Mindfulness

Hey, cadres here. Welcome. It's 11:00 here on the east coast, which means it's time to talk mindfulness in cadres. It's a beautiful day. I know the last time I was here, I was talking about the anticipation that comes with having kids head back to school. And both of my boys are in school, which is awesome. They. My youngest son is in kindergarten. My older boy is in second grade. They went to the first day of school, and my older son came home with impetigo, which I guess is, like, he had, like, sores on his face.

So we had, like, this false start of him going to school for one day and then being off for an entire week while he waited. Hey, Luke, how are you? While he waited for. We waited for him to clear back up and be ready to go back to school. So. Hey, Khalid. So it was, yay, they're back in school. Oh, no, he's not back in school for another week, and then, okay, he's back in school and hoping that the younger son does not get catch this thing, because then we would have had another week of both kids home.

But thankfully, everyone's healthy and everyone's in school, and they're loving it. They're loving it. They love. My youngest boy is really loving going to the bus stop in the morning and walking there with his little backpack and getting on the bus and playing with the other kids. They all play this Randy Moss inspired football game at the bus stop while they're waiting for the bus to come. So they run around like crazy, and then he comes off the bus at the end of the day and is happy and loving school.

So all is good. All is good. And that's what I want to talk about today, is things being good. You know, there is often in talks about, I think, mental health broadly and in mindfulness specifically, a focus on suffering. And the course and the program that I teach most frequently is even called mindfulness based stress reduction. And the idea there is that stress is kind of synonymous for suffering in. In our kind of secular lives. So we experience stress in all different kinds of ways. And when we talk about mindfulness, often we're talking about it from the perspective of how do we use mindfulness as a way to reduce stress, or how do we manage the symptoms of anxiety and depression, or how do we help with the symptoms of burnout or I decreasing some kind emotional reactivity or coping behaviors.

There's lots of ways that we talk about mindfulness, and these are all really valid because they're true. They also can be a bit of a bummer occasionally, because mindfulness also is really about learning how to be present and appreciate the joy and the pleasures of our lives. So while it's okay to think about mindfulness as a practice that can help us work through the challenging parts of our lives, it also has really the capacity and power to let us enjoy the good parts of our lives even more.

And I can tell you I was at a trampoline park with my boys. They were there for a birthday party. And, you know, when you're at a trampoline park, I mean, there's trampolines and padding and things from the jump off of and dodgeball courts and all this stuff. And also a million children running around bouncing on all these things. And as I was there and they were kind of running around having a good time, what I noticed was that, and thanks to my mindfulness practice, I did notice this. I noticed I was starting to feel some tension, and I was starting to feel some constriction, partially because I was really thinking about the potential for someone to get hurt.

And I was kind of getting nervous because there were some bigger kids, and then my little kids, and they're all running around these things, and someone's going to knock heads and something's going to happen. And what that did is it started to help me. I love this. Colleen says that she remembers going to a therapist and saying, everything is great. I love that. What I noticed was it was starting to kind of shut me down, and I was constricting, closing off a little bit, and noticed this happening.

And thankfully, dropped into a practice. And I remember standing in the middle of this trampoline park, and there's a very simple practice called the three step breathing space. Maybe I'll teach that in a future episode where you essentially pause for a moment. You start to take an inventory of what you're noticing going on in your body. So that could be. I'm feeling constriction. I'm feeling anxious thoughts, or I'm thinking anxious thoughts. My urge is to, like, protect the kids or to grab the kids or move the kids around.

I can feel this in my stomach. I can feel tension in my shoulders. Whatever you're noticing that's happening and then shifting your attention to some sort of stable anchor. And for many people, that's the breath. It's just kind of taking a few conscious breaths and noticing those breaths coming in and out. In that case, I was standing in this part, in this trampoline park. And what I did is I shifted all of my attention into my feet. And I said, okay, I'm going to just focus on the sensations in my feet for a moment.

And this all, by the way, is happening in the span of a total of a minute or two minutes and anchoring my attention there in my feet. And then as my attention is anchored in the feet, I start to contemplate, how is my intent? What is my intention? How do I want to show up in this moment of being at the trampoline park with my two boys? And by connecting to that intention, I was able to say, you know what? We're just going to have a good time. Yeah, something could happen, but in the meantime, we're going to have fun.

They're going to have fun. We're going to jump on some trampolines and have a great time. And by doing that, by kind of becoming aware or noticing what was going on for me, anchoring my awareness in something stable like my feet, in that case, and then connecting with my intention, I was able to then open my eyes and say, how do I want to be in this time? And then we had a great time. We had so much fun at the trampoline park, and everything was great. So mindfulness practice isn't just about dealing with the more stressful or the suffering that happens in our lives.

Although it's very powerful for them, it also allows us to tap into more joy and be present for what's actually happening in a good way in our lives and also then kind of enjoying it even more. So that's my message for today, is while you can use your practice to help with suffering, you can also use your practice to really experience the joy of everyday life. So thanks, Cadre. It was great being with you. I think I'll do that three step breathing space practice. I'll break it out a little bit longer in a future episode, so have a good one.

Thanks. There's always this countdown.