quiet like shutting up the noise because that's for someone that doesn't want to try and meditate just like turn off the static for a while every day you know that's really cleansing to the mind and that will actually draw your awareness inward because this is one of the big things is that like when you're always engaged with like content or data or some type of distraction you can't hear your own voice because you're always thinking in relation to whatever the other thing is and so shut all that out and think what am i thinking right now not what am i reacting or whatever to you know because you're co-regulating your your consciousness by constantly being engaged with external material yes yeah dude here's an awesome hack for that just drive in the car without any music on without anything in your ears this was something that i started doing when i went to the drive to the office is about 15 minutes and it was so good i'm already driving i'm doing something which is sufficiently system one that i don't really need to think about it right you're not thinking about driving when you're driving unless you're really bad driver and there are some awful drivers in austin i'm gonna segue austin has the most barbell strategy drivers i've ever met in my life everybody is either an ex rally car driver or a danger on the road that shouldn't have a license there is no one in between there are people that are amazing people are terrible but um driving to work with silence is so good and you're doing the drive anyway and it's sufficiently passive it's probably not going to matter that's a great way to do it i think yeah no that's a good way to do it and so the point of doing all that would be to start to withdraw somewhat from the continuous kind of panic mode of always dealing with something and give yourself a chance to slip into that very sympathetic mode right so by doing that you then that's the rest and digest zone where you become less um frantically focused on things less kind of anxiety and more calm full more serotonin releasing more self-aware heartbeat slows down breath becomes more shallow you know and in that state um you're of course feeling good that's where most people would like to be and that's ultimately after you meditate for 10 minutes or whatever that's where you will switch over to um but doing that getting into that state consciously through even just sharing some noise or some type of formal meditation practice easy breathing practice um that will begin to bring balance because if you're always in that fight or flight mode all the time messing with a bunch of noise it's just going to introduce a counterbalance to that state and draw it out and back a little bit and the more that you practice those and the more time you spend in that state of stillness and mindful awareness the more balance those things you want to become how happy would you be with someone doing this alongside a fairly menial job so let's say driving a car doing the washing up mowing the lawn are you happy with somebody utilizing that time or is there too much stimulus going on if they're doing a task um as long as they're focused on the task i mean i could that's definitely a mindfulness practice yeah yeah but apply suggestion number one that we had to that moment so getting into the awareness of your actual experience as you're experiencing it and being aware of the sensations and sensors and so forth while having that you know just something to focus on is a good way to do that as well thinking about how overloaded i sometimes am but also some of my friends are ridiculous at this they'll be listening to a book on three times speed whilst the rumor automated schedule is going around and hoovering up the house and they'll be cleaning things up they'll have the laptop open because they've got some notes for an exam that they've got coming up a little bit later on i'm like the threshold the waterline for acceptable stimulus has just shot through the roof you're already listening to something at a million times speed you've got this schedule thing going on you know you've got to call in five minutes but you're going to fit this in because yeah the um i don't know where that compulsion comes from i think it's partly productivity more than in less time stuff but i also think that you're right that there is an anxiety beyond i should be doing more with my time there's simply an anxiety with just sitting yeah yeah yeah yes because if you if you haven't done it before you know then all the stuff that you haven't seen you were going to start reacting to because you feel like oh well now you become aware of your internal dialogue and what you're actually sensing it's just overwhelming because you're used to numbing it by being distracted away from it you know what's next well um from there i'm going to go to just a something a bit more fun it's a bit more more deep but um it's a fun thing that we can do to really begin to get to the root of something that'll be very helpful so along with the sensory input of uh just experiencing what you're experiencing in a physical way with more awareness um start paying attention to throughout the day to your your movements and what kind of what you choose to move how you move your hand what you're actually doing and again just note those things in your mind as you're doing them so you're sort of like oh again i'm lifting the cup you know i'm setting the cup down i'm walking i'm talking right now and you can do this as detailed as you want this is actually a part of the fundamental training of mindfulness uh as far as it's actually written is to do this but a monk would do this 24 7 for you know however long for weeks years months whatever it's very very detailed and that's all you're doing is noting um but the point is is that the more that you start doing that and you focus on just kind of noting your own awareness being aware of your own experience then something interesting starts happening is that the time it takes because you'll stop doing that and then at one point later in the day you'll then go you kind of catch it again and remember and see like oh yeah yeah i was noting things so now i'm i'm getting some food or whatever it is right um famously uspensky i believe it was regis disciple uh went out to he was doing what he called self-remembering same concept different school of thought i was walking he was self-remembering things were going good and then uh a few weeks went by i got to get a pack of cigarettes a few weeks went by he's oh yeah i was self-remembering and told him to go get that pack of cigarettes you know so even someone who's doing it in this train that you you could start it and be doing it and something will kind of sweep you into this long chain of thought so much that a lot of time could go by but eventually you'll remember it and you'll go all right i'm gonna do that thing and you start doing it again um and the more you focus on that just the more curious it becomes how how you're not really um as in control of yourself as you think you are you know we're very much these autonomous kind of beings that are on autopilot in a lot of ways in our lives you think the amount of times that you shift your feet around while you're sitting in a chair or you scratch your arm or you go to have a sip of water or you lift your arm up or you kind of move a thumb across the fingernail or something like that or you blink whatever it is there's all these things that we do constantly that we're not even aware of we're just engaged with whatever kind of our focused mental mind is on at that moment but when you start doing this practice more you'll start noticing how much that you're actually doing without realizing it you'll notice how you're shifting in your chair you'll notice all those little movements and stuff like that and what gets really trippy is that then you start to notice like something for example oh if your arm is itching if you were completely unexamined you'd be sitting there at your office or home your arm would it you would scratch it and you wouldn't even think about it it would happen way way in the background if you're noting your your present experience you'll notice oh i just scratched my arm that's interesting cool and then as you continue practicing this as time goes on then you'll get to a place where you can if you so desire to go deep into it of oh my arm is itching i want to scratch my arm now instead of just going oh i just scratched my arm and you go oh there's an itch there interesting and now we get to a deeper level of it which is the arising array of impulses that we have because our impulses are really the root of all of our behavior and whether you you note your physical movements enough you then can go backwards one step or deeper one step and realize the arising desire and impulse to do things as opposed to just the fact that you're doing them and what that does is gives you one level deeper of control and awareness of your actions and how you're existing in the present moment and all of this really boils down to being able to navigate you put a sail up on the boat of your life and navigate your existence with more intentionality and more self-awareness and what's interesting is if you watch this example say you have the itch and you notice the impulse to scratch then you realize you have agency within that you go hold on i don't have to lift my hand up to scratch it right now i can choose to respond to that or to not and i can just kind of focus my attention on that itch feeling like what is that really just an odd little sensation it's really not unpleasant it's just there but i'm so conditioned to mechanically automatically engage with it that i've always done it but you just watch it and you keep watching it and it just kind of goes away like huh and the more you start getting to that level then you realize that that awareness of the impulse to do things not just as you're doing them you become more in control of everything in life like like eating per se you're not stuffing your face you're actually aware of what you're eating you're aware well there's a rising impulse to just crush whatever's on your plate or go like you know i'm actually gonna i'm already getting full i'm gonna stop now because i'm full i don't want to feel sick later um if you're speaking with someone and you have these words arising in the directions that you want to change or move the conversation or the interaction with normally a person who's unexamined is just kind of you know they're going going it's all unraveling against their real will it's just kind of just happening to them almost a person and that's why people say things they regret they say harmful things they say kind of unskillful things as one would say um or just stupid things you know um but with that deeper level of mindful awareness you then like the same awareness of the impulse to do a physical action as opposed to just doing it you become aware of the arising dialogue in your mind and what you're going to say and if you should say it or not and that's really where that mindfulness gap appears that you mentioned earlier because then say that you have a reaction to an experience someone says something that triggers you and you get irritated and you feel normally you would react and say something cutting or mean or like resentful to them um with that level of clarity and self-awareness and intentionality you can then feel that feeling arising and actually examine and know what you're going to say you know more skillfully if anything at all and like what the moment actually calls for as opposed to being drawn into a further detachment distraction of that panic anxiety state yeah man i think about an example sam harris uses a lot while he was sat at a meditation retreat and if you have tight hips like almost everybody you sit on a meditation cushion your knees can hurt a fair bit a good bit of force going through them and he said he focused on the pain in his knee for so long until it broke apart and it became sort of pure bliss and i've been going to a play called kuya which i need to force you to come with at some point uh hot and cold therapy sauna gets up to 250 degrees which is a hot puppy and then they've got 34 degrees fahrenheit cold plunge straight outside you go and you lower yourself in there's a little clock on the wall and um very quickly after starting to do that i noticed that if i focus on the sensation of what cold feels like not on being cold not on the narrative around the fact that this is cold and this sucks and i've just come out of 250 degrees and i'm in 32 degrees if i focus on the sensation everything completely changes it's a fascinating experience that kind of feels like tiny little needles tiny little pinpricks and then it feels like advice and now it feels like warmth and now it feels like something else but it doesn't feel like cold cold is the narrative name that we give into that particular combination of sensations you actually get into the sensation itself it breaks up apart into components that like a meal right you eat a meal if you're not focusing on meal you're just eating the aggregated macro flavor overall but if you really really pay attention you go okay well that's the chicken that's oregano that's the pesto that's the spice that's the pat and you can break it apart in that way and um the richness and the level of depth i mean you can see how much i'm desperately trying to say in three minutes i'm going into some black hole of uh mindfulness just to try for 180 seconds but it's awesome the cold therapy has been you know those whatever i've been maybe 30 between 20 and 30 three minute blocks since i've been here in that cold plunge and every single time it's fascinating yeah i like to do the cold plunge in the sauna oh you think no um uh yeah no that type of stuff is that's almost like manufactured uh external intervention you know where you're shocking the system into forcing attention to something um which for someone is useful for anyone it's useful useful experience but also for someone who just feels like they can't break out of it it's like well there there are ways oh man put yourself put yourself in that cold plunge and think about something that isn't what you're doing yeah so paul bloom's most recent book the sweet spot is great he interviewed a dominatrix for it and he was trying to work out why it is that some people in the suffering is part of your life right pain sort of contributes to our sense of enjoyment and this dominatrix said nothing captures attention like a whip what he means is that if someone slaps you in the face for the next three to five seconds you're not thinking about anything other than the fact that you've just been slapped in the face and it's not that people want peace of mind it's that they want peace from mind can i enter into a state it's one of the reasons i think people love extreme sports that have a very very high chance of death you know base jumping wingsuit downhill mountain bike snowboard ski all this stuff it forces your attention into such a narrow chasm because you know that the problem and the issue of you straying from that is so crazy you may die and that's peace from mind not peace of mind right exactly it's kind of fascinating that there are so much easier ways to get to that place than getting a wingsuit and jumping off that mountain um but to each other um yeah i think going a little deeper and moving into a real useful aspect of what we're getting to here with this being more aware of what's going on in the mind what's going on starting with the body being aware of the senses and it's starting to move into the mechanism of the mind if you keep following that you get to you know one of the places you mentioned where like well these are rising things these impulses these are just fabricated concepts that don't really mean anything you know i'm just like resonating like a wine glass you know with someone singing but there's not really that material the conscious material that's arising that's not me those are just mental formations you know so even whenever you you want to say you go i need to go check my email real quick like that impulse you see it arise that the feeling to go go into motion and check the email it's like well that since that's just a complete passing cloud of nothingness you know and being able to distinguish those are really coming from nowhere and going to nowhere will show you that your thoughts are really not you right you are the awareness is observing the passing of the thoughts the witness to the content of mind not the mind itself and understanding that is so valuable because one of the things that people do is mistake their thoughts for who they are and that leads to an extensive amount of self-criticism of self-doubt self-hatred all sorts of things and really just a true confusion about the nature of self and reality an example that i have been enjoying using lately to describe that is um imagine if you are there you have a nice orange nice tasty orange you open it up you smell the orange right you smell it for a moment and while you're eating or whatever and then you carry on about your day for hours later you never mistake that you were the smell of the orange you're well aware that you smell an orange that was the smell you moved on it moved on and it's not there anymore right but with thoughts what happens is that a thought arises someone looks at that and go oh that's who i am or that is some type of truth and then because it's internal instead of external they're then able to grab onto that and then relate to it right their identity to that thought that sensation and that's much more insidious and long-lasting because it's internally resonant as opposed to externally informed so with the smell of the orange we're aware that that is outside of our skin there is a tactile world and in that there is stuff happening and our senses taking the information from that world and we recognize that there's a relationship between our experience and that external object and there's no real confusion there in general right but the issue is the reason why that's so clear is because we're getting constant feedback from the external object right but you always know your arms are on the table because the table is always pushing on your arm you know there's no mistake i'm becoming the table like it's there i'm here right and so um with the mind since those things are generated internally whenever a thought goes by there's no resonance there's no reference there's no constant feedback it can just hang in the space of the mind's eye right and so then because often our thoughts have to do with us because we're thinking about our own narrative and creating our story of whatever's happening in the moment um we can we begin to mistake that mental material you know for truth and for reality and for what we are so if someone has this thought you know sometimes like i'm a piece of shit like i should have done this you know and i'm failing it like this thing whatever that thought arises and then you can grasp onto it because it's kind of suspended in space in your mind and you like an endless orange yeah the endless orange of self-hatred and self-doubt and then you that gets kind of grafted onto the lens of your experience and then the longer you stay with that that begins to then inform your decision making and life because your temperament has changed you know your outlook on the self is changing so therefore your confidence in your general navigation of your own life changes and it also just becomes a snowball of suffering because the longer you stay thinking that that is real and true the more real it will seem because the mind is always naturally looking for ways to reinforce whatever it's currently thinking at the moment whatever it's experiencing trying to build a case our consciousness is always litigating reality at all points right and so in 12 a jury of 12 of your peers who are all other aspects and layers of the self are all you know voting to convict constantly and so by recognizing that the conscious material that's arising in the mind is simply just disconnected happenstance truly just transient sort of data you can then step back and observe that and not get caught up mistaking what you think for who you are yeah man thoughts not being things is it's so easy to forget um do you have any more stories or examples that you like to use with the people that you teach about how to remind themselves that thoughts aren't things oh well i mean that was pretty good when i just shared but yeah um i'm just i'm just trying to think if we've got the orange we've got that idea we've got i'm just wondering if there's another another way that you like to frame that yeah so you can think about something more simply because i know that's complicated and exhaustive something more simply you think about like how say you you are you wake up in your bed one morning right and you feel great you didn't have any drinks at prior night you ate well you slept well you feel good the sun is shining in the window smells good fresh in there beautiful crisp day there's a little owl outside your window looking at you he's happy belly full of mouse everything is good in the world right you get up you feel good all right i'm gonna go this beautiful day i'm gonna go out i can't wait etc etc you go on now say that the next that night because you're having to celebrate right now you're going out with you know with your friends you're having 30 drinks or whatever it is you're eating cheeseburgers at 4 a.m and then a pizza um you get into a fight of some kind you know someone glasses you in the head with a bottle you know whatever um then you decide to have a glass of sand instead of a glass of water before getting in bed we've all been there so you get in you wake up the next morning headache shattering pounding sweating headache eyes are blurry that sunlight now is like giving you this crazy headache it's contributing oh god pulls the curtains closed you know now the smell in the room you're now smelling sour to you because now everything's got this kind of pungent repulsive smell everything makes you a little nauseous the colors in the room now hurt your eyes as well and seem distasteful and disorganized you have no energy you know for the day you don't want to get moving none of that stuff and you just want to land your sweaty bed and just lay there and just rot right with this headache i mean the bed feels lumpy you can't get comfortable you know all this stuff now think about the fact that that room didn't change the room a person you had those two distinct experiences in was the same same room what was different was your mind and what was different was your frame of consciousness your state of mind in the way that you're perceiving it because of what was going on in your body at that point in time now that's an extreme example and what i'm doing here is peeling apart the subject and object relationship of mind so what we experience and what we think about experience is we receive all based upon where our mind is at that point in time and how we're thinking and how we're feeling right and so as far as the thoughts are not things go if you a good practice to notice you know kind of uh the true nature of that is to pay attention to uh things you're experiencing whenever you're feeling good and how you project your feeling onto that situation versus an experience when you're feeling bad and how you project your feeling onto that situation as well with a negative light a disruptive light versus positive or optimistic light and then as you start realizing that you're really kind of projecting the story of how you're feeling onto your experience then try to separate that it's easier to do if you're in a good mood realize like oh i'm feeling good this room is great blah blah blah these people are nice and just stop for a second and well am i enjoying this so much or am i just in a good mood you know like is this really the best wine i've ever had or am i just looking forward to it you know you can start to just notice how the difference between the way that you're thinking versus what really is would you say i think if you run that forward the stoic stoicism's prescription would be something along the lines of the external environment should never impact your internal state now to me given the fact that most people are trying to find a route to happiness and joy and flourishing in life that feels a little bit like you wake up on a great day and the hours fall and everything's going fine but the stoic would remind himself this is no materially no different today when i woke up with a hangover that feels a little bit like constantly trying to build a fire someone coming and throwing kerosene on it and you say no no no i don't want that how do you um factor in the ability to be sufficiently robust as to be able to deal with bad situations but also um absorbent enough that when you have a good time that you utilize that as a catalyst do you get the tension i'm talking about sure sure yeah and that's why i think stoicism is um has a lot of incredible beneficial qualities to it but at the end of the day it's quite repressive you know um because the reality is is that no matter who you are you're always going to be affected by your external environment it's just the fact that we're hairless little monkey creatures you know like we are in nature and we're a part of nature so we give them the idea of saying you know well i'm not going to respond to my environment like you are the environment you know that the way of looking at reality is as if you can just create this wall between reacting completely to what's happening out there it's like you're out there too you know it's like someone that's in traffic and that guy hey all this traffic is like your traffic yeah yeah you are too and so that that way of thinking to me is unrealistic and doesn't really you know fall through all the way and so it's realizing you know in those moments the fact that you always are going to be flowing with what is but it's just about and this really is the crux of all the stuff we've been talking about putting enough effort into being more self-aware being aware of what you're thinking in the moment that you're thinking it being more aware in the present about your actions and the choices that you're making and using your intentionality to then make choices towards you know the direction of who you want to be or what you want your life to be like and in that comes you know interfacing with the the truth of whatever your environmental circumstances are at that moment and using the information there along with your self-awareness to then continue to make intentional choices what about emotions because that's like a not a particular thought not a narrative you know a felt sense a phenomenon that arises how would someone utilize taking mindfulness off the mat uh to be able to give them that mindfulness gap when an emotion arises yeah that's a really bad one because emotions are like the ultimate you know no no logic a lot you know if you can't it's tough to be very emotional very logical at the same time um so people tend to do things very you know brashley whenever they're getting emotionally um I'm getting emotional rather and so mindfulness is very valuable because it takes some of the heat and the impact off of negative emotions and allows you to then react or respond to them so just be rolled over and controlled by them so even if you say you know something happens and you get like furious at someone normally without you know being unexamined you would just jump into whatever it is yelling at them or I don't know what people do whenever they get furious but um with you know being more tuned into a mindful way of living that would arise and then you really get to address the root of that fury and that anger in the first place it's important distinction to make because obviously it's not useful to just respond emotionally be crazy not controlled see red and do whatever um it's also not useful to completely play and this gets into an interestingly nuanced area of what you know mindfulness of someone to say spiritually um to not look at that situation whenever you get frustrated and go full on like okay I notice the arising feeling of frustration I'm not going to respond to it I'm going to you know exhale breathe calmly allow it to move on and just let that move and then later I'll engage with whoever the person was you know if it's still an issue and discuss you know constructively what the problem might be um that also if not done well can be you have danger of again passivity and of compartmentalization um and so if you want to get to the root of the matter you when it arises you can use mindfulness to not react to it but then to pause and actually really examine like the impulses what am I thinking why did I get so reactive like is this something of a mind that I'm being triggered is something I need to work on is it something that I need to create a boundary that someone has done something to me that I need to address and else you actually get out like why you had that reaction in the first place instead of just getting swept up in the drama of the emotion bring that back for me someone has an emotion arise what what are some of the cues or the triggers or the practices that they can use to just build that mindfulness gap in before the downstream how to deal with it what's the first step in that yeah the first one again I think that the noting thing is really valuable so you start getting mad just recognize okay hold on I'm getting getting really pissed off here let me just pause you notice it and pause don't go straight into action and this is the same for a self-talk about being sad or anxious or depressed exactly just notice it's there and then pause and you can take a breath create a little bit of space give yourself time to actually catch up to the flurry of what's happened and then you can start the self-inquiry process and realize you know what an intentional choice you need to make um what I was going to do earlier is an interesting pretty um tricky part of the ever-evolving story of someone living mindfully or more um you know a quote about spiritual identity which I'm not really into that word or those words but it's in terms of what people think about it as um is you can do all these practices let's look at like the maximum optimal person who is uh doing you know they're completely non-reactive they're tranquil they're peaceful you know they're doing all this uh 24 7 never disrupted always just super easy going um what can happen there interestingly is that you can begin to feel like you um you get stiff in this way where you can start out of the service of trying to do these things so much and um trying to almost play the character of this person as you try and do this stuff more you can run the danger of actually becoming uh self-righteous in this way right so whenever you're you don't want to kind of break the character and acknowledge that you are actually a human being and you're actually feeling some of these things you're just you're living this kind of calcified form of mindfulness zombie and not allowing yourself to acknowledge the truth of what's going on deep inside of you and that is a trap that people can fall into you know and you start the self-righteousness is that then you wear that character of being the completely calm tepid person at all times around others and even with yourself and that way you're like oh yeah i'm completely unaffected by all of you and all of this you know and become a prisoner of your own mindfulness exactly exactly and so whenever you do feel those things you know and it says you know it answers this question with itself whenever you feel the anger or whatever you know oh no i'm just gonna let that pass and i'm not gonna well that's great and you should not react to it but if you aren't engaged in it then you're messing up because you want to engage in well why did i what happened there like why did i feel that like what's going on what do i need to understand more clearly about the situation myself or what should i be saying or doing in this moment as opposed to just always like you're shutting off right because that's one of the miscommunications that people get is they think well that leads to a lot of resentment you know of other people and as i said self-righteousness um because i've got so many messages from people who are like hey so i've gotten really good at disarming my reactive anger towards my wife and kids or everyone they're being crazy and i want to yell at them i've got that now but now i feel resentful that i'm always the one that's having to set aside my my feelings and they're just totally unexamined running wild and i'm just dealing with it all and so now i'm starting to feel irritated and that's where as i said self-righteous because now you're like no i'm the victim kind of the one having to bear all of this and these people are inferior animals and now i'm starting to dislike them because i'm always having to offload the stuff and that's because step one is stopping the reactions and all that step two is actually examining understanding why you're feeling that why that button's being pushed and then engaging and communicating with you know the person people clearly about what you're experiencing right so if you're you know if the kids are running around screaming breaking stuff and you're feeling irritated and you go okay let that go just be cool move on go to another room yeah you do that but you also go hey by the way you all need to calm down and chill out and be whatever you know tell give them some feedback you get the kids i don't know but done but that's what if you move that into all the areas of your life and that way it keeps you from getting that resentment or that weirdness or the righteousness and actually again it's you know engagement is so important you know in this stuff one of the big misnomers that's out there is people mistake being more tranquil and self-aware with passivity you know because for a lot of various reasons but they think it's almost this kind of like disengagement like no i'm just gonna like let things kind of flow by it's not that at all you know it's it's actually kind of the opposite of that in a lot of ways is it's stepping out of the the causal kind of flow of reactivity but then stepping into actually being present and engaged with you know intentionality triggers final bits anything that you think that we haven't got in order to bring that mindfulness into the into daily life any habits any routines any triggers any cues that people should remember to use if they want to try and really instantiate this yeah i think a useful one is looking for like little bits of time in the day because you can practice even just kind of like checking in your breathing just calming it down checking your shoulders that's really oh so much tension and anxiety and worry and all that stuff that people have uh it's just through un being unaware of their own tension and grasping so you kind of get tense you start thinking your shoulders get tight you know your brow gets tight your heart starts racing if you take a moment to just like hold on a second let me change my posture relax the shoulders relax the face and take some breaths kind of just calm things down a little bit like that will do so much for people it's crazy but it's just having never thought to do that is why no one hasn't done it before but if you do think to do that it's on the menu for you then you just find these little spaces in your life whether you're standing in line you're waiting for something you're waiting for someone to show up you're meeting them you have five minutes or whatever even 30 seconds you can realign the posture relax the shoulders and the face and then focus in on just taking a couple of relaxing breaths and just tuning back in again and if you do that consistently we find these little empty spaces in your day then what happens is that actually just becomes a trained behavior over time but i do that without well i'm aware i'm doing it but i don't have to stop and go okay i should do it now i just do it and i'm like oh cool just gonna reset real quick and then move on man if people spent six months working on one habit one mental cue trigger occurs i understand the response you can move that from the very deliberate system two to the automated system one and i've done this with a bunch of different things so the stoic fork was one that i did it for a while where look do i have control over this or not and that now for me is mostly automatic it just arises look i don't have control over it so fuck like it's a traffic jam i didn't know that it's raining i didn't know that this was going to occur the power's gone off today i was supposed to have a podcast and the wi-fi went off on my ibmb all right well i can't fix it i messaged the person to the ibmb i'm gonna go to the gym instead and that's now automated the number of times and i think that six months is a slow enough period for you to have okay i have one goal i have one behavioral goal that i want to try and move from system two to system one and if you can do that in five years time you are unrecognizable you just accumulated and maybe after whatever a couple of years you need to go back and do a little sense of some of the first ones you did but man there's so much here and you know from the first episode that we ever did i think you're episode number nine or 12 or something um and this will be 410 but the mindfulness gap which was the term that i got from you that now is still today one of the things i try and focus on something arises inside of me and there is a beat just a half second pause between simzenia so you some response and that's power i've said this over and over if the only thing i get out of meditation is the ability to have that beat i'll consider it a win maybe some greater levels of flourishing and meditative bliss would be would be nice but that's enough of a win to make it worthwhile to make the practice worthwhile and i think that trying to make it practical trying to take it off the mat trying to go from when you're doing your sits to okay now how does this apply how does this make my daily experience more effective i think there's some awesome stuff in there for people so if people want to check out what you do get the guided meditations do your other stuff where should they go yeah they go to cory-shown.com and then hey cory allen is all my social handles amazing and the astral hustle that's the podcast yeah thank you thank you