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Today I invite you to first take 3D press.
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One.
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to
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and then three
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Now, I want you to ask yourself, how do you feel and what is the difference just a few moments ago between now and then?
Do you feel relaxed? Do you feel comfortable? Are your shoulders more down? Is your head a little bit more forward or maybe up?
And to think about how that just happened, that you were able to possibly change your entire mood by taking three deep breaths.
very unusual to some people, but for those of us who practice mindfulness, it comes a lot easier. And today we're going to talk about mindfulness and how it kind of came over and what are the benefits of it. So the Dalai Lama once said about mindfulness, there are four billion people
and one billion who are Buddhists, but all are suffering. What are we going to do? Keep it to ourselves? So he was referring to the question by Dr. John Cobbetson, who actually introduced the concept of mindfulness and into the medical world. So he was a PhD and he found out
Dr. Tom (02:15.598)
that this type of thinking and exercises existed called mindfulness. So he refined it, he did multiple experiments on it. He treated thousands and probably over 20 ,000 people, maybe 30 ,000 with mindfulness for multiple different diseases. And now we know the different
neurological reasons why it happens as well as how it's activated in the brain. But today I'm not going to get into that today I want to talk about what does it actually feel like or what is the perception and how is it helpful to those of us and just in our everyday lives. So mindfulness defined by Dr. John Cumbiton is moment to moment non judgmental awareness.
And let's break that down. So if we take apart the first one, the moment to moment, and the reason why this is important because our brain is making significant amounts of judgments and perceptions and evaluations at a blinding rate. So it happens within less than half a second that you perceive something, you
compare it and think about it and then you evaluate it and then you have just a fraction of a second to look at that going on and then you act on it. So mindfulness aims to kind of widen that gap where you are aware that your body is reacting or your mind is reacting and then you get to choose which path you want to take. So if we
Think about when you're, let's say you plan to go out and have a good day with a friend. So you're out there and you're maybe on the boardwalk, you're next to the beach and you're having lots of fun. And all of a sudden your friend does something or they say something and within half a second you perceive that or your brain perceives that as some type of threat or insult or derogatory mark when in fact your friend had no intention of this.
Dr. Tom (04:41.358)
And so immediately your mood starts to fall. You start to react in a certain way in a way that you ultimately did not want to. So ultimately you wanted to have a good day today. But as soon as your mind quote unquote becomes triggered by an external event, then it starts to derail everything that you want to happen. You want to have a good mood. Your brain sees a threat.
and it compares against past memories. So it compares against past memories or possible other threats that can happen. And then now you've set up a barrier, you're reacting harshly, you're shutting down and you really don't want that to happen. You want the opposite to happen where you're still laughing, you're still having fun and you want to have an awesome day.
and finish it out that way. So instead of also maybe just talking to your friend or asking what their intentions are, you do not do that. So you don't even a bridge or make a bridge for communication, you just do something else or you react in a way that is mean to them. So this is...
reactivity, right? Or maybe overreacting or feeling overwhelmed. And you don't really want this to happen. You want a little bit more of a resilience towards intrusive or possibly harming thoughts coming in and causing you to go down a different path. And that's actually what mindfulness helps to do. So it helps
you to have kind of a meta awareness or an awareness of these reactions and judgmental thoughts that arise in your mind. And there's a lot of them. In fact, the number one emotion or negative emotion is shame. And being able to just see that alone and seeing that your mind is perceiving shame when it's not really happening or will never happen.
Dr. Tom (07:03.598)
is extremely powerful. And this is a very serious topic that I enjoy talking about because many times, many times throughout the day, you are faced with this weird judge in the background that is saying, you did something wrong, or you know, that person's gonna think weird of you because you did something odd, when in fact, that is not the case at all.
And this is where the non -judging part comes in. So there's moment to moment where you're recognizing what's happening in the world as well as within your own thoughts. And the second part is non -judgmental. So you don't want to judge what's going on. You simply want to see that it's coming up and then either recognize that it's a thought that has no real basis or real
impact on your life and is not even predicting what's going to happen in the next moment. See it as a thought and then push it to the side. And we've seen this extremely helpful or extremely profound changes in people with anxiety and depression, as well as PTSD. In fact, the US Armed Forces put out a publication that said, hey, our armed forces guys coming back from war.
with PTSD should try this out. They should try mindfulness out and it's a recommendation. So that non -judgmental part is very important. So when you see a thought coming up that's maybe shameful or regretful, you kind of look at it and you don't judge it, right? You don't judge the fact that you're feeling shameful because then you're just judging the judge, right? You...
look at it and go, this is something that is interesting. So that's how I say it. I say, this is interesting. I wonder how, or wonder why I'm feeling this way. Maybe where does this come from? Or do I even need it right now? Maybe I can just kind of push it to the side and go, okay, this is just what I thought right now, but not really relevant right now. So I'm going to move forward.
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and I'm going to continue playing in the pool with my son. Because it doesn't matter that, you know, I have a little bit of muffin top going on with this tight bathing suit because I gained five pounds over Christmas. So instead of judging that action or even the action by your friend, you simply see them as thoughts that are kind of.
interplaying with each other or coming seemingly from nowhere. And then you kind of just watch it float on by. You see it as sitting on, you know, a little raft in the river and it goes on by, or maybe seeing it as a cloud in the sky. And you see that go on by. And that's part of being the non -judgmental part. And then, of course, non -judgmental awareness.
meaning that we have awareness of what's going on and we can see right here right now that this thing is arising or this type of interaction is playing out. In fact, when they look at Buddhist monks who meditate, they find that they can see their own frustration rising up.
long before regular people who have never meditated. And there's some really cool experiments on that. So you, through mindfulness, become more aware that these emotions are rising up sooner than you would have before, which is very interesting because everything occurs within about half a millisecond or so. So that's kind of a little bit of a breakdown of mindfulness, which is moment to moment non -judgmental awareness.
Now, what are the other parts of mindfulness or what are the kind of seven attitudes of mindfulness? Let's talk a little bit about those and I'm gonna take each one and try and make a separate podcast about each one because I think they're extremely important to understand. The first one, which is...
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Probably, I think, one of the most important ones, which is beginner's mind. So when you're approaching something new that you've never seen before, let's say a musical instrument like a piano, then it's important to see that.
instrument and that event as happening new for you, right? Which in a lot of cases it may be. So you walk up to the piano, you feel it, you touch it, you listen to it, and all of these things are very intriguing. Same thing with the guitar, you're strumming it, and you're like, that's an interesting sound. And if you can approach the rest of life that way, your mind seems to lower that judgmental.
judge and they seem to take a break or take a hike for lunch. And you see it as something more engaging, use all of your senses to peel it, maybe smell it, look at it, touch it. Hopefully you're not licking the piano. But that is one of the attitudes of mindfulness. The first one is beginner's mind. The second one is non -judging, which we kind of talked about. The third one is acceptance. So really accepting that
this is your life now. So maybe in your 20s, you were a party goer and all of a sudden you're hitting 30s and you may be starting a family. So maybe you're starting a family and you still want to hold on to your 20s when you had a lot more, you had more energy, you could go out, you had more freedom. Now, when you do that, you start to create a little bit of a discord.
with your mind, what it wants to do, and what is the current reality of what it can do now, or what you physically can do right now. So accepting that this is your life right now, that this is where you're at, allows you to actually pay attention to your life right now and really see it for what it is, so that way you can start to plan around it, or maybe make some changes.
Dr. Tom (14:09.582)
The other part, the next one is letting go, letting go of things that may no longer be of use to you. So I work with this a lot with my son where we say, okay, we have a toy here and if we want a new toy, is there some older toy that we can let go of and maybe donate? And he goes, yeah, yeah, I bet you we could donate something. So we pack it in the car.
We drive over to the donation center and he's able to let it go and watch it go away. And so we can do that too. As adults, we can let go of things. We can let go of things that are cluttering our house and saying that, okay, let's push this somewhere else. Or let's let somebody else have it. The next one is trust. So trust kind of goes...
with you, inside of you, and towards others outside of you. So inside of you, the way you can cultivate trust is to really pay attention to the current moment and take a few seconds to make a decision and really think about it. Because what happens when you just let your mind go on autopilot and decision and reactivity and action all occur within half a second,
you start to lose a little bit of trust with yourself. You start to have more anxiety because you're acting on anxious thoughts. So you lose that trust with yourself. So being able to widen that gap and actually make choices where you are thinking about the correct pathway that is aligned with your principles will allow you to
Do that. So patience is another one, right? This comes very important when we're driving. I learned this a long time ago with my friend who's in France, very relaxed. He said, why are you wanting to get there so fast? It's still going to be there. So he kind of let me in on this and really taught me about patience. And patience is very nice sometimes.
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Sometimes when you can just wait things out and see what's playing out, it requires no energy from you really. It just requires a relaxation of state. So if somebody is having road rage with you, then you let them pull ahead and go on by and you see them. You can watch them and go, this guy or this girl has some issues going on.
And I'm glad that they didn't pull me into those issues because my life is my life and I want to go maybe somewhere with it. Or I just want to have a good day and do something with my friends. So having patience with children to watching them play and we can learn a lot from watching them play. It really goes a long way. They also begin to trust you more because you have patience and you're not displaying anxiety with them.
The other one is non -striving. So this is a little bit along the lines of patience. Non -striving means being able to see that right here and right now is what you should be dealing with instead of having this feeling of either, let's say, separation anxiety. Let's say you play games like on the PS5 or something like that, then
if you're wanting to strive and go for that video game, then you are creating a suffering for you. And there's different types of suffering, which I'll go on later on, but you're creating the suffering that is between you and that object or you and that event. So let's say you're striving to get to a...
and like an air show or maybe a movie theater because the show is gonna start, right? And in reality, it doesn't matter too much that you get to this point. It matters that you are enjoying this current moment, maybe with your friends and family or maybe even with yourself and you can look around, you can look outside. And instead of having this feeling of once again, exciting, then you are able to concentrate more
Dr. Tom (19:02.382)
on what's going on right now. Gratitude is another great one. Gratitude is where you are saying thank you for things and truly meaning it. And it's easier to truly mean things when you pay attention in the moment because you're now gathering or using all of your senses to enjoy that thing that maybe somebody cooked like a meal and understanding that that meal took a farmer working
extremely hard and hot and burning fields to harvest this crop and to cultivate it. And then there was somebody maybe who was helping him and then they were putting it on the truck and the truck driver drove it several miles and maybe had to stay overnight in their own truck and a small cramped bed and realizing that to get to this point of making a meal is very
difficult to achieve. It took us a long time to come to this kind of futuristic state comparatively into the past, to be able to put food on the plate and to have it be very fresh and edible. And also to the cook who cooked it, right? This person cooked in the kitchen, maybe your wife or husband, sister or mom or brother and
to have, you can build gratitude through the utilization of your senses like sight, smell, taste and touch. And so using those senses and then really closing your eyes and thinking, wow, this is amazing. Then you can express the true gratitude that you feel and it shows on your face. The next one, generosity. This one I've been working on more recently is that
Generosity is a way to try and give as much as you can, right? You wanna be generous in, I try to be generous in when I tip people things, if I see somebody on the side of the road, like they're getting their car pushed. And my wife comments on this sometimes and I'm always trying to help somebody.
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Maybe it's because I grew up watching Superman, I don't know. But I think that generosity is lacking a little bit in the world today. And I think that as we become more involved in social media, as we become more disconnected through certain other things that are happening in the world, by having an us or them mentality,
then our generosity is gonna go down and it just kind of further perpetuates this abstraction from each other's lives. So we lose our empathy, which is very important, which I go over in mindfulness communication in my course. But so I think that generosity is something we can all try and do just a little bit harder. So those are the seven different attitudes of
mindfulness and I'm gonna go over more of these things in a later podcast. And so I just wanna leave with kind of a takeaway that, you know, your breath is always there. Your breath is always there to rely on, to get back to, and if you don't breathe, well, that's a huge problem as we all know, but
you can rely on the breath and slow it down and do intentional breathing just to start out with and take three breaths before something that's hard or stressful and let it out and paying attention to this can start your own massive transformative process.