Sacred Smartphoning: How Mindful Use of Technology Can Amplify Our Lives

By Thomas McConkie, adapted from an episode of the Mindfulness+ podcast.

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We've never been so connected and had the ability to reach out and connect with people all over the planet, and yet a little bit counterintuitively, some of us feel more disconnected than we've ever felt. And there even seems to be a correlation in some studies that the more time people spend on social media, the more disconnected they feel. 

It's also common — I think we've all had this experience — where we're on our phone or we're on the computer, and we have multiple windows open, multiple apps running, and we have this experience of our mind just bouncing around from thing to thing. Our flickering screen is almost steering us rather than us doing the steering. 

So there's this kind of disturbing quality to using digital technology that makes it really difficult to settle in. Sometimes using a smartphone or a computer can represent the polar opposite of a mindful state of awareness. I think you can all relate.

The question I want to bring up today for Mindfulness Plus listeners is, How can technology become an expression of our deepest mindful awareness? How can we use this technology to amplify and spread the effects of our mindfulness practices rather than be hampered by this technology? Rather than the technology challenging us to get centered and be more mindful, how can we actually use this technology as a tool?

I want to start with a challenge. I want to challenge the assumption that technology causes symptoms that feel like ADHD and suggest that we're looking at effect rather than cause. What I mean is that in my experience when I approach technology in a place where I'm very centered and have a clear intention, the technology becomes this instrument in my hands. It magnifies my expression. It allows me to deepen my experience of mindful awareness rather than taking it from me. 

So whereas we often blame technology for contributing to the ADHD pandemic in the modern world, we blame technology for scattering us, I want to suggest that if we ourselves are centered, there's an opportunity to really use technology in a new way.

A slightly different way of saying this is that technology, in the end, is a reflection of our inner state. If we're not grounded, if we're not centered, if we're not mindful, if we are ADHD from moment to moment, then the technology is probably going to amplify that. If I'm scattered as I sit down at my computer and open up twenty different windows with my facebook and twitter-feed, and youtube videos, and email, and so forth, I'm probably going to have the experience of being even more scattered than when I first sat down. But if I come into a still point, everything changes. You can do this right now. You can take a breath. Breathe out. Allow yourself to become spacious. From this place of stillness, from this place of spaciousness and centeredness, we can use the technology to propagate mindful awareness. We can use technology to express mindful awareness.

I want to lead you in a really simple exercise that you can do many times a day throughout the rest of your life to change your relationship with technology: help it start working for your mindfulness practice.

So we're going to do a little game, here. It's a fun one that involves a mindfulness practice. To do it, I want you to have your smartphone or a computer handy. Let’s get started.

*start practice* 

Feel the ground beneath you. And just feel the way the breath naturally softens you. As the breath moves through you like a wave you can continue to let go more and more. soften more and more. Just letting the body and the mind unwind according to their natural rhythm.

Whenever we settle in this way, it's natural for there to be a settling-in process. For the first little bit, for a few minutes, for twenty or thirty minutes even, you'll notice sensations releasing through the body: tensions, thoughts in the mind. And you can just let them release. Let your awareness expand and open. Just letting things come and go. Sensations in the body, thoughts in the mind. Sounds, activities in the world, rise and pass. Meanwhile you just abide in the stillness.

Letting come, letting go. No need to do anything. No need to make anything happen. Just letting go. Relaxing into your spacious nature. And from here, I want you to open up your awareness to all of the relationships in your entire life. Friends, family, romantic partners, spouses, colleagues, classmates, teammates, plants, animals, all of it. And as you hold your awareness open to all of your relationships I want you to just make a space for an intuition to arise. Someone you feel called to reach out to and express something to, from the heart of your awareness, your practice, your love for them. Maybe it's an expression of gratitude, of love. Maybe you owe someone an apology and have waited too long to address it. Or maybe there's a genuine conflict in a relationship that you care about and you've been delaying, hiding your truth. Not offering it in service of a deeper connection with this person. Just see if anyone comes to mind. Anyone at all you feel an intuition, an impulse, to connect with in this moment.

As you’re ready, as something occurs to you, I want you to pick up your phone (if you've got a phone). If you're on a computer you can go to email, you can go to facebook — however it is you connect with people through your technology — and just offer them something very simple. I'll give you a moment to do that. As you go to send a simple text message, an email, I just invite you to stay centered, stay grounded. Let your awareness be open, your heart be open. Don't worry about evaluating the message too much, just trust the pure expression of it. Trust its simplicity. And if you're still composing you can stay with that. If you've finished the simple message you can just totally let it go and just remain in the afterglow of this practice. At the very heart of awareness is infinite and endless relationship. The more we practice mindfulness, the more we work with our awareness, the more we realize how deeply connected we are to all things. As a practice moving forward you can take time to ground, periodically. Come to stillness. Listen from this place of intuition. Something in life is calling you to connect with a certain somebody. Say something that needs to be said. Say something that, if left unsaid, would be painful and limiting. And you're invited to continue in this practice as often as you remember. As often as you’re called to it.

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Interview With Diane Hamilton, Author of the Zen of You and Me

The following is a transcript for Episode 27 of Season 1 of Mindfulness+. Listen along, or read the transcript below.

Thomas: I want to introduce you this morning to a special guest we have in the studio: Diane Hamilton. She's been a personal friend of mine for years and a real inspiration of a human being to be in a relationship with. 

Diane is an award-winning mediator in the state of Utah and has done some real pioneering work in the legal system here. She's also a transmitted Zen teacher. 

The reason I wanted to bring her in this morning is because she's written a new book called The Zen of You and Me, published by Shambhala.

And a little trivia about Diane that I think is fascinating and also contextual to the conversation as she is a former rodeo queen, born and raised here in Utah. So as she's doing her Zen thing and taking us to the depths and heights of human consciousness, you can imagine her riding a bull as well [laughs]. The last thing I want to say on a personal level is that Dianne has always been an elegant example of a human being to me and has shown me what a mature mindfulness practice shows up like in the world. 

I feel really lucky to be here with you this morning, Diane. Welcome to the show.

Diane: Thank you, Thomas. I feel really privileged to be here, too, and I also just want your audience to know that I really deeply appreciate our friendship and the work we do together and just the opportunity to have a conversation with you is something I look forward to. 

Thomas: Thanks Di. Diane and I share a lot in common. We've been meditators for many years and we also have a keen interest in adult development. So something I want to say just from the outset as we discuss adult development in this show, and recall if you haven't heard previous shows, the Mindfulness Plus title. The “Plus” in Mindfulness Plus is referring to adult development. There's mindfulness as an awareness practice, which helps us be more grounded, more present and open to the bloom and the fruition of the moment, but then there's the element of development where as we deepen in our mindfulness practice, our very sense of self, our personhood changes, it transforms, it expands. And Diane and I share this interest very deeply so we decided we're going to spend a little time talking about adult development today. And just so you can track this conversation to help you follow along, what I want to say about adult development is that it's happening all the time. In this very moment in the intimacy and the encounter of this very moment, life is calling us to grow. It's calling us to transform and to evolve. And when we name it, when we actually bring our awareness to it and we understand the principle of how development is working on us and inviting us to change, we catalyze that process. We give ourselves more fully to the process. We animate it and amplify it by naming it. So Diane and I are going to do just that. We're going to step through some different aspects of development and invite you to just notice that this is not something foreign to you, this is actually happening in yourself in your own experience right now and we invite you to just notice that. Does that sound okay, Di? 

Diane: Sounds great.

Thomas: Do you want to add anything to that?

Diane: Well, I think the point that you made that it's our natural predisposition to grow and to change. We see that in children and we expect it in a certain way because it's just so obvious the way in which children unfold. But what we know from the research is that adults seem to have an option to either kind of remain at a certain kind of place, or because of life conditions or a new relationship, or an illness, anything can jostle us in continuing to grow. And the idea that we start to notice that it seems so innate, and that if we join with it and allow ourselves to grow that we do expand our way of being and seeing and thinking, and life becomes actually more pleasurable and joyful. So, I'm with you.

Tom: Awesome. And isn't that interesting that, you know, in childhood, there's something automatic about development. Like our bodies are going to grow provided that we have the right nutrition and supportive elements. We just grow. And something you touched on that's really significant: as adults, we seem to have, there's a choice-fulness about it, there are invitations to grow moment to moment and something about us can relax into them, can open up to them, or we can contract and shrink away from them. And to open and relax and to experience just how big we really are is a joyful thing. So I want to ask you a question. The first time you came across adult development, when was it in your life and how did that change your sense of meditation practice and just your outlook?

Diane: Well I, as you mentioned, I kind of have two things that I engage: one is that I'm a mediator, and the other is that I'm a meditator, and I like to joke sometimes that I have talent as a mediator but not that much training, and I have a ton of training as a meditator but not so much talent [laughs].

But both meditation and mediation are really involved in what we call bringing two into one. So when you sit down on a meditation cushion, what we're doing is we're bringing out body, our speech, our mind into coherence, and we're becoming one with our environment so that we experience relaxation, flow, connectedness, the meaning that kind of arises from feeling connected to our life. And when we work as a mediator, we're bringing disputing parties together. We were talking about that a little bit earlier - you're going to be working with some people this weekend, and basically as a mediator I started to make an observation. And that was that I would see a range of people, and at the time I was working, I was the director of dispute resolution for the administrative office of the courts in a Utah judiciary. And we were doing work on race at that time — the racial and ethnic fairness task force — and we were doing some prejudiced reduction work in the courts and so when I would have these more difficult conversations, or I might be involved in a mediation in which there was a high amount of emotion and divorce, I really started to see that I as a mediator was somewhat naive. That I brought this assumption to my work that if I created a safe environment and gave people tea or coffee, and spoke to them in soothing tones, everything was going to work out. And what I saw was that wasn't the case. And it wasn't the case because not everyone had the same capacity for taking different perspectives. Like I would get some people who literally couldn't take their own point of view. So that might be a person who'd been abused and they weren't used to being able to speak, it might be someone from a culture — maybe they were a young person in which if you were young you were supposed to be quiet — maybe it was a more marginalized group and a person wasn't used to speaking up. So I would see people who literally couldn't' take their own point of view, which for a mediator, created a challenge because we assume everyone can speak for themselves. Then I would see a lot of people, and all of us have this built-in capacity to take more perspectives, we don't always use it, and under stress, we tend to go to one singular perspective, so people could take their own point of view but not the view of the other. Some people could take their own point of view, the view of the other, and they would be able to take a third person perspective of the court or the law, or what a jury might do. And then you'd get these wild people who could take their own perspective, they could take another perspective, a third person perspective, they could drop their perspective and not hold so tightly to it, they could take a metaperspective, they could look at the process backward and forward, and I got really interested in that. And it was shortly after that that I got introduced to the work of Ken Wilber. Ken Wilber is my main source for development, and realizing that perspective taking is a hallmark of human development. It's not pathology, it's development. In the same way that a child moves from sitting up to crawling, to walking, to running, our ability to hold complex perspectives evolves in exactly the same way, and it totally changed the way that I did my work. Completely.

Thomas: Yeah, amazing. I just want to underscore that, a quick and dirty definition of development is the ability to take perspectives. And as Diane was just pointing out in her rich experience in mediation, sometimes we have the experience of not even being able to take our own perspective. Like, I feel something, but I don't necessarily feel safe to inhabit that perspective and share it, say, with my romance partner or my family. So I have the experience of not even being able to inhabit the truth of my own experience.

And then we've all had the experience of not being able to put ourselves in another persons shoes and really be vulnerable enough to see the world through their eyes and maybe even see that they're seeing a flaw in us that needs correction. So that the risk of taking another persons perspective who's looking back at us and seeing something that maybe we're not ready to see in  ourselves. And then, Diane mentioned the third-person perspective: if we step back objectively and take the personalities out of it, what does this situation look like from a detached, "objective," point of view. And it just goes on and on, this hall of mirrors, this perspective taking, the process of development is ongoing and without any detectable end to it.

Diane: And if we talk about perspectives just for a moment as truths, we can say one of the reasons it's difficult to see multiple perspectives is because as soon as I — If I have a point of view and then Tom expresses his, now I’ve got two and they conflict, that creates tension in my body and I. And I'm not used to dealing with that tension and so I will often drive another point of view out, adhere just to a single point of view because that's clear to me. It gets very confusing if I have multiple perspectives. Then there's the other problem which is once I develop the ability to hold multiple points of view, how do I decide which one is most important or most true?

Thomas: How do we prioritize. So, the tension, the rub, the friction that inevitably comes up when there's more than one perspective, right? Because every perspective reveals something different and if we open up our awareness to the different perspectives, we're dealing with that inherent tension - part of human life, and this is one of the driving forces of development.

This is getting rich here, Diane. I want to talk about a key theme in your book The Zen of You and Me, and I'll hold up a copy, it’s a gorgeous book, it's recently published by Shambhala, it's Diane’s second book. The first one Everything is Workable. Also another very worthy read about conflict resolution. One of the key themes in The Zen of You and Me is sameness and difference. And we're touching on it here as a developmental theme that when we're embodied as a human being, and when we're in relationship with other human beings, there's going to be sameness, there are things that you and I have in common that are the same, and there's going to be difference. And we're going to love the sameness, it's going to be soothing and "oh let's just hangout here and relax forever", but then that can get really boring because nothings happening. Then the difference is stimulating, but so much so that it can be threatening. Like "what if our differences are so great that we can't overcome them"? And you are the most skilled and talented person I have ever met to take on this topic. This is really your gift, and your bread and butter. So what would you say about sameness and difference from a developmental point of view?

Diane: Let's think for a moment about just a beautiful human birth. A human birth is generated from two different people coming together, right? and then a baby grows in the womb of the mother and there's this really — the baby and the mother are really the same. And then when birth happens, birth is a little bit of a traumatic event, in a way there's a separation. The baby comes into being, and the umbilical cord is cut, and there's separation, yet there's still this incredible sameness that's going on between mother and child, but we start to see this alternation of sameness and difference throughout stages of human development. So, a two year old is demanding that it's mine, and that's a difference that you're not going to see in a one year old. And so people refer to the "terrible twos" partially because what's happening in the mind of the child is that they're starting to experience in themselves apart from the parent. Like, "not the same, this is mine, not yours" and that struggle.

So where difference comes up, it's exciting, we grow through difference, but at the same time it's threatening to the status quo. So we see that same thing happen, families reorganize and then as soon as kids start to hit twelve and thirteen you start to feel that differentiation set in again, where you know, it used to be that your fourteen-year-old when she was ten stood next to you on the street corner and now she stands six feet away and kind of looks at you judgmentally [laughs]. And people don't realize necessarily how healthy it is for a fourteen-year-old to differentiate. And I think one of the original developmental psychologists who talked about this was Erik Erikson, and he talked about the importance of healthy individuation - becoming an independent human being. But It's always a back and forth between sameness and difference. So imagine for a moment: fourteen you separate from your family, you leave and you go away to college. If you stay separated, that's actually not healthy development. What's healthy is when that difference is integrated and you kind of return home at Christmas and you feel this sameness with your family and the difference. That's a more complex way to experience being in a family than "we're all entirely the same, we think the same, we dress the same, we walk the same, we do everything the same," and then difference is threatening, or we're so differentiated that we can't really get together. Everyone drives a separate car to the event, and leaves, and you can never have any feeling that anyone is actually really together. So, it's sort of a beautiful in and out of human development.

Thomas: Yeah, totally. I recently complained to my family: every once in a while, every few months, we'll manage to get together and go out to the cinema and see the latest movie. We all drive in our separate cars there, we sit down side by side and don't talk to each other or interact during the movie, then we get in our cars after and drive home [laughs]. And I'm the voice complaining that we need to have a meal after and talk about what we felt during the movie. This shows up everywhere. The drive to individuate, and come in to our own agency and autonomy, and the drive to remain in communion.

Diane: Yeah, so it's really that tension of being both a part of a family and being a whole unto yourself — a part-whole. So everything in life has this autonomy and independence and also wouldn't survive if it didn't have communion. And even in our evolution we can think about "we survived because we grew up in small bans of human homo sapiens - fifteen to sixty - and that togetherness is what allowed us to survive. And we were threatened by other tribes, different human beings, and that sense of other humans being threatening to us is still really deep and it results in what these days we experience as a lot of prejudice and you know, there's a fundamental threat coming from difference.

Thomas: I want to ask you, from a developmental perspective, how does our relationship to this threatening difference, this threatening other, start to shift? 

Diane: Well, we're going to explore this at the end of our conversation and we're going to take a little journey through a developmental trajectory. And we're going to move from what's called "egocentric", where it's about me and you're not me, then we're going to move to "ethnocentric" where it's about us and them, and then we're going to move “world-centric” where it's really about all of us, and then “cosmic-centric" — all of it. So we move from me, to us, to all of us, to all of it. And difference has a different function at different levels. If it's us and them, difference is threatening and our job is to keep it out. But if it's all of us, our developmental task is to start to be curious about cultural differences, differences in life experience and values, and to bring in more difference. That's literally how we grow. And if we don't have the experience of difference than we stagnate.

Thomas: I've noticed that when I teach development and work with people developmentally, it can feel abstract. It can start to feel like "oh, these are a lot of concepts and they're foreign to me", but really what we're pointing to is just the territory of who we are and what is. What I mean by that is I wonder if you can invite our listeners right now in to kind of a grounded application of what do they do with this. All of this talk about development.

Diane: I think as a listener, maybe the first thing I would ask myself is: do I tell a story, when I talk about myself, that I'm growing? Do I speak about myself as though I'm a process that's unfolding, that new perspectives are coming online for me, that I'm willing to take on new challenges, that I maybe am not the same person I was five years ago. Or the same person I was ten years ago. Because there's a stark contrast as we know in our research between the people who tell a kind of consistent story about who I am, and those who tell a story that "I'm actually in the process of growth and change". So, if you feel like you are wanting to grow, then there are certain things that maybe we can give you a heads up about. You know, like there are certain qualities in your life that will start to come online that you'll want to start to pay attention to. So I think the first one that you and I talked about is how you're relationship to pain in life, and also discomfort - how that starts to change. At certain stages of development we just push that away. But when we become a person oriented towards our growth and development, we start to relate to pain and discomfort differently. Do you want to say something about that?

Thomas: Well, it's interesting. We're Mindfulness Plus here, right? We're always working with awareness in the moment and we're also holding an awareness of the changing self via the developmental perspective. And the topic of pain and discomfort is interesting because it's such an important one in a mindfulness practice. Anytime we bring our awareness to the present moment, most often there's going to be some level of discomfort, whether that's in the physical body, the emotional body, the thinking mind, there's something we're tending to push away from - something uncomfortable - and as we do this over time, as we bring our full awareness to the pain and the beauty of a given moment, over time that also has a developmental impact on us. Meaning that the state of mindful awareness that we cultivate over time tends to stabilize in to a stage of development or a more effortless mindful awareness that we carry though out the day. Something that one of my colleagues Terri O’Fallon says, "We just start to walk around with it." So there's such an intimate relationship between the mindfulness practice, the developmental practice, and how we relate to pain and discomfort.

Diane: So the idea is that when we learn to sit in meditation and experience discomfort, that extends into new situations so it could be that in an intimate relationship, emotions come up, normally I chase my anger away or I don't want to feel your insecurity, but because of the sitting and the mindfulness, suddenly there's space for these emotions to arise. And when they do arise, I can learn how to name them, I can include them in my communications, and most importantly I can also let them go. I'm neither pushing them away, nor am I dwelling in them. So, one hallmark of development is we become more emotionally literate. We literally know how to include our emotions in our life more. 

Thomas: Beautiful. So, we've been talking about difference and how that can be threatening, but it becomes enlivening as we open up to it and take new perspectives. We've talked about pain and discomfort, I want to talk a little bit about creativity. This is a question I get a lot from people beginning a meditation practice, and it comes up a lot in the context of adult development. I wonder if you could speak a little bit about how you see creativity being related to a developmental unfolding.

Diane: Well, as we grow and change, and take on more perspectives, and relax with the things that used to cause us distress, we just start to notice that there's just simply less fear in the body. What happens is that our impulse to try to maintain the status quo - like keep my life exactly the way I want it with a really clear set of beliefs, and a clear set of injunctions and activities that I do — it's like suddenly there's a relaxation to that, and I'm more interested in what new is emerging as well. It's not that I don't want to preserve what's valuable, but I also want to be open to what life is bringing me that I haven't experienced before. Because novelty is one of the great sources of energy and inspiration. So as I feel less fear, I'm kind of more open to uncertainty, I'm more open to new things emerging and trying things out. We notice that people are more willing to take risks, more willing to fail, more willing to integrate what comes of that, and you can't really be a creative person in life without a willingness to risk and to fail. So that changes entirely.

 Thomas: Amazing, as you speak, it reminds me of Otto Scharmer’s work at MIT. He talks about a process which is very much a mindfulness process and a developmental process. We open our minds, we start to take perspectives on the stories we've been telling, and those start to soften. And as the stories start to soften, our heart opens, and we feel just how involved we are in life. And how vulnerable we are to it, how much we care, how much we participate, and the final step in his process he talks about about open will. Something  deeper than the body, deeper than the mind, deeper than who we think we are opens up. He talks about open will and you've used the word willingness — we just start to become willing to see what's emerging and to participate in that dance. 

Diane: And it's fascinating. And it's surprising. And it's revitalizing.. what's the word? Invigorating! 

Thomas: It's really profound, actually. My kind of litmus test for am I present or not, am I in the present moment? If I'm not totally surprised by what's going on, then some part of me is not actually present. I mean, reality is so surprising when we actually open up to it.

Diane: It's bringing up that Heraclitus quote about how you can never step into the same river twice because it's not the same river and you're not the same person. So each moment is fresh.

Thomas: Yeah, the mind labels it and says "river, I've seen that river". But the actual immediacy of the experience tells us that we've never been here, we've never known this moment, and it's radically creative.

So, we have a couple more minutes, here, I want to give you time to lead us in this facilitation. I wonder if you could just speak personally about this offering, The Zen of You and Me, your book, what do you hope people take from it.

Diane: Well, It happens to be coming out at just the time that certainly America seems to be suffering a lot around this question. And I think of sameness and difference, and I think that where America's always had a relatively liberal policy towards immigration - and really there was this sense of vast abundance, and we could share as the world becomes more stressed in a certain way and resources appear more limited, and then we have large number populations of people that are living in war zones, or they're living where there's environmental decimation, and they literally need to be able to live in a new place. And that's just creating incredible tension around you and me, and around us and them. And some of those considerations are reasonable, people come to new environments and don't acclimate very well, and if you're a person who has a history of violence, having come from violence, or being prone to violence, that's a dangerous situation. On the other hand the sort of innate generosity of the American spirit is something that I certainly identify with and I feel like we really need to look more deeply in to what is it we need to preserve in terms of our boundaries, in terms of our national identity, in terms of our resources. And what is it that we really can share and in what way? And I'd love if we could have the conversation differently because right now we're in this kind of either/or process, like full immigration, no immigration, but we're not getting at the deeper values, we're not talking about the genuine risks and the genuine costs, and the genuine benefits that come from the mixing of culture. I mean that's just the way human beings grow and change. And we’re, the USA, the embodiment of that. That's who we are. So, I just want a different conversation, I hope I can contribute.

Thomas: Thank you, Di. That's spoken like a true peace pilgrim, and it's a gorgeous offering, the book. It's so beautifully written, the stories you share, just how personable it is, and how wise. I strongly recommend to the readers at Mindfulness Plus - the listeners - that they get familiar with Diane Hamilton and her work. Thanks for this conversation, Di. I'd love to leave a little space for you to take us on a little tour through the cosmos, as they say.

Diane: [laughs] Alright, sounds great. Thank you. We're going to take a journey and this is really  a journey of perspectives and some of these perspectives will be really familiar to you and some of them will be newer. And so I just want you to notice both the texture of what's familiar and also the texture of what's different. And notice that the difference is sometimes unnerving a little bit, but it's also stimulating, that your system gets awakened a little bit by these differences. So as I said earlier, we're going to just take a moment and move through four levels of development, this is a very rough, rough schema. It doesn't really approach reality but it works for our purposes.

*start practice

So, we'll begin by just finding a posture where you can sit up right and also somewhat relaxed and bring your attention to your body, and take a moment to just notice your breath and how reliable the breath is. And touch in, if you will, with your emotional state as your listening right now. Sometimes when we begin a meditation process or a guided visualization, there's a period of time, three or four minutes, where we just really need to settle. So whatever settling is happening, just notice that as settling.

And now bring your attention to your mind. To the quality of your thoughts, images, whatever activity is in your mental domain right now just pay attention to that. And I just want your permission to move through different perspectives and just invite you to just simply explore and see what might be available to you, what might be new. 

So we're going to begin the process by identifying with the egocentric self. So I just want you to just notice yourself as an egocentric self. and as the ecocentric self, just notice what is it that feels like me. It may include your body, it may include certain memories, it may include your ambitions, what it is you're hoping for, maybe some of the stresses in your life or struggles. As the egocentric self, take a moment to notice just simply your wants and your needs. And everything that arises in your experience as we explore is completely legitimate. You can't do anything wrong. You can notice if you feel like you don't like something that comes up, but at the same time just know it's fine.

So as the egocentric self, notice anything in your surroundings that is not you. And notice as the egocentric self that others are not you, of course, and others may offer you things - they may be a source of comfort or they can be threatening, they can be irritating, but whatever others are, they're crossing this boundary of the ego. And when they cross that boundary, there's a felt sense of what that's like, as I said, sometimes pleasurable, often irritating. And notice as the egocentric self that, you know, surviving and thriving and taking care of yourself is really at the heart of your experience and that the world itself is not me, but I have to get things for myself. I have to accomplish things or secure things. Everything from food, to love, to education, to a skillset, to a career, it all has to be acquired because it's not me. And this probably seems pretty obvious. But the fact that the boundary around the egocentric self is so strong and so limited, we can notice that we feel a little bit claustrophobic as the egocentric self. Or maybe we feel stressed because we're alone. Or maybe we just simply want a bigger perspective because we want more input - there's something so limited about just my point of view. So we're going to expand and we're going to, as Tom talked about in development - expansion is one word that describes what happens. So we're going to move now to what we call the ethnocentric self. Or the socio-centric self. 

And now I would like you to identify with yourself and with those people like me. Right? So the ethnocentric self includes my family, it includes my teammates, it includes the city I live in, possibly my state, my country, but notice the boundary around the ethnocentric self is the boundary between us and them. And suddenly I feel like I'm held in a larger environment, I belong, I'm apart of others, I know what my duties and obligations are, I might even go so far as to sacrifice myself for the good of my people. On the other side, people not like me can feel quite threatening. It could be people that aren't my skin color. It could be people that don't have my worldview, or have a different religion. So while there is more belonging at the ethnocentric level of development, there's also a feeling of threat because these others are potentially damaging or destructive to my group. And as much as the security of being in the ethnocentric self feels good, I might also notice that I just want to look over the next hill. Like everything within my group is already defined, maybe I want to step out and explore what I really think and feel. So let's notice the impulse towards maybe even a bigger perspective. So I'm going to invite you to move from ethnocentric to a world-centric perspective.

And in the world-centric perspective notice now that you're one with all humanity. That previously where people felt different, now you feel the commonality. Everybody is born and will die. Everyone has things they're caring about that they're trying to secure. There's so much commonality in humanity. Our differences seem, you know, kind of not so significant from this perspective. And as the world-centric self we can also notice that other things come online that we didn't experience before. For instance, we might notice that the planet suddenly matters. That’s because we have this big perspective, we see the whole planet earth as this one interactive whole. Maybe we start to think about other species. Not just other human beings but ecosystems and other life forms and how they're doing. We notice at world-centric level that we start to be interested in outer-space and what it is that is actually beyond this. But the national boundaries tend to dissolve. We see large ecosystems, we see waterways, we see the oceans, we see everything as a much more continuous whole. But the downside of being here as the world-centric self is that we also see how immense the problems are. So whether it's a problem of climate change, or warming of the oceans, or species dying off, it's like suddenly the problems seem insurmountable because they're so big. And it's this moment of feeling like somehow the world-centric perspective is also limited that we may grow to what we call the cosmic-centric self. So I'm going to invite you expand one more time and to identify as the cosmic-centric self. And as the cosmic-central self, just ask the question: how big am I? And where is my boundary?

There was a boundary at egocentric between you and me, a boundary at ethnocentric between us and them, a boundary at world-centric between humanity and its' challenges. It's the cosmic-centric self you might notice that there's no limit, that there's just this open, vast, and peaceful quality of being. At cosmic-centric, your perspective is so large, in a way you're no longer bound by space and time. You can dwell in this infinite here and now and yet there's room for the entire history of the cosmos in your mind. And there's also room for whatever potentiality there is in the future. You might notice as the cosmic-centric self that you just simply don't feel the stress and the trouble and the struggle that you do at earlier levels of development. that somehow there's this fundamental trust in the way things are, which is not to say that you can't participate politically or you can't serve others, or you can't do those things that are fun for you, but it's just everything is held in a much larger container with a lot more space and a lot more love. As I said, there's a trust in life itself, there's a trust in your life, your particular life. and even though your life is very specific, there's a quality when you awaken to the cosmic-centric self that you absolutely, utterly belong, and are apart of all things, and that the separation that you experienced at egocentric is no longer so rigid or defined and it doesn't create these levels of stress and struggle. That the mind is fundamentally relaxed, that the heart is surprisingly open and caring, and that the anxiety and fear that often attends our experience, it just disappears. And if you have a meditation practice, you can access this cosmic-centric Identity in which space and time are no longer pressing down on you, but there's actually a  quality of flow and of relaxation. So I hope this little journey was useful to you and that you can see that you're filled with tremendous potential. And my wish for you is that you find different ways in your life to grow and to change. Thank you.

Thomas: Thanks so much, Di.

***

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Mindfulness: A Way to Calm the Drive of Addiction

By Thomas McConkie, adapted from an episode of the Mindfulness+ podcast.

We tend to talk about addiction in our culture as though there are some people who have addiction problems and the rest of us don't struggle with that kind of thing. 

In point of fact, when you start to practice mindfulness — when you look really closely at the dynamics of experience moment to moment — what you discover is that at the heart of experience is a kind of addictive mechanism. Whether you have an illegal drug habit or a texting habit or a potato chip habit (like I am plagued with personally), what you realize through meditation is that the object of addiction is less important than the actual underlying structures of addiction.

The Buddhist tradition is exceptionally articulate about the mechanism behind what we in the West call addiction. The way it basically works is that we are attracted to things that are pleasant, and we have an aversion to things that are unpleasant. And when we investigate our experience directly we notice a very basic and deep-seated push and pull. We push things away from us that are uncomfortable, and we pull pleasure and more comfortable things towards us. 

This is described as “seeking” or “the seeking mind” in Buddhism. The Buddha had a term for this in ancient Pali: taṇhā, which meant thirst. And what he meant by thirst, as I understand it, is that we have a fundamental not “okay-ness” with what is. So, either we're thirsty for more pleasure or we're thirsty for less pain, and what the Buddha pointed out is that our lives are often characterized by this fundamental thirst. This thirst is at the heart of suffering.

So you might say that's the bad news, that human life is characterized by suffering, by a fundamental thirst. Even worse is that by this standard we're all addicts, right? If we take a moment to reflect on our lives and our behaviors, it becomes apparent to us pretty quickly which activities we engage in to mask over the thirst we feel at deeper levels. 

I know when I stop at a stoplight my right hand almost instinctively and involuntarily reaches towards my cell phone because I might have time to check out the latest headline on the newsfeed on my app. And when I take a moment to just pause with that, I sense into a quality of restlessness, and just beneath that restlessness I sense into a deeper and abiding peace. 

This fundamental dynamic of seeking is prevalent in all our lives and this seeking is in response to what is often very subtle, even unconscious, pain and suffering. And we search endlessly for different activities to busy our minds — to numb out, to anesthetize ourselves — to whatever’s happening in the moment that we don't want to be present for.

The good news is that mindfulness practice opens a new door of possibility to us. Without a mindful practice that opens up a quality of stillness and spaciousness in our lives, there would be no end to or recourse from this push and pull — this addictive mechanism at the heart of our experience. We would be stuck in this basic pain-pleasure principle, always chasing after more pleasure, always avoiding more pain. But it turns out that there's a whole different dimension in human experience and human awareness that I've come to call “the still point.”

I'm certainly not the first person to call it that, but when I talk about the still point, I'm talking about a place of profound stillness, a place of profound peace, something even beyond space and time, tinged with a quality of bliss. 

As we get more and more proficient at accessing the still point, we come to experience a kind of profound contentment — a transcendent contentment, happiness beyond conditions. By “beyond conditions” I mean when we come to this place of stillness in our experience, we find that we can be in a tremendous amount of pain, but that we don't feel the same drivenness, the same compulsion to avoid it. 

And on the other end of the spectrum we can be experiencing a tremendous amount of pleasure, almost unbearable pleasure, and yet we don't cling to it. When the pleasure subsides, we let it subside. When the pain wells up, we let it well up. This practice of living in the still point is a deep attitude of letting come, letting go. 

If you think about it, all of us as addicts tend to live a lot from the mindset that “I can't bear this pain; I need something to make me feel better" or “I can't bear for this good experience to end; how do I extend it? How do I prolong it and get even more pleasure out of it?” But when we take a kind of ninety-degree turn straight down into the depths of our awareness, we realize that we don't have to manipulate conditions. We don't have to avoid pain by engaging in some compulsive behavior. And we don't have to manipulate circumstances to prolong or seek more pleasure. We can rest in the still point, this profound contentment, letting life be exactly as it is. 

Let's take a moment to drop in to this experience together.

Find a comfortable position where you can settle in. And just allow a few moments for that body to settle in to the posture. Letting the mind unwind, unload any thoughts. You don't have to try and get relaxed or slow down, you can just trust the rhythm of your own body and mind to do the slowing down for you.

And as you do this, you can notice in the physical body in this moment areas of pleasure. Areas where the body feels just right. And you can just open up to that and receive that. Also notice different aspects of the body that might not be so comfortable. Maybe you can detect some subtle pain, or maybe the pain is quite intense. Just notice any discomfort in the physical body in this moment, without trying to make it go away, without wrestling with it. You can just notice. And notice that your awareness is plenty big enough to hold all of the pain and all of the pleasure of the body in this moment.

And you can bring your awareness to the thinking mind, noticing any pleasant thoughts you've had today or recently. Pleasant thoughts that drift through your mind. And just allow those to come. Notice any negative thoughts, any unpleasant thoughts that have been floating through your awareness today or the last few days, and just see what comes to you when you relax, open up awareness into this vast space. Notice that your awareness is plenty big to hold all of the positive thoughts, all of the negative thoughts.

And finally just take a moment to contemplate the conditions of your life at this moment. The state of your health, your relationships, your livelihood, dreams, aspirations. Notice the conditions that feel favorable, things that are going well for you, and notice the challenges. Conditions you might wish away if you could. Notice that whatever the conditions of the body in the moment, whatever the conditions of the mind, whatever the conditions of your very life in this moment, there's a part of you deeper than the body, deeper than the thinking mind, deeper than life conditions themselves, where you can access a quality of profound contentment. At the level of pure awareness, it's simply a  joy to be awake, to be present.

Allow yourself to relax, resting deeply in a quality of no-seeking. Life conditions ebb and flow, they surge and they fall. But at the heart of your experience, as awareness, as intelligence, you can be deeply present for all of life's experiences, all of conditions: pain and pleasures alike. And through this presence comes a profound freedom. A freedom to just be right here responding to life, just as it is.

Heartfulness: A Meditation on Giving and Receiving Influence

By Thomas McConkie, adapted from an episode of the Mindfulness+ podcast.

When I work with students in a mindfulness capacity, something I often have them do early on in the process is shift their attention to the emotional tone in their own body as well as the emotional tone around them. I'll have them get into small groups of three or four and notice what they can be aware of in terms of the subtle information that's flowing through the air, so to speak. 

What I find when I ask students to do this is that they often have a moment of self-doubt, especially if they've never done the practice. They wonder if what they're sensing is just a part of their imagination — if there's anything they can actually sense at all — when they tune their awareness to this more subtle bandwidth of experience. 

We're used to seeing with our eyes and feeling sensation through the body, but when we tune into the more subtle elements of human experience, it takes a little more time to adjust and start to sensitize ourselves to this new kind of information. But as we practice tuning into our own emotional state, our own subtle rhythms through the body and heart, we spontaneously become more sensitive to the environment around us. Ultimately, this practice of shifting our attention slightly to pick up on a different wave-length of experience is something we can get more and more proficient at. And as we get better at it, we start to trust ourselves more and realize just how much information is available to us when we pay attention in a slightly different way.

Not only are we giving influence throughout the day just by walking around with this human body and this human heart, but we're receiving influence deeply as well. I've mentioned in the past how permeable we are, how vulnerable we are, and in a different light, how connected we are — how much influence we have over one another. Heartfulness is just a slightly different way of talking about that. 

You can experience this right now if you put your hand over your heart. Take a breath. And just notice that your awareness has already become more subtle. Tuning in to this different wavelength, you can sense into the environment around you. Just notice how it feels. 

*Start Practice

I want you to start by focusing on the breath. And for a moment here, we're going to have an intention to breathe rhythmically. You can just choose your own adventure here. If you feel like it, you can do four counts on the in-breath, four on the out-breath. Or maybe you want to do six counts on the in-breath, eight counts on the out-breath. I personally like to do a little bit longer of an out-breath, so I'm going to do the six counts in and eight counts out.  

So go ahead and start with this breath, breathing rhythmically. And if you need to adjust your counts, maybe extend the out-breath a little more or the in-breath, just make the adjustment you need to. And as you do this I also want you to focus on the quality of evenness in the breath, so that you're breathing in a steady stream of oxygen and expelling a steady volume of oxygen. Evenly breathing in and evenly breathing out, according to your own rhythm. Just trust yourself with this. Find what's comfortable to you. The important thing with this exercise is to hold the same ratio, meaning maybe six counts in and six counts out. Eight counts in and ten counts out, just see what feels best for you. Try this for a while.

Good. Stay with that just another couple of breaths. Feel the body softening, coming into coherence. Less of a ragged feel, like you're burning energy, and more of just a smooth flow. All of the organs — all of the systems in the body — coordinating with the energy field of the heart. Like the London Philharmonic Orchestra playing together in unison.

The last step I'll ask you to take, here, is to focus on the heart. Just bring your awareness to the physical heart and notice how it feels in this moment. You can continue to breathe. Don't worry about the count, the ratio, so much at this point. Just trust the intelligence and wisdom of your body to find its own rhythm. Just notice how the heart feels in this moment. Notice the emotional tone of the body. And feel the influence, the energy of your own heart extending out several feet away from your physical body in every direction. If there are people nearby you in the moment or other forms of life — a house pet, a plant — whatever it is, you can just extend your influence to all of life around you. And notice the environment around you. It's quality, it's subtle energetic. Notice what you can sense when you shift your awareness one degree and tune in to this more subtle wavelength. 

You can stay with this practice as long as you want. You can come back to it as often as you want. Breathing rhythmically, evenly, bringing awareness to the heart, inviting the body into coherence. Sending out a loving influence all around you. Blessing other’s lives — human beings, other forms of life. I encourage you to stay with this practice. Stay embodied through the heart, and as you walk around the world you can know yourself to be a human love machine, sending out your influence, receiving influence from others, all in a seamless exchange.

***

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Reclaiming the Body: A Meditation to Integrate Body and Mind

By Thomas McConkie, adapted from an episode of the Mindfulness+ podcast.

***

In a famous (and hilarious) TED talk, Sir Ken Robinson talks about how our education system hampers creativity. He says that for many university professors the body is reduced to a vehicle that shuttles their heads around from meeting to meeting. It's his funny way of saying that university professors are so in their head, so involved in the intellectual side of life, that they forget that they have bodies. 

What Sir Ken Robinson points to isn’t just a phenomenon with university professors. He may as well have been describing adulthood itself. There's a shift in the locus of our identity when we become adults. Just think about childhood and the roly-poly, rough-and-tumble, playing-out-in-the-sun kind of kids we were — coming home with grass stains on our clothes and a big ring of grape jelly and peanut butter around our mouths after lunch. 

The world is so physical when we're young. We're physically embodied for a long time in life, and it's around adolescence where we start to get what is sometimes referred to as a mind-body split. And this is not all bad news.

When the mind and body split, our cognitive function is starting to develop. It's starting to come more into the foreground of our experience as adults. And we do amazing things with cognition. For instance, you can imagine what your life could be like if you really dedicated yourself to your values and your principles. To imagine who it is we want to be, what we want to do with this precious life, and to actually apply ourselves to realizing that vision — that all requires cognition. 

The trouble we get into with the thinking mind is that there's a tendency to leave the body behind. And when we have less awareness in our physical bodies, the body becomes less sensitive. It becomes less vibrant. It can even get sick and start to break down when we're not, for example, eating healthy and exercising or just paying attention to our physical state. 

So, the opportunity of adulthood is to develop our minds and bodies. And this is where a mindfulness practice comes in.

Mindfulness is a practice that can help us grow and develop in a more healthy way into adulthood. And reclaiming the body is a perfect example of this. What we see in our research in adult development is that this mind-body split is a real thing and it becomes a challenge for many adults in their lifetime. You could say it's a developmental threshold of sorts. We reach adulthood, and we start to lose touch with the body,  and a lot of problems can come up from there. So how do we cross this threshold? How do we reach back down into the physical body — into embodiment — and integrate the body with the mind? To me, that's the question. How do we really take this challenge as an opportunity? This challenge of disembodiment — of the body being a vehicle that just shuttles the head around from meeting to meeting. How do we actually invite the physical body to become more sensitive again, to play more of a central role in the sensuous delights of human life? How do we bring the body back online and start to integrate it more fully with the adult mind?

Rather than talk about the answer to that, which would just be more cognition, we're going to practice this. We're going to practice bringing more awareness into the physical body and feel the way it can start to integrate, cooperate with, and flow with the activity of the mind. 

I'll invite you to settle in wherever you are and we'll begin.

[bell to commence practice]

You can start by just taking a couple of deep breaths and if you're comfortable doing so, just allow yourself an audible sigh. Just letting it all go. 

You can just start to settle in. whatever you're doing, whether you're in stillness or motion, you can just start to gather awareness in the physical body - all of the physical body. And as you breathe you can imagine that you're breathing in through every pour of your skin. Lighting up and nourishing the entire body. And moment to moment you can notice the flux of sensation through the body. Even if you're sitting perfectly still with eyes closed, just the expansion and contraction of the breath is a cascade of physical sensation.

As you notice thoughts pulling for your attention, or sounds in the world, sights, just notice that and practice letting go and just allowing your awareness to flow as the sensations of the physical body. Notice that this flow is like a mighty river. Sometimes white-watered. Sometimes silently flowing. But it's unbroken. Moment to moment there is just a stream of sensation through the body.

And as you let awareness really deeply flow and merge with the stream of physical sensations, you can see if that changes the quality of sensation. Noticing if it becomes more clear, more vivid. Often times just bringing attention to the body lights up the experience. Makes it more deeply felt.

From here, you can open up the scope of your focus a little bit wider to include not just physical sensation, but also the thinking mind. So not trying to get rid of thoughts, but not indulging in thoughts or elaborating on them, either. Just allowing thought to flow through awareness the same way that physical sensation flows through awareness. And you can just let it be one in the same flow. It's not that physical sensations are good and thoughts bad, it's all just one unbroken flow. And you can relax your awareness, relax right into this flow.

Let your awareness remain soft and open. Physical sensations flowing, thoughts flowing through the mind, all flowing through awareness. Just take another moment to give yourself back to this flow of nature. And as you practice this more and more, you come to directly experience that you're not a thinking mind separated from a physical body so much as a body-mind. One unbroken flow always flowing through the open expanse of awareness itself.

[bell to conclude practice]

No need to stop, here. You can just stay with this, continuing as one unbroken flow of body, mind, and spirit. Return to this practice again and again as you see fit.

***

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