This is the first of three podcasts about amplifying experiences we love. Let’s start with joy, that wonderful bubbling, engulfing feeling of loving to be alive.
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This week we add a Brain Gym exercise to our open focus session: Sit erect and put your hands over your heart, one on top of the other. Then press gently on your heart so that you feel the joints in your fingers, hands, arms and shoulders and maybe even your back. Then just stay there as breathe for as long as you like. This lets your body know that it is safe, and free to feel and express joy.
Liz obsesses a little more about the 20 pages she’s read in Lisa Feldman Barrett’s book, How Emotions are Made. and we use Open Focus to connect with where we experience delight and joy in our bodies. Kat somehow connects this to glitter and Glynda the good witch, which I love! The Open Focus session starts at 20:41.0 We hope you enjoy it.
Here is the transcript:
0:00:00.3 Kat: In the immortal words of Ferris Bueller.
0:00:03.6 S?: Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.
0:00:10.3 Kat: But is there an art or a science to stopping and looking around once in a while?
0:00:16.6 Liz: I’m Liz.
0:00:16.7 Kat: And I’m Kat, and this is Beyond Resilience.
[pause]
0:01:05.6 Kat: Hello, Liz.
0:01:09.6 Liz: Hello, Kat.
0:01:09.8 Kat: How you been?
0:01:12.1 Liz: It’s… It’s a good thing. It’s a good thing. I’ve been good.
0:01:16.3 Kat: Yeah.
0:01:17.2 Liz: It’s spring. It’s good. Life is good.
0:01:17.5 Kat: I’m glad for you.
0:01:17.9 Liz: Been doing some things. Thank you. I’ve been exploring the nether regions of the brain.
0:01:23.2 Kat: Oh, well, that sounds very disturbing for me anyway. Right, okay.
0:01:27.0 Liz: Right. It is disturbing.
0:01:29.2 Kat: All right.
0:01:29.5 Liz: Yeah, ’cause I’ve been using a pitchfork and, wow, talk about the wrong instrument for that. I guess really there aren’t… There is nothing but the nether region of the brain. You know, I’m on this Lisa Feldman Barrett…
0:01:39.6 Kat: Yes.
0:01:41.9 Liz: Let’s call it a kick, but really it’s like a deep dive. I’m so fascinated with her research and her… How she’s just like, no. I mean, she’s taking on all kinds of things. So I saw an interview with her that she did maybe nine months ago online the other day that was like, “No, your body does not keep the score. Your mind keeps the score. Your body is the scorecard.” So she… It’s not like everything she says totally debunks or throws out everything that’s been said before, but it puts it in. It’s like it kind of spins it a quarter turn and puts it in a new context. It’s like, oh, it just expands for me. It expands my thinking hugely. So she is starting to take on the whole trauma is stored in your body mythos, which is quite entrenched at this point. So…
0:02:31.2 Kat: But I think. So I… And I think that what that speaks to mostly is that, this is this… The mind body, what it is to be human, how to survive this crazy claptrap rollercoaster called life, right? We don’t know what we’re doing. And I think that whenever we get into these places where we’re like, “This is the thing, here it is guys.” Never any… Dogma of any kind is disturbing to me because it’s, I mean, I have a friend who lives in an area that is heavily obsessed right now with psychedelics. Psychedelics are gonna solve everything. She happens to be diagnosed with a condition that means she cannot do that. She cannot do psychedelics.
0:03:19.7 Liz: Oh no. Oh no.
0:03:22.1 Kat: And so she is struggling with that reality. And then also being in a situation where you have all these people who are like, “Well, it’s the only way. It’s the… It’s the magic pill.” And I think the body keeps the score embodied trauma. That is kind of a necessary process of maturation for us to go through, as kind of a human community, when like, really the birth of psychiatry and really like Western medicine for the last few hundred years has been this separation of mind and body that it’s not, integrated.
0:04:00.3 Liz: That’s a really good point. Yeah. Yeah.
0:04:02.4 Kat: So I think going in and going, no, actually there is a connection. Maybe it’s going too far and saying like, “Okay, no, there is some balance. There is some interplay. It’s not only in the body.” ‘Cause at the end of the day, right? They still are connected. And I think maybe I shouldn’t speak for her, but I’m guessing that’s her point. It’s not the body… The trauma stored in the body is still trauma stored in mind, right? Because the mind is part of the body.
0:04:23.8 Liz: Well, it’s not just that… Yeah, I mean, the mind, they’re not disconnected. They’re the same thing. I mean, it’s the mind… Your brain is part of your body.
0:04:33.0 Kat: Yeah.
0:04:35.9 Liz: And the… She does a… So yes, to everything you just said that, yes, that it… That’s right. It is right? ‘Cause it got artificially separated and all kinds of what is now accepted dogma got built on that. And so we’re kind of stumbling our way back. And as you were talking, I’m thinking, “Yeah, I’m with you.” ‘Cause I even… So I’m really fascinated with this book and with her research, but her research is made possible by the instrumentation that is available now.
0:05:00.8 Kat: Exactly.
0:05:02.7 Liz: And in… I keep thinking about that Star Trek movie that was shot in San Francisco where, McCoy, the doctor is… One of the crew members has like a brain injury and McCoy doctor… The ship’s doctor runs into the operating room and where they’re going to open up his skull and says, “You barbarians.” And he takes out this little electronic device and sticks it on his head and repairs the brain injury. And I’m like, so every time some new truth emerges, it’s just tomorrow’s outdated BS. Right? So. I am always mindful of that.
0:05:37.7 Kat: I mean, we don’t… We don’t use leeches anymore regularly.
0:05:43.5 Liz: No they’re back. They’re back.
0:05:45.8 Kat: Yeah. I’m saying regularly. It used to be that they were in the hospital…
0:05:49.0 Liz: Right.
0:05:50.6 Kat: As part of standard operating procedure, like let’s draw blood, let’s… Let’s purify the blood through leeches.
0:05:51.8 Liz: Right. That’s not what they’re doing anymore.
0:06:00.2 Kat: No, no.
0:06:01.5 Liz: They’re there for circulation to increase circulation, but yes. So one of the things she does in terms of eviscerating, I would say dogma is she goes over what is, the very commonly accepted triune brain theory. Where we have the reptilian brain, which came first in our evolution, and then the next layer of the brain and the cortex, which is the most recent and the most… She just… She goes back to Plato and says, “That was Plato’s take on morality.” That there are these kind of three cells essentially, right? The animalistic urges and blah, blah, which maps pretty well to Freud’s ego, superego, and id.
0:06:39.8 Kat: Yeah.
0:06:41.1 Liz: And then just got grafted wholesale onto the brain before there was any way to know. So triune brain theory has always been BS. It’s never… There’s no… It’s just… It’s not even… It’s hard to even call it a theory. It’s like an idea based on platonic morality and reified by Freud and then everybody just runs with it. So as I’m doing more and more listening about brain stuff, I’m having a lot of… I have to translate people who are talking about the brain in this way. That’s not the way it works. So that the link between the brain and body is constant. It never… The brain is scanning the body all the time, taking all of our physical sensations in and what creating… Or yeah, creating what she calls effective feeling, which is not emotion. It’s just, am I aroused or calm? Is this pleasant or unpleasant? The body, the brain is looking for that because the brain is looking to keep us alive. So it’s looking, if it’s unpleasant and you’re aroused, I think what do I need to do?
0:07:48.3 Kat: It’s reading the room, basically.
0:07:50.5 Liz: So what is… Yeah, exactly right? The room is the body. So if your shoulders are tight, maybe that’s… So if I have only one story for why my shoulders are tight, that starts looping in on itself and becoming my only option. The brain needs to get me out of there or whatever. So that’s the first thing. It’s like, there’s just one brain and it’s part of a body and emotions are predictions that your brain makes in order to keep you safe. So feel this, take this action. This emotion, take this action because you must be in danger. So what… The reason I’m so fascinated with this, of course, is the connection between this and Open Focus, which is another aid to keep the brain from mistakenly choosing fight or flight in situations when it doesn’t need to.
0:08:46.3 Liz: So I… So there’s the theoretical research that Feldman Barrett is doing. And then there’s like, how do you apply it? What do you do about this? So one of the things she recommends is to separate pure body sensation from every interpretation. So like the first level of interpretation is affect. Is it pleasant, unpleasant, aroused, or calm? As soon as I notice that I’m having some kind of affective feeling, I can just go back to, oh, maybe I’m hungry. Maybe I’m thirsty. Maybe there’s just a purely physical cause for this and I don’t need to go any further. I don’t need to have a feeling about it.
0:09:25.7 Liz: I can just go get some water or something to drink. Maybe I take a little micro nap. Maybe I’m just tired. So unhooking even affective feeling from a physical sensation is a way to become smarter about that and then give our brain new information. So a tight shoulder is not always an emergency, a situation that’s traumatic abuse. It’s just tension. I could… Hey, how about if I move my shoulder and my neck? Would that help? I might do that. So it’s taking a lot of the nonsense out of this and it… I think it’s such a good pairing with Open Focus.
0:10:13.2 Kat: And it’s… And it’s about sort of removing the meaning or removing the requirement to give a sensation meaning.
0:10:24.1 Liz: Yeah.
0:10:24.5 Kat: Okay.
0:10:24.6 Liz: Which we do so fast.
0:10:26.5 Kat: Oh, absolutely.
0:10:26.6 Liz: In a quarter of a second, boom.
0:10:26.8 Kat: Absolutely. Yeah.
0:10:28.3 Liz: It’s this. I feel anxious. Do you? Do you feel anxious?
0:10:31.8 Kat: Yeah.
0:10:32.9 Liz: Or is that… That feeling in your stomach, is it, are you… Do you have anxiety or do you have… Are you excited? Or is this just what it takes to prepare to do this activity? Kind of like stage fright, right? You’re gonna go give a performance. You wanna do your best. You should be aroused on the effective… On one of those effective poles. If you’re too calm, you’re not going to be as engaged as you need to be with the audience.
0:10:57.6 Kat: It’ll be like a…
0:10:58.6 Liz: Perhaps.
0:11:00.0 Kat: It’ll be like a Cheech & Chong show, an old Cheech & Chong show.
0:11:01.5 Liz: It’ll be…
0:11:02.0 Kat: Hey, hey.
0:11:03.6 Liz: Yeah, Reefer Madness. That’s right.
0:11:04.8 Kat: What’s going on? Not much.
0:11:08.5 Liz: Yeah. I don’t know, Kat. How are you? Who are you?
0:11:10.4 Kat: Too chill.
0:11:11.4 Liz: Get it? I don’t… Like, are you… Yeah, right. Exactly.
0:11:14.4 Kat: Too chill.
0:11:17.8 Liz: Too chill. So, as part of all that exploration about how do you apply Feldman Barrett’s research, came across Brain Gym.
0:11:24.0 Kat: Okay.
0:11:24.2 Liz: Which is this international movement. It’s all… It’s essentially movement is one of the ways to give your brain a new experience. So that is always an option too. I’m having this feeling. What if I moved? Ooh, what would that do? So movement is a way to give your brain new experiences so it can start interpreting your effective feeling in more broad terms, which gives you more choices about what emotions to have and what actions to take. So Brain Gym is another thing that I think that fits really well with Open Focus and with this approach to the brain that Barrett is talking about.
0:12:04.8 Kat: Okay.
0:12:05.8 Liz: So it’s… I’ve learned four of their exercises, which calm the physiology, like really calm the physiology, really, really calm the physiology. So, we could do one of them now. I know this is audio and visual would be really helpful. We could maybe put the actual visuals for this, on the website if we decided to do that.
0:12:27.4 Kat: Okay. Yeah, we could do a video.
0:12:30.0 Liz: But I’m gonna do the least visual one.
0:12:33.0 Kat: Okay.
0:12:33.4 Liz: For right now.
0:12:33.5 Kat: Okay.
0:12:33.9 Liz: And, it’s simply if you put one palm on your chest, right? Like on the bottom of your sternum kind of, or as close to the bottom as you can get.
0:12:45.2 Kat: Okay.
0:12:45.3 Liz: And then just put the other hand over the top of that hand. So one palm is on top of the back of the hand. And all you’re doing is, breathing. That would be inhaling and exhaling. And on the exhale, you just press in just a little bit. And you’re not pressing in so you can squeeze your heart because it’s behind your rib cage. So that’s not gonna work out for you, but you’re just putting a little pressure in because that will activate the receptors in your joints.
0:13:15.6 Liz: Every joint has a receptor, right? Because the brain has to know where it is in space all the time. So if you activate that… And because in Open Focus, we’re sitting erect, when you press on your heart a little bit, you’ll feel the joints in your hands and fingers in your wrists, in your elbows, in your shoulders, and ideally all the way down your back. And just after a few breaths there doing that, you will, I hope I do anyway, start to feel calm, a deep sense of calm.
0:13:51.3 Kat: And so with each exhalation, I’m pressing a little bit more.
0:13:56.1 Liz: Just a little bit.
0:13:58.2 Kat: Just a little touch… More. Okay.
0:14:00.9 Liz: You’re just wanting to activate those joints, which will happen. You don’t have to worry about that. So if you get calmer, or as you get calmer, the reason you do is because your brain, which has no way of seeing anything except for scanning the body, is saying, “Oh, she’s here. She’s here in space.” My proprioceptive sense is what I’m activating here. And that gives the brain information that I’m okay. I’m here. I’m still. I’m breathing deeply. I must be okay. And everybody kind of stands down. The brain stands down. The body stands down. If you do this in a moment when you’re really stressed out and you take, I don’t know, 5-10 breaths, your body will settle because it’s physiological.
0:14:58.8 Kat: Okay.
0:14:58.9 Liz: If you want to counter any thoughts you’re having, you can also float an affirmation in there. Let’s say you’re feeling really alarmed. You could say… Take one of Kristin Neff’s self-compassion affirmations and say, “May I be safe?” Just let your brain hear that ’cause it’s always listening. Can do a more proactive, I guess, affirmation. “I move forward in my life with compassion.” Let that be the sound that your brain is hearing as it’s getting this physical input. And that’s it. That’s it.
0:15:54.1 Kat: So it’s a new tool in our little toolbox to kind of prime the pump.
0:16:03.0 Liz: Exactly.
0:16:03.8 Kat: Lay the groundwork to then get into some Open Focus. So now we’re chill, but not too chill.
0:16:10.9 Liz: Exactly right. Not sleepy, but really receptive, right in the place we wanna be for Open Focus.
0:16:18.1 Kat: And so we’re gonna delve into our Open Focus today is to kind of get aspirational. So.
0:16:26.8 Liz: Yeah, it’s a little bit of a new approach to Open Focus. But if we can disperse our pain, the particles of our pain throughout space, why can’t we find where joy is in our body?
0:16:41.6 Kat: Yeah.
0:16:43.1 Liz: Where if you felt peaceful during that brain gym exercise, where did you feel that? How do you know that you’re happy? How do you know that you’re calm? What is the feeling? It’s the same thing. We locate it in the body, give it a shape. It’s exactly the same process as dissolving pain, but we’re dispersing joy.
0:17:05.7 Kat: I love this.
0:17:06.5 Liz: Dispersing presence.
0:17:07.1 Kat: I love it. Yeah.
0:17:08.4 Liz: Yeah. So the thing to do before… Well, what we’ll do in the session is find that beneficial feeling, the thing you really like. And so the Brain Gym exercise helps us to get more peaceful.
0:17:24.4 Kat: Yeah.
0:17:25.9 Liz: So if you wanna do that as we’re starting Open Focus, put hand over hand on your heart and then halfway through, just switch the hand, put the other hand on top. So the brain is getting kind of equal input from both sides. You can do that. You’re not forcing something. You’re not trying to attain a state of calm. You are letting your body work the way it was designed to work. And if you don’t feel anything, that is excellent. It’s just as excellent as feeling something. We are not trying to manufacture a feeling. Just keep going. It’s like any practice, right?
0:18:08.4 Liz: Just keep doing it and you’ll catch up with yourself. That’s why a lot of people give up on practice. Well, I’m not feeling, I’m not feeling what you feel. That’s okay. It’s a practice and you’ll start where you are. And eventually, if you just keep doing it, so you can do this little Brain Gym exercise several times a day and see what happens, see what you notice. So the more you practice, the more effective it will be, just like Open Focus. And we are attempting to interrupt a circuitry in the brain that’s been there for a long time, interpreting certain bodily sensations in a certain way. So if we’re interrupting what input our brain is getting from our body, that’s all we’re doing with this Brain Gym exercise.
0:18:55.6 Kat: Okay.
0:18:57.2 Liz: We’re giving the brain a different physical sensation, which it already knows how to interpret. Oh, she’s okay. She’s sitting still. She’s got an arm and a wrist and hands and shoulders and a back. All good. That’s great. So we’re attempting, just like with Open Focus, we are creating a different physical experience that the brain will use as information in future predictions about what’s happening in our world and what we should do about it.
0:19:28.0 Kat: And so by doing this practice similar with Open Focuses, you get into a place where it just becomes part of your day to day.
0:19:39.2 Liz: Exactly. Yeah.
0:19:40.5 Kat: But it’s okay if you’re not there yet. It’s just keep doing it.
0:19:45.4 Liz: Totally.
0:19:46.7 Kat: Right. Yeah.
0:19:48.1 Liz: Yeah. Every time you think of it… If thinking of it as, oh, I didn’t do that today. Great. Put a post-it somewhere. Do it tomorrow or do it right now. Three breaths. Put your hands over your heart. Three breaths. Switch hands. Three breaths. You are good. Just do it, do it slow. Don’t rush through it. Be there in it. But don’t worry about it. It’s okay. Successive approximations is what we’re after.
0:20:14.2 Kat: All right. Well, I am primed. I’m ready.
0:20:19.2 Liz: All right.
0:20:20.2 Kat: So should we get into dispersing our joy?
0:20:23.2 Liz: Let’s do it.
0:20:24.9 Kat: I feel like it’s like the Glinda, the Good Witch. Oh, darling. Like glitter. I’m dispersing my joy.
0:20:29.9 Liz: Okay. If we do a video on these, you are totally gonna be dressed as Glinda, the Good Witch.
0:20:37.0 Kat: The Good witch. Okay.
0:20:39.1 Liz: Is it a deal?
0:20:40.5 Kat: Okay. You got it. Yeah. All right.
0:20:41.0 Liz: All right. Okay. So starting as we do in Open Focus with our eyes closed, our hands free and available because we often use the index fingers and thumbs. Eyes closed, which helps us to open our focus. Can you imagine the space inside your thumbs and index fingers? And can you imagine that your imagination works without any help from you? That it is effortlessly, not only possible, but a certainty that your imagination is equal to the task of imagining something in answer to these questions. And can you imagine that over time with repetition, you and your imagination will work together more and more effortlessly, and you will experience the things you imagine more sensitively and fully and intimately all without any effort on your part.
0:22:40.0 Liz: Can you imagine the space inside your thumb and index fingers? That is the space filling your entire thumb volume and the volume of your index fingers. At the same time you are feeling the space all around your index fingers and thumbs, not privileging either the space inside or the space outside, but broadening your attention to include both effortlessly, just making it up. That’s what imagination does. And using the feeling of space in and around your index fingers and thumbs. Can you imagine the space inside the rest of your 10 fingers? So your middle fingers and ring fingers, little fingers, index finger and thumb, all full of space surrounded by space and permeated by space.
0:24:27.9 Liz: Can you imagine that same feeling of space inside your palms and wrists all the way up into your forearm and elbow, upper arm, shoulder blade, full of space, surrounded by space, permeated by space. Can you imagine that same feeling of space filling your head, face, ears, eyes, eye muscles, eyelids, the muscles under the skin on your face where so much tension is stored full of space, surrounded by space, permeated by space. Can you imagine space filling your entire head and neck, including your ears, middle, inner and outer ear. All the sinuses and eustachian tubes, everything, it’s behind that skin just full of space down into your neck, all the way down. Joining up with the space in your shoulder blades and around all of these structures full of space surrounded by space, shot through with space.
0:26:45.7 Liz: And is it possible to imagine that same feeling of space all the way through your torso, down to your Sitz bones, all of the structures, the organs, your genitals, buttocks, all the muscles full of space surrounded by space, including your upper legs, your thighs, your knees, your calves and ankles, your feet and all 10 toes full of space, surrounded by space, permeated by space. And if you find yourself trying, just let go and ask yourself, can you imagine effortlessly your entire body full of space, surrounded by space, permeated by space?
0:28:09.3 Liz: And can you imagine this space that the room you’re in occupies at the same time that you are imagining this space inside your entire body? And can you imagine where delight lives in your body? Where do you feel delight or happiness or joy? Is it the laugh that bubbles out of your throat? Is it the center of your being somewhere in your torso? Is it a tickle in your mind? Is it the urge to move and throw your arms open or dance around? Can you imagine the region or place where you experience joy? Whatever that sensation is, wherever it is.
0:30:16.7 Liz: Can you imagine it has a shape? Just make that up. And can you imagine the specifics of that shape? Is it like a ball, like a cube, something irregular? Is it smooth or spiky? Thick or thin, irregular shape, or all over the place? Whatever that shape is, can you imagine it full of space, just like your thumbs and index fingers full of space, just like your entire body full of space. And can you also imagine space all around that shape so that it’s full of space and surrounded, held in space?
0:31:51.9 Liz: And can you imagine that physical sensation of joy as a shape full of space? And imagine the particles, the outline of that shape dissolving into space, becoming particles floating through space, expanding, dispersing, sending joy all throughout your body, sending it all throughout the room that you’re in, out into space, letting yourself be immersed in those particles. Can you imagine what it sounds like? Can you imagine what it tastes like and feels like? What texture does it have? Can you imagine what it’s like to bathe in those particles? Can you imagine that all throughout your day, no matter what else you’re doing? Then you can do this exact sequence of using a feeling of joy whether you’re having it now or remembering it, locating it in your body, giving it a shape.
0:34:15.6 Liz: Taking your time with this, letting your imagination do all of it. Imagine the shape. Imagine it full of space, effortlessly surrounded by space. Taking the time you need to let your imagination dissolve that shape into space. Let the particles of your happiness or calm or joy move throughout the space in your body. Can you imagine taking even one tiny step toward this? Having a passing thought about it, remembering that you didn’t do it when you could have, these are all tiny steps toward turning this into a habitual practice, a habitual, effortless practice.
0:35:54.3 Liz: And can you imagine finding a time so easily and effortlessly to practice these steps, locating a sensation, giving it a shape, filling that shape with space, surrounding it with space, and letting it dissolve and disperse into space to all the space that you can imagine. I am gonna… That’s the end of the Open Focus session.
0:36:47.4 Kat: I just I was thinking about how the previous three have been about dissolving different sort of approaches to pain and then this being sort of dissolving joy. It’s like it can be sort of a positive method of like crowding it out. If concentrating on a mental, emotional, or physical pain that you’re feeling is too much, right? It’s too heavy, it’s gonna bring up too much and you know this is a way you could kind of concentrate on the opposite and sort of expand that so much that maybe there’s not room for that. Yeah.
0:37:39.3 Liz: Well, this is what’s really interesting. We… You don’t need to do that. So and here’s why you don’t need to do that. So when we talk about flexible attention, it doesn’t matter what’s there, it’s not what you pay attention to, it’s how you pay attention to it. So when we are… The most striking aspect of that for me is the nature of reality, which is that an atom is mostly space. That the diameter of the atom, which is defined by the electrons that travel around it in orbit around the nucleus. That diameter of the atom is 200,000 times the diameter of the nucleus. So that means there’s 200,000 times nothing to part… The ratio is 200,000 times to one in terms of space to particle. It’s so much more space than mass. Everything is.
0:38:42.5 Liz: So it’s okay for it… It’s all there together all the time. And with flexible attention, I change how I pay attention. So I don’t need to narrow my focus to exclude, I can simply shift my attention and center it wherever I wish to. So I can have those quadrants we talk about narrow objective is me and tunnel vision pushing everything away from me. The opposite is broad immersed where I’m… My attention is super broad and I’m immersed in everything. And then there’s the other ones where I’m narrow but immersed, broad but objective.
0:39:22.7 Liz: So I can use all of those styles and they will shift the brainwaves and reduce the stress effect in my body, which gives my brain different information about where I am and how I am and tells how I should… What emotions to generate. What actions to take. So any tightening and pushing away and any refusal puts us right back into that narrow objective focus. ‘Cause we wanna distance ourselves. So we don’t need to, you can just keep it all and we can practice this more in future Open Focus sessions. Where it’s both end and I can center my attention here. I can center my attention in space, which is really what the practice is. And then I can also bring in other things into the center of my focus and then practice… Or center my attention. I don’t wanna say focus ’cause I don’t mean focus. But where do I center my attention? It’s much softer than concentrate or focus.
0:40:26.5 Kat: Do this.
0:40:27.3 Liz: It’s just what’s my… Yeah. Right. Do this now and don’t do that. Because don’t do that is the same as do this. It’s I have to. You don’t have to do it. I think that’s… I’m going to make a wild assertion here with no evidence.
0:40:43.2 Kat: Okay. Let’s hear it.
0:40:43.9 Liz: Okay. No evidence, no experience. So here I go. I think that’s…
0:40:47.7 Kat: Just a reminder. We’re not professionals, folks.
0:40:50.7 Liz: We are so not professionals. And here’s…
0:40:52.7 Kat: We’re just a couple of weirdos.
0:40:53.6 Liz: Here’s a moment you can tell but I… From what I understand it… I think this is where people… Longtime meditators get to. It’s all kind of just phenomena that comes in. And I can choose how I hold that phenomenon whether it’s joy or pain. It’s just what’s here now. And it doesn’t disturb kind of the ground of my being, which we would call space in Open Focus practice. It comes into space, it goes out of space. Space is unharmed and undisturbed.
0:41:29.7 Liz: That’s kind of the dance of reality in a way. There’s all this space and then there are these particles coming and going, woo-hoo. Let’s have a party. Let’s have a pity party. Okay. Whatever. Space is undisturbed. And we can return… We can pay attention to whatever the phenomena is by including space inside it and around it and letting ourselves be immersed in that space.
0:41:57.2 Kat: And not trying… Well, not don’t do, but we don’t have to put meaning or make judgment about it. We’re just with it. We’re accepting it all.
0:42:07.1 Liz: Yeah. Yeah. That’s not a word we use in Open Focus. But I think that I feel… That’s something I feel when I’m… It’s almost like pre-acceptance. I’m just letting myself be immersed. Acceptance almost has too much weight but it’s the closest word that I can find too.
0:42:25.6 Kat: Non-judgment. I don’t know the pre… Yeah. Something.
0:42:27.9 Liz: Yeah. Almost any language is like, wow, it starts to have weight. It starts to have meaning and a cultured meaning and all that stuff. So it’s… It can be a bum steer. Apologies to cattle everywhere. I meant that metaphorically.
0:42:46.2 Kat: Well, thank you very much, Liz. This was a great session and I will see you next week.
0:42:53.4 Liz: Yeah. Thanks a lot, Kat. Always a pleasure.
0:42:56.0 Kat: Are you interested in learning how you can incorporate Open Focus into your daily life? Consider joining us for our weekly Open Focus Friday group session at 12:00 PM Pacific on Zoom. Registration details and more information on Open Focus are available on our website, www.beyondresilience.io.
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0:43:20.6 Kat: Thanks for listening to Beyond Resilience, which is hosted by Liz Williams and Kat Oak, and produced by Liminal Nation. Neither Liz nor Kat are trained medical or mental health professionals. And all of the ideas, techniques, resources, and tools we explore in the podcast reflect our own personal perspectives. Special thank you to Stephen Carey for our musical ambiance and to John Hughes and Paramount Pictures for the excerpted audio of the preeminent philosopher of late stage capitalism, Ferris Bueller. All rights, where appropriate, are reserved. Until next time, stay open.
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