7ğPqıÃqPØØŎį +Ã悮٠36 Exercises, Insights and Tips For Everyday Mindfulness It with extreme pleasure that I pass along this book to you. Please use it as a source for inspiration. As you were my inspiration for creating this. I would also like to express my gratitude to each of the wonderful people that contributed.

If you find anything that bugs you (misspellings, formatting, grammatical issues, etc) please email your thoughts to [email protected]. Nothing to big or small. This is a work in progress and your feedback will be helpful.

Arranged by Brandon Park of unwobble.com in partnership with MindPodNetwork.com Version 1.2 Original Released February 17, 2017 Version 1.3 Released May 14, 2017

© 2017 Whobody LLC. All rights reserved.

All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used Jeff Agostinelli Sean Dunne 1 How to turn a nervous habit into an 51 Simple choices can get you started. exercise in mindfulness.

Cory Allen Melissa Eisler 6 Two exercises to help you overcome 54 The Art of Mindful Listening suffering or stress.

Toni Bernhard Elisha Goldstein 10 Using Mindfulness as a Refuge for Your 60 Three Things To Do When You Get Home Troubles.

Tara Brach Trudy Goodman Kornfield 16 Waking Up From Reactivity: Three 63 Gentle advice for when it feels like you Invitations to Remembering Truth have too much going on to be mindful.

Mirabai Bush Chris Grosso 21 Frustration and Impatience at Work 67 Hey, Asshole

Jamie Catto Andy Hix 27 Like Me! 76 Making Peace With Yourself

Lily Cushman Jack Kornfield 30 How Mindfulness Can “Bridge the Gap” 80 Transforming Sorrow Into Compassion

Giovanni Dientsmann Noah Lampert 33 Why Meditation Matters 85 Lucid Dreaming and Mindfulness

Michael Donovan Kelly MacLean 41 Can there be mindfulness without 89 Make Love To Your World meditation? Raghu Markus & Rameshwar David Silver 94 Das Lytton 164 Finding Abiding Mindfulness At The Heart Of Mindfulness

Thomas Miller Biet Simkin 101 Two exercises to help you overcome 175 The phases you must pass through to get suffering or stress. to a state of completion.

David Nichtern Lama Surya Das Mindful of the Pie Hole Remembering To Remember Or Tibetan 107 177 Mindfulness Training & The Practice of Presencing

Jared Perry Steve Taylor An Artist’s Guide To Sacred Space The Power of Acceptance: How an 119 186 Attitude of Acceptance Can Transform Your Life

George Pitagorsky Duncan Trussell 125 Mindfulness At Work 194 Duncan’s spiritual practice

Nina Rao Lama Tsomo 128 “Call to Prayer” 198 The Ocean of Awareness

Simon Robinson Yoshino 134 What Is Mindfulness To Me? 202 Curating Your World

Sharon Salzberg Eric Zimmer 150 Everyday Mindfulness: The Art Of 207 How to beat rumination when basic Beginning Again mindfulness doesn’t seem like enough.

Bill Scheinman 156 Bringing Mindfulness To Our Conversations Jeff Agostinelli (cont’d) Jeff Agostinelli

This tip I’m about to share will help you become present by being mindful. I’ve found personally and professionally as a coach that we all have habits that reflect our emotional and mental state.

Habits, and in this case, “nervous” behaviors, could be anything from biting your nails to tapping your leg, to compulsively checking your smartphone, to playing with your beard or hair (at least this was/is mine :)

The reality of the situation is that when we can be more mindful and queue up meditative like states, we can make quick decisions better because we feel more centered, and when you can show up more fully in the moment, people feel it.

This is a way to pinpoint your nervous habits and will give you an idea of where you are mentally and emotionally.

Here is how this went for me… I have a beard. I started to notice I would nervously stroke my beard when I was anxious, overwhelmed, or feeling a variety of things. I

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also noticed I could become aware of what I was doing and slow it down.

First… Pinpoint a nervous habit. It could be biting your nails, or if you have a beard, it could be playing with your beard :) The goal here is not to STOP the action, but like pain or any other physical manifestation of a mental or emotional state, to gather enough information to be able to come to center. So… you are going to still do the thing, but do it consciously, slow it down. As you start to slow down the behavior, just tune into your body. Do you feel any tension? Are you holding your head a certain way? Is your breathing shallow?

When you can start to unravel the chain of habits and sensations, you start to become aware, and “in tune” with whatever is going on internally.

How do you know you are “doing it right”? Simple… Your breathing will likely deepen, and most of all, you’ll start to feel better.

Here is my beard example in a little more detail...

I noticed when I was playing with my beard that my thoughts were racing. So the first thing I did was move from playing with my beard with my fingers to actually

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stroking my beard full palm style, with my 4 fingers on one side of my face and my thumb on the other. This brought my awareness to the fact that my thoughts were racing and it was time to slow down. With a little practice, this nervous habit became an exercise in mindfulness.

You can do this with any type of reactionary behavior…

● Swearing at people that cut you off driving

● Reprimanding your kids

● Just general complaining

● Biting your nails

● Compulsively checking social media, email, or other digital media

● Any excessive internal dialogue or self talk

● Overanalyzing

● Trying to control situations and circumstances

Basically you are going to do the thing you were doing by habit or “unconsciously” and start to do it mindfully. Slow it down to the point where you become aware that you are doing it. Then, if you choose, change it.

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So what’s the point?

Energy always seeks an outlet. Excessive mental and emotional energy are just trying to find a way out. Practicing mindfulness in this way will start to let you know where you are triggered and find areas in your life that you choose to change.

In any change, the first step is becoming aware of the thing. Often times, just connecting with the thing you are doing less than mindfully can start to shift once you start practicing it mindfully.

unwobble.com 4 Jeff Agostinelli (cont’d)

Jeff Agostinelli is a Life Coach, personal development strategist, and host of The Next Level Podcast. His mission is to help individuals realize their own power to transform their lives and live a life by design. Jeff has also written A Beginners Guide to Overcoming Anxiety. jeffagostinelli.com

unwobble.com 5 Cory Allen (cont’d) Cory Allen

Our consciousness is like a river. There are many fragments of thoughts flowing through our mind at any given time. It’s easy to get swept away in the current of these thoughts. Our ego gets drawn in and entangled in this river. We’ll ruminate on thoughts that feed into our fear and anxiety or ego gratification. Our mind is always looking for something to do and sometimes it decides to chew on itself.

This distraction takes us away from the present and causes us to respond to life in ways we normally would not. However, we can learn to be mindful of our thoughts as they come and simply acknowledge them and let them go.

As this practice grows, so does our self-awareness. With greater self-awareness comes deeper vision. This vision allows us to see more about ourselves. We can then sit on the rocks and watch the river flow by, instead of getting thrown around in the current.

Visualization Practice

Wherever you are, whether it’s at home, at work, on a plane, or in bed and you find yourself feeling stress or negative emotion: Simply pause.

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Close your eyes, and begin to relax your body. Check in on each part of your body. Relax your face, neck, shoulders, arms, hands, legs, feet, and feel your body resting on a foundation.

With your eyes closed, direct your attention towards your breath. Start counting your breaths. See if you can count to five. Then, try ten.

Visualize the inside of your body as being hollow, almost like your skin is a shell, and there’s only negative space inside. Now, imagine your negative emotion as jagged little edges growing inside of your body like crystals in a cave. As you inhale, visualize yourself breathing in a green smoke, and see it fill your body. Visualize that green smoke softening the sharp edges inside of you. As you exhale, see the pieces breaking free, being carried off by the green smoke as it flows out with your breath. Now, take one more inhale, and as you exhale, picture a lotus blossoming where your heart is, and a flame shooting from your chest, out into the universe.

Any time you’re suffering, you can repeat this practice. Contextualizing our negative emotions or trauma in the form of symbolic imagery is a powerful tool. It isolates a single thought or emotion, and allows us to work with it directly in a conscious way.

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Breath Alarm

A few years ago, a dear friend of mine was finishing his PhD in Molecular Biology. The amount of intense stress and pressure he experienced for months on end was extreme. It challenged his physical health, mental stability, and personal relationships. We had lunch weekly to talk about what he was experiencing, and I always tried to offer anything I could to reduce his suffering and keep his spirits up.

One simple, yet effective suggestion I offered was for him to put a reminder on his phone calendar that said ‘Breath.’ I suggested he set it with hourly alarms. That way, as he was going through his day lost in extreme stress, he would literally have something nudging him every hour. This continuously reminded him to take a moment to pause, connect with his breath, and reground himself.

If you’re experiencing a patch of life like this, give it a try. It never hurts to have a little help remembering the simple things.

unwobble.com 8 Cory Allen (cont’d)

Cory Allen is a meditation teacher, composer, and podcast host from Austin, TX. He has taught hundreds of people the practice of meditation through his guided workshops and online course Release Into Now. Cory also hosts The Astral Hustle podcast where he talks to himself and his friends about the nature of being and the magic of the cosmos. www.cory-allen.com

unwobble.com 9 Toni BernhardToni (cont’d) Bernhard

Using Mindfulness as a Refuge from Your Troubles

The beauty of practicing mindfulness is that it grounds you in the present moment, and this provides welcome relief from ruminating about the past and worrying about the future. (I’m not referring to constructive reflection or planning, but to those obsessive and troublesome thoughts that just won’t go away.)

You can bring your attention out of your stressful stories and into your present moment even if you’re not meditating. I’ll describe the way I practice this and then give a concrete example from a recent trip I took to the doctor.

Three steps for bringing your attention to the present moment

When I become aware that I’m lost in stressful thoughts, I start by silently—and gently—saying “not now.” Those simple words can break the spell that these unconstructive thoughts have over me.

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Second, I immediately focus my attention on three in- and out-breaths. Paying attention in this way to the physical sensation of the breath grounds me in my body, which is always in the present moment. As I exhale on that third breath, a sense of calm comes over me, sometimes strong, sometimes slight—I’ll take either one!

Third, I consciously notice what’s going on around me right now—perhaps silently describing my sensory experience: “seeing the dog on the bed; hearing another dog barking in the distance; feeling tightness in my shoulders.”

Having changed the focus of my attention, I’m no longer stuck in stressful thinking patterns. This is why I think of this practice as taking refuge in the present moment. Even if it’s not a pleasant moment—I might be in physical pain—when I go through these three steps, at least I’m present for what’s happening instead of being lost in stressful stories that only make me feel worse, stories such as: “What if this pain never goes away?” That type of ruminating and worrying serve only to intensify my mental suffering.

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Taking refuge in the present moment on a freeway trip to the doctor

A few months ago, I had to do something unusual for me: drive on my own from my small town to Sacramento and back again. I had a doctor’s appointment in Sacramento, and my husband (who usually drives me) was out of town.

The appointment was with my surgical oncologist to discuss the results of a breast MRI I’d had a few days before. This was my first MRI since the surgery I’d had a year before to remove a cancerous lump in my breast.

There I was, driving 65 mph on a freeway packed with cars, but my mind was elsewhere, worrying about the test results. I was busy mocking up one worse-case scenario after another. I like to call this “being off in la la land,” meaning I’m not paying attention to what’s going on right around me.

Then I remembered a quote from the Vietnamese Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh:

If we practice mindfulness, we always have a place to go when we’re afraid.

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This inspired me to gently say to myself about these thoughts: “Not now.” Then I took three conscious breaths, paying careful attention to the physical sensation of the breath as it came in and went out of my body. This replaced the worry with a sense of calm. Then I said to myself: “Stay in the moment by truly experiencing what it’s like to be driving a car on a freeway.”

And what an experience it was. I felt as if I were on the autopia ride at Disneyland. It was quite a feat to be moving so fast while also being sure to stay exactly between the painted lines. I was impressed with my skills! And I was amazed at how dozens of cars right around me were going just as fast but not crashing into each other. It occurred to me that this was an exquisite example of social order at work.

And that MRI result? Everything was normal.

I’ve been doing this exercise many times throughout each day. When I realize I’m lost in stressful thoughts, I say, “not now” as I bring my attention to the present moment by taking three conscious breaths. Then I notice what’s going on around me right here, right now.

I think of these little moments of awareness as moments of liberation because, in my experience, being present for my experience brings with it a feeling of contentment

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that’s often tinged with awe, as I pause and take in the wonder and mystery of being alive at this moment—even with its challenges and difficulties.

Recently, one of our town’s most treasured citizens passed away after a good long life. The obituary in our local paper noted that Martha loved to say: “The past is history. The future is a mystery. The present is a gift.”

I hope you’ll take refuge in this gift.

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Toni Bernhard is the author of three books: How to Be Sick: A Buddhist-Inspired Guide for the Chronically Ill and their Caregivers; How to Wake Up: A Buddhist-Inspired Guide for Navigating Joy and Sorrow; and How to Live Well with Chronic Pain and Illness. Her blog, “Turning Straw Into Gold” is hosted by Psychology Today online. www.tonibernhard.com

unwobble.com 15 Tara Brach (cont’d) Tara Brach

Waking up from Reactivity: Three Invitations to Remembering Truth

There are three key teachings that have shaped my life in a very deep way. Each of these teachings is a way to free yourself from the suffering of reactivity so that you can respond to life in a more compassionate way. I like to think of each as an invitation:

Please, don’t believe your thoughts.

We spend most of our days lost in thought. We spend most of our time in a virtual reality.

If you think back on your day you will notice how much of the day was lost in moments of living inside that incessant dialogue going on in your brain. I know this is true for me.

When we start catching on to this invitation - Please don’t believe your thoughts - it creates a little more space around that virtual reality and a little more possibility to investigate our thoughts and choose to step out of the dream they create. It’s helpful to ask yourself: Are these thoughts serving healing? Are they helping me connect unwobble.com 16 Tara Brach (cont’d)

with others? Or are they limiting me by fueling self-doubt and a sense of separateness?

The point isn’t to get rid of thoughts, but to know that they’re there so you don’t mistake them for reality.

You have a choice. If there’s even a little bit of you that says, “Please, you don’t have to believe what this thought is telling you,” you’re on the right track. Or if you remind yourself, “I’m not my thoughts,” you’re opening the door of awareness and letting the light come through. Simply remembering this possibility promotes a radical shift in consciousness.

Please, pause and come back into presence.

The most challenging part of this invitation is that, when we come into the present moment, part of what we contact is the unpleasant, uncomfortable stuff that is going on in our body and heart—the very stuff we’ve managed, over a lifetime, to not hang out with.

We’ve spent decades learning how to move away from difficult feelings. So this simple invitation - Please, may I pause and be with what’s right here - is like saying, “Please may I pause and feel the fear that’s here, the sensations of being squeezed and achy and sore.” And when we directly contact the emotional or physical pain or confusion going on inside us, it’s not easy to learn to stay.

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However, it’s possible and profoundly healing. Which leads us to the third invitation.

Please, remember love.

If we regard whatever’s going on inside us with a quality of tenderness, all of a sudden we find out we can stay. There’s just enough space, softness and kindness so that we can hang out with what’s here—because we’re not so inside of it and caught in it as a victim. When, in some way, there is a remembrance of love, then what we are opens and we become a bigger space of presence.

There are countless pathways to remembering love. This is an experiment for each of us and we have to explore and try things out.

One pathway of remembering love is to simply have the intention to offer love or care inwardly. It can be through words or images. You might consider whether there is any message that would bring healing, wisdom, comfort or truth into your own being. I often put my hand on my heart. The warmth in the neural center of the heart area of your chest actually calms down the sympathetic nervous system. I also send a caring message, like “It’s okay, sweetheart.” Others might say something like “I’m with you,” or “You can relax now, you’re doing fine.”

Even having the intention and going through the motions works. Why does it work? Because deep down, who we

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are is loving presence. By going through the motions, we begin to reach back for it and reconnect with more of the truth of who we are.

So one pathway to remembering love is to offer love inwardly. Another pathway is to call on the love that we know is in the universe and ask to be held by it.

When a young child is upset, they are comforted by their mother’s hug. This actually helps them self-regulate. When you imagine being hugged, that imagining does the same thing.

To the degree that we suffer, we are believing thoughts that are not true and we are caught in some kind of reactive looping that keeps us identified with something that is smaller than the truth of who we are.

We all need ways to remember—practices of presence. We need to train ourselves to take the time to pause and learn not to believe our thoughts…to pause and come into presence…to pause and be kind.

So the next time you have limiting, harmful thoughts, remember for yourself: Please don’t believe this thought, please be here, and please be kind. You might find it hard to remember at first but, with practice, these three invitations have the power to bring peace, wisdom and a deep experience of inner freedom.

unwobble.com 19 Tara Brach (cont’d)

Tara Brach, Ph.D is a clinical psychologist, meditation teacher and author of bestselling Radical Acceptance and True Refuge. Over a million people each month tune in to Tara’s podcast. In addition to her public teaching, she is active in bringing meditation into the Washington, DC area schools, prisons and to underserved populations. www.tarabrach.com

unwobble.com 20 Mirabai Bush (cont’d) Mirabai Bush

Frustration and Impatience at Work

My document disappeared! I need to report on something I know nothing about, and the Internet is down. I try to remember the name of someone I recently met, and it’s gone. I am trying to meet a tight deadline and my colleague is late with his information. Frustration! Impatience! Stress hormones rising! What to do?

It’s time for The Pause. Impatience is inside us, tech is outside. In moments of impatience, pause, bring your attention to your breath: breathe in, breathe out. Try three long slow breaths, noticing the breath and nothing else.

Pausing, even for three breaths, before reacting to a difficult situation is a form of patience. Patience includes perseverance and acceptance of truth. And it also allows us to not return harm, rather than merely enduring a difficult situation. It helps us control our emotions even when we are deeply frustrated.

A Pause may also give us a better understanding of the situation and our intentions within it. At the very least it

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will reduce our stress level, calm us down. And maybe help us reflect on the truth of the moment: What is so terrible about waiting a few minutes for the net to return? Maybe we need to look at how we’ve overscheduled ourselves, or what it is we are trying to prove by doing so much in one day. Learn to recognize the signs. Remember that it is not worth the racing cortisol (the hormone effective for escaping a tiger, but not for coping with a lost document). And then Pause and Breathe. Aaah…

Mindful Listening

Mindful listening is a way of hearing in which we are fully present with what is happening in the moment without trying to control it or judge it. We let go of our inner clamoring and our usual assumptions and listen with respect for precisely what is being said. We listen to our own minds and hearts and, as the Quakers say, to the “still, small voice within.” We listen to sounds, to music, to lectures, to conversations, and, in a sense, we listen to the written word, the text. There is a well-known image of the Tibetan poet and mystic Milarepa, sitting in across- legged, with his right hand cupped over his right ear. He is listening for the truth.

For all of these kinds of listening to be effective, so that we understand and remember what is being heard, we require a mind that is open, fresh, alert, attentive, calm, and receptive. We often do not have a clear concept of listening as an active process that we can control, but, in

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fact, mindful listening and a contemplative mind can be cultivated through practice.

Wake Up Listening

Early morning is especially good for listening. Try this: Listen carefully as you wake up. Instead of turning on the TV, your IPhone, or your computer, be still and just listen. In a rural setting, the sounds may be birds and animals waking up. In a city, sounds of outside action begin-- garbage collection, building construction, traffic. On campus, the sounds of opening doors, feet walking in the hallways, other students talking. Listen for the soft sounds, a cat purring, leaves rustling. Rest your full attention on one sound until it fades away and then let another come to you. As thoughts come into your mind, gently let them go and return to the sound. Then get out of bed and enjoy the water on your skin in the shower.

In the Groove

Play some music, maybe classical or slow-tempo music. Notice the sound and vibration of the notes, the feelings that the music brings up within you, and the sensations in your body as you listen. When you notice thoughts arising, gently bring your attention back to the music. Breathe.

In the Shelter of Each Other

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Mindful listening helps us be fully present for another person. It is the gift of our attention. It moves us closer to each other. It allows the speaker to feel less vulnerable and more inclined to open up to the listener. Not listening creates separation and fragmentation, which is always painful. Thoreau said, “The greatest compliment that was ever paid me was when one asked me what I thought and attended to my answer.”

To listen mindfully to another person, stop doing anything else, breathe naturally, and simply listen without an agenda for what is actually being said. If thoughts about other things arise, gently let them go and return to the speaker’s words. As responses arise in your mind, wait until you have heard all that has to be said before replying. Try not to let your story overcome the speaker’s. Be curious; don’t assume that you know. Listen for feelings as well as the words.

And you will want to be listened to also. But when you are speaking, if the person you are talking to doesn't appear to be mindfully listening, be patient. As Pooh once said, “It may simply be that he has a small piece of fluff in his ear.”

Mindful E-mailing

You're sitting at your desk and you're about to initiate an email or you're responding to one.

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Set your intention

Ask yourself: what is my intention in this email? How can I best serve that intention? Recognizing that sometimes emails can have impacts, especially emotional impacts, that we didn't intend.

Now type it out as you ordinarily would, but before hitting send, stop.

Bring your awareness to your body, noticing the sensations: sitting on the chair - letting go of attention to the email and everything else. You don't have to close your eyes, just simply pay attention to your body, take 3 deep inhaling and exhaling deeply 3 times , and then return to the email.

Re-read the email and ask yourself, "How is the person I'm writing to going to receive this?"

Think about the emotional response - is this email going to have a negative impact? Might he be irritated, impatient, angry? Or maybe too positive an impact. Will this person get excited that something will happen that isn't going to. Am I being really clear? Now, if necessary, make changes, and send.

unwobble.com 25 Mirabai Bush (cont’d)

Mirabai Bush is Senior Fellow and founding Director of the Center for Contemplative Mind in Society, a nonprofit organization that encourages contemplative awareness in American life to cultivate a more just, compassionate, sustainable society. She has led trainings for corporations from Hearst to Google, where she was a key developer of Search Inside Yourself. She is co-author, with Ram Dass, of Compassion in Action: Setting Out on the Path of Service, and co-author with Daniel Barbezat, of Contemplative Practices in Higher Education: Powerful Methods to Transform Teaching and Learning. She leads contemplative practices on the CD, Working with Mindfulness. www.contemplativemind.org

unwobble.com 26 Jamie CattoJamie (cont’d) Catto

Like Me!

Have you noticed how often you make judgements about other people, whether just to yourself or in conversation? For one day, I want you to practise the habit of adding ‘like me!’ whenever you hear yourself say anything about anyone, good or bad.

For example: ‘He’s such a great guy, but not always completely honest . . . like me!’ ‘She’s so talented but a bit of an attention- seeker . . . like me!’

It is so liberating.

We can create a lot of false separation and alienation when we describe or pass judgements on others, as if we ourselves are ‘not like that’. We separate ourselves from them in our de nitions. The truer and more intimate way to live is to shout ‘like me!’ each time we judge something in another. We all have the potential to act in the darkest and lightest of ways and one major reason we judge is because we want to distance those ‘unacceptable’ qualities from ourselves. Joyously announcing one’s fallibility at every opportunity dissolves this false separation and creates oxygen for everyone to

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be their perfectly awed selves without feeling the need to live in hiding.

Once the separation is dissolved, intimacy naturally arises…

If you want to see this menu of your disowned parts in action, for one full day, keep track of each and every judgement you place on someone else and every time add the ‘like me!’ phrase at the end. It will also give you a tidy list of numerous ways you’ve not, until now, been in acceptance of yourself, and if you’re in the mood to be diligent, with a little enquiry, you can dissolve them one by one.

unwobble.com 28 Jamie Catto (cont’d)

Jamie Catto is the author of Insanely Gifted and runs personal development workshops worldwide. His teaching builds on his own experience of overcoming creative hurdles, and provides techniques that invite everyone to full their potential. He was also a founding member of dance mega- group Faithless and acclaimed global music and philosophy project 1 Giant Leap. jamiecatto.com

unwobble.com 29 Lily CushmanLily (cont’d) Cushman

Some years ago I was running a teacher training at my yoga school and hired my friend Adrienne to teach the anatomy portion of the training. Adrienne is incredibly vivacious and big-hearted, so I was happy to have her hang out with my students for the afternoon. She told me beforehand that she takes these training very seriously and prides herself on making the content engaging (the anatomy section in these training tends to be naptime for most). So it was very sweet to watch Adrienne weave her magic with some highly entertaining props - including balloons, crayons, bones and some mystery goo. My favorite part however, was when she talked about body wisdom, and how every day she takes the time to dance to Madonna because it makes her body so happy!

When it came time a few months later for Adrienne to return for our next training module, my partner and I agreed that the best way to welcome her back was with a surprise Madonna dance session! It was a stroke of brilliance. Everyone was milling around the room when Adrienne arrived, and right on cue I blasted Material Girl on the stereo and everyone dance-mobbed her! She was so touched that she cried tears of joy, as did many of us. Seeing everyone laughing and dancing like that was something I will never forget.

Looking back, I now know that this was my mindfulness practice at work. By being fully present with Adrienne while she was teaching, I had seen her more fully. I wasn’t unwobble.com 30 Lily Cushman (cont’d)

just lost in my usual mental noise. Instead, I was able to really pay attention to her, and in doing so, found a fun way to make her feel seen and appreciated. But the best part was how happy I felt doing something so meaningful for a friend.

Of course, we all want our lives to be full of moments like this, but there is often a gap between who we want to be and how well we can implement that vision. Mindfulness bridges this gap so we can show up how we want to in our lives. When I first started practicing yoga, I was a sophomore in college and struggling to find a way to take care of myself. A daily yoga practice was revolutionary for me in many ways. I slowly learned how to be at ease in my own body and how to be kinder with myself, but I often struggled to bring these qualities with me off the mat. It wasn’t until I started working with mindfulness that I found a way to integrate these new skills into the rest of my life.

The practice of mindfulness is vital because the changes we often seek do not magically happen overnight: they require the steady application of attention and care to retrain years of habits. If we want to react to an angry co- worker with generosity instead of anger, it takes a lot of practice. Over and over we can slowly learn how to be fully present with our experiences (whether pleasant or difficult) and from there, consciously choose how to respond. Of course, not everyday can be a Madonna dance party, but mindfulness offers us a tremendous amount of freedom so we can meet life with greater curiosity and kindness.

unwobble.com 31 Lily Cushman (cont’d)

Lily Cushman is the co-founder and director of the Brooklyn Yoga School: a donation-based yoga center voted "Best of New York" by New York Magazine in 2011. She has been teaching classical yoga for 10+ years and practicing daily since her teens. She serves as the Executive Assistant to meditation teacher and NYT bestselling author, Sharon Salzberg and has worked for many years with world-renowned chanter, Krishna Das. In 2014, Lily started Vanaras Music, a record label that supports chanting in the Brooklyn community with recordings and live events. Through all these different avenues, Lily holds the singular goal of sharing the ancient practices of yoga, chanting and meditation to help others cultivate compassion, joy and greater freedom. www.brooklynyogaschool.com www.vanarasmusic.com

unwobble.com 32 Giovanni Dienstmann (cont’d) Giovanni Dienstmann

If you are interested in meditation or mindfulness, but haven’t made a solid start yet, you may be struggling either with the why or the how. On the other hand, if you already have some practice, but haven’t observed much self-transformation yet, then you might be struggling with integration.

In this article I will cover the why and how of meditation, and present a simple practice that everyone can easily follow. Let’s start with the why.

Part I. Why Meditation Matters

Yes, you have probably heard of the over 70 benefits of meditation, but that somehow doesn’t fire you up to practice it yet. So here is the real reason why you should meditate: because you have a mind. And you are not the boss of your mind - often, your mind is the boss of you.

Meditation helps you have greater mastery over your mind, by helping you develop four “superpowers”: zooming in, zooming out, pausing, and changing channels.

unwobble.com 33 Giovanni Dienstmann (cont’d)

And all of these are developed out of the core mindfulness exercise of:

• observing your mind

• noticing distracting

• pausing and bringing the attention back.

1. Zooming in

Focusing means that you can zoom in your attention on anything, and sustain it there, ignoring distractions.

As we live in times of continuous distraction, our attention span keeps getting shorter. Having the ability to focus is very useful in all spheres of your life: career, education, relationship, finances, and performance.

2. Zooming out

This is the ability to not get sucked into mental and emotional states that you don’t want to. It’s the ability to see with clarity and serenity.

Zooming out is specifically handy when troublesome emotions and addictive thought patterns have taken hold unwobble.com 34 Giovanni Dienstmann (cont’d)

of you. It frees your mind and gives you perspective to see things afresh.

3. Pausing

We often live in an unconscious, automated way. This means we become the product of our environment. We react, rather than respond. In this mode, we are acting on the loudest impulse in our heads. We’re reproducing our past conditioning - many times in regrettable ways.

Living a creative and fulfilling life requires just the opposite. It means to be intelligently present in the moment, acting fresh. For that, the ability to pause is essential.

4. Changing the channel

Think of your mental world as a TV with several channels. Some of them are informative, entertaining, or useful. Others are full of bad shows, even though you might find them addictive.

The problem is: your remote control isn’t working properly, and the TV is just displaying whatever channels it wants, in the volume it wants.

unwobble.com 35 Giovanni Dienstmann (cont’d)

The more you develop the abilities to pause, zoom out, and zoom in, the more you fine tune your remote control. As a result, your favorite channels get more screen time, and the unhelpful ones end up being discontinued due to lack of attention.

Part 2. Mini-Meditation Moments (MMM)

Have you seen what the powers of zooming out, zooming in, pausing and changing channels can do for you?

Great. So now we will explore what I considered to be the easiest way to get started with meditation - or to better integrated it in your daily life, if you already have a practice. I called it MMM, or mini-meditation moments.

The idea is that once per hour, or once every two waking hours, you get reminded to pause whatever you are doing, and introspect your attention for a short minute or two.

1. Reminder

The best way I found to reliably get reminded is by using technology. These are the three tools I have used for this purpose:

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• MeaningToPause — a lovely bracelet that vibrates once every 60 or 90 minutes, in a non-intrusive way (link). Built for this purpose.

• FitBit — allows you to add up to 8 reminders a day (link). I researched other wearables but they usually only allow up to 4 reminders.

• Mobile apps — there are also apps that help you achieve the same result, like Mindfulness Mynah and Mindfulness Reminders. I personally prefer not to use apps for this, since it relies on the already distracting world of your smartphone.

2. Introspection

Once you get reminded, you then do a mini-practice. The practice could be bringing your attention to the natural flow of breath, or repeating a mantra a few times, or bringing loving-kindness into the heart, or whatever your main meditation is about.

What I personally do and recommend it to actually modulate your breath. Take a few deep, long, and slow breaths. You will be surprised at how this simple exercise shifts your mental, physical, and emotional states.

Here is a 5-week course in mini-meditation moments I’d unwobble.com 37 Giovanni Dienstmann (cont’d)

like to suggest. These are brief instructions for the exercise you do multiple times a day, during the 1-2 minutes of your mindful pause.

• Week 1: Breathe in as deeply and slowly as you can, counting 10 at the end of it. Then breath out equally deep and slow, counting 9. Proceed until reaching 1.

• Week 2: As you breathe in, count 6 seconds; as you breathe out, count 6 seconds. Do this for 10 breaths. Slowly increase the length of the breaths, without forcing. If 6 is hard, start with to 4 or 5. Feel your whole body while breathing, and consciously relax it.

• Week 3: Do as in week 2, but this time place your right hand on your belly, and left hand on your chest. Follow abdominal breathing, which means that breathing in and out, only your right hand should move. When inhaling, gently push your abdomen forward; when exhaling, pull it back. Keep your attention in the counting and on the moving hand.

• Week 4: Keep the abdominal breathing and the counting, but start making the exhalations longer than the inhalations. Gradually, the breathing out should be guided to become double length than the breathing in. For example, if you inhale for 5 seconds, exhale for 10.

unwobble.com 38 Giovanni Dienstmann (cont’d)

• Week 5: Keep the abdominal breathing and the counting, but now introduce a small breath retention, of the same duration of your inhalation. So if you breathe in for 5 seconds, gently hold for 5 seconds, and breathe out for 10 seconds - 5:5:10.

In all of these five weeks, your goal is to keep your attention 100% engaged with the process of breathing and counting. If distraction happens, just let go of it, and bring your mind back to breathing.

These exercises are simplified forms of pranayama, which are breathing exercises in the Yoga meditation tradition. They are a great help in developing some of the benefits of meditation in a short period of time, and also in integrating or preparing for a formal practice.

May this practice allow you to have a greater level of mastery over your mind, and release thoughts and emotions that don’t serve you.

unwobble.com 39 Giovanni Dienstmann (cont’d)

Giovanni Dienstmann is a meditation teacher, the writer behind the popular blog LiveAndDare.com, and the creator of the acclaimed Master Your Mind program. He has been intensely seeking personal growth and enlightenment since his teenage years. In this process, he has practiced meditation daily (totaling over 7,000 hours), read hundreds of books, tried several different techniques, and spent time on retreats with masters and instructors around the world.

All this practice, learning and training has radically transformed his mind and experience of the world - as a result, he now lives a fearless, peaceful, and content life. Giovanni is not a guru or a spiritual master – but a practitioner on the way, sharing the powerful tools and insights that have helped him thus far. His work is to translate, synthesize and “update” the tools and teachings of world-wide wisdom traditions so that they are easily digestible for the 21st-century person.

If you want to learn more about these topics, check out these two posts: Mindfulness Tools to Integrate Meditation In Daily Life The 4 Superpowers of Meditation

unwobble.com 40 MichaelMichael Donovan (cont’d) Donovan

I'll be honest. I was first asked to write something for this book I was deep in to a meditation practice.

I thought, “Wait, what?”

I thought, “What the fuck are these guys talking about?! Brandon and Noah are stupid. You CANNOT be mindful without meditating! Charlatans!! HERETICS!”

So fast forward. I flew to LA for a job that blew my mind. We were traveling and being awake constantly. I was with the client all day, nonstop, and didn’t make time to meditate. I carried my mala beads with the intention of meditating, but nothing came of it.

Then I flew home to see my parents after my dad was in an accident. I taught them to meditate but, during the two weeks I visited them, I only meditated about three times.

I returned to NYC in this new, post-crisis state of being.

I hadn’t meditated for awhile and I was moving.

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I went to Shambhala to meditate. I went to MNDFL to meditate. But, in the last two months I had only meditated about forty minutes.

But then I remembered this book idea Noah and Brandon had.

And bingo!

It hit.

I did some of the things I did while I was heavily meditating and it brought me back.

Below are a handful of tools I use to be awake, alert, mindful, and centered.

Watch The World Go By

The simplest thing I do is watch. This is easy to do in public spaces.

Simply watch people drive by.

Look at the driver and just connect with them.

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Just stay with a driver until they move out of your visual range and pick up a new driver coming back.

Follow them and their passengers until they start moving out of visual range and reconnect with a new car to come back.

It’s sort of like watching a tennis match between commuters and travelers.

You can use the same technique to connect with people walking on crosswalks or walking through the mall.

If you are near nature, watch the nature. It’s truly brilliant.

This exercise is beyond simple and works well.

Just slow down, look, enjoy.

Observe Your Time And Space

At some point you find yourself waiting: Someone leaves to use the restroom, they have to step aside to take a call or respond to an email, you have to wait in a lobby or conference room for a second. You are suddenly given “time to kill.”

unwobble.com 43 Michael Donovan (cont’d)

Some people find this moment awkward.

People mistakenly jump on their phones to distract themselves but STOP!

Use this time!

It’s a gift!

It’s your gift!

Use this time to have a moment to have your mind blown: “Whoa! Look where I am!!”

Look at the room, listen to the sounds, smell the air, feel the quality of the energy, and so on.

Look at the quality of furniture.

Look at the light moving through the windows.

Leave the excitement or drama or boredom of the conversation behind and be with the moment.

Just drift away and allow yourself to sink in to the space.

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This is your time and space between conversations to just enjoy life by yourself without any responsibilities.

Tell yourself, “You made it! You’re HERE!”

Touch Hands

This may be one of the weirder techniques I will share.

I do this on your commute, at work, at home, at the store, and anywhere else where people have hands.

I stare at people’s hands throughout the day.

You may be thinking, “Have you done this much? Jesus fuck!”

It’s solid!

People are usually pretty occupied with themselves so there is little chance someone will freak that you’re staring at their hands from afar, so use your commuting time to be mindful.

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Just slow down and look at people’s hands as they hold newspapers, clutch their phones, or wrap their sweaty palms around the poles for support.

Trace their hands with my eyes.

Look at their fingernails, their skin tone, their wrinkles, their quirky habits and movements.

Open the staring sessions by sinking into the person’s life and express some heartfelt love toward their hands.

Use A Gratitude Alarm

This is the king of all mindfulness hacks.

I’ve had my phone chime every day, four time per day, for over a year now.

Every day, four times per day, I hear some chimes and see a popup on my phone that says “G R A T I T U D E”

At 8:30am, 12:30pm, 4:30pm and 8:30pm.

The Gratitude Alarm has this ability to pull you out of the moment and lift the entire day.

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Your gratitude will raise and that will have you enjoying all aspects of life.

It will go off when you’re busy and you’ll be grateful for your business.

It will go off when you’re sleeping and you’ll be grateful for your sleep.

It will go off when you’re frustrated and you’ll be grateful for your frustration.

It will go off when you’re feeling love and you’ll be grateful for love.

It’s your check-in with yourself.

Connect With The Moon

This one fell in to my lap. I started releasing my podcasts on the moon cycles. It was sort of a gimmick, but I felt drawn to it so I went for it.

Three months in to it I had an “a-ha” moment.

Life was more calm.

unwobble.com 47 Michael Donovan (cont’d)

I was no longer a prisoner to the Monday-Friday world.

I escaped to a new time and space by syncing with the moon.

The process is easy: look online and search moon cycles.

Download a free app that tells you the cycles daily.

Schedule important and fun things around the full, new, and quarter moon cycles.

The moon cycles are great times for deadlines.

Every night you can connect with the moon.

Even if it’s for a second, you’ll have that eternal moment of you and the moon.

Time stops.

You’re alive with the moon.

Bonus Tip: Be An Artist

Make art and be in nature.

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The muse will call you and guide you.

Art and nature have a way of keeping humans present.

…

I’ll end this by encouraging you to meditate.

It helps.

You know what true stillness is when you meditate.

Or do some great psychedelics.

PS: Noah and Brandon: Sorry I called you charlatans and heretics. Apparently you can be mindful without meditation.

unwobble.com 49 Michael Donovan (cont’d)

Michael Donovan is a fashion photographer, short filmmaker, and artist. He runs a podcast focused on navigating the spiritual and material worlds. studiodonovan.com

unwobble.com 50 Sean Dunne (cont’d) Sean Dunne

Mindfulness has allowed me to open my heart and begin to genuinely feel the lessons, the love and the inspiration that constantly surround me. It’s the feeling of being at home no matter where you are or whom you are with. It’s flipping the switch from habitual judgment mode to gratitude mode, realizing that you can only change the lens, not the landscape. It’s about having the epiphany of the obvious, that nothing is happening to me, it is happening for me.

It’s easier than it sounds. I simply challenge myself to stay with each breath. Conscious breathing is meditation, keep it simple and start there. When you are with your breath you are transported to the here and now and magically the concerns, the worries, the dramas, the stress, it all starts to dissolve and there you are, your true self. Over time you’ll begin to notice that you can navigate life with an energetic ease almost as if you’ve graduated to a new dimension in the multi-verse, one where you are no longer a victim of circumstance but a receiver of light. By nurturing this path of the heart we are essentially surrendering, letting go of who we thought we were and what we thought this was all about and with each breath replacing the darkness, anxiety and negativity with balance, patience, grace and gratitude.

unwobble.com 51 Sean Dunne (cont’d)

It’s a choice, but a simple one that can start with this breath.

unwobble.com 52 Sean Dunne (cont’d)

Sean Dunne is a documentary filmmaker and podcaster from Brooklyn, NY. Sean uses film as a medium for spreading understanding and acceptance. All of Sean's films are available to watch for free on his website VeryApe.tv.

unwobble.com 53 Melissa Eisler (cont’d) Melissa Eisler

The Art of Mindful Listening

Listening is defined as “the act of paying attention to sound, hearing something with thoughtful attention, or paying attention to someone or something in order to hear and understand what is being said, sung, or played.” While hearing is simply “the act of receiving sound or information by the ear.” These definitions highlight a distinct difference between hearing and listening.

When you are really listening to someone, you are hearing him/her. But when you are hearing something or someone, you are not always listening. Book definitions aside, let’s take a look at the experience of listening versus the experience of hearing …

Listening requires 100 percent focus on the person who is talking. It’s being with them in what they are saying, and taking in their words and emotions through all of your senses. Listening is hearing with every part of you. Think of a time you were talking with a friend, spouse, or therapist about an important situation in your life, and when the conversation was over you felt lighter, loved, and cared for. This is likely because they were with you fully. True listening is not as easy as it sounds. unwobble.com 54 Melissa Eisler (cont’d)

When you hear something, you recognize a sound, but don’t necessarily comprehend or register its meaning. Think of a knock at the door or the TV on in the background while you’re cooking dinner.

Why We Don’t Listen

True listening is a lot of work. After all, it requires 100 percent of our attention, and we are trained to multi-task. Cooking dinner while helping the kids with homework. Watching TV while working out. Responding to emails while on the phone. It’s tough to focus on just one thing at a time, and life circumstances don’t always encourage this. Often when we’re in listening mode, we’re also in to- do-list-mode, doing laundry, or getting ready for the next task. This doesn’t mean we aren’t hearing what’s being said. It just means we aren’t fully present.

When we’re truly listening to someone, we are holding space so the person can express whatever thoughts and feelings they want to share. We are inviting that information into our space and holding it open for them to feel welcomed, comfortable, at peace, and in loving company.

For some people, this is natural and effortless. For others, it’s a muscle that will need to be worked, practiced, and improved.

unwobble.com 55 Melissa Eisler (cont’d)

Listening as Meditation

Meditation is a practice that trains the mind to focus … and trains the mind, body and emotions to be still and present with whatever comes up. And it does require practice.

Just like in sitting meditation you sit with whatever comes up, when you’re listening to someone … consider it a practice, too. Be with whomever you’re with—don’t just receive the information—fully listen to them. Invite whatever they say to the conversation to encourage them to open up further. Try to feel what they’re feeling, relate, and understand. This is the practice of true listening.

5 Steps to Turn Listening into a Mindful Practice

Next time you find yourself in the role of the listener, practice mindful listening. Follow these five steps to tune into the person you are listening to and see how it feels.

1. Focus on the person talking

Try to tune out other distractions—turn off your cell phone ringer, email notifications and TV—in order to fully focus on the person you’re talking to. Try to keep your mind focused on the person talking … just like in sitting meditation, when you notice your mind wandering, bring

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it back to the conversation.

2. Be present

Nothing is worse than having to ask someone to repeat themselves when you should have been listening. Be present completely, and tune out thoughts about the past, future or anything irrelevant to the conversation.

3. Welcome whatever comes up in the moment

Whether you agree with what is being said or not, invite the thoughts and emotions the person you’re with is expressing. Welcoming the other person’s words does not mean you agree or validate, it just means you are being there for them to express themselves. This includes offering facial expressions and body language that are neutral and warm. Try not to react to what they’re saying too much with your voice, body or face. Just be with them in a loving, present, inviting way.

4. Hold your tongue

If you are in the listener role, just be there. There will be time for you to share your thoughts, offer advice, and share stories. But for now, when they are talking and you are listening, just hold the space for them and save your commentary for later. This may require patience.

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5. Learn

Take it all in and try to truly understand. Learning will require all of the above steps. If you’re not present or focused, you could miss something, misinterpret, or misunderstand. You could also risk that the person you’re with will feel ignored or not heard. And you’ll likely be asked for your opinion or invited to share your thoughts at some point … you’ll be able to do this with much more care if you truly understand the message delivered to you.

Plus, when you learn about someone, it brings you closer to them and builds a stronger connection. That’s why we talk to one another in the first place—to connect. So why engage in conversation if we aren’t truly connecting or listening to one another?

*This was adapted from an excerpt of Melissa’s book, The Type A’s Guide to Mindfulness: Meditation for Busy Minds and Busy People.

unwobble.com 58 Melissa Eisler (cont’d)

Full-time content and marketing strategist and part-time yoga and meditation teacher, Melissa Eisler has spent the last 10+ years figuring out how to balance the world of mindfulness and the fast-paced nature of modern life. She’s the creator of Mindful Minutes a blog about mindfulness and life balance in the digital age and author of the book, The Type A’s Guide to Mindfulness: Meditation for Busy Minds and Busy People mindfulminutes.com

unwobble.com 59 Elisha ElishaGoldstein (cont’d) Goldstein

Three Things To Do When You Get Home

Here are three things that you want to do when you get home in the evening.

The first thing is, before you even step foot in the house, take a deep breath and soften your body to become present. Take some time to become clear on what your intention is when you get home. Do you want to spend time with your family? Do you want to relax? The idea is to figure out how you want the rest of this evening to unfold.

The second thing is, when you get home hug something. Hug an animal. Hug a loved one. If there is no one else around curl up and hug yourself. Hugging allows us to feel connected. It soothes the body and sets yourself up to feel good for the rest of the evening.

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The third thing is control your environment. Put on some soothing sounds. Or put on some playful sounds to bring some play into your environment. Light some candles if you want it to be a relaxing evening.

Those are the three things. Take a deep breath and relax to set your intention when you get home so you can be mindful from the beginning. The second thing is to hug something or someone. The third thing is to control your environment, making it playful or soothing depending on your intentions.

Enjoy!

unwobble.com 61 Elisha Goldstein (cont’d)

Elisha Goldstein, Ph.D. is cofounder of The Center for Mindful Living in Los Angeles. He is author of several books including Uncovering Happiness, The Now Effect, Mindfulness Meditations for the Anxious Traveler and co- author of A Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction Workbook, Foreword by Jon Kabat-Zinn and MBSR Everyday. He also developed the Mindfulness at Work™ program, the premier eCourse Basics of Mindfulness Meditation: A 28 Day Program and co-developed the CALM (Connecting Adolescents to Learning Mindfulness) with his wife Stefanie Goldstein, PhD. elishagoldstein.com

unwobble.com 62 Trudy Goodman Kornfield (cont’d) Trudy Goodman Kornfield

All that seems to be asked of us is to be mindful. To be mindful is to live with open-hearted awareness in the present moment.

I was working recently with a women who suffered from anxiety and depression. She was enrolled in one of our MBSR course offerings at InsightLA. Overwhelmed, she was tense and contracted in trying to do everything right in class. She wound up feeling inadequate, which was gathering momentum in her negative self talk, "Life isn't worth living."

This is not the time to put more on this person's to do list. What we can ask, and the intervention that I offered was, to ask her to simply, mindfully make herself a cup of tea, sit and drink it.

Or to notice a patch of sun light on the floor. Have notice the feel of the breeze on her cheek, the warmth of the sun on the back of her hand. . . These little moments--are big moments. Huge moments of freedom and rest.

As one of my colleagues, Jacques Verduin, teaching mindfulness to lifers in San Quentin Prison says, " We are all doing time, whether in the prison between our ears or a 10X4.5 foot prison cell." unwobble.com 63 Trudy Goodman Kornfield (cont’d)

We grant ourselves sips of freedom (and rest) every time we fall into any one of the 5 senses: seeing, touch, smell, sounds, taste. Mindfulness means moment-by-moment awareness. And isn't that the only way life comes to any of us? All of us? Moment by moment.

It is so easy for people to become trapped in their conceptual prisons. But the golden key to a life of ease and agency is knowing: you are walking when you are walking by feeling your feet on the ground or inside your shoes, brushing your teeth and becoming warmly curious about how your arm moves the hand that knows just the right pressure for your gums and teeth, feeling the temperature change as you begin to wash dishes--every single moment, moment by moment, out in this incredible world of ours is an opportunity to practice embodied awareness.

And here is the ironic thing: you do not even have to enjoy what you are doing; it’s kind of like eating kale — it will nourish you whether you like it or not! The rest, freedom, and well being we all long for can come from the simple activity of being fully present with what you are doing. Hard to believe, but true — see for yourself!

unwobble.com 64 Trudy Goodman Kornfield (cont’d)

Trudy Goodman Kornfield, Ph.D., is the Founding Teacher of InsightLA, the first center to combine training in Insight (Vipassana) Meditation and in non-sectarian mindfulness and compassion practices, including Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) and Mindful Self-Compassion (MSC). The

fourth teacher ever of MBSR, Trudy taught with its creator, Dr. Jon Kabat-Zinn and studied Buddhist meditation for 40 years, with Asian and Western teachers. She is the Guiding Teacher and co-founder of the Institute for Meditation and Psychotherapy in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the first center in the world dedicated to integrating these two disciplines, and had a private psychotherapy practice there for 25 years.

unwobble.com 65 Trudy Goodman Kornfield (cont’d)

Trudy co-founded Family Path and Growing Spirit, family mindfulness programs, with Susan Kaiser Greenland in Los Angeles, and has worked with kids and families throughout her career. Trudy teaches retreats and workshops worldwide; often teaching with her husband, Jack Kornfield. Trudy is a contributing author: Clinical Handbook of Mindfulness (Springer, 2008); Compassion and Wisdom in Psychotherapy, (Guilford Press, 2011); Mindfulness and Psychotherapy, (Guilford Press, 2013). Trudy teaches the Sunday Sitting Group, Deepening Your Practice, as well as daylong retreats and special events

unwobble.com 66 Chris GrossoChris (cont’d) Grosso

Hey, Asshole

We’re all assholes sometimes, myself very much included. I’m not proud of it but if I’m truly dedicated to becoming a better person and cultivating greater compassion for myself, and others, I need to be honest about this.

The thing is though, I, along with many others I know, we’re typically the biggest assholes towards ourselves. For example, I was a particularly big asshole to myself while finishing up the rough draft of this book for my editors. Thoughts like, “You’re a terrible writer” “You don’t have anything of worth to say” and “You’re setting yourself up for embarrassment and failure” have made temporary residence in my mind, and for one reason or another, I’ve allowed them to stay… but why?

I mean, if I overheard someone saying any of that shit to someone else, whether it was a friend, family member, or even a complete stranger, I know I would have stepped in on their behalf, and I’m guessing that most likely many of you would have too. Yet, when it comes to the self-inflicted asshole syndrome, we usually just let it ride.

unwobble.com 67 Chris Grosso (cont’d)

So why is it that so many of us feel unworthy of the very same love we so freely share with other people? And why is it easier to show compassion to a complete stranger, than it is to the person looking back at us in the mirror?

My very honest and simple answer is, I don’t know. I mean sure, I could offer you a handful of spiritual and psychological theories, things I’ve personally learned and implemented throughout my life, some of which have helped, and some of which I’ve found to be complete bullshit, however, the fact remains that the self-negating thoughts still arise.

I used to try to play spiritual superhero by suppressing these thoughts, or, when it was too difficult to suppress them, I’d lie to myself and pretend like they didn’t bother me (which was obviously a complete crock of shit.) But it’s through facing these thoughts and acknowledging the mental and emotional impact they have on me, rather than pretending like they don’t exist and that everything is double rainbows and unicorn rides, that they begin to happen less frequently and with less force behind them.

So I guess the one completely cliché spiritual thing I’ll leave you with, which I find works significantly well in guiding the mind away from asshole territory is to remind myself, again and again, that underneath our material forms, we really are all One.

And remember, when Ram Dass said, “Treat everyone you meet like God in drag,” he didn’t mean everyone unwobble.com 68 Chris Grosso (cont’d)

except yourself, because you, you’re just God in drag too silly. So stop being an asshole towards God, okay?

* Hey, Asshole is an excerpt from Chris’ book, Indie Spiritualist: A No Bullshit Exploration of Spirituality

Unconditional Love and Acceptance Practice

It’s all one, even the pain. I had to dig really deep to remind myself of this a few years ago when my mother told me a story about something that had happened when I was blackout drunk at their house (which, unfortunately, wasn’t the only time that had happened). The abridged version is that, in an attempt to keep me from harming myself or others, my father confiscated my bottle of Klonopin (a benzodiazepine that when mixed with alcohol makes things go from bad to worse). I was hell-bent on getting the pills back, so what made the most sense to me in my blackout state was to pull a large knife from their kitchen drawer, go out to the driveway, hold the blade to my throat, and threaten to kill myself if they didn’t give me back my pills. They did.

I had absolutely no recollection of this happening, and as I listened to my mother tell me about it, I felt my entire body begin to tighten and my stomach tie in knots. After she finished telling me about what was a horrific experience for her and my father, I excused myself from the living room, without letting on that the story was affecting me. I didn’t want to cause my mother any more pain by letting her see my own pain arising from hearing

unwobble.com 69 Chris Grosso (cont’d)

that story, because that certainly wasn’t her intention and I felt like she’d already hurt enough. I headed upstairs to sit alone with the pain and emotions that were arising, and as I did, I found myself in a state that was comparable to some of the worst withdrawals I’ve experienced. The thought of putting a knife to my own throat and doing it in front of my mom and dad while threatening to kill myself made me sick. I sat there sweating as anxiety raced through me. Even as I’m typing these words, I feel residual uneasiness, and it still fucking sucks.

It was at that point—sitting there on my bed, soberly experiencing withdrawalesque symptoms—that I sought solace in a practice that is inspired by something I once heard from Thich Nhat Hanh in one of his many wisdom- filled dharma talks. He mentioned holding our painful thoughts and emotions with love in the same way a mother holds a newborn baby. The image affected me deeply. Over the course of the next several months, when painful thoughts and emotions arose, I found myself thinking about Hanh’s words and began working with them, adding a few elements of my own.

I’d been working with this practice for awhile when I learned about the incident with the knife, but had not yet worked on anything quite so heavy. It was definitely scary to bring my full attention to the ridiculously shitty feelings I was experiencing as I opened my heart to the overwhelming hurt arising within. But I knew I had to do this work to release my accumulated pain.

unwobble.com 70 Chris Grosso (cont’d)

The practice itself is relatively simple, with the exception of when we have to actually acknowledge and address our pain rather than act with habitual avoidance. I’ve broken it down into two parts for you.

Part 1

• Begin by sitting in a comfortable and stable position, spine erect but not overly rigid, belly soft, and hands placed gently in your lap in whatever way is most comfortable for you. The practice begins whenever you become aware of negative thoughts, emotions, and feelings arising, and you identify, acknowledge, honor, and accept them. Are the thoughts self-judging or are they of bad memories? How about your emotions? Even emotions as subtle as dislike or ambivalence should be taken into account. What are you feeling: depressed, angry, or anxious? Anything that causes dis-ease is applicable.

• Identify the physical sensations that are arising in you as a result of your thoughts, emotions, and feelings. Is there tightening in your chest? Is your stomach turning, or is there a throbbing sensation in your head? Again, anything that causes dis-ease is applicable.

• Once you’ve clearly identified the thoughts, emotions, and feelings, explore any imagery they create in your mind. Are there colors, shapes, or figures? Are they abstract or clear? (While sitting on my bed, I saw an unwobble.com 71 Chris Grosso (cont’d)

image of spikes, like the ones the police use to stop cars, which possibly represented the extreme pain I was experiencing.) The important thing is to let the thoughts, emotions, and feelings create the imagery while you simply notice what it is. Sometimes there won’t be any images and, as you’ll see in the next step, that’s fine.

Part 2

• So when you have the mental image of what your thoughts, emotions, and feelings have created, picture yourself holding it in the same way a mother holds a newborn baby. Picture the image wrapped in a warm blanket. If no image came to mind in the previous step, simply place your thoughts, emotions, and feelings themselves in the blanket. Now imagine yourself holding the blanket and its contents close to your chest with loving care. As you do this, imagine your heart extending unconditional love, acceptance, and compassion to the bundle. (In the beginning, if embracing the bundle of thoughts, emotions, and feelings to your chest feels too close and personal, you can also imagine wrapping them in a warm blanket, placing it in a baby carriage, and rocking it back and forth.)

• Next, mentally (or verbally) acknowledge the image, thoughts, emotions, and feelings with an open heart. unwobble.com 72 Chris Grosso (cont’d)

Promise to care for them and to hold them with compassion for as long as they need you to, and do your best to think or say these words with sincerity.

• Finally, sit with the image, thoughts, emotions, and feelings, offering them love for as long as they need you to, until they’re ready to go. I find that it usually takes less than a minute for this to happen, but there may be times when it takes longer (for example, I had to sit with the pain from the knife story for roughly half an hour).

That’s the practice. We can apply it to everything from minor stuff to our heaviest memories and most difficult experiences. Remember that no practice is a cure-all. Sometimes, we may need extra help from a professional, or medication, or possibly a combination of both. And there is absolutely nothing wrong with that. Meditation and spirituality go a long way in our healing and transformation; for some it will be all that’s necessary, but for others that won’t be the case.

When we fearlessly bring our attention to the painful thoughts, emotions, feelings, and any subsequent images that may arise, and we tend to them with an open heart, we’re doing the most natural thing we can— expressing a pure and complete love. It’s a love they’ve never known before and a love many of us have never known before either. After I sat on my bed with an open heart and accepted the painful thoughts and emotions while expressing love and compassion toward them, I felt

unwobble.com 73 Chris Grosso (cont’d)

as if I’d dropped a hundred-pound weight.

So when it comes to working with, and through, difficulties, it’s all relevant; it’s all grist for the mill; and it can all be healed. Please just be as honest with yourself as possible regarding what is and isn’t working for you in said healing process, okay? It takes a bit of willingness to lay it all out there like this, which can be scary—trust me, I know. What I also know is that we’re all capable of doing this. We just have to decide if we’d rather continue perpetuating the cycle of unnecessary pain or take the power back and do something about it. So . . . what do you want to do?

* Unconditional Love and Acceptance Practice are excerpts from Chris’ book, Everything Mind: What I’ve Learned About Hard Knocks, Spiritual Awakening, and the Mind-Blowing Truth of it All

unwobble.com 74 Chris Grosso (cont’d)

Chris Grosso is a public speaker, writer, spiritual director of Tovio by Advocacy Unlimited, and author of Indie Spiritualist and Everything Mind. theindiespiritualist.com facebook.com/XchrisGrossoX/

unwobble.com 75 Andy Hix (cont’d)Andy Hix

Making Peace With Yourself

Last time I was really struggling to get to sleep, I felt like I’d tried everything: I’d gone to bed at a decent time, followed my usual routine to tell my body that it should get ready for shut down, not looked at my phone before bed… but I was wide awake. I did a forty minute meditation in bed, and was felt no closer to the land of nod by the end of it.

One thing to look at in this situation, is what is your mind doing. Is it chewing over something incessantly? Is it trying to make sure you remember all the things you need to do tomorrow? Would it be helpful to write some things down?

In my case there didn’t seem to be many troublesome thoughts. So what was going on?

I realized that I was feeling tense in my belly area, so I thought I’d try to listen to what this sensation wanted to tell me.

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I gave it a voice. I said “I am the tension in Andy’s belly, and I am…” And almost immediately, it became clear. “…I am fear about Andy’s work. I fear he won’t get enough clients. I fear he’ll run out of money. I fear it’s all going to go wrong.”

Most of us, when we feel uncomfortable sensations in our body and messages that we don’t want to hear, we try to suppress or get rid of them. The mindful approach, however, is to welcome whatever comes, so I said to this feeling inside me, “I know you’re trying to help me. I hear you. Thank you.” Fear doesn’t want things to go wrong for you, you see.

I then decided to hear from the opposite perspective, ‘Andy’s love of his work”.

“As Andy’s love of his work, I know this is the right job for him, because it feels right, it feels great in fact. I know that doubts and fears are all part of the experience. I know that it’ll all work out in the end.”

And with that, I almost immediately conked out.

I had listened to and accepted the different parts of myself that wanted to be heard, and that meant I could be at peace.

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Tension resulting from fear can get in the way not only of sleeping, but of your libido, of concentration at work, of connection with another person and generally of being able to enjoy yourself. To release the tension, you have to listen to it.

Your mind is very much as it is depicted in the Pixar film Inside Out, in which Joy, Fear, Anger, Disgust and Sadness all jostle for the controls inside the little girls head. None of them are bad or good, they all serve different roles in the common purpose of serving the whole.

So remember that all the feelings you experience are there to serve you. Instead of ignoring or fighting them, see what they’re trying to tell you. Personifying the feeling and giving it a voice can really help.

Speak it out loud or write it down, and listen to what it has to say with kindness and openness, just as you would a good friend.

It is a practice for befriending yourself. Of making peace with yourself. And it will improve your ability to relate to others too.

unwobble.com 78 Andy Hix (cont’d)

Andy Hix is founder of zen at work He helps people in business and schools perform better and feel happier using mindfulness. You can follow his blog here.

unwobble.com 79 Jack KornfieldJack (cont’d) Kornfield

Transforming Sorrow Into Compassion

The human heart has the extraordinary capacity to hold and transform the sorrows of life into a great stream of compassion. It is the gift of figures like Buddha, Jesus, Mother Mary, and Kwan Yin, the Goddess of Mercy, to proclaim the power of this tender and merciful heart in the face of all the suffering of the world. Whenever your own heart is open and uncovered, the awakening of this stream of compassion begins within. Compassion arises when you allow your heart to be touched by the pain and need of another.

To cultivate this quality, you may wish to practice the traditional meditation for the practice of compassion and for the transformation of sorrows in the fire of the heart.

Let yourself sit still in a centered and quiet way. Breathe softly and feel your body, your heartbeat, the life-force within you. Feel how you treasure your own life, how you guard yourself in the face of your sorrow. After some time, bring to mind someone close to you whom you unwobble.com 80 Jack Kornfield (cont’d)

dearly love. Picture them and your caring for them. Notice how you can hold them in your heart. Then let yourself be aware of their sorrows, their measure of suffering in this life. Feel how your heart opens naturally, moving toward them to wish them well, to extend comfort, to share in their pain, and meet it with compassion.

This is the natural response of the heart. Along with this response, begin to actively wish them well, reciting the traditional phrases, May you be free from pain and sorrow, may you be at peace, while holding them in your heart of compassion. Continue reciting these phrases in this way for some time.

As you learn to feel your deep caring for this person close to you, you can then extend this compassion to others you know, one at a time. Gradually you can open your compassion further, to your neighbors, to all those who live far away, and finally to the brotherhood and sisterhood of all beings. Let yourself feel how the beauty of every being brings you joy and how the suffering of any being makes you weep. Feel your tenderhearted connection with all life and its creatures, how it moves with their sorrows and holds them in compassion.

Now let your heart become a transformer for the sorrows of the world. Feel your breath in the area of your heart, as if you could breathe gently in and out of your heart. unwobble.com 81 Jack Kornfield (cont’d)

Feel the kindness of your heart and envision that with each breath you can breathe in pain and breathe out compassion. Start to breathe in the sorrows of all living beings. With each in-breath, let their sorrows touch your heart and turn into compassion. With each out-breath wish all living beings well, extend your caring and merciful heart to them.

As you breathe, begin to envision your heart as a purifying fire that can receive the pains of the world and transform them into the light and warmth of compassion. This is a powerful meditation that will require some practice. Be gentle with yourself. Let the fire of your heart burn gently in your chest. Breathe in the sorrows of those who are hungry. Breathe in the sorrows of those who are caught in war. Breathe in the sorrows of ignorance. With each out-breath, picture living beings everywhere and breathe out the healing balm of compassion. With every gentle in-breath, over and over, let the sorrows of every form of life touch your heart. With every out-breath over and over, extend the mercy and healing of compassion. Like the mother of the world, bring the world into your heart, inviting beings to touch you with each breath in, embracing all beings in compassion with each breath out.

unwobble.com 82 Jack Kornfield (cont’d)

After some time, sit quietly and let your breath and heart rest naturally, as a center of compassion in the midst of the world.

unwobble.com 83 Jack Kornfield (cont’d)

Jack Kornfield trained as a Buddhist monk in the monasteries of Thailand, India and Burma. He has taught meditation internationally since 1974 and is one of the key teachers to introduce Buddhist mindfulness practice to the West. He is a founding teacher of the Insight Meditation Society and Spirit Rock Meditation Center. He holds a PhD in clinical psychology, and is a husband, father and activist. His books include A Path with Heart; After the Ecstasy, the Laundry; The Art of Forgiveness, Lovingkindness and Peace; The Wise Heart: A Guide to the Universal Teachings of Buddhist Psychology and Bringing Home the Dharma. Jackkornfield.com Spiritrock.org

unwobble.com 84 Noah LampertNoah (cont’d) Lampert

Lucid Dreaming and Mindfulness

My entire life I’ve been fascinated with dreams.

It’s no surprise then that something I like to do to stay more aware throughout the day involves dreams.

Dreams are alternate universes that we all go to every single night. Sometimes we’re lucky enough to remember our dreams, which I find especially cool.

Lucid dreaming is an experience where you’re aware that you’re dreaming. In some lucid dreams you can actually choose what you focus on and sometimes you can even determine what your entire dream landscape looks like.

A technique for increasing the occurrence of lucid dreams also works as a wonderful mindfulness exercise during your waking life.

unwobble.com 85 Noah Lampert (cont’d)

Also, as an interesting aside Dream Yoga has been practiced in Tibet for thousands of years. So this is partially grounded in teachings that have been around a lot longer than me.

Here’s the one-step exercise:

Throughout the day ask yourself “Am I dreaming?” or “Is this a dream?”

The key here is to really investigate the question.

Don’t just respond with “No, obviously this isn’t a dream, duh.”

Really investigate the question on multiple levels.

Notice objects or people around you.

If there’s writing on a sign or in a book, quickly look away and look back again.

Is the writing still the same?

unwobble.com 86 Noah Lampert (cont’d)

Besides fostering lucid dreams asking “Am I dreaming?” can be an incredibly useful and helpful exercise throughout your daily life.

The question itself has a way of loosening rigid mind states and tension filled situations.

Try it for yourself and see if it helps you stay more aware throughout your day.

And if you start to lucid dream come say hi to me in dreamland sometime.

unwobble.com 87 Noah Lampert (cont’d)

Noah Lampert is the host of the Synchronicity podcast on MindPod Network. Noah has worked with Ram Dass’ Love Serve Remember Foundation, The Alan Watts Foundation, Jack Kornfield, Krishna Das, Sharon Salzberg, Upaya Zen Center and many other individuals and organizations within the consciousness sector as a digital strategist and consultant. Noah is also the founder of MindPod Network. syncpodcast.com mindpodnetwork.com

unwobble.com 88 Kelly MacLeanKelly (cont’d) MacLean

Make Love To Your World

My mother loves to gush about what disciplined meditators her daughters are—especially to nice Buddhist boys. She literally wrote the book on family meditation. She’s also penned a children’s book called Moody Cow Meditates and I’m pretty sure that pissy cow is me. I’ve taught youth meditation workshops from rocky Australian beaches to soft, French valleys. In truth, my whole life has been about meditation. Yet somehow these mornings I’m much more likely to be found at the coffee shop typing away as I mainline kombucha than seated on a cushion. What about the end of the workday, you ask? Indeed, I have a strict daily regimen of drinking chardonnay on my porch. I scarcely miss a session—if I go missing check local wine shops before searching the Shambhala Center.

Now, do i long for daily practice? Desperately. Like a lover lost. Do I notice the difference when I’m in the habit? Absolutely. But somehow in this day-to-day hustle I find it very hard to balance work, family, love, service, LA traffic, exercise, keeping an uplifted home and, apparently, drinking. In the frame of life, meditation is the piece that gets all-too-often squeezed out of the picture. unwobble.com 89 Kelly MacLean (cont’d)

I’m not looking to confirm your spiritual lameness here by telling you about my own. There is absolutely no replacement for sitting. Hiking isn’t your meditation; a colonic doesn’t cleanse your soul; hot yoga isn’t the answer. Nothing cuts the mustard like sitting down and coming face to face with the neurotic horror and untamable bliss of your own naked mind.

Still, I know this to be true: The whole fucking thing is a meditation if you let it be. Every single day I practice living. Person meditation. The Homo Sapian sadhana. I make offerings to my world when I bring my man a perfect butter-peanut butter-banana-chia toast with coffee brewed just the way he likes it. I come into the joy of the present moment when I drop everything to play with the little girl next door on my way to the car. And when the universe pings me, I listen.

What I consider to be some of the greatest news of all in the perpetual pain of humanity is that the universe is not a flat, one dimensional screen happening before you like a movie. It’s sentient. The world is in fact screaming at you all the time. “I’m here! I’m alive! I see you! Let’s play!” When you create the space to listen, you find it communicating with you every moment. Sometimes it flirts sending a catfish falling out of the sky to hit a woman on the head as happened recently in Philadelphia —she came out unscathed, and eventually found the humor in it. Other times it takes your hardened heart and

unwobble.com 90 Kelly MacLean (cont’d)

cracks it wide open with a devastating blow. But the phenomenal world is trying to tell you something.

Learning to decode what it is saying is no easy feat but, as with any language, the more you listen, the more fluent you get.

Follow the accidents

When Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche was asked by a student whether or not she should move to India and take her life in a whole new direction he responded “follow the accidents”. Those little coincidences in life that make you do a double take and wonder “is some force at work?” If you just so happen to be seated on the plane next to the guy you connected with most at a work conference—explore why. If In Tibetan Buddhism we call these moments ‘tashi tendrel’ or ‘auspicious coincidence’. These mystical accidents can be an indicator that blessings are afoot.

Experiment with life surfing

It’s the act of riding the natural momentum of life rather than forcing it. Let the tide do with you as it pleases; you can use the energy of forward movement to propel you forward rather than having to paddle. Here’s the catch: the tide isn’t always as strong as you want it to be and it unwobble.com 91 Kelly MacLean (cont’d)

scarcely sends you in the exact direction you wanted to go. It’s completely unpredictable. Couldn’t you just stand on the board on the sand? You’d be perfect at it—you’d never wipeout! Sure, but the torrential chaos of the waves is where the magic truly lies.

…And always let your subconscious be your guide

The subconscious inner voice known as intuition is the point of contact for the universe. It’s the radio tower to your higher self; the barometer for the psychic climate of the world. This is the energy we can access in meditation but it can be accessed, too, through intuition. Listening to these gut feelings constitutes a big part of life meditation, how to choose x over y. The process of honoring your deepest inner voice above all is a meditation capable of transforming your life. Oh, and trust your dreams. You’ll know which ones. The subconscious is prone to dropping hints as we sleep.

Inviting the universe to play with you in this way will foster more intimacy—it will respond in kind, like a courtship. A dance. If you carry this everyday practice far enough you just may end up making love to your entire world.

unwobble.com 92 Kelly MacLean (cont’d)

Kelly MacLean is a comic, writer and host of The Tao of Comedy podcast. Her writing has been featured in The Guardian, Reader's Digest, Entertainment Tonight and Los Angeles Magazine. Her blog post 'Surviving Whole Foods' is among the most read pieces in Huffington Post history. Kelly was raised Buddhist and lives in Santa Monica, California. @thekellymaclean www.taopodcast.com www.kellymacleancomedy.com

unwobble.com 93 Raghu MarkusRaghu & Rameshwar Markus Das Lytton (cont’d) Rameshwar Das Lytton

At The Heart Of Mindfulness

All of us can remember those first very present moments when we realized that there is a path to inner freedom. Once that switch goes off, our world changes. And it’s only then that can we actually begin to look at our life from a different vantage point.

That self-awareness gives us a perspective of reality that reflects a plane of consciousness that is beyond the senses and the mind. It opens the possibility that there are other planes of consciousness just as “real” as this physical plane that we have become habituated to. How do we find that out? Perhaps we had an ineffable experience through a piece of music, literature, or we took a psychedelic, or we were inspired by somebody who was free and not caught in the material plane. A revelatory experience like that can lead us to want more of that precious feeling of being aware and awake.

Mindfulness is one of the practices for slowing down our lives, for finding a way in. It can help us to quiet down and find our way into who we are behind the mask of our roles. At that point we have the motivation to pursue a

unwobble.com 94 Raghu Markus & Rameshwar Das Lytton (cont’d)

practice of mindfulness, of becoming more aware, of living more fully in the moment. With this first flash of self-awareness we can reflect, "Okay, what is mindfulness? How is it going to help me get my life in balance?”

Self-awareness is exploring our own identity. Everyone needs to find their true identity, their real self, the basic reason why we’re here, our raison d’etre. In some respect it’s part of being human, the ever-present question mark behind every life, behind every breath. The core question of human existence is; who are we really?

Finding our true self is a lifelong search. It's not called practice for nothing -- you've got to practice it to get results. You actually have to tread on the path to get somewhere. Not that there’s anywhere to go, just to become more here, to be more present in this moment.

Once we begin to explore our own psyche and mind and heart, we begin to appreciate that everybody else is in the same situation. We're all distracted by phenomena, everything that’s going on all the time. We're not so different that way.

Our awareness is individual given the particular karma or family situation or what we do for a living, our cultural milieu. But awareness is something that we all share,

unwobble.com 95 Raghu Markus & Rameshwar Das Lytton (cont’d)

that's what makes us human or divine. That interconnectedness happens as a corollary to mindfulness practice, to doing any kind of meditation practice.

Starting from Zero

The first step without question is to be able to concentrate the mind. As long as the so called monkey mind has us overwhelmed to the point of distraction, fear and separateness, then becoming more mindful is a difficult prospect. To dive deeper into the moment, to get more spaciousness within yourself, to get more aware of who you truly are, is to connect with a deeper part of yourself.

How many times have people said, "You know I tried meditation but my mind is way too hyper-active. I can't settle down. That's really not for me." People repeat that to themselves ad nauseum. But we all have the same tape running at some time or another. We all have monkey minds. Everybody.

We were introduced to southern Buddhist Vipassana (Insight) meditation in our early days in India. Vipassana is mindfulness training. It gave us the grounding to get to that one pointed focus and to begin to deal with the impermanence of life. We no longer were quite so invested in replaying our personal tapes over and over.

unwobble.com 96 Raghu Markus & Rameshwar Das Lytton (cont’d)

Mindfulness is a very intentional program to calm our minds down. To do that in our ordinary lives requires discipline, but first of all it requires motivation. For most of us the motivation is the stress and distress, the discomfort that we experience being pulled around all the time by our minds and emotions and sensations. It's tiring. In some sense meditation or any practice like that, or going on a retreat, is giving ourself a spiritual vacation. Meditation is vacating our ordinary mind.

Pausing our life, going on retreat or taking a meditation vacation is a way of “vacating” our habitual patterns and “monkey minds” for a period of time. In a sense this is what we are talking about when we use mindfulness to put our mind movie on pause to just be in the moment. Mindfulness provides a path to slowing down our systems enough to be with our senses, be with the phenomena that appear to us, to be with ourselves with awareness. It opens a channel of communication with our deeper selves and allows for the transformation of our neural pathways. We can realize that we are not separate- we can relax and make friends with suffering.

To be mindful is to just relax into a moment where you're not judging yourself or hating yourself. That is a primary function of mindfulness. Some people start mindfulness practice as a way of enhancing their life, for stress reduction or concentration, or so you can do better in your work.

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Mindfulness is literally a self-fulfilling prophecy. You may start with other expectations but mindfulness has its own results built in. After all, it’s a twenty-five hundred year- old system. Like anything else, if you come to it sincerely and work at it, with what are called right view and right effort, it will take you home, home to your heart.

unwobble.com 98 Raghu Markus & Rameshwar Das Lytton (cont’d)

Raghu Markus spent two years in India with Maharaji and Ram

Dass. He has been involved in music and transformational media

since the early 1970s when he was program director of CKGM-FM

in Montreal. In 1974 he collaborated with Ram Dass on the box set

Love Serve Remember. In 1990 he launched Triloka Records and

Karuna Music in Los Angeles, California. Triloka established itself as

a critical leader in the development of world music and for 17 years

was home to such artists as Krishna Das, Hugh Masekela, Walela,

Jai Uttal and transformational media projects that featured Ram

Dass, Deepak Chopra, and Les Nubians. Currently he is the

Executive Director of the Love Serve Remember Foundation and

his Mindrolling Podcast is part of the Be Here Now Network.

unwobble.com 99 Raghu Markus & Rameshwar Das Lytton (cont’d)

Rameshwar Das Lytton met Ram Dass in 1967 soon after his return from India, and spent time with Maharaji in India from 1970-72. His principle vocations have been as a photographer and writer, primarily free lance including for the New York Times. He has taught photography and photo-journalism, and has also worked as an environmentalist and writer. Over the years Ramesh has collaborated on several projects with Ram Dass including the original collection of manuscripts that became Be Here Now, the Love Serve Remember box set of recordings, and is the co-author of Ram Dass’ newer books, Be Love Now and Polishing the Mirror.

unwobble.com 100 Thomas Miller (cont’d) Thomas Miller

So You Don’t Like to Meditate…Then Don’t! Do something else instead to connect to a higher consciousness

It is truly amazing how many people today are not mindful. If you want a simple little exercise to tune into your own mindfulness, walk down any street, park or mall in America and count the number of people glued to their smart phones. How many can you count in say, ten minutes? Then, of course, only observe, form no judgment, and go on about your day, knowing for those 10 minutes you were giving your attention to a particular topic (which might help you become less glued to your phone by bringing attention/mindfulness to it).

Over the last three years, I’ve had the privilege of narrating seven audiobooks for Fred Dodson. If you’re not familiar with his work, you should check it out. The last book I completed is called “The Miracles of Attention and Awareness,” and is all about this topic of what we focus on expands, how to deal with challenges by diffusing them by re-focusing your attention elsewhere, unwobble.com 101 Thomas Miller (cont’d)

and much more. Nine hours of excellent material on this very topic. I’d encourage you to look for it on Amazon, Audible or iTunes.

I have a regular meditation practice that includes several aspects. While I do sit in silence and turn my mind off (or I meditate with headphones to Kelly Howell’s incredible meditation audios from brainsync.com), I have found hiking meditations to be the best for me. I now live in Colorado, so hitting a majestic trail in the mountains is easy, and I find no better connection with my higher-self than on a hike, especially down-hill!

The point is, there are no rules. Do whatever works best for you. One of the most important, beneficial, fundamental spiritual things you can do in your life is to tune out to the world-self (ego) and tune into your higher consciousness. Yes, there is a part of you that mostly remains silent and subservient to the conscious mind, but is that part of you that connects to the Divine.

Science is finally beginning to prove that our unconscious self (subconscious mind, higher self, higher consciousness) can anticipate and respond to outside stimuli up to a half-second before the stimulus occurs. That’s what can be measured in controlled tests! Think about all the stories you’ve heard of people not getting on certain flights because they just “knew.”

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Don’t you want that level of power working for you all day, every day? I do!

To achieve that, we have the ultimate challenge of making our mind (ego) subservient to our higher self. I often ask my conscious mind (especially on my hikes) if it is willing to let my subconscious talk for, say, the next 10 minutes. Or I will look ahead and pick a particular destination and say to my conscious mind, “we’re going to let Dream Weaver talk until we get to that rock up here.”

(By the way, Dream Weaver is the name I have given my subconscious mind. I would highly encourage you to connect with your subconscious mind to the point where you learn its personality. There is a name your subconscious wants to be called. Mine was clearly Dream Weaver, and the 1976 hit by Gary Wright kind of goes with it. )

At first, my conscious mind would struggle to release control of the internal conversation. Finally, after working on this for some time, now my conscious mind is so willing to hear what Dream Weaver has to say, that it almost shuts up instantly! Then, my subconscious is free to communicate through that still small voice, intuitive prompts and feelings, or almost by an audible internal voice.

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These hikes give me direction for the future, clarity in the present, peace when I need to be calm, and assuredness that I am being guided along my soul’s highest path.

Again, borrowing from Fred Dodson, our soul-path is like a river. If you’re floating on a river, you can let the current take you where it will, or you can choose to paddle up- stream, sideways, or even go to the bank and pull your boat out of the river and try to find a “better” river. Certainly there will be obstacles in the river (rocks, shoals, etc.) but when those appear, you just gently take your oar and direct the boat around them, then allow the flow to take you downstream effortlessly. Eventually, the river will take you where “you” (your soul’s agreed destination for this life) are “supposed” to go. The less resistance (up-stream paddling) you do, the easier life will be for you.

This is one of the best analogies for higher-consciousness living I’ve heard. Paul McCartney was a great higher- realm philosopher when he wrote, “Let it Be.” That’s great advice. Keep the oar in your hand and your eye in front of you, but then just Let it Be.

I have talked about this and much more on my podcast series “Subconscious Mind Mastery,” which is easily searchable on iTunes or on the web at subconsciousmindmastery.com and would love to have you listen in. unwobble.com 104 Thomas Miller (cont’d)

Bottom line, DO IT! Some love to sit in silence for extended periods. Some like to journal, allowing the pen to flow their unconscious thoughts. Some do best in- motion. Regardless of the “how,” the fact that you step out of your self and into your higher-self will totally change everything of how you relate to yourself and the world around you.

Blessings,

Thomas Miller

unwobble.com 105 Thomas Miller (cont’d)

Thomas Miller is an author, businessman, podcaster and ardent student of energy and higher consciousness. Thomas dramatically turned his life around at age 47, when most people think they are stuck in their ways and pretty much give up on radically changing their life. His life story is vividly explained on his podcast at subconsciousmindmastery.com

unwobble.com 106 David Nichtern (cont’d) David Nichtern

Mindful of the Pie Hole

Mindfulness is a big topic these days. I think there are different meanings, different takes on what exactly it is, but for the sake of this article let’s keep it simple and just say that mindfulness means actually paying attention to what you’re doing. When I’m teaching mindfulness in Japan I sometimes say – “let’s go watch the sushi chef next door – watching him, we will learn much of what we need to know about this topic – he is so present, so fully there with what he is doing.”

Mindfulness also has the connotation of being aware, in a clear but non-judgmental way, of your current experience – thoughts, emotions, sense perceptions and bodily sensations arising and dissolving – just seeing those come and go while staying with some present sensation like the breath to anchor us into a feeling of nowness – vivid yet impermanent.

My meditation teacher, Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche, after attempting to teach us heathen western students the art and benefits of mindful living, finally said “OK, now we’ve got to relate to one of the biggest sources of unwobble.com 107 David Nichtern (cont’d)

your gap in mindfulness – YOUR MOUTHS!” So he introduced mindful eating systems, including a Japanese monastic practice called oryoki, as well as western style dining etiquette; and also - believe it or not – elocution – so we could begin to work with mindfulness of speech as well.

As the years progressed and now, long since his passing, one cannot help but notice how astute an observation this was. Eating and speaking present huge opportunities to practice mindfulness in everyday life and to be “practically mindful” as the title of this book suggests.

For those of us who are seeking to extend our meditation into our everyday lives, and also for those of us who are not inclined to practice the seated forms of meditation, here is an opportunity to simply relate to our food and our speech in a mindful way. Huge benefits can come from this effort!

One of them is actually conquering what we Buddhists call poverty mentality or the “hungry ghost” syndrome; when we are in the hungry ghost realm (see my book “Awakening From the Daydream: Reimagining the Buddha’s Wheel of Life” for a more in depth description ☺ ) food, or any other object for that matter, becomes a replacement for an often uncomfortable feeling of open

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space, which we are anxiously trying to fill with something. Food can be, as we all know, a major source of comfort and security. In the hungry ghost realm we find ourselves stuffing our face in a mindless attempt to achieve a sense of contentment and satisfaction that continues, ironically, to recede as we gorge.

This article is therefore part of a larger concept I am developing (possibly for a new book ☺ called “Mindful of the Pie Hole – a Buddhist approach to Weight Loss”). There are other benefits from the practices presented herein – including appreciation, contentment and the return of a sense of humor and balance – which the endless cycle of craving and binging can obscure and obstruct.

Here are some exercises that you can begin to do starting right now, in everyday life, with or without an accompanying sitting meditation practice (strongly recommended but not required):

Mindful Eating

1. Place a mindful dot on your refrigerator door!

Put a golden dot on your refrigerator door. When you see it, pause for 5 seconds and contemplate if you are unwobble.com 109 David Nichtern (cont’d)

actually hungry or simply following a knee (or stomach in this case) jerk reaction to fill the pie hole in order to mitigate a feeling of longing, despair, boredom, or irritation.

Just allow a pause or gap between impulse and reaction, bring awareness to mind and body and continue. Sometimes there will be a shift, other times it will be beyond you, but creating a pause or gap right there is extremely powerful. The golden dot is telling you that you already have what you need; you are rich and powerful in mind and body; you are already basically good and content.

2. All start eating together

When you are eating with people, wait until everyone is served before digging in to fill the pie hole. This approach is also considered to an expression of common decency and good manners; it allows you all to settle and cut the inertia of creating a feeding frenzy.

3. Offer the food

Many cultures have a way of pausing before eating to show respect, appreciation and gratitude. Choose one, possibly from your own religious or cultural background

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(whatever that is) – say grace, express gratitude, offer the benefit to others, whatever appeals to you, but acknowledge that this food comes to you through a series of interdependent contributions from many people, plants and animals, and mother nature herself. Offering will set a healthy tone for your meal. In Japan they simply say “Itadakimasu” – which means “I receive” – very elegant and simple.

4. Mindful Snacking

To understand mindful snacking, we first have to understand our normal approach which could be described as “mindless snacking”. Take a look in your supermarket in the snack section for the endless array of chips, pretzels, carb and chemical laden, salty or sweet, bite size morsels coming to you in a big bag that you can just tear open, stick your mitt in, grab a fistful of snacky things and stuff them into your pie hole. If you are a snacker, the most important thing here (which is the Buddhist approach in general) is to bring mindful awareness to whatever you are doing. Snack mindfully! If you’re going to be a snacker, don’t be a slacker.

5. Portion Control

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While we’re on the subject of snacking (and eating in general), before you even get to the pie hole gateway, you can select an appropriate size portion for your meal elements or snacks and put them on a plate or in a bowl. Never snack directly from the bag! Then you can go for a second portion (which should be smaller than the first), but your meal or snack will never degenerate into an “eaters without borders situation”. Your friends

will never again have to here you say, “I can’t believe I ate the whole thing!”

6. Create Mindful Space to Eat in

If you are eating on a bed that is not made up, with clothes and other belongings strewn about, that is not a good sign. Take the time to create a clean and comfortable space to eat your meal or snack in. Every meal doesn’t have to be an elegant dinner but your outside world and your mind are always reflecting back to each other. Care for your environment and a healthy state of mind go hand in hand.

7. Clean up properly afterward

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Cleaning up is part of the process of consuming. This is not moralizing – it is common sense. We are connecting with the basic ecology of life on earth.

8. Be kind to yourself and others

This point cannot be emphasized enough. Anybody who has studied decorum will tell you that the basic premise is consideration for ourselves and others. Sometimes when we try to become mindful or change old habits we are way too tight and hard on ourselves. We are talking about being kind and gentle here. A light touch will take us much further than a heavy hand.

9. Chew slowly and thoroughly without becoming a new age automaton.

OK so one final technical point. Just slow down and enjoy your food. Actually taste it and take the time to chew properly. There is no need to count 56 chews for every bite which will turn you into a pedantic new age robot and nobody who is being honest will actually want to eat with you because you are a killjoy! ☺ But we can just slow it down a bit and actually chew before swallowing.

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And now for the output of the pie hole, here are a few points regarding:

Mindful Speech

1. Limit your gossip to 20 minutes a day

I won’t go as far as to say don’t gossip at all. That would signify the end of the human race as we know it. But hey, thin it out a bit and give others a break sometime. Would you say those things if the person you were talking about was actually present? – maybe not. Just lighten up on the gossip – everybody’s doing their best.

2. Don’t malign others

When we malign others we are giving in to the darker part of our nature. All the great spiritual teachers got this one right. There is, of course, space for critical assessment and discernment, but that means you can see the whole picture. Let’s notice if we have a tendency to dwell on the dark side and use the Force to come back into mindful and caring use of our vocal cords, mouth and tongue.

3. Speak more slowly perhaps and every once in a while actually pause unwobble.com 114 David Nichtern (cont’d)

OMG. This is so obvious but do we do it? Try it out occasionally and watch what happens.

4. Actually listen while other people are talking instead of just mentally preparing to take the mike again

While we’re on the topic, we can refer to the great blues line “Your mind is on vacation but your mouth is working overtime.” Use your ears for something other than holding your glasses up. Really listen. Take it in. Then it’s your turn.

5. Queens’ English and THE Queen’s English

Slang is cool and an occasional racy word won’t kill anybody, but every once in a while it can be good to relate to the elegance and subtlety of whatever language you are actually speaking.

6. Body Language – Reading & Speaking Between the Lines

Attitude, energy, and physical posture are all part of the realm of speech. Being more aware of your own and tuning into others’ multi-layered communication can

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improve the exchange of real meaning between you and them.

7. Do not bring things to a painful point.

This is actually a classical Buddhist slogan. When making an important point, simply present what you have to say and leave some space for the other person to receive. Avoid conversational equivalent of the “ground and pound” (UFC for those un-initiated among us – the meaning should be clear in any case).

And finally, the coup de grace, one my mother and yours would have loved – bringing together mindful eating and speech:

Don’t talk with your mouth full!

I believe this one is self explanatory.

In summation:

If we can see all these methods as an expression of precision and affection, rather than yet another way to beat ourselves up or achieve some Spartan notion of

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perfection, the Buddhas of the 3 times will smile and all beings will benefit immeasurably!

Let us know if you have any ideas to add and what works for you.

All best wishes,

David Nichtern

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David Nichtern is a senior meditation teacher in the Shambhala Buddhist lineage of Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche and Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche. He is also an Emmy award-winning/Grammy-nominated composer, guitarist and producer. He is the author of "Awakening From The Daydream: Re-imagining the Buddha's Wheel of Life" (Wisdom Publications Oct 4, 2016). davidnichtern.com facebook.com/davidnichtern

unwobble.com 118 Jarell Perry Jarell(cont’d) Perry

An Artist’s Guide To Sacred Space

Know thyself, know thy space. In your home. In your relationships. In yourself. This process is sometimes overlooked in the hurry to create more art and do more work, but it really is an essential tool for any lifestyle.

I look at external spaces as direct conversations with the internal. An environment that reflects my ideal vibe on the inside lets me create more freely.

This is me seeing inspiration as the muse and the muse is a guest to be welcomed in as warmly as a lover. I light the proverbial fireplace for her. Intentionally setting the tone in my space sends a private message to the body and mind that says, “relax, this is where the magic happens."

How do you create sacred space in your studio/ workspace/home? I rent a one-room loft in downtown L.A. that often serves as all three. Here’s a list of small things that have added up for me:

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1. White Walls

I used to spend a lot of time figuring out what I wanted on my walls, where to hang it, how it would read to people visiting, and how long I wanted to see it on a daily basis. All of that unnecessary noise faded when I decided to leave my walls blank. My mantra since then has been “clear head, clear walls.” Leaves more room for imagination. And functions well for last minute photo shoots.

2. Mood Lighting

Investing in a wi-fi connected lighting system felt like a nerd luxury at one time, but now after a year’s worth of use it's one of the most important pieces in my home and studio. With the geofencing feature my lights turn on before I open the front door, and I can set the theme from my phone with a tap of the app. When I sit down to work on a song I usually wash the room in bluish purple hues, but my theme for reading/more domestic duties is reds and creams.

3. The Kettle

As a singer I’ve criminally underestimated the health benefits of hot water. After my friends at the Chopra Center sent me some of their organic ginger tea, I realized I was doing it wrong and finally bought an old school water kettle. It’s a bath for the senses when you

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think about it: the high pitched whistle when the water hits a boiling point, the steam on my face as I’m pouring it to brew, and of course that herbal taste and smell. It’s all simple preparation for a working session that makes a difference.

4. Smoke + Oil

Small spaces can easily be compromised by the wrong scent, but the ritual of lighting incense not only neutralizes the air but also adds a calming routine to my day. My default is original Nag Champa. For the bathroom I use eucalyptus oil to open the sinuses while I shower.

5. Wireless Sound

Bluetooth speakers are pretty standard these days, but I underestimated the power of having one that is reliable, portable, and sounds great all the time. I use a Bose Soundlink, which lets me seamlessly pass a song from my headphones to the room as I walk in the door. It's uncomplicated and it's worth it.

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Bonus:

The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up

by Marie Kondo is a strong book with a fluffy title that really changed the way I view my space and my things. A regular ritual of letting go and tossing possessions which are no longer useful and/or "spark joy" for me has been essential to maintaining clarity. I can say with confidence that the book is now viral enough for you to go check it out without saying much else.

Secondly, in the last few months it’s been important for me to curb my internet/social media addiction. The endless feedback loop of information online and the muscle memory in my thumbs to compulsively open and scroll the feeds on my phone are a lot to take on, but a few simple measures have helped deter these interruptions from taking over my sacred space:

A) I’ve turn off all mobile notifications for most social media sites. Because generally if the news is really both that urgent and that important, it won’t come to me via Instagram. B) I use a free Chrome plug-in called StayFocusd that lets me set a daily time limit for browsing notorious time-sucking sites. C) I delete all distraction apps from my phone once a week or so. When the urge strikes to mindlessly open up Twitter or Facebook it’s not so easy anymore, leaving me free to focus on what really matters: the present moment. I let the urges subside and forget what made me so manic unwobble.com 122 Jarell Perry (cont’d)

about checking in to Snapchat literally every five minutes. And when I finally do decide to download the apps again, it’s a conscious choice. The mindful one.

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Jarell Perry is an accomplished singer-songwriter and founder of StillMind.co, an artist collective and personal development blog dedicated to artists and their unique paths to self-discovery. jarellperry.com stillmind.co

unwobble.com 124 GeorgeGeorge Pitagorsky (cont’d) Pitagorsky

Mindfulness At Work

If you find yourself in the middle of a hectic day here are a couple of techniques you can do at your desk to ease the stress. They do not require much time. Just 60 seconds or less. They will act as a tension reliever and reminders to be mindful.

Sense the body. Whenever you remember to do so, simply pause, tune in to the sensations of the body and breath.

Take 1 or 2 conscious breaths and then re engage into whatever activity you were performing.

Sensing the body immediately brings you into the present moment. When you are present the thoughts of the past and future, likes and dislikes, or things that stress you out are gone. You can always take a rest in the present moment. It is always there.

You can set a little alarm to go off every so often to remind yourself. Or use habitual stress signals.

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For example, a feeling of being late or sense of frustration to remind you to take a moment to get centered and get present by sensing the body and breath. You can do this for a few seconds or minutes depending on your situation.

See if one minute per hour will make a difference in how you feel and the way you perform. Taking a moment to be present and mindful will generate great results for you and your projects.

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George Pitagorsky is a speaker, teacher of mindfulness meditation, consultant, author and currently CIO and Enterprise Architect at the NYC DOE. He promotes optimal performance through mindful awareness and system and process thinking. George authored The Zen Approach to Project Management, Managing Conflict in Projects, Project Management Foundation and publishes the Breakthrough Newsletter .

unwobble.com 127 Nina Rao (cont’d)Nina Rao

“Call to Prayer”

Ram Ram Ram Ram Ram Ram Ram Ram Ram Ram Ram Ram Ram Ram Ram Ram

For years I have observed as my Guru prescribed specific spiritual practices, individual to the seeker who came to Her for darshan. Once, I asked Her what I should do – what should my specific practice be? She said “You are so busy, just do as much as you can.” That is an interesting instruction; in one way, that let me off the hook, yet in another, I had to figure out what I could do. I did know that I need a regular disciplined practice. So I do my best to dedicate a period of time to spiritual practice first thing in the morning, and for the rest of the day try to keep the intention to have some awareness around all the busy tasks and interactions with people – to be Mindful.

We have been given the great gift of our senses to experience the world we live in. Mindful Practice, amongst other things, trains us to fully experience the beauty of the world through our senses. Our senses don’t have to be an obstacle, but can be the very conduit to en-Joy ourselves. As we experience this beauty, we immerse ourselves deeper in the ocean that holds us all. We feel connected. This beauty comes in all kinds of

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forms, and we will recognize them more and more with training, as the mind quiets down and the heart opens.

Of the many practices in mindfulness training from traditions all around the world, in the Indian tradition, puja, the act of worship and prayer, is what I’m most drawn to and can be regular with.

11-Minute Simple Daily Practice: see, hear, smell, taste, and feel

• Leave your phone in another room of the house

• Make as your altar, a small quiet area with a small table or shelf at eye level (when seated) that is clean and clear. Cover the table with a sacred cloth.

• Have a pillow, chair, or mat to sit on comfortably and keep your spine long, strong, and stable to face the altar

• Select a photo/image/statue of your Guru, your Deity, your chosen Beloved Being to gaze upon or to be gazed upon by.

[At home your altar can remain in one place. Since I travel a lot, I also have a packable altar that wraps up in small cloth and goes with me to hotels’ nightstands everywhere. When I’m on a plane, I have a photo of my

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altar that I look at, or when I can’t do that, I close my eyes and visualize my altar]

• Pranam or bow, touching your forehead or crown of your head to the floor in front of your altar (if that’s not possible you can mentally bow)

• Light a candle (remember to put it out after your puja is over)

• Offer a fragrance by fresh cut flower, incense, or a spritz of rose water

• Place fresh or dried fruit, nuts, seeds in a specific bowl (that is used only for puja) on the altar

• To begin the ritual, ring a small temple bell, if you have one

• Read aloud a verse or prayer from a sacred text turning the pages with your fingers, or move the beads of a mala through your fingers as you chant aloud a mantra, Divine Name, or sing a prayer or hymn of devotion. It’s important that for these few minutes as you recite, you pay attention as much as possible. If thoughts pull you away, come back, and maybe do over if needed. The sacred text, prayer, or mantra has a transformative and clarifying energy of its own, and that power is amplified with concentration.

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• Close your eyes, breathe quietly, and let your practice wash over you

• Open your eyes, take the food you have offered as it is now blessed. Chew well and swallow with gratitude for all we are given (you can give some to your family members as well).

• Pranam or bow. As you bow offer the merits of your practice to the health, peace of mind and ease of heart to all beings everywhere

Go about the rest of your day. At the end of the day, visit your altar and if you can do the puja again before bed, great. If you are too tired, offer a bow, lie back in your bed, silently offer thanks… rest in the buoyancy of the Ocean.

* As a parent of a small child even these 11 minutes might feel impossible. I chanted while breast-feeding and often did my puja with my baby on my lap, walking around with her in the baby sling, and as a toddler she would do it with me to some extent or have her parallel puja with her toys going on! I always sang her to sleep with a bhajan, or kirtan, or her grandparents would play a CD of chanting. This way we didn’t loose the thread of dedicating some time to puja.

The busy-ness of life, thoughts and emotions pull our mind and heart apart. When we feel disconnected we

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don’t feel well. We can’t really reconnect by holding on to and grasping at people, places, and things. We have to find a way to dip into the Ocean that holds us all until we recognize we are forever swimming in the Oneness.

Ram Ram Ram Ram Ram Ram Ram Ram Ram Ram Ram Ram Ram Ram Ram Ram

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Nina Rao learned traditional chants (bhajans) from her grandfather in a village in south India when she nine years old. The chants quietly stayed with her until she rediscovered chanting with Krishna Das in New York in 1996. Her childhood was spent living in and moving between many countries around the world and when she settled in New York her working life began in the banking world, switched to organizing and leading photographic wildlife safaris in Africa and India, and now for many years, is Krishna Das’ business manager and assistant.

Nina tours with Krishna Das, playing cymbals and singing with him, and was honored in 2013 to accompany him at the Grammy Awards webcast performance. In 2007, she recorded the track 'Nina Chalisa' on Krishna Das' CD "Flow of Grace - Chanting the Hanuman Chalisa" In January 2013, she released her debut album, "Antarayaami - Knower of All Hearts" . The double CD includes devotional kirtan, bhajan, and a variety of Hanuman Chalisa melodies including a duet with Krishna Das. Nina regularly leads kirtan, chanting of the Hanuman Chalisa, and sings for yoga classes in her hometown of Brooklyn, NY and beyond.

unwobble.com 133 Simon Robinson (cont’d) Simon Robinson

What is Mindfulness To Me?

Mindfulness in my opinion is extremely important in every aspect of life and should be enthusiastically practiced by all of us even if you don't have a spiritual bone in your body.

In fact I prefer to see it as our true expression rather than an exercise we are required to do in order to get some far off promised result.

Let me explain.

When you see the Doctor or the Lawyer that is noticeably stressed and unclear in their communication do you feel confidence in their ability to help?

Or do you gravitate to the confident, charismatic individual who speaks calmly and 'Mindfully'?

I think for most of us it is the latter.

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When we are mindful, we are not rushed, our body is under control and has a certain poise to it.

Naturally there is a sense of charisma, confidence and power.

As William Walker Atkinson would say it is the attitude of ' I Can and I Will'!

My definition of mindfulness may differ from others. You see I believe 'Mindfulness is a state dependent upon our awareness and awareness (general) is linked to attention (specific) which is reliant upon will power and discipline.

They are all interrelated. It may sound complicated to explain but much easier to experience.

Who Is In Charge?

Have you ever promised yourself after eating a big chocolate cake that is the last time you will eat it and from now on you will only eat a healthy diet? I know I have...... often!

But the very next time you walk past the bakery you go into some sort of auto pilot that overrides your previous decision and buys, then eats a very tasty cake. Does that

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sound familiar?

It could be food, smoking, or other behaviors but it shows you that there are other forces at work.

What 'part' of you overruled that other 'part' of you that said no to the cakes the last time? You see so we can agree that we are not entirely in charge of ourselves.

This links to many other aspects of life such as being caught in the rat race and loosing touch with who we are, spacing out and missing whole chunks of time, forgetting things that have just been mentioned to us and generally living a life that is no where near our potential.

So if that is the case what do we do. Well there are tried and tested methods to help. But, the unpopular truth is that nothing comes for free so everything requires some effort.

If that seems fair then lets move on to look at what we can do.

Awareness of the Moment

Now everyone says be aware of the present moment, enjoy the moment. But not many ever mention the how.

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The how I think can come in many ways direct and indirect.

Indirect being several years of regular practice or just dealing with what life gives us.

What I would like to share now are several direct methods of getting in touch with the present moment.

This will provide an experience, being aware of the now. It then serves as a measuring stick as we can then get a sense of how far we are from this state.

This state can then help move us towards mindfulness in daily life having the ability to remind ourselves and wake ourselves from these mini mental trips and trances.

Experiments

These experiments can be played with in daily life. None of them need be heavy and in fact should be fun.

All these exercises are super simple but their effects leak into all aspects of ourselves.

Experiment 1 - STOP

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This is originally a Tibetan Method which I learned from a Western School which incorporated its practice.

It is super simple just like most of the effective exercises.

Now either in a group or on your own (mentally) someone will command STOP!

At this point 1) observe your mental state and notice the thinking, 2) observe your hearing - what are all the sounds you are receiving (so often we filter out lots of background noise) and 3) observe the colors and the objects around us.

This seems simple but really does create change. Most important is not the state it creates but the noticeable difference from the state we where in before.

We were in a trance!

Experiment 2 - Speech

In daily life begin listening and being intensively aware of your speech. Listen to each word as you say it hearing your own voice.

Just the action of this bringing an awareness to speech

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brings a power to it. We naturally slow down and speak clearly and our words seem to be noticed and acknowledged by those around us.

Experiment 3 - Awareness to habits

This links to the previous cake example but what else do we do? Sometimes people fidget, hands move, legs wiggle.

So with this exercise try and restrain all unnecessary movement. Sit still, stand still, move only when required.

There will be something pushing you to move, people around us feel a little uncomfortable if we have such poise and stillness.

But persevere. You will begin to feel a sense of power in yourself, a strength that perhaps was not there before.

Experiment 4 - Yes OR No

Super simple. Only give Yes or No answers with no explanations unless absolutely necessary for work or business etc.

At first it is super awkward. But once you start it gets

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easier and people will begin to treat you differently.

Why you ask? Well often in modern society we feel bad for saying no, so bad that we feel the need to give elaborate explanations as to why our decision makes sense.

This exercise is to remind us that there is no need. It wastes energy and time. There will be an urge to explain but be aware of this and follow that feeling back and try

to identify why you felt the need to explain and where its coming from.

Experiment 5 - The Clock

In my opinion this is THE best exercise to get started.

Remember in my eyes Mindfulness is very much interrelated with other qualities. It cannot just be turned on unless those other qualities are present.

This is the engine room.

So the clock.

Sit completely still (Exercise 3) and observe the hand on unwobble.com 140 Simon Robinson (cont’d)

an Analogue clock that counts the seconds. I use the analogue clock on my IPAD.

Put all your attention upon the hand that is counting the seconds. Any nothing should exist in your mind apart from that hand. Follow it as it counts the seconds and do this first for 3 minutes.

Then go to 5 and finally to 10 minutes.

If you do this and honestly let nothing take away your attention, not a thought, an image or a memory

maintaining the focus then you will see changes very fast.

Bonus Experiment for the brave!

This sounds silly but it teaches a valuable lesson perhaps a little more strongly than the previous experiemnts.

Cold showers and Ice baths - Before you get in take a mental note of how you feel, what your mind is like. Is it sharp, dull, tired?

Carefully get in the cold shower or ice bath.

Examine your mental reaction ..don't freak out take some unwobble.com 141 Simon Robinson (cont’d)

deep breaths and examine your mental state.

Get out and now again examine your mental state. Generally people describe a sharpening and widening of their awareness after this experiment.

This then points again to ask the question if I feel awake and alive now, what kind of state was I in before?

What do these experiments have to do with Mindfulness?

Mindfulness - the ability to be aware of the moment. This then in my opinion is an end result and also the process.

It is a sliding scale as we can all be aware of 5 seconds but what is the quality of this 5 seconds.

So these exercises allow us to gradually see and hear more internally and externally. With this the quality of our mindfulness changes and deepens.

A bit like sleep sometimes its restful and sometimes it isn't. We can tell the difference.

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Habits

We are a result of our habits. Before we can change our habits we have to notice them.

Some are very obvious but others, the ones that are the cause of other things are more like a Ninja. They hide and work from the shadows.

So these exercises begin to bring us back to a center, to a mid point whatever wording you feel comfortable with. But it is the point where we are not being pushed to do anything unconsciously.

Think of bad habits like drugs or some other addiction. People want to be free of it but somehow they keep on doing the same thing with the same result.

So these exercises wake us up, show us what is going on

in our mind, and start to create some distance between our emotions/feelings and our thoughts.

When this happens all our energy that was being used by unconscious habits in the body and mind are recovered.

Suddenly we have energy, we have vitality.

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The best thing to do is to try. Choose an exercise and do it for 10 days, really commit to it and see the results.

So these exercises wake us up, separate thought from emotion and recover lost energy. Out of this can spring Mindfulness, but this also something of a habit. But at least now we have the ingredients that we need.

Now we need to look at where habits are formed.

Subconscious - Our Greatest Ally

We are nearly there. At the beginning I gave the example of cakes and deciding to do one thing but actually doing another.

This is a result of a habit in the subconscious. The subconscious takes care of everything we are not consciously aware of.

Think of our body, I don't know how to stimulate nerves or process oxygen in the blood but it still gets done. All thanks to my subconscious.

It is our greatest ally as it just gets on with the job with no questions. But as it does not question we also need to make sure we give clear instructions.

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So if someone has a a bad day and starts saying to themselves how bad the world is and how life is terrible they are in fact saying this to their subconscious.

It hears the message and says okay boss I got it! It then ensures that it serves this person with images and thoughts to back up their original idea.

It becomes a viscous circle. (Notice earlier I said experiments not exercises as exercises sometimes have a negative memory in the subconscious)

Turn it around and feed positive thoughts, words and images and it will do its best to flood your mind with these ideas.

It really creates the mental atmosphere. Add to this the habits

You walk past the cake shop and consciously decide I want a cake. You enjoy it.

Next week you walk past and you do the same.

The 3rd week you arrive at the cake shop almost on auto pilot. You have created a habit. The more you go with this habit the stronger it gets.

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So if we decide suddenly no more cake! It is not strong enough to override the habit we have previously formed.

Auto Suggestion to Create Habits

We can remedy this by creating positive habits consciously.

Everyday we will state a short sentence in the present tense.

For example 'I am mindful, I observe my thoughts and feelings' or something like 'I am happy, healthy and full of life'.

It may sounds crazy but gve it a go.

Using auto suggestion puts the seed nto the garden of the unconscious to create a healthy self mage and healthy habits. Then the qualtes of awareness, will power and discipline allow us to consciously take control of each moment.

Can you see why I had to mention the subconscious? How can we develop mindfulness if we are unaware of our unconscious habits which cause anxiety and worry in the present.

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Summary

A lot has been said. Let us now make this practical for real life

Life is short.

Why go through it wth one eye closed. Play wth the experiments and see the difference in your mental state.

Begin to notice your thoughts, feelings and the amazing people around us every day.

Begin to see the opportunities that life presents and slowly begin to hear another voice deep inside.

Once you can see the difference between the dull and sharp consciousness that the experiments highlight then life becomes very exciting.

Meditators I believe will get great benefit from developing this 'Mindfulness' as it becomes the real practice of meditation. Our day becomes super exciting as we develop this state with the actual meditation time

being more like a litmus test to see how steady and deep our mindfulness has become.

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At the end of the day it comes down to being aware of everything we do, that we consciously and purposely do things. Being mindful moment by moment rather than attempting to be mindful from now on for ever more.....

This all of course is only my view of what mindfulness is. I believe it brings benefits to every corner of our lives whether it be in business, on the golf course or on the meditation cushion.

Best wishes to you on your journey.

Simon Robinson

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Dawn Of Truth - lives in South East Asia and spends his time reading, writing & studying in order to reach the goal of Financial, Physical & Mental Freedom.

Simon the founder has a background in Tibetan Meditation (Nyingma Palyul Lineage under HH Penor RInpche), Chinese & Indonesian Martial Arts and is currently studying the European Meditation Traditions.

He is actively studying and teaching and welcomes correspondence. dawnoftruth.com

unwobble.com 149 Sharon Salzberg (cont’d) Sharon Salzberg

Everyday Mindfulness: The Art Of Beginning Again

No matter what our life looks like, mindfulness is always available to help us find greater ease and depth in our experience. It is mindfulness that gives us space from feeling really overwhelmed, anxious, or obsessively regretful of that poorly written email we sent too quickly, or the argument we got into with a friend or coworker. Mindfulness creates space in our experience by changing the way we relate to the things around us, without necessarily changing those circumstances to do so. Often students are surprised to realize how challenging mindfulness can be, simply because the idea of paying more attention seems so simple - and while that is true, it doesn’t mean necessarily mean that it’s easy!

One of the clearest instructions I have heard about bringing depth and peace into our everyday lives came from a Tibetan teacher of mine who encouraged “short moments, many times”. For many of us, this is significantly different that how we think mindfulness works. Nowadays, the word “mindfulness” is thrown around in a wide variety of circumstances, and often

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misinterpreted. Many people think of mindfulness as a singular state of mind, or more so, a singular decision that we make - “today I will be mindful all day long” - as though we can set our minds to it and magically make it happen! In reality, we quickly find that meditation practice of mindfulness doesn’t work this way. Mindfulness is not just one decision, but rather a process that we engage with - often many, many times throughout the day. It truly is “short moment, many times” as my teacher so eloquently described. These short moments quickly lead to one of the core skills in a meditation practice: the art of beginning again.

Learning the art of beginning again is one of the most powerful skills you can cultivate in your practice. But learning a new skill doesn’t happen overnight. We don’t suddenly know how to be a master chef - first we have to cook of lot of food that doesn’t taste that great, and slowly we refine the skillset. The same is true for the practice of mindfulness. We begin with an intention to pay attention in a new way, however, we quickly lose touch with that, become distracted and return to our habitual ways of being. So the practice mindfulness actually means that over and over we notice when we’re lost, return to our intention, and begin again. Practically speaking this means that we will begin again millions of times each day—simply by remembering to tune back into ourselves, take a few breaths and shift gears in terms of our energy and our receptivity. It is short moments,

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many times. It can be fun and creative to build little mindfulness moments and habits into your day to help you begin again. Here are a few examples:

• Before you press “send” after writing an email, take three breaths, perhaps making a mental note of “inhale” and “exhale” as you breathe. After those three cycles, re-read your email and make any changes you feel are necessary. Then take one final inhale and exhale before pressing “send.”

• Try taking two full cycles of breath every time you receive a notification on your phone—be it a text message, call or Before you go into a meeting?

• Every now and then during your day, try to notice if you are “multitasking”—a misnomer we use to refer to those times we are on a conference call while writing emails and refreshing Facebook. Don’t judge your actions, but recognize them and then make a commitment to “unitask”; do one thing at a time and breathe with more intention as you do it.

• If you’re walking from room to room, take it as an opportunity for a short exercise in mindfulness: just walk, feeling each foot make contact with the floor or ground in different places as you move.

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Each of these examples are genuine mindfulness exercises. When we make the decision to “be present” and more aware of our actions and behaviors throughout the day, we aren’t just more in tune with our sensations and experiences, but are also more balanced. Even if we don’t feel calmer after taking a short mindful walk or a few intentional breaths, these sorts of “pauses” in the day give us some space from our daily routine, in which we can discover greater wisdom and insight. With mindfulness, we can shift our relationship to our experiences. By paying attention to our experiences, we can regroup—even if it means doing so a million times throughout the day. It is never too late to begin again.

unwobble.com 153 Sharon Salzberg (cont’d)

Sharon Salzberg is a central figure in the field of meditation, a world-renowned teacher and NY Times bestselling author. She has played a crucial role in bringing meditation and mindfulness practices to the West and into mainstream culture since 1974, when she first began teaching. She is the co-founder of the Insight Meditation Society in Barre, MA and the author of ten books including NY Times bestseller, Real Happiness, her seminal work, Lovingkindness and her forthcoming release by Flatiron Books, Real Love. Renowned for her down-to-earth teaching style, Sharon offers a secular, modern approach to Buddhist teachings, making them instantly accessible. She is a regular

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columnist for On Being, a contributor to Huffington Post, and the host of her own podcast: The Metta Hour. For more information, visit SharonSalzberg.com.

unwobble.com 155 Bill ScheinmanBill (cont’d)Scheinman

Bringing Mindfulness to Our Conversations

We are in communication with people all the time. We have conversations with colleagues at work, with our mechanic, with our spouses and kids, and we convey messages both verbally and non-verbally. But how often are we really being present while communicating? Because the way we communicate has a big impact on whether we experience relationships as positive or stressful, it’s important to bring mindful awareness to the domain of conversation.

Mindfulness helps us cultivate an assertive communication style rather than an aggressive or a passive one. When we include awareness of our mind- body experience while communicating it helps us understand how the conversation is going; through awareness of body sensations and mental reactions, we can mindfully pause and acknowledge anxiety, hurt or frustration, and create a space that helps us respond wisely rather than rashly. By taking care of ourselves as we communicate, we are also taking care of the other person.

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In addition, practicing empathetic listening is a great way of establishing clarity and trust in dialog. When we let go of our agendas, the desire to fix other people or have absolute clarity, we can open to what people are saying and really understand them. When someone feels deeply heard and understood, conflicts lessen and collaborations are more effective.

Here are some suggestions for creating mindful conversations, both as a speaker and a listener.

While speaking:

• Body awareness: Stay in touch with your body to connect with your own authenticity. This means that as you speak, now and then notice any places in your body that might be tight or tense. When we speak words from a place of body awareness, it’s easier to know when we might be going astray or uttering thoughts or ideas that are not in alignment with our values.

• Truthful: Speak truthfully. Dishonest speech leads to problems down the line that may be hard to fix. When people know they can rely on us to be truthful, it goes a long way to establishing a sense of trust.

• Be of benefit: Speak beneficially, not just to say something. If what we speak is without benefit to the

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person we are communicating with, why do we need to say it?

• Kindness: Speak with kindness. Not only is speaking with kindness more relaxing and peaceful, but people tend to respond to kind words rather than harsh ones. Keep in mind, speaking with kindness does not mean that you neglect constructive criticism when it’s appropriate. We can criticize, set boundaries, confront, and be kind while doing it.

• Timely: Speak at the right time. If you give feedback to someone who is visibly upset, it might not be the right time to do so. Being sensitive to the when of speaking supports effective communication.

While listening:

• Body awareness: Stay in touch with your body to notice how the person’s words land for you. If someone says something untrue, inaccurate, or unfair, it’s better to feel how those words land in your body first – it gives you the appropriate pause and a chance to digest and release any negative emotions that might have been triggered by the words. When you do speak, you’ll do it with more presence and non- reactivity.

• Empathy: Practice empathetic listening by understanding that everyone wants to be fully heard.

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While advice may be useful, it’s helpful to realize that much of the time when people are struggling they really don’t need advice – they need to be heard.

• Openness: Have an open mind towards the speaker even if you know the person well.

• Focus: Just as you return to your breath whenever your mind wanders, return your attention to the speaker whenever your mind wanders.

A Simple Practice for Hitting the Reset Button

You’re sitting at your desk at work when you realize that you feel disconnected from yourself, you feel anxious and tense, and your mind is full of half-formed thoughts. You seem to have lost your presence of mind, your inner equilibrium thrown off.

At such times, a simple exercise in awareness can totally shift the energy and change your perspective. The Mindful Reset can take as long as 10 seconds or one minute to do. You can do the Mindful Reset at any time. While sitting at your desk, before entering a meeting, while walking to lunch, or while on the train to work. It is a powerful and effective way of bringing mindfulness into your everyday life that doesn’t require hours of intensive meditation practice.

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Firstly, when you notice that you’re feeling out of sorts, simply stop what you’re doing, close your eyes if you can, and notice your breathing. Follow the breath as it comes in, and follow it as it goes out. How does the breath feel? Is it relaxed and easy from the beginning to the end? Is your breathing tight or squeezed? Noticing how the breath is also helps you notice if there are any sensations of tension or tightness in the body. Follow the breath as it travels through your body to become aware of any sensations of discomfort or contraction that are making themselves known. Notice wherever the body feels tight or tense; acknowledge those sensations without needing to get rid of them. You can invite those parts of the body to relax, but do it softly, not as a command but as a kind request. Simply bringing awareness to how your breathing and body are can begin to relax them.

Secondly, notice what your state of mind is like. What thoughts are present? Are they thoughts of the future or the past? Are they thoughts of worry, planning, remembering, judging, figuring out? Is your mind clear, collected, unified? Or is it dull, muddy, scattered? Just notice what’s going on in your mind without any judgment or self-criticism. Again, simply bringing awareness to how your mind is and what thoughts might be present gives you important information about what is driving your behavior right now. When you are aware of what patterns are present in the mind, you are less likely to be controlled by them.

Thirdly, notice what the emotional tone is like in your experience. Underneath those physical sensations and unwobble.com 160 Bill Scheinman (cont’d)

thoughts, what emotions might be present? Is there worry, fear, sadness, anger, anxiety, doubt, frustration? Again, don’t feel like you need to get rid of the emotions. Just noticing the emotional tone of any experience gives you greater freedom in responding wisely.

When you give yourself the space to notice how you are, your mind starts making adjustments that will bring you back to equilibrium. This is called a closed feedback loop. The system of mind-body is working to bring you back into balance.

The Mindful Reset doesn’t magically solve all your problems or remove all your pain. What it does do is put you in touch with yourself from the non-judgmental perspective of awareness. Without this perspective, we contract and tense up when faced with a challenge. We are under the control of the reactive mind. With the non- judgmental perspective of awareness as our ally, we release, let go, and see the big picture. We are being guided by the responsive mind. Mindfulness returns us to the clear-headed perspective from which it is easier to see how to meet our challenges and live our lives with more wisdom and balance.

Again, you can practice the Mindful Reset throughout the day, as often as you need to. It can take as little as 10 seconds or as much as a minute to complete.

unwobble.com 161 Bill Scheinman (cont’d)

Bill Scheinman is a mindfulness teacher in the San Francisco Bay Area. He leads corporate mindfulness programs, facilitates 8-week courses in mindfulness- based stress reduction, and works with individuals as a mindfulness coach. He is the author of the mindfulness guide, Moment By Moment. stressreductionatwork.com

unwobble.com 162 David SilverDavid (cont’d) Silver

Finding Abiding Mindfulness

“If the meditator is able to use whatever occurs in his life as the path, his body becomes a retreat hut.” - Jigme Lingpa

All of our experiences are embedded in the real joy of living. Yet this realization does not usually come in an epiphanical burst of the miraculousness of it all. Rather, the 100%-in-the-present mindful heart is able to elucidate our neuroses and obsessions and illusory beliefs – not by the gaining of bliss necessarily, but by the acute awareness of what our mind is doing, all the time, largely unnoticed. We have our quotidian quota of questioning queasiness. Yet, happily, we also have relatively easy access to our witness mind, which has to be activated by practice and perseverance.

If you can’t make a loving kindness meditation out of as much of your life as possible, then you are sort of missing the boat. Then this state/dimension, that the Buddhists call the natural bardo, becomes preoccupied and nervous and compelled by modern nonsense. It doesn’t know what it actually is because of the total absorption in what it thinks it is. This paradigm of normalcy then can wipe out the ability to be self-aware.

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“When a great moment knocks on the door of your life, it is often no louder than the beating of your heart, and it is very easy to miss it.” Boris Pasternak

Are these “great moments” all about the eternal and infinite, about the omnipresent pervasive meaning of life, about the whole mighty question of suffering, about the essence of Shiva, Jesus and Buddha.? I suppose in an ultimate kind of way they are, but the way they often manifest to me is in that ultra quiet but assured voice (just like the Quaker description) that hips you quickly and efficiently to what is simply, actually, really, authentically, beyond-the-bullshit going on with your mind.

This inner spirit is hearing all your static and, lo, a sacred listening happens. The truth unvarnished, untarnished Sometimes not exactly pleasing or positive – like when and how your mind is either playing tricks on you, or somehow filling your head with a seductive yet reductive mental mist of fantasies and daydreams ergo obscuring the mainly marginalized mainstream mystic, thereby stopping you from exploring the miracle of the momentary experience, second by second, throughout your current incarnational life cycle.

In other words, it’s necessary that you are aware in the moment. Ram Dass’s Be Here Now and its ripened, sweet legacy in our lives now covers that.

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Mindfulness is all about inhabiting your present, your real, zero-obfuscation mind- stream as it is, without rationalizing, without judgment, without bias or fairytale- like painting over by your own unique take on the immediate truth. If the will is there to achieve this, then it becomes easier and easier to achieve. Once you come to realize what’s happening mentally or physically or emotionally, even for a fraction of a picosecond, it can then steadily transform into a benign addiction of attention

It must be said in fairness that it’s more conventional to suggest that all the static of your hopes, aspirations, anxieties, obsessions, preoccupations, and so on appear right in front of your head when you are meditating and there are simple ways to transcend all of them because of the very act of doing the practice. It is surely true that meditation gives you the inner witness to overcome the headlines that insist on keeping you in that fragmented space.

Certainly, meditation as a separate discipline can definitely help this process of presence awakening, but it is not essential. Meditation is for sure a transforming engine on the level of mindfully knowing where you are at right now on Earth. The observation and cooling of the fires of desire, distraction and dualism. But it is not the only game in town.

Unless, of course, we can mean the kaya of constancy in your own time/space awareness, vision and grasp:

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constant meditation without meditating. We decide to commit to a transformative dynamic, then aim like a Zen arrow at effortless, deathless, loving awareness, non- panicking space: equanimous, serene presentiment of life as precious and as rich as the more isolated 20 minute meditative practice can be. As The Kinks once sang: ” “All Of The Day And All Of The Night.” Both sacred and profane – in fact anything that is happening in your life at ground zero Be Here Now’d presence, with minimal anxiety thought stressors.

We seem to have a karmic choice within an incarnation of fully living and loving and loved - or neurotic and depressed, when we don’t authentically know we are actually living. They are not polarities, simply continuum constituents of this stage of life manifestation – human beings with the crying-out, singularly ready, willing and able to love us with no conditions whatsoever – the forever inner winner G-d right there and we know it and grow with it and find freedom.

Our busy, electronically assisted lives so much of the time are foggy and evasive of the inner truth – distractions, emotions, a myriad of both indulgences and fears getting in the way of the clarity of high quality, present-based awareness. But consciousness has a way of persisting with its own pure actuality, if you at least are open to letting it have its way with you, without an emotional wall persistently enclosing the heart and mind in self- perpetuating distortions and distancing. Self- absorption can be radically lessened by everyday, everyway kindfulness- mindfulness, thereby letting you live to the unwobble.com 166 David Silver (cont’d)

max, rather than worry to the max. Enthusiastic basic altruism replaces hatred and self-hatred messages very quickly if asked. The wall can be dissolved by intention.

Some years ago, I was talking with the Pink Floyd founder and musical master, Roger Waters. It was for a special interview on two of his political songs, so we had no problem avoiding the usual questions – tour, recording, etc. Roger noticed there was a paper serviette on the table in front of him. He told me that very much back in the day of his life, he was in a London restaurant and found himself – almost automatically – drawing on a serviette a heart first, and then, without much conscious volition, sketching a brick wall around the little heart. The Wall. THE Wall! We all know what the end product of that was...all because of some sudden stasis of intrusive thoughts on Roger’s part, a tremendously crucial truth came to him.

Suddenly you catch a glimpse. You feel that the entire so- called external reality, supposedly outside what you consider to be your self (a weird commixture of flesh, blood, bones, brain-as-mind) is feeling different. Even looking different, like when you’re stoned on good herb. But much less evanescent, possibly a semi-permanent happening.

If you can just rein in that glimpse and keep it for a bit longer, then it all enters the inner self, inside of you, which is actually in truth in and out of the you that knows itself, there, here, everywhere.

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The more that you can appreciate this un-meditated on me-movie, the thing that is you walking around, talking, listening, gardening, fucking, acting obnoxiously, being empathetic, losing it, gaining it, flip-flopping, lusting about, thinking about a cupcake, thinking about gossip - that actuality, the more you find absolute presence with that feeling, the more calmly mindful of the perfection and uniqueness and gift of that glimpse or elongated glimpse feeling, the more it begins to happen of its own accord. This intensified perception-geared mindfulness mode can be cultivated. Every time you realize that it happened, the more you get that it is part of our natural make-up. It is an appreciation of the stunning miracle that is everyday existence, without either meditation or chemicals or herb.

So, this planet is exactly 92.96 million miles from the sun and doesn’t just suddenly change its massive mind and be, say, 92.86 million miles away. The blood courses swimmingly through the veins, pumps through the heart, the brilliant memory chip kicks in and remembers something from 1983, a butterfly lands on your keyboard, then flies away, the water comes through the faucet, water doesn’t break up into the wrong proportions of hydrogen and oxygen, the sky is blue, the field is green, the moment is crystal clear, the hour is restful, the day is still a day...we go on living lives that seem fragile sometimes but are actually astonishingly resilient, even with earthquakes, hurricanes, tsunamis, Donald Trump, wars and obvious carbonized climate change.

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Also, the amazingness of the “return.” That is the process of being distracted by god knows what and then the interior holy witness pulling you back in to the clear. You forget yourself. You remember your Self. You forget your goodness. You remember your unpolluted awareness. Gone completely. Returned completely.

It’s true that after an intense meditation, when you are cool with the fact that you are no longer meditating, this inner into outer atmosphere often is right there, feelable, knowable. But you are no longer meditating, yet the awareness is of something different, something realer, something intriguing, something ultimate, something of the nature of deathlessness. So it’s not as if meditation itself is not some manner of engine that drives mindfulness – it often does just that, both within the meditation itself and after it.

The clearer truth is that all of your life can be a mindful reminder, even if it’s just a flash, a tiny moment.

I just came back from a hike I’ve been doing for decades – same sand, same trees, same cottages, same breeds of bird, same inclines. Today, in my peripheral vision I noticed a trail I had never seen before. Never in thousands of walks. So I took it for the first time. It was very different – much more jungly, far more birds, bigger birds, a narrower path, a whole different experience. So I noticed it and then indulged it. Attention first, then absorption. A kind of mindfulness – not the kind that notices (sometimes to one’s absolute horror) that you are

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being judgmental, prejudiced, unfair, self-obsessed, downright selfish, unreasonable, revengeful hateful, even murderously hating, etc.)

Zen absolute presence is being in the best zone for that exact karmic moment in the whole scheme of things and phenomena and the omnipresence of love if we could only surrender to that fact and stop all the debating, inside the bubble of individual manifestation and outside of its perceived yet illusory encasement in solitary self – we stop all that meandering and come gently back to the precious jewel of the moment that you are living. The microbes of Maya that infect us are driven away by the carefully grown – remembered - all-the-time mindfulness.

It’s a cliché to bring up, but I will do it anyway, the old Zen thing that basically says if you can’t reach a Zen place while doing the dishes, you are still compartmentalizing your reaching for truth and clarity. In other words, you are under-selling the flow of life. It’s also true to emphasize that when there is intense suffering in your picture, it is far harder to be Zen-like and mindful. But, as every Master seems to have said over the years, you have to go through the suffering to get to the other side. And this is where mindfulness outside any meditation is crucial. I cannot speak for the tremendously horrifying suffering of innocents in Syria right now, or in the death camps of the Third Reich. That would be totally insensitive. But it remains a profound insight to see the utility of going straight to the “full mind” and open heart part of your consciousness to even be able to surrender to pain and suffering and then explore the way that ensues. unwobble.com 170 David Silver (cont’d)

Anger, revenge, hatred, - they are an individual ego’s relentless retardations. If your well rehearsed – practiced – mindfulness source is ready to rock and step in and sweetly wag its invisible finger and calmly dismiss the emotions – emotions being a combo of thought and energy according to Jung - then there can only be something better awaiting – right there - to replace these disturbing emotions. The key is practice – even when it’s not practicing via a repeated meditation session. The practice comes in the ability to find the dynamic that, at least for that moment in time, erases the negative or diluting thought/energies, thus allowing you to inhabit your time/space and even thereby go beyond those dimensions to pure peace and love.

David Silver

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David Silver’s #1 charting MGM/UA/Warners film, “The Compleat Beatles” is the critically acclaimed biopic movie about history’s most famous band. The term ‘rockumentary’ was first applied to this two-hour movie. His Warner Brothers’ feature film, “No Nukes” started the whole trend of music/activism feature documentaries. Twenty years later, David’s film about the teen band Hanson was the fastest selling home video of all time. David has been responsible for three Billboard #1 charting home videos.

In 2008/09, David worked as Academy Award-winning director Ang Lee’s historical consultant on his Universal/ Focus Features feature movie, “Taking Woodstock,” released in August 2009.

David Silver has produced, directed or written films about unwobble.com 172 David Silver (cont’d)

The Beatles, Bruce Springsteen, Bob Marley, Ringo Starr, Paul McCartney, Allen Ginsberg, Andy Warhol, Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, Joey Ramone, Mick Fleetwood, Frank Zappa, Mickey Hart, Muddy Waters, Roger Waters, Crosby, Stills and Nash, James Taylor, The Moody Blues, Jackson Browne, Count Basie, Tony Bennett, Elvis Costello, Deepak Chopra, Carly Simon, Tom Petty, Timothy Leary, Ram Dass, Liberace, Bonnie Raitt, Krishna Das, Spalding Gray and many others.

David started his unorthodox media career in the late sixties, hosting his own talk show out of PBS premier station WGBH-TV in Boston: the weekly nonconformist talk show, “What’s Happening Mr. Silver?” is considered to be the only authentic sixties counter-cultural TV series and way ahead of its time. Abbie Hoffman was David’s first guest, William F. Buckley Jr. his second…

At the same time, David taught literature at Tufts, Creative Writing at Brandeis, guest lectured at Harvard, B.U., Boston College plus did a forty college lecture tour.

In the seventies, he was also responsible for PBS’s very first originally produced magazine series “The Great American Dream Machine” an Emmy-winning weekly network show also at the vanguard of TV innovation.

As a Senior Vice President at both Warner Brothers and Polygram/Mercury Records, he created dozens of CD’s and movies, including pairing Allen Ginsberg with Paul McCartney, producing the DVD biography of Timothy Leary, “Beyond Life.” He also created unique spoken- word CD’s for a New Yorker magazine/Polygram joint unwobble.com 173 David Silver (cont’d)

project with readings by Frances McDormand, Viggo Mortensen and Gabriel Byrne. In 2006, he worked extensively with Roger Waters (Pink Floyd) creating imagery for Waters’ opera “Ca Ira.”

From 2007 to 2015, he produced films for the Love, Serve, Remember Foundation and founded the Mindrolling podcast and the MPN network.

David is currently finishing his memoir and preparing a new documentary.

unwobble.com 174 Biet Simkin Biet(cont’d) Simkin

At home working on my book. I am passed the wanting to throw up phase so that's great! For anyone out there who wants to pursue their dreams. It is good to know about the phases that one must go through to get to state of completion. If you know these phases then it will be easier to deal with when you are in pursuit of your vision. To loosely describe it, it looks like this. 1. Inception 2. Enthusiasm 3. Some Action 4. Moderate difficulty (the throwing up phase) 5. Foundation / Nectar, a sweet period of accomplishment and arrival. 6. Impossible Difficulty, the confrontation of external circumstances or internal demons whose whole aim is to stop completion. 7. Completion/ Metamorphosis, the state of completion which consequently leads to rebirth. 8 is a new beginning! A return to Inception/ Enthusiasm. What stage are you in in the pursuit of your total vision? Is knowing what's next and what's possible a motivator to keep going? Keep in mind no master of anything stopped in the middle, period. What's it gonna take to move passed the throwing up phase?

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Biet Simkin is a Meditation Guru and Artist. She is the founder of Center of the Cyclone, an immersive meditation experience that weaves music, art, meditation, philosophy and fashion into explosive events around the globe. Her work can be found at: bietsimkin.com Instagram: @guidedbybiet Facebook: Center for the Cyclone

unwobble.com 176 Lama LamaSurya Das (cont’d) Surya Das

Remembering To Remember Or Tibetan Mindfulness Training & The Practice of Presencing

Decades ago, before the influx of trendy mindfulness, Munindra-ji (Joseph Goldstein’s learned and realized teacher), was my Bengali Indian teacher in Bodh Gaya. Munindra always used to say that mindfulness is the essential heart of the Dharma. It is a simple solution to our confusion and restlessness, a panacean spiritual medicine: easily applicable and good for use in every situation. While nonsectarian, it is still extraordinary potent in producing insight, self-knowledge, wisdom and loving kindness. Our dear white clad, peripatetic Dharma teacher made this simple for us. It was accessible, demystified, practical and doable. It was living in an Old World country veritably teeming with a myriad gods and goddesses, Brahmins rituals and other forms of worship, with infinite varieties of spiritual teachings, paths, gurus, philosophies and practices.

Anagarika Munindra himself was an excellent role model. He walked the talk: peaceful, kind and generous, friendly, patient and harmonious in all situations. He was easygoing yet rigorous in his own studies and practice,

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disciplined and monkish. For us, even eating in his simple room at the Gandhi Ashram, shopping in the market bazaar with him, or walking around the Bodhi Tree where the Buddha himself sat and realized enlightenment was an opportunity to learn and a co-meditation on interbeing and integrating the liberating Dharma into daily life. We chelas (disciples) couldn’t tell if he was explicitly meditating or simply habitually mindful. Such was the seamless integration of his inner spiritual practice and his daily life and activities. It was a great lesson and inspiration to us, which I have never forgotten. I came to think of his integrated way of being on the practice-path as “Being there while getting there, every single step of the way.” This has helped me a great deal over the years. I recall him once saying, “I practice mindfulness so I can see the little purple flowers that are growing along the roadside.” To put it simply, mindfulness is the opposite of heedlessness. It implies remembering to be aware of what we’re doing while we’re actually doing it. It’s the secret to living in the here and now on a spiritual level.

A recent scientific study at Harvard found that people spend half their waking hours thinking about something other than what they’re actually doing. This mind- wandering makes them unhappy. Mindful awareness is a lucid attention to the present moment. My image of this ancient yet timeless practice is not just people sitting with eyes closed and legs crossed on the floor, though mindful meditation has certainly taken on that yogic form in the West today. I see mindful awareness in action more like the story of people carefully crossing a frozen stream in spring, paying close attention to each step before

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moving forward onto each foot. This is not unlike how we do formal walking meditation, whether alone or in a group; slowly, steadily, one step at a time. Repeatedly, lifting one foot at a time, moving it forward, placing/ putting it down, then shifting our weight onto it, before repeating the process again with the other foot. Simply relaxing, breathing calmly, and even slightly smiling. Practice is perfect, buoyant, even joyous; we just do it!

Breathe, relax and smile is an excellent way to try practicing this simple yet significant mindfulness practice, even right now, while reading this. The following is an instant, one-minute meditation. One can do this anywhere.

Breathe, relax and smile.

Breathe, relax, center, focus and smile. (It ain’t so hard.)

Try it--

Again, breathe, relax and smile.

Children too can easily learn to develop these effective mindfulness skills in what I call “meditation games.” For example, practicing walking on a straight line on a tennis court, or rug edge, or along a beach or lawn; or by playing together at keeping a beach ball up in the air for a time while maintaining focused attention on the joint task of keeping the ball in the air. This is applied

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mindfulness practice in action, and furthers concentration and attention span.

I myself have had the good fortune to be able to spend years in Asia with many of the enlightened masters of the last four decades. I know now that I’ll never be like them; nor should I be. I will be like myself and align with my true self. The path is not just to follow, in an overly-literal and unimaginative way, the exact footsteps of someone else wearing the same clothes, having the same hair style and eating habits, or using the same lingo. Following in their footsteps means to seek what they sought, which is authenticity and genuineness, and actualizing one’s own Buddha nature, buddhaness, or innate divinity.

Naturalness, genuineness, straightforwardness and spontaneity are integral principles of awakened meditation. Wherever we find ourselves in life, we naturally and genuinely have an opportunity to attune with the true path from which one never strays. In other words, you may feel far from the Tao and out of touch with the flow, but it always flows right through you.

During my initial private meeting with the Venerable Kalu Rinpoche, I asked him about the main points of meditation. He asked what kind of meditation I was doing, and I told him “mindfulness of breathing”. “What will you concentrate on when you stop breathing?” he asked. That was a real eye-opener. Suddenly I realized that I might have to broaden the scope of my understanding of Buddhist practice. In time, I came to

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discover that it included a great deal more than any one meditation technique and also that the many forms of Buddhist meditation shared fundamental elements.

I myself discern my students in six kinds of mindfulness, when developing deepening meditation practice and understanding for my students. This can help them guide and modulate their own ongoing experience in actual daily practice.

Six Kinds of Mindfulness

• Natural mindfulness (basic intrinsic faculty of attention, interest, concentration and alert presence of mind)

• Cultivated/generated mindfulness (sub kinds: directed or directionless; aka with object/ characteristics and without), focused

• Intermittent mindfulness

• Established, stabilized mindfulness (where mind/ attention rests on an object without much effort in maintaining that continued focus)

• Total continuous mindfulness, choice less panoramic open awareness

• Innate, Dharmakaya mindfulness (totality; unity vision; cosmic awareness, Oneness)

"Without mindfulness, we live like the dead. And every time mindfulness is born, we are born again into the Pure unwobble.com 181 Lama Surya Das (cont’d)

Land or country of the Buddha, on Buddha's earth, into the Kingdom of God.” - Thich Nhat Hanh, from "True Love: A Practice for Awakening the Heart".

Moment to moment present awareness is the heart of it all. Tibetan master yogi Milarepa said, long ago, “The ultimate view is to observe one’s mind, steadfastly and with determination.” At first it may seem hard. Learn how to practice mindful meditation techniques, and then try to carry awakeful awareness with you wherever you go. The practice naturally carries you and becomes more effortless. This is the joy of natural meditation and continuous mindfulness.

Awakening oneself awakens the whole world. When my perception becomes clearer, everything becomes clearer. Transforming ourselves transforms all, on some level or another. It certainly transforms all our relationships. Gradually, through the interwoven circles of our profound interconnectedness and interdependence it helps bring us all there, to where we believe we really are and should be. The Pure Land, nirvana, the Kingdom of God,as we perceive it, is always accessible; and yet, are we genuinely willing, ready and available? Thich Nhat Hanh says Buddha taught that he who sees interbeing, sees the Buddha. Thus relational mindfulness is called for in this. The best of all possible worlds. One cannot do it alone. We need each other to become enlightened, as the Dalai Lama says.

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When Buddha radically stated, over twenty-five hundred years ago, that anyone could become as enlightened as he did, male or female, young or old, literate or illiterate, of any race or color, Buddhist or otherwise-- by practicing and progressing on such a path, he actually meant it. Many have reaped these blessed results. This is the premise and promise of Buddha Dharma, of the wisdom of meditation.

The liberating Dharma is a gift we can give ourselves and the world. The gift of radiant spirit which expresses itself as transformative spirituality: good in the beginning, the middle and the end. Worldly life seems easy in the beginning, but gets harder in the end. Spiritual life might seem harder at first, but it just gets better and better, and helps deliver us to the best possible end.

Awakening is simply a matter of spiritual evolution. Practice can be perfect. What we seek, we are. As the Buddha said, “Help yourself.”

My root guru, the late Sixteenth Karmapa, said, “If you have one hundred percent dedication and confidence in the teachings, then every living situation can be part of spiritual practice. You can be living the practice instead of just doing it.”

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Lama Surya Das is one of the foremost Western Buddhist meditation teachers and scholars, the Dalai Lama affectionately calls him “the American Lama”. Coupled with twenty years living in India and the Himalayas, Lama Surya has spent over forty five years studying Zen, Vipassana (mindfulness), Yoga, and Tibetan Buddhism with many of the great old masters of Asia, including some of the Dalai Lama’s own senior teachers. He is an authorized lama in the Tibetan Buddhist order, a leading spokesperson for Buddhism and contemporary spirituality, a translator, poet, meditation master, cartoonist and spiritual activist. He has long been active in refugee causes, having lived in Tibetan refugee camps in India and Nepal.

Lama Surya Das is the author of fourteen books and several translations, notably the international bestselling unwobble.com 184 Lama Surya Das (cont’d)

Awakening trilogy: Awakening the Buddha Within: Tibetan Wisdom for the Western World; Awakening to the Sacred: Building A Spiritual Life from Scratch; and Awakening the Buddhist Heart: Integrating Love, Meaning and Connection into Every Part of Your Life. His latest book is Make Me One with Everything: Buddhist Meditations to Awaken from the Illusion of Separation. In 1991 he established the Dzogchen Centers and Dzogchen Retreats, and in 1993, with the Dalai Lama, he founded the Western Buddhist Teachers Network and regularly organizes its International Buddhist Teachers’ Conferences.

Today Lama Surya Das teaches and lectures around the world, conducting dozens of meditation retreats and workshops each year. He is a regular contributor at The Huffington Post and Elephant Journal, as well as writing his own blog Ask The Lama, and hosts a pod cast called Awakening Now on the Be Here Now Network. With the creation of his Lamas’ Lineage & Legacy Preservation project, in association with the Tibetan Buddhist Resource Center founded by pre-eminent Tibetologist Dr. E. Gene Smith, Lama Surya Das continues focusing his attention towards mentoring and eldering younger generations. Lama Surya can be followed on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. For more information on Surya, his lecture and retreat schedule, etc., go to surya.org.

Lama Surya Das resides near a tree-lined pond and bird sanctuary in Lexington, Massachusetts.

unwobble.com 185 Steve Taylor (cont’d) Steve Taylor

The Power of Acceptance: How an Attitude of Acceptance Can Transform your Life

One morning in August 2000, I was sitting in my flat in Singapore, meditating, enjoying a state of inner calm. But suddenly, for no apparent reason, a loud, high- pitched ringing noise started up in my ear. It was as if someone had pressed a button inside my head. Everyone gets ringing in their ears sometimes, of course, so at first I wasn’t so concerned. But this ringing didn’t go away. And it seemed to get worse – after a few days, it got louder, and developed an awful screeching overtone. I found it impossible to meditate, and difficult to sleep. In fact, I was disturbed by the noise almost all the time. It was so loud that I was always conscious of it, unless there was very loud background noise.

I gradually realised that the noise wasn’t going to leave me. I realised that I had tinnitus. Perhaps it was the result of playing loud music in rock bands for several years when I was younger, or perhaps it was related to an episode of bronchitis I’d had shortly before. The worst thing was that I could never escape the noise – it was

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always with me, 24 hours a day. I used to love silence, to just sit or lie down and listen to the stillness, so it was depressing to think that for me silence was gone forever. I went to see a specialist, who told me that I was partially deaf in my ear due to the tinnitus, and that there was no chance of a cure – it was something I’d just have to get used to.

I tried to mask the noise – the specialist gave me a ‘white noise’ generating device to put in my ear, and at night I went to sleep with the radio tuned between stations. But that wasn’t fair on my wife – the noise of the radio made it difficult for her to sleep. Eventually I said to myself, ‘This is ridiculous – the noise isn’t going to go away, so I’ll have to try to accept it.’

One night I decided to face up to the noise, and not switch the radio on. And to my surprise, it wasn’t so difficult. Imagine there's a person who you think of as an enemy and are afraid to face - but once you do face them, you find that they're not so objectionable after all. I managed to get to sleep quite easily, and the next night it was even easier. I found that I was less affected by the noise during the day as well. I even found I could meditate without background noise.

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I still hear the tinnitus now – it's screeching in my ear as I write this, but it doesn't affect me. It's just there, in a neutral, non-bothering way.

The Alchemy of Acceptance

To me, this experience illustrates the amazing power of acceptance. An attitude of acceptance can neutralize unpleasant and irritating experiences – and even sometimes transform them into pleasant ones. I realised that the tinnitus was affecting me so negatively because I was resisting it. As soon as I stopped resisting, it stopped affecting me.

I discovered a similar phenomenon when I wrote my book Out of the Darkness, which examines how difficult and traumatic events can sometimes have a positive transformational effect. Some of the people featured in the book underwent transformation after being diagnosed with cancer, bereavement, losing everything through alcoholism, becoming disabled, suffering from severe depression, and so on. They found a new spiritual strength inside themselves, felt a new sense of connection to the world and to other people, a new sense of purpose and meaning.

I was curious about what distinguished these people from others – by far the majority – who don’t experience the

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transformational effects of turmoil and trauma. I found that the essential factor was acceptance. All of the people who underwent ‘transformation through suffering’ – as I called it – experienced a ‘moment of acceptance,’ when they gave up resisting their predicament. They ‘let go’, or surrendered to their state. In some cases, they felt they had no choice but to accept their state because they had nothing left to cling to or to hope for. This didn’t mean that they stopped trying to get better, or to rebuild their lives. It just meant that they faced up to the full reality of their state, and stopped trying to resist it in a rigid, adversarial way.

Once I became aware of the power of acceptance – following my experience with tinnitus – I began to use it in other situations. I used it once when I was ill, lying in bed feeling miserable. I made a mental effort to shift my attitude from resistance to acceptance. I replaced thoughts like ‘I can’t afford to be ill, I’ve got deadlines to meet!’ with more positive thoughts such as ‘There’s nothing wrong with this situation – I’m lying in a warm and comfortable bed, relaxing. Everything that needs to be done can wait.’ Immediately my mental agitation and frustration began to fade away.

Everyday Acceptance

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neutralized – or even made pleasant – by the alchemical power of acceptance. Think of household chores, for example. Are they innately boring activities, or is your antipathy towards them due to a ‘resistant’ mental attitude? Think about how you feel when you’re stuck in a long queue of cars at the traffic lights. What is the source of your frustration? You’re just sitting in the front seat of your car; you could be listening to some pleasant music or staring curiously at the other people in their cars, or at the streets, buildings or the sky. It’s only your mental resistance to the situation – your impatience and eagerness to reach your destination – which makes it unpleasant. Our lives are full of neutral situations which are made pleasant or unpleasant by our mental attitude and our thoughts.

At the same time, it’s important to be aware that there are some things we should never accept – abuse, oppression, situations or role to which we’re innately unsuited, and so forth. It’s essential to differentiate the situations which we should try to accept from those which we should try to change. For example, if you’re being bullied by your manager at work, it would be wrong to accept the situation – you should try to change it, by taking action against the manager, or by getting a new job. If you’re living in area of high crime and violence, acceptance may help to some degree, but it’s probably still advisable to move out, if you can. There are some occasions when it’s appropriate to change our mental

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attitude, and other occasions when it’s more appropriate to change our life-situation.

This has never been put better than in the ‘Serenity Prayer’, created by the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, and later adopted by Alcoholics’ Anonymous: ‘God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference.’

Eventually, I formulated a four stage process of acceptance, based on these experiences. This is a simple method you can use in any situation where you feel negativity, and are aware of an attitude of resistance. It works very well with physical problems, and other seemingly unpleasant situations which produce mental discomfort. I go through the stages here, with a simple example.

Stage 1: Become aware of your negative feelings and the thoughts which accompany them. Try to verbalise these - if the situation allows it, write them down. For example, let’s say you’re driving and stuck in heavy traffic. You might verbalise the feelings “impatience, boredom, anxiety.” You might verbalise the thoughts, “I could be here forever! I’m going to be so late! There are so many places I’d rather be than here!”

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Stage 2: Give your attention to the reality of your situation. Be mindful of your feelings and your surroundings. For example, in the traffic jam, be aware of the sensation of your hands as they hold the steering wheel, and your feet on the pedals. Look around you, at the other drivers and cars. Give your attention to the sky, to the buildings and trees at the side of the road.

Stage 3: Replace your negative thoughts with conscious positive thoughts. Ask yourself “What’s really wrong with this situation?” For example, in the traffic jam, you might have the conscious thoughts: “What’s the problem? I’m sitting down. There are lots of interesting things to look at. It’s a beautiful day, and I’m listening to music on the car stereo. What does it matter if I’m late?”

Stage 4: If there is any resistance left, let go of it. Don’t mentally push the situation away, welcome it. Embrace the situation.

If you do this, you’ll experience the alchemical power of acceptance, how it can transfer negative moods into positive—or at least neutral—ones. You’ll become powerfully aware that it’s not so much the events or situations in our lives that determine our mood, but our attitude towards them. When we cease to resist the present, and embrace our experience, the present embraces us too, and we become one with it.

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Steve Taylor PhD is a senior lecturer in psychology at Leeds Beckett University, and the author of The Calm Center: Reflections and Meditation for Spiritual Awakening, published as an Eckhart Tolle Edition. For the last five years, he has appeared in Mind, Body, Spirit magazine’s list of ‘the world’s 100 most spiritually influential people.’ stevenmtaylor.com

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If thinking about meditation were a spiritual practice, then by now I would be able to walk through walls and bring dead birds back to life. I would have that inexplicable inner light that radiates from saints and babies. I would have regular visitations from angels and my underarms would smell like roses.

I hardly ever meditate. I’m looking at my puja table right now. The many spiritual souvenirs that I have acquired over the years sit there like dusty arrowheads in a poorly attended museum. There is a picture of Neem Karoli Baba, a framed picture of Obama that used to sit on Ram Dass’ altar, a painted picture of Terence McKenna, some lavender from my backyard placed in a little glass jar, various little figurines, a plastic Jesus, a sculpture of mushrooms, some mushrooms. They are all sitting there waiting for me to spend just a few moments being quiet in front of them. Watching my thoughts. Dissolving into everythingness. But I won’t meditate anytime soon. Not today. Not tomorrow. And probably not this month.

But eventually I will meditate. It might happen after I finish another Chögyam Trungpa book or attend another Ram Dass retreat. It might happen after I get into a fight with my girlfriend and need to cool down. It might

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randomly happen in the middle of the day after I’ve eaten too much edible marijuana and want to stop thinking about how Bush definitely did September 11th. One thing for certain though is it will happen.

And when it does I will follow my breath, and zoom out from my thoughts, and zoom out from zooming out. And if I am lucky in that moment I will remember just how incredible the stillness is. My puja table will not care that I have been away. My picture of Neem Karoli Baba will look at me with the exact same beaming sort of love. And when I get up my day will be a little better. I will not be able to walk through walls or to bring dead birds back to life but something will be different. There will be a slight reduction in the gravitational field that holds me to the rocky surface of my identity and that’s its own sort of miracle.

And that’s what a spiritual practice gives you. It’s like a little air bubble. A place you can go when you are choking on the endless bowls of self-destructive thought patterns your mind likes to shove down your throat. It’s a little hole in the icy permafrost that tends to accrue on the human heart. Just knowing it’s there for you is a powerful thing.

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If you’re like me then you’re someone who secretly enjoys human drama. If you want to use a hideous new age term generally dished out as a passive-aggressive insult at crystal gatherings, then you could say that I’m a “new soul.” I get off on the horror. I laugh with Nancy Grace. Forensic Files relaxes me.

But just knowing that there is a ladder I can use to partially climb out of the sticky tar pit of egoism and self- delusion in which I so enjoy rolling around is it’s own form of bliss.

So rather than end this with some pithy summation of whatever I just rambled about, I’m going to stand up and traverse the six feet that separate me from my meditation altar. Won’t you join me?

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Duncan Trussell is the host of the Duncan Trussell Family Hour podcast and a comedian.

unwobble.com 197 Lama Tsomo (cont’d) Lama Tsomo

The Ocean of Awareness

Simply put, we don’t like suffering. In our never-ending quest to always be happy and never feel pain, we try all sorts of solutions when things go wrong. We overeat or drink too much. We get angry and yell at people when technology doesn’t work or traffic holds us up. If we’re late for an appointment we usually find ways to blame others for “making us late” rather than looking at ourselves in the mirror. If we don’t get the credit at work that we feel we deserve we might blame our short- sighted boss or needy colleagues rather than ask tough questions of ourselves.

Yet blaming events or other people actually takes our power away. Once we take honest responsibility for our part in the story, we have the power to change our lives for the better. Reactivity (yelling, making insensitive remarks, retreating into our room) is what we know and what we have experienced. Rather than repeating those behaviors, we can learn how to take a pause, a moment to really feel and see what’s going on. That’s when these practices come into play. Through meditation and self- reflection—on and off of the cushion—we clean off the windshield and see reality more clearly. And with that, shifts begin to occur:

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• We take a moment before ordering another drink at the bar because we remember that it just might give us a hangover the next day. And on a deeper level, we see we’re escaping into that alcohol haze. Instead, we might become interested in asking a question, as Siddhartha did: “What’s really going on? What am I shying away from? How might I actually make it better, instead?” And we notice the result of taking a pause.

• We don’t get frustrated at the cashier when her register isn’t working because we know it’s not her fault. We commiserate with her and she smiles. We both feel a bit better. And we notice the difference— that instead of acting on our anger, we were able to calm ourselves.

• We realize we haven’t felt happy at work in over a month and do some reflecting on our career path. We notice how it feels to consider a new possibility instead of numbing ourselves to an uncomfortable situation.

So now that we’re taking time to meditate every day and build those mindfulness muscles in a consistent way, let’s bring some pauses into our daily life and our interactions with others. These exercises can help us grow, feel connected to each other, and better sense the “great ocean” of reality that we’re all a part of. Instead of reacting, we go inward and deepen our contact with our own experience until we pass through a certain threshold and find a calm, less reactive response.

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Lama Tsomo is a Tibetan Buddhist lama and author of Why Is the Dalai Lama Always Smiling? Born into a Midwestern Jewish household, she followed a path of spiritual inquiry that ultimately led to her ordination as one of the few American female lamas teaching Tibetan Buddhism. Lama Tsomo is co-founder of the Namchak Foundation and Namchak Retreat Ranch. Namchak is dedicated to sharing one of the oldest forms of Tibetan Buddhist practice and making the teachings newly accessible to Westerners.

Lama Tsomo and the Namchak community recently released an eight-week eCourse serving as an introduction to Tibetan Buddhist practice. The course combines how-to videos, readings, and an interactive journal and it offers students an introduction to meditation, basic Buddhist teachings, and self-reflective unwobble.com 200 Lama Tsomo (cont’d)

exercises designed to help support students coming together in communities of practice. The eCourse is designed for beginners who are interested in meditation and is appropriate to people of all religious backgrounds, those who are spiritual but not religious, or those who are simply curious and want to check out the practices. The eCourse is FREE for a limited time. namchak.org

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Curating Your World

We are all curators of our own worlds. Every decision we make has a positive or negative effect on our lives. It is like Newton’s third law (1). “For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.” We should look at all aspects of life this way. The decisions we make are pieces in the vast and complex puzzle of our existence on this planet. It is all part of the human condition.

Practices of consciousness and mindfulness have become increasingly more relevant to me the older I become. In my early adolescence, my approach to life was very instinctual without being mindful of the decisions I would make. Because of this I took the path of more resistance. I found myself encountering areas of dissatisfaction and emptiness within myself. I would fall and get back up, then repeat again. It’s important to embrace that sense of childlike fearlessness within ourselves, but with that we need to ensure discipline and meaning within our actions. Fearlessness without consciousness is like a scientist continuing to search for a solution without taking into account his past errors.

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Growing up as an only child, I was given the freedom to curate my existence at a very young age. I interacted with environments of my choosing. Whether that be within the hobbies I would take on, such as skateboarding, photography, playing guitar and drums, escaping reality through video games… etc. Although I was unconscious about this at the time, these actions helped me understand how to interact with the world. The more conscious we are about what we let into our lives, the happier we can be with the results. I strive to create authentically, independently, and happily. I want to create a world that I’m happy with. I wake up everyday enjoying the minutia of life.

Curating your life may seem like a drastic undertaking, but it all starts from the simplest tasks. Ask yourself a few questions. Are you happy with the way your life currently is? Are you making decisions in the present that will lead you to the eventual person you want to be? Are you including people in your life that add value to you and in turn, are you adding value to their lives? Be realistic with the questions you ask yourself. Understand that many have encountered challenging areas in their lives. You’re not the only one. Once you put this into perspective, everything seems so much more relatable and achievable.

I prefer to look at the negative aspects of my life as areas of improvement. Our perspective shapes the way we

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view the world. We can’t deem the negative areas of our life to be unsolvable. This is where mindfulness can come into play. You can examine an area of your life similar to how a mathematician looks at an equation. Once you can internalize this process, hopelessness will begin to fade away. You can feel empowered knowing that you can change any aspect of your life with a bit of consciousness, empathy, gratitude, and understanding.

To constantly reinforce mindfulness into my daily routine, I like to practice being present. Whatever it is you’re doing, try to eliminate any sort of distractions. Multitasking, although it seems like the right way to approach completing tasks, actually is a deterrent. Stanford University conducted a study and compared a group of people who had a tendency to multitask to another group who preferred completing tasks singularly. They found that those who multitask frequently were actually less productive (2). It was also harder for them to filter out irrelevant information and they were slower at switching between tasks. Part of staying present is to enjoy the moment and the process. Be intentional about the moment that currently lies in front of you. Train yourself to appreciate the mundane aspects of life. If we appreciate the lesser areas of our existence then we can fully appreciate life.

Practicing vulnerability and empathy helps us comprehend the complexity of our world. When we are

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vulnerable we allow ourselves the freedom to express thoughts freely, empathize with others, and create ungrudgingly. We need to give ourselves the time to dig deep and challenge our thoughts. Be honest with yourself. Look yourself in the mirror and speak from a place of honesty, relinquishing fear and doubt. Through these practices you will begin to understand that consciousness and mindfulness are like muscles you need to exercise. The understanding of this physicality helps us to continue to nurture and grow these muscles. We can structure our thoughts around this. The exterior and interior of our bodies become one. In this way it behooves us to practice consciousness and mindfulness when creating the world we want to embody.

[1] http://www.physicsclassroom.com/class/newtlaws/Lesson-4/Newton-s- Third-Law

[2] http://news.stanford.edu/2009/08/24/multitask-research- study-082409/

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"I was a 20 y/o college student when I started exploring photography. At the time, I didn’t realize how much image making would influence me. Like most of my peers, I didn’t fully understand or question my motives for pursuing something — I just did it. I was curious and it felt right.

Diving deeper, I started to question what photography meant to me and understand its impact. Eventually, I found passion in creating a narrative for myself and my work: I found an outlet and poured my heart and soul into the artistry, and it transformed my perspective. This story became my life force, my pulse, and a part of my identity.

My journey as an artist will always be an interesting one. I continue to question what makes up my artistic voice and challenge an aesthetic that I’ve always been drawn to: transposing my surreal understanding of what is beautiful, exploring beauty out of context, and daring to create.”

unwobble.com 206 Eric Zimmer (cont’d) Eric Zimmer

One of the things that is a real blocker to mindfulness is rumination. Sometimes if we are buried deep in rumination basic mindfulness is nearly impossible. We try to be present but our brain keeps sucking us in.

Rumination is thinking over and over and over about what's bothering us and it's possible causes, it's consequences, as opposed to thinking about solutions. This is generally considered different than self reflection because self reflection tends to offer us new insights whereas rumination is just playing the same negative thoughts over and over and over again. There's an old Irish proverb I like that says, ‘You will never plow a field by turning it over in your mind’.

The challenge with rumination is that it can feel like we're doing something about the issue or the problem by continuing to think about it. However rumination is very destructive and is strongly linked to deep depression and anxiety. A recent U.K. study, revealed that rumination is the biggest predictor of the most common mental health problems. The other problem with this is the more that we ruminate the more likely we are to continue to ruminate. Mindfulness can be next to impossible when we are deep in rumination.

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So when basic mindfulness is not enough to lift us out of rumination the best approach is some sort of positive concentration game.

My very favorite one is called ‘Alphabet Gratitude’ The way to do this is to start with the letter A and try and think of something that you are grateful for that starts with the letter A. Then once you have thought of something for letter A you move on to the letter B. And so on through the alphabet. Each time we wander back into rumination we go back to the letter we are on.

The trick to this is by giving our brain a game we are able to engage the brain enough and pull it out of rumination. It’s interesting enough to pull the brain out of the trap it is in.

Once we have done this for a while and we emerge from deep rumination, we can go back to more basic mindfulness techniques.

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Eric Zimmer is the host of The One You Feed podcast. The show features conversations about creating a life worth living and was named a Best of 2014 Podcast by iTunes and one of the best health podcasts of all time by The Huffington Post. He has been involved in many successful startup companies in the software and clean energy industries. He founded Tipping Point Renewable Energy in 2008.

In addition to the podcast he is currently doing e- commerce consulting for Fortune 500 companies along with coaching for select clients. He is a frequent public speaker on topics related to entrepreneurship, clean energy and creating a life worth living.

At the age of 24 Eric was homeless and addicted to heroin In the years since he has found a way to recover from addiction and build a life worth living. oneyoufeed.net unwobble.com 209 Thank you for reading.

Warm regards, Brandon Park

If you are borrowing the book from a friend and would like to learn more please visit unwobble.com.

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