We should have called this the f-bomb episode, or the ADHD episode – we’re that off the hook. But we do come back to the point, which is that being fully present enhances all kinds of performance = sports, at work, connecting with loved ones. Performing in fight or flight, on the other hand, is not enjoyable and can leave a sticky residue. The Open Focus practice starts at 26.07.02
Here’s the the transcript:
0:00:00.3 Kat: In the immortal words of Ferris Bueller:
0:00:03.6 S?: “Life moves pretty fast. You don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.”
0:00:10.7 Kat: But is there an art or a science to stopping and looking around once in a while?
0:00:16.3 Liz: I’m Liz.
0:00:18.1 Kat: And I’m Kat. And this is Beyond Resilience. When Liz and I met during the COVID-19 pandemic, we discovered that we shared a passion for exploring accessible ways of experiencing and incorporating trance into our daily lives. In particular, we were interested in how different trance inducing practices might promote physical, mental, and emotional healing, enhance creativity and inspire liberation. So in the first season of Beyond Resilience, we explore Open Focus, a practice developed by Les Femme that helps us retrain our brains to access all the different types of attention available. Please join us as we explore Open Focus and learn about the benefits of daily practice. Oh, hi Liz.
0:01:09.1 Liz: Hello, Kat. Hello.
[laughter]
0:01:11.5 Kat: We’ve been struggling this week with some technical difficulties.
0:01:19.5 Liz: We have.
0:01:19.6 Kat: Yeah. Liz, you noted that the tech gods are angry at us. And we need to bring the goddesses back.
0:01:26.6 Liz: Yeah. They’re more creative. They’ve got more options, yeah.
0:01:31.5 Kat: Although, I don’t know. I mean, when you read some of those old, like Greek myths and Roman myths, the goddesses are, they can hold a grudge.
0:01:39.7 Liz: They do hold grudges. It’s really very true. And that’s part of why I love them.
[laughter]
0:01:44.0 Kat: Me too. You know what? I was just gonna say, like, I like the fact that like, Greek gods were like sort of hot messes. You know, they had a lot of sort of like human characteristics and like flaws. And they weren’t like these like deities of like sweetness and light that we…
0:02:06.7 Liz: They weren’t.
0:02:06.8 Kat: Yeah. I mean, I guess it’s probably a little bit like that’s pantheistic, right? ‘Cause like, Hinduism is that way, right?
0:02:12.1 Liz: I was just gonna mention that.
0:02:13.6 Kat: Where the Gods also have… Yeah.
0:02:15.6 Liz: That’s funny, right? All of the characteristics, all of the human characteristics can be found in that, those pantheon of gods and goddesses and I love that. It’s all okay. It’s so we don’t, this certainly doesn’t extend to modern day Hinduism or modern day India, so please don’t hear me saying that.
0:02:35.7 Kat: Yeah. [laughter]
0:02:37.6 Liz: But in that view of accepting all of us and loving all of us and allowing everything without demonizing something and then declaring it unfit and unwanted and then needing the other half to control it, what could I be referring to? [laughter] Right? It just is…
0:02:55.8 Kat: I wonder.
0:02:56.7 Liz: It’s all here. It’s all okay. It’s all, it’s the, was the factory set I got when I came into this world, I came with all of that. The ability to hold grudges, the ability to be enraged, the ability to hate as well as love and connect and forgive and everything in between. I have all of that. So how is it that when the Abrahamic religions got started, and I include Islam in that, it’s just this, it’s like chrislam essentially. So similar. Half of my starter set, half of my factory presets became shameful and problematic.
0:03:39.1 Kat: Although I will say like the first Testament, God is kind of a creep.
0:03:42.2 Liz: Yeah. He’s a creep [laughter]
0:03:44.5 Kat: He is sort of jealous and vengeful.
0:03:48.8 Liz: Yeah. Right?
0:03:50.2 Kat: You know, like, yeah. So I think like, there’s some crossover there a little bit I think.
0:03:57.2 Liz: A little bit.
0:03:58.4 Kat: Yeah. But it’s interesting you bring up factory sets. I was just reading this article today. It was written a couple of years ago by, I don’t know if you read Olga Khazan in The Atlantic.
0:04:06.1 Liz: I don’t.
0:04:06.7 Kat: Anyway, so she writes a lot of different sort of articles about her perspective, experience of life. She’s an immigrant. Her parents are from the former Soviet Union. And so she has a very unique kind of perspective on what it’s like to be American ’cause she was, they moved here when she was young, right? So she has a little bit of a split experience, but she did this thing about, like, the essay was like, about how she didn’t like her personality and most other people didn’t like her personality either. And she was like, I wonder if this is something I can change. And so she did this whole analysis that like the five kind of big personality traits around like sort of conscientiousness and sort of, like agreeableness, like neuroticism. I can’t remember what the other two are. Anyway, it’s like a scale, like this guy developed this test that’s like, here’s these scales you can be on. And he’s very much like, you can theoretically change these traits that kind of make up a personality in a kind of fake it until you make it sort of methodology. Right? So she decided to do it for three months. She did all these exercises to see, she did an analysis of, she took this really detailed test, and then she did all these practices that he recommended in order to like shift the needle and then took the test again.
0:05:41.1 Kat: And she actually did change in a couple of them in sort of more positive way, right? And then like agreeableness, she got less agreeable [laughter] than she was before. But she was already pretty disagreeable, so she went even worse. [laughter] But one thing I thought was interesting was one of the psychologists or psychiatrists that she spoke with that, you know, is like, I think she’s a behavioral, I thought this is fascinating. A behavioralist geneticist.
0:06:11.1 Liz: Oh, that’s interesting.
0:06:13.1 Kat: So, yeah. So she kind of focuses on that kind of like how our genes kind of like influence who we are. And she said one of the fake it till you make it kind of issues that you can have is that, you can start to feel, you can start to increase your stress because you feel like you’re not being true to yourself. [laughter] Right? So…
0:06:37.3 Liz: So I take it that wasn’t one of the five traits?
[laughter]
0:06:42.5 Kat: No. So it was interesting. And then another person kind of interpreted her results where they were like, well, some of this stuff, like your choice to be more extroverted versus introverted. It’s like, that can just be like a feedback loop, like sort of positive feelings and that long term it might not sustain. Like right now it’s just kind of building. But like, the example that they used was like, happy people, or a group of people smile more so then people smile back at them, and then they’re like, the world is a better place because everybody’s smiling at me all the time. [laughter] Right? Versus like a sourpuss, like an Eeyore who’s just like…
[vocalization]
0:07:28.6 Kat: All the time, right?
[laughter]
0:07:29.6 Kat: And everybody’s like, man, I wanna stay away from that person. Like they’re sour, right? And they’re like, everybody hates me and avoids me. The world is full of horrible people, right? So… [laughter] So, anyway, but yeah.
0:07:44.2 Liz: Yeah, it seems like it shifts the internal locus out. It’s like, I can lose touch with myself.
0:07:53.3 Kat: And I honestly have, I mean, yes, I was an extreme introvert and I had to learn how to be an extrovert, but I did it because I felt like that was what was required of me. And it took me a long time to kind of get to a peaceful place with my introversion and kind of the value that it can bring to a situation, versus like, we live in an extroverted society.
0:08:18.3 Liz: We do.
0:08:18.9 Kat: And if you don’t behave that way, you’re seen as damaged, right? So I kind of struggled a little bit with her doing that, because I’m like, I don’t think necessarily that it’s a bad thing to be introverted, but it can be that way if you’re so introverted that you can’t communicate, right? [laughter] In this world.
0:08:43.7 Liz: Well, it’s interesting. Yeah.
0:08:45.5 Kat: Right? So you need to maybe… You know, and so her whole point was even tiny bits of change is change, and maybe we’re like focusing on the wrong things when we’re saying like these self-help things where you have this complete turnaround, or you’re like, I wanna be like that. And it’s like totally, like, markedly different from who you are, but you should just do… Moving a little bit is great too, you know?
0:09:11.5 Liz: Yeah. As I’m listening to you I’m thinking that there’s this performative aspect of the self, right? I need to still bring my, it’s like being an actor, I guess. You don’t leave yourself behind. You find a way to embody the character and whatever the character’s characteristics are in the play or a movie or a TV show, you become that without losing yourself. And I think that I’m doing that a lot. And I think where we run into trouble, or where I wanna put on the breaks is when value starts being assigned to certain traits that, as you alluded to, that extroversion is better. What comes with extroversion is confidence. And that’s all that comes with extroversion. And we fall for that in this country hard. Confidence is equated with competence, and there is no correlation between confidence and competence. There was a great Star Trek episode, the original Star Trek where, oh sorry, not the original one, but the one with Jean-Luc Picard with Patrick Stewart.
0:10:20.7 Kat: Oh, yeah.
0:10:21.8 Liz: And the ship’s physician, Beverly Crusher, was her name in the show, and they’re stranded on an alien planet, and they are strapped together. It’s like a three-legged race, right? They can’t get away from each other, and they’re having to [laughter] run and escape this alien hostile planet. And because of the link between them, Beverly Crusher can read Captain Picard’s thoughts. And he says in a very confident, strong voice, they have no idea where they are or where to go. They have no instruments, nothing, none of the usual gadgetry they had. And he says, he looks both ways. He says, let’s go this way. And they take two steps and she stops. And she says, you have no idea.
[laughter]
0:11:05.2 Kat: Totally.
0:11:08.4 Liz: You have no idea about what to do. And yet you just, and she’s just looking. And he is like, well, no, I don’t, but I’m the captain and people expect me to make decisions, and I have to do that with confidence so they’ll follow me. And she’s just standing there going, you have no idea. Why should I follow? You have no idea. And so that to me is the picture. That’s what extroversion does. Just because you’re confidently leading in a particular direction doesn’t mean that [laughter] there’s been any data, you know, or any…
0:11:46.4 Kat: Yeah. I almost hesitate to call it confidence, right? It’s more like bravado. Like, I must do this. Right? Because I know, like I think some sort of, as an introvert, I sort of envy the people that are also introverts that are sort of like quietly self possessed. Like that to me is confidence. They’re confident in who they are.
0:12:13.3 Liz: Exactly.
0:12:13.9 Kat: They don’t need external feedback. They’re good. You know, so it’s like that kind of broad, that sort of like blustering, like let’s do the… You know, yeah.
0:12:25.0 Liz: Yeah. And it shades into bloviating, blow hard, all of that kind of behavior really easily, and then it does become this self-perpetuating loop. And we do love that. We think of that as leadership in America, and certainly in corporate America. If you’re… You know, there’s plenty of research if you’re tall and male and white and you act with confidence, people imbue you with competence. And there’s never been a correlation between extroversion and competence or even extroversion and intelligence, which is another thing that shows up. People think you are more intelligent. So, I’m with you. I’m also obviously also an introvert. And I love being able to sit back and listen and think before I speak.
0:13:12.6 Liz: Another, at least in the Myers Briggs type indicator world, which is currently having a moment of public shaming, which happens every once a generation, Myers Briggs is soundly thrashed by people who say there’s no connection between Myers Briggs results and work performance. It’s like, well, did you understand what the Myers Briggs does? ‘Cause it’s never made that claim.
[laughter]
0:13:36.0 Liz: And it’s not about that. And so you’re right, and you’re confident and you’re being extroverted, and you have no idea what you’re talking about. So let’s illustrate that extroverted bravado. So, the introverted way is exactly that, it’s self possession, it’s thinking before you speak. Extroverts, and this shows up on brain scans, talk to understand what they think, because their brain goes dark without doing or saying something without input. The introvert brain, on the other hand, lights up like a Christmas tree at the slightest input, and it’s like, oh, something else to run through every possible circuit in my brain, including long term memory. And there’s just a party happening in our heads all the time. So we’re very confident in our thinking process, and no need to jump in and speak if other people are saying what needs to be said, great.
0:14:36.1 Kat: So my son was with me last weekend, and he was complaining, he’s about to turn 14. He’s in a deep, intractable battle with his sister, who is 11, which will continue for at least a decade as we know. And so he’s just talking about how horrible she is and, you know, she’s like, she’s so mean. And I said, well, it sometimes takes a while for people in general, like, you know, this was just recently something I had to learn, sometimes you just don’t need to say anything.
[laughter]
0:15:16.7 Liz: Right? So what is that saying? Speech is silver, but silence is golden.
[laughter]
0:15:21.1 Kat: Yeah. And he’s like, yeah, Kat, I need to learn that myself.
[laughter]
0:15:27.9 Kat: And I was like, we all do. And we learn it in varying degrees throughout our lives, like even if we think we have it. And so I was recounting that story to one of my close friends, and she’s in her mid 40s, and she’s like, and I was like, it’s so fascinating to be talking with this person who’s developing, like, how he’s gonna conduct himself in the world, right? Like, he’s starting to see how he’s interacting with people and how his decisions impact others and consequences and things like that. And she’s like, hell, I’m still, you’re talking about that. I’m like, how am I conduct… You said that? And I’m like, oh my God, am I doing that? How am I conducting myself [laughter] in the world? I haven’t thought about that, you know?
[laughter]
0:16:11.6 Liz: Send him over. I need to talk to him. Oh my God.
[laughter]
0:16:13.9 Kat: So, yeah. I think it’s a moving target, obviously, and I do think personalities do change as we see, right? And I think there’s general trends that they always talk about in terms of like rebelliousness versus adhering to the law. Like you might become more law abiding as you get older, might have more respect for traditions than you did when you were younger. You know, that kind of stuff. But I think it’s interesting to think about actively trying to change.
0:16:55.0 Liz: That’s not happening for me.
0:16:58.7 Kat: You’re not?
0:17:00.9 Liz: That’s not happening for me. I remember, I don’t know the words.
0:17:03.4 Kat: I’m getting more rebellious as I get older.
0:17:05.5 Liz: Well, I think that there’s a gender split here, that men get more conservative and obedient and women get more rebellious and less interested in convention. And, I could make up a story about why that is, but that’s certainly true of me. I have less and less interest in silliness and, so much of “convention” is just oppression by another name.
[laughter]
0:17:36.3 Liz: Right? You have to…
0:17:37.1 Kat: It’s like when you… You’re like, I’m not okay with silliness, but Liz, that’s the cornerstone of our podcast is silliness though.
[laughter]
0:17:43.4 Liz: That’s right.
[laughter]
0:17:46.2 Liz: Good point. I don’t mean our silliness. I mean, all the silliness out there, the convention starts to appear just absurd. It’s just feeding itself and not accomplishing anything. And I get less patient with that. As the older I get, the more I’m like, what? Why? No.
0:18:06.5 Kat: I mean, I think I’ve joked before about as you age as a woman, you start to go into this sort of perimenopausal chaos that I’m currently in. And then in menopause, you start to understand why amongst cultures worldwide, there is a narrative about an old witchy scary woman living in the woods.
[laughter]
0:18:27.1 Kat: Who’s just like…
0:18:28.2 Liz: But she’s wise, Kat, she’s also wise.
0:18:30.9 Kat: She is wise. And she’s like, leave me the fuck alone, for less… She’s just like, yeah, okay, I’m a scary witch. Woo. Go. Yeah, I’m growing a bunch of herbs. Yeah, I’m gonna curse you. Stay away, right? It makes sense. You’re like, oh yeah, because, you know, basically as you age as a woman, your fuck level goes down. You have none, right? Like, you get to a certain level, they’re gone. And so…
0:18:56.9 Liz: It’s not even I give zero fucks, it’s I have negative fucks to give.
[laughter]
0:19:00.7 Kat: Exactly. Yeah. There’s, it’s a debt. It’s a debt of fucks.
0:19:06.0 Liz: There’s a debt, a debt of fucks. I definitely have, yeah, a debt of no… Yep. Absolutely. That’s right. Yeah.
0:19:13.8 Kat: Yeah. But speaking of giving a fuck.
0:19:16.8 Liz: Yeah, absolutely, which we were.
0:19:18.1 Kat: So there are… [laughter] there are certain times when people give too many, right?
0:19:25.2 Liz: That’s right.
0:19:26.7 Kat: And they psych themselves out, and so…
0:19:27.4 Liz: That’s right.
0:19:31.1 Kat: Yeah. So when we were diving into this episode about Open Focus, we wanted to talk about amplifying presence. So can you talk a little bit about what that means?
0:19:43.9 Liz: It’s Really doing that as a way of not getting fucked by giving a fuck. Right? So if, because we’re, it’s the f bomb episode, apparently. Because there’s, it’s just such a concise way of saying what we’re talking about when you need to or want to do really well at anything, which we call perform, which is interesting because of, referencing back to our earlier conversation about performing the self when you’re in a situation where you have to do a certain thing, like play a sport, you’re not bringing everything to your golf game. Or if you are, you’re probably having a pretty bad time, you know, all of the stress and anxiety because you’re narrowing your focus to that golf game. If you’re giving a presentation, you’re not thinking about being stuck in traffic that morning. You’ve got to, the phrases we use are interesting. Shut all that out. Leave that behind. Do it, so it all tends towards that emergency mode concentration, that narrow objective focus that gets all the stress hormones going in our body.
0:20:52.4 Liz: So amplifying presence is what we’re calling the ability to bring Open Focus and flexible attention to those performing situations where you do care, where you really care, where you really want something. So having flexible attention isn’t about floating through life like a ray, you know, like a little rathe not caring about anything, or not being attached to anything. That’s, you still are a human being and we do care about a lot of things and want to do well. So if we can bring flexible attention, so that’s from narrow to broad attention, from an objective or separate focus to being immersed in something, we will be able to bring our best selves to that. And in most of those situations, the kind of the invitation and the habit we have is to be narrow, you know, shut everything out and just focus hard on this. So if you’re, for instance, golf is a good game to illustrate this with. And full disclosure, I don’t play golf. And I don’t understand why anyone does, but, I know that some people…
0:22:01.7 Kat: Golf carts.
0:22:06.3 Liz: Is it golf carts?
0:22:06.4 Kat: That’s what I assume.
0:22:06.2 Liz: I’m guessing.
0:22:06.3 Kat: I mean, come on. You get to like fly over the little grassy knolls. I mean, yeah.
0:22:09.4 Liz: It’s pretty cool. Grass… Did you just say grassy knoll?
0:22:12.1 Kat: Yeah.
[laughter]
0:22:16.9 Liz: Okay. So we’re not gonna talk conspiracy theories here today.
[laughter]
0:22:22.8 Liz: So, sorry. Yeah, it’s probably the golf carts and the cool club. Like, you get to pick, like tools. You have tool, you have gear.
0:22:27.1 Kat: The plaid pants.
0:22:30.8 Liz: The pants are good. Yeah. And the shoes with the little spikes in them, and then…
0:22:33.4 Kat: I mean, and it was created in Scotland. And I am assuming that the original like process involved a lot of whiskey, and so that’s part of it.
0:22:38.8 Liz: I think a lot of things of this nature did and still do. So it’s a drunken golf cart ride with tools and gear.
0:22:51.2 Kat: In plaid.
0:22:53.3 Liz: In plaid. Wow. Okay. I’m…
0:22:57.4 Kat: Hopefully that gives you new insight with your next golfing client.
[laughter]
0:23:00.2 Liz: Even working… No. So the thing that makes golf so fantastic, and I have had golfing clients, and I will again, even though they, we need to have full disclosure. It’s like, yeah, I don’t care about this game nor will I, but I care about you and I care about what Open Focus can do for you. You are all alone out there with just this club and this little ball and the raging wind, because the wind is always raging. And then there’s like this big sand trap, and then there’s water over there, and then there’s like a little flag way off in the distance, which you think you can see, but you may be imagining, you know, but that’s where the little hole is, so that alone can be overwhelming. And then there’s all the things you have to do just right.
0:23:42.7 Liz: The elbow has to be here, the shoulder has to be here. The timing has to be perfect. And you hit this little ball at the end of this long stick. Really, it’s just kind of an overwhelming thing. So I can see why it would be thrilling when any part of that works, much less all of it. So the possibility for focusing overly on one small part of it, trying to protect your attention and not be distracted by noise around, you know, the golf clap is there for a reason. The tiny little golf clap so it doesn’t shock anyone. People are very unobtrusive on the golf course when they’re watching. So Open Focus is how do you pay attention in a broad and immersed way that isn’t distracted and isn’t tense? Because tension is gonna really mess up physical performance.
0:24:33.2 Liz: It’s also gonna mess up any kind of performance in front of an audience, speaking or acting, any of that. If you get pulled out of this broad immersed attention, you’ll be, it can get thrown. So in golf, it’s the yips, right? Your body just jerks. It just does something ridiculous. In acting you forget your lines, you don’t hit your mark. There are all kinds of things that we get afraid of. We have anticipatory dread of, and that sets off this narrow focus. So how do you bring flexible attention to that? Well, we do a lot of things in Open Focus about dissolving various experiences, dissolving emotional experiences that we don’t want, dissolving physical experiences we don’t want. We can also use it to amplify the experiences we do want. And that’s what we’re gonna do today. So, your performance will automatically, this is the great part, you don’t have to like put together all of the pieces. You can get right into flow in Open Focus. So all the pieces just come together, and the way we tend to experience that is as being fully present. So that’s why we’re calling today’s episode amplifying presence. So, that’s what we’re gonna do. We’re gonna do…
0:25:57.5 Kat: All right, that sounds great.
0:25:57.6 Liz: Open Focus session all about that. And I’ll be performing the extroverted role.
[laughter]
0:26:04.7 Kat: And I shall go inside.
0:26:07.2 Liz: Excellent. We have our positions. Action. So you’ll have your position too, so feet flat on the floor, sitting upright so you don’t fall asleep, because while that’s lovely and you may need to sleep, Open Focus is something different. And more healing to your body and mind than sleep could ever be, oddly enough. So, feet flat on the floor. Probably best to close your eyes because the visual sense is very grabby of attention and it’s going to be easier to broaden your attention with your eyes closed. And I’m gonna be asking questions, which you are not going to answer. I phrase everything as a question not so you’ll answer it, but so that, that phraseology helps the brain to not focus. So that’s why I’ll do that. So we’ll start with, can you imagine the space your body occupies? And can you imagine the space the room you’re in occupies? And is it possible to imagine even more sensitively and even intimately the space that your body occupies? Can you imagine, for instance, the space in your index fingers and thumbs that is space filling the entire volume of your thumbs and index fingers?
0:28:40.1 Liz: And at the same time, is it possible to imagine the space all around your index fingers and thumbs? And if it helps to do this, to move your index finger and thumb on each hand a little closer to each other, and then a little farther apart, sometimes that can enhance the feeling sense of space, both inside and all around your index fingers and thumbs. And using that experience of space in your thumbs and index fingers, can you imagine the rest of your fingers on both hands as well as your hands and wrists full of space and surrounded by space? And can you imagine that space, that felt sense of space, traveling up your arms to your elbows, including your forearms and upper arms, all the way to your shoulders. Just the way air comes into a balloon as you’re blowing it up, space, filling your entire body, your arms, your shoulders, your entire torso, from the top of your shoulders and neck, all the way down to your sitz bones, including your pelvis, your genitals, your butt, all of that full of space, all of those organs and structures and your torso full of space and surrounded by space.
0:31:08.2 Liz: Flowing up to your head and neck, full of space and surrounded by space. Every structure in your head, your brain, every cavity, your sinuses and mouth, ears and every structure, your eyes and eye muscles, your skin, your nose and ears, jaw, jaw muscles, teeth and gums, all the muscles in your neck, all the structures in there, all full of space, all surrounded by space, all permeated by space. And then that space, can you imagine it continuing down your legs so that your thighs and your knees, your hips, all full of space surrounded by space, your lower legs and ankles, your feet and all 10 toes full of space and surrounded by space. And is it possible at the same time to imagine simultaneously the space all around you? Whether it’s the space that fills the room in all three dimensions above and below to the sides, the front, the back, a three dimensional kind of sphere or donut or square of space. And if you’re outside, just pick a boundary. Can be to the edge of the grass you’re sitting on, can be to the outer limits of the city you’re in. You can do that if you’re inside too. You can imagine anything. Can you imagine this space around you extending from where it contacts your skin all the way out to the edges of space, whatever you can imagine, whether it’s the atmosphere, the solar system, the universe.
0:33:55.5 Liz: All that space surrounding your body, which is also full of space, and your body being permeated by that space, comfortably immersed in space. And can you imagine yourself in a situation where you want to do well, and as you imagine that situation, can you notice the thoughts in your head? It might be, I have to, everything depends on, I must. Can you imagine, as those thoughts come through your mind, can you imagine surrounding them with space and filling them with space and letting them dissolve into space? You don’t need to try to shut them out or to answer them. They can be present just as you’re present in the space. It’s okay. Their presence doesn’t make them true or dominant. Can surround them with space. Let them be permeated by space. All in your imagination, just making this up. And can you imagine those thoughts becoming smaller? Just the way particles are only a tiny, tiny portion of every atom. Atoms having a nucleus at the center of them and electrons that rotate around that nucleus. And the size of the nucleus is 200,000 times smaller than the size of the atom as defined by those orbiting electrons. So everything, every atom is mostly space. So our physical experience, our mental thoughts, the stress response in our body, everything physical about us is mostly space. And because space can’t be seen or touched, we imagine it.
0:37:51.6 Liz: Can you imagine a vast space around the thoughts that evoke the tension in our bodies? And can you find where those thoughts land in your body? Can you imagine where that is and what it’s like? Is it big or little, pointy or rounded, large or small? Can you imagine it having a shape and a place? And can you fill that place and that shape with space? Plenty of it available. Can you imagine that space filling the shape of where this tension lands in your body? Filling the shape of the thoughts in your head. And as you imagine this space and imagine yourself in this very important performance, can you imagine the sounds that you might be hearing in the space all around you? Can you include information from your other senses? Just make that up. Can you imagine what the sounds are? Can you imagine what the breeze feels like on your skin or the growling of your stomach feels like? Can you imagine the taste in your mouth? And can you let all those awarenesses, all those imaginings just dissolve into space?
0:40:31.2 Liz: Can you imagine yourself in the situation where you want to perform and do your best, connected and filled and permeated by space? Can you imagine yourself effortlessly and simultaneously aware of the space inside your body, your thoughts, and the space outside and all around you, extending out into space itself, and all of the senses, the sensory information available in that space? And can you imagine yourself in this performance situation able to instantly and fully access space in all these ways? The space inside, the space outside, the space between thoughts, the space inside thoughts, all of the five senses existing simultaneously in space, surrounded by space and permeated by space. Can you imagine yourself accessing one, two, three or even more of these in real life as you are performing? Can you imagine yourself finishing that performance still connected, still imagining the space inside and outside, The space between you and others, comfortably including it, while at the same time giving the attention to your performance that it needs. And can you imagine effortlessly performing space, effortlessly performing this kind of Open Focus practice at least once a day. Bringing space even to the practice of Open Focus. Okay, Kat. Stopping.
[laughter]
0:44:33.1 Kat: I could see, I could definitely, I mean, I don’t do any performing like that anymore, but I could definitely see usefulness in that in my day-to-day life in regard to like having to give presentations, you know? Or even like, you know, I interview a lot of people and sometimes I kind of am nervous beforehand. And so kind of going, you know, kind of settling myself beforehand with that would be good, I think.
0:45:07.6 Liz: Yeah. And, the next podcast we’ll do, excuse me, is about that. It’s about how do you amplify connection between you and another person. That’s a great lead in for that, in fact.
0:45:22.0 Kat: Great.
0:45:23.0 Liz: How do you do that? Because there’s always that, I think, that performative aspect when we’re connecting with someone, am I doing this okay? Am I, whether or not we wanna admit it, it’s, I think it’s, for me anyway, it’s always there. How do I do that? How do I interact with someone? How do I not go home from the party, the meeting, the interview and do the horrible postmortem of self-loathing or recrimination, you know, and how can I…
[laughter]
0:45:58.3 Kat: That I’m sure extroverts never feel.
[laughter]
0:46:01.2 Liz: Well, we should ask one. Do you ever feel… No, I think they do. I think they would say, oh yeah, I think I might have said too much. I think I, you know, I talk too much, I think.
0:46:16.5 Kat: Cool. All right, well thank you very much, Liz. And I will see you back here next week, same bat time.
0:46:22.1 Liz: Thanks Kat.
0:46:22.9 Kat: Same bat channel.
0:46:24.8 Liz: Yep.
0:46:27.1 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.
[music]
0:46:50.7 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.