🔑 Key Takeaways
- Connect emotional feelings with cognitive understanding through dropping into your body and opening your heart. The drop it and handshake practices can help meet difficult emotions and enable us to be okay with them. Belly breathing can also be helpful.
- Being aware of the subtle body and practicing relaxation and mindfulness can counteract cultural pressures and help individuals find a natural speed limit and true value beyond societal norms. Integrating psychodynamic therapy can also aid in mindfulness practices.
- Mindfulness and the Drop it practice have the potential to help individuals break free from patterns of repetitive thoughts and feelings and nurture healthy love, care, and insight for self and others. Letting go of unnecessary worry and irrelevant hope and fear can pave the way for the next thing in life.
- Taking a few seconds to drop worries and concerns can provide much-needed respite and strengthen mindfulness, but transformation requires kindness, insight, and being with emotional imprints.
- Through the Handshake Practice, we can learn to confront difficult emotions and understand the distorted habits that arise from past experiences. By making peace with our own monsters, we can cultivate compassion and extend it to others.
- Understand and separate your identity from your demons through cognitive clarity. Treat them with kindness and non-judgment, and slowly open up without disturbing them, like a horse trainer's approach.
- By calmly and attentively dropping our preconceptions, meeting our emotions where they are, and waiting with awareness, we can communicate with our emotions and achieve a neutral understanding that leads to transformation.
- Acknowledging and accepting our emotions instead of suppressing them can lead to growth. Nurturing our innate essence love can bring balance, happiness, and fulfillment to our lives.
- Real happiness and love come from within by acknowledging and being patient with difficult thoughts and emotions. Through meditation, we can uncover our intrinsic nature and minimize unnecessary suffering by recognizing and feeling compassion towards our own imprints.
- Facing and managing leftover imprints, reconnecting with joy, and finding purpose through mindfulness can lead to emotional and biological wellbeing. Kindness and patience are essential in this journey towards personal growth and improvement.
- Belly breathing and being mindful of your speed limits can reset the nervous system and prevent the negative effects of overexertion, allowing for sustained productivity.
- Through meditation and self-kindness, you can not only calm your mind, but improve your heart rate variability, reconnect with your basic well-being, and better understand yourself, leading to a more sustainable and fulfilling life.
📝 Podcast Summary
Overcoming Obstacles in Meditation through Dropping into Your Body and Heart
The Art and Science of Keeping Your Shit Together is a podcast series that combines ancient Buddhist teachings with modern science to help regulate your emotions. In this episode, the focus is on why meditation is important and how to overcome obstacles in meditating. The main obstacle is the speediness of modern life, which makes it difficult to connect cognitive understanding with emotional feelings. This can be overcome through dropping into the body and opening your heart to feel the transformation of teachings. The drop it practice can help meet difficult emotions and the handshake practice can enable us to be okay with them. Reasoning with your emotions doesn't work, but experiencing a fundamental okayness can help you overcome them. Belly breathing can also be helpful.
The Importance of Calmness and Mindfulness
Calmness is in the body, especially the subtle body, and disturbing it leads to a lack of calmness in the mind. Repeating thoughts are a reaction to the first thought, and practicing awareness and relaxation can allow for space and clarity. Mindfulness can counteract the driven speediness imposed by culture, and help people notice others and their own bodies. Conditional love from society can create driven individuals seeking normative success, but mindfulness can aid in finding an organic speed limit and value beyond achievement. Mindfulness practices can benefit from integrating psychodynamic cognitive therapy, as emotional deprivation and fear of abandonment are common recurring thoughts.
The transformative power of mindfulness and the ancient understanding of energy levels for Westerners.
Mindfulness can help transform early life patterns to not be so powerfully taken over by them. Westerners have patterns of repetitive thoughts and feelings that can be transformed by working with them. The concept of subtle body, central to yoga and Tibetan Buddhism, is an ancient understanding of energy levels that science is oblivious to. The Drop it practice involves breathing out, putting down unnecessary worry and letting go of irrelevant hope and fear. This exercise helps to nurture healthy love, care, and insight to help oneself and others. It's better to put down what's holding you back to hold the next thing nicely.
Letting go and finding freedom in mindfulness
Let go of your worries and concerns and breathe out. Drop the extra baggage from your conscious mind and take a few seconds to enjoy the freedom. This practice can be done in formal meditation or daily life to give yourself a break from rumination and unhelpful worry. Understand that dropping something for a few seconds won't solve the problem but it will give you respite. This exercise is a reference point of clear, open awareness that is not occupied by thoughts and this can strengthen your mindfulness. Emotional imprints also reside in the body and it's important to meet and listen to them. Transformation requires kindness, insight, mindfulness awareness, and being with the emotional imprints.
Embracing Open Awareness and Meeting Beautiful Monsters through the Handshake Practice.
Open awareness is the practice of being present without judgment or worry. It is a profound state of being aware of awareness without being attached to thoughts. The practice of meeting difficult emotions and resolving them can lead to liberation and compassion. Beautiful monsters are distorted habits that arise from past life or childhood experiences that are trying to help us. Understanding and making peace with them can open up compassion and joy. Making peace with one's own demons can lead to a wellspring of compassion that extends to others. The Handshake practice described in the book is a way to meet and resolve difficult feelings through awareness and listening.
Transforming Your Beautiful Monsters with the Handshake Practice
We all have our own beautiful monsters or demons, and it's important to understand them. The handshake practice can help in transforming these monsters. Cognitive clarity is essential in separating our identity from these monsters. Our beautiful monsters need kindness and non-judging. It's important to stay in the same room, being aware and feeling the pain of the monster, without suppressing, indulging or rejecting it. Slowly opening up without disturbing it is essential. Non-disturbing approach is like the one used by horse trainers, who approach the horse slowly with kindness, calmness and relaxation.
How to be Kinder to Your 'Beautiful Monsters'
Being kind to your difficult emotions, or 'beautiful monsters', involves listening, doing nothing, and waiting. Rather than lecturing or giving orders to our emotions, we should aim to calmly and attentively be with them. By dropping our preconceptions, meeting our emotions where they are, and waiting with awareness, we can eventually communicate with our emotions in a way that can lead to transformation. This approach has scientific support and can be implemented through a four-step process involving dropping, meeting, being with, and waiting. The ultimate goal is to achieve a neutral understanding between the mind and emotions, which paves the way for transformation.
Embracing Dysfunctional Emotions and Nurturing Essence Love.
Accepting and being mindful of our dysfunctional emotional patterns, rather than suppressing or slaying them, can lead to transformation and growth. This approach is supported by studies and is synergistic with Che's teachings. One practice for nurturing our innate nature is essence love, which connects us with our birthright of love and joy within us. Focusing too much on external factors can cause us to lose connection with this essence love, leading to feelings of hollowness. Befriending our beautiful monsters and nurturing our essence love can lead to a more balanced and fulfilling life, according to Tsoknyi Rinpoche's teachings.
The Path to Essence Love Through Meditation
Real happiness and love come from within us, and not from external sources. This 'essence love' is the fundamental okayness that we need to reconnect with, by acknowledging and being patient with difficult thoughts and emotions. Through meditation, we can purify our minds and burn off the negative aspects to uncover this intrinsic nature. The mind and the emotions are different, and we need to listen to both. By recognizing and feeling compassion towards our own imprints, we can minimize unnecessary suffering in the world.
Overcoming Fears and Finding Joy in Life through Kindness and Mindfulness.
It is important to face and be patient with one's leftover imprints to overcome fears and develop confidence. Kindness can help open up these imprints, leading to a joyous outlook on life. Data shows that toddlers have a natural capacity for happiness and love, but this can be lost due to societal pressures of competitiveness. Mindfulness and finding a sense of purpose can help one reconnect with this joy and achieve emotional and biological wellbeing. Speedy thinking and actions can also be a problem, but being aware of and managing this can lead to personal growth and improvement.
The Three Kinds of Speed Limit and How to Prevent Burnout
There are three kinds of speed limit - cognitive, physical, and emotional - and being aware of speediness and practicing belly breathing can help relax the energy in your subtle body and prevent burnout. Belly breathing involves breathing in, holding and exhaling while scanning your body for symptoms of restlessness. When done repeatedly, this practice can reset the nervous system, shifting it from a state of anxiety and speediness to rest and recovery mode. This 'grounded body' can catch whatever needs to be done with sufficient energy, without causing burnout. Being aware of your speed limits and practicing relaxation techniques can help prevent overexertion and its negative effects.
How Meditation and Kindness Can Improve Your Heart Health and Well-Being
Practicing meditation can shift your heart rate variability, allowing your heart to adapt to different challenges. The main goal of meditation is to calm your mind and clear it of clutter. Chet's approach combines ancient wisdom from Tibet with modern research and psychology, making it a pragmatic and beautiful method. Reconnecting with basic wellbeing can contribute to a calm and sustainable planet, as it mitigates the need for unnecessary stuff. Being kind to your 'beautiful monster' is transformational advice because it changes how you relate to yourself and the world. Practicing warmth and kindness towards your inner struggles can help you better understand yourself.