By Leo Babauta
In this webinar, I shared ideas about how to transform your relationships and I answered some awesome questions.
I’ve broken this webinar recording into two parts:
- Part I – My Talk: Transforming the Relationship (See notes)
- Part II – Questions & Answers: I answered questions about maintaining equanimity, visualization, dealing with self-criticism, regulating emotions, and more!
Part I: Leo’s Talk (with notes)
You can download this video here, or download just the audio. Or watch below.
Here are the notes from my talk (video is below the notes):
By practicing being open-hearted and fully feeling our feelings and the present moment, we change how we relate to our lives.
Meditation – just noticing experience, inwardly & outwardly
The problem:
* We often reject our experience, not liking a situation or something about another person or ourselves.
* We can see when this happens when we’re mentally or outwardly complaining, when we feel resistance to doing something and procrastinate or run to distraction, when we’re angry or frustrated or hurt
* There is nothing wrong with feeling these emotions, but it’s good to become aware that it’s a sign that we’re rejecting something about our experience
* We can often reject those emotions as well — we don’t want to feel sad, lonely, angry, hurt, upset, depressed
* All of this adds up to a difficult relationship with our experience — imagine if we had a friend, but only wanted to be around them when they were being the way we wanted them to, and when they were hurt or going through a hard time, we turned away from them and wanted to do something else
* They would not feel like we had a good relationship with them, like they could trust our presence and friendship.
* This is the relationship we have with our moment-to-moment experience
Changing the relationship:
* When we start to practice mindfulness with whatever struggle we’re going through, we start to change this relationship
* We start to show ourselves that we’re willing to be with whatever comes up, no matter how uncomfortable
* We’re willing to stay
* We’re even going to practice being open, curious, gentle, friendly
* Maybe even find compassion and love for whatever we’re feeling
* It won’t feel good, especially not at first — it’s hard being with difficult emotions and situations
* But just like with a good friend, we’re not only going to be there in good times — we’ll stay with them even when things are hard. Especially when things are hard
* The goal is not to end the difficult feelings. It’s not to exit from the difficulty. It’s to transform our relationship
* In the end, we develop a good relationship with whatever we’re experiencing, and a trust that we can be with it, even be friendly and compassionate
* We start to develop a curiosity about our experience, not judging or thinking we know, but a radical not knowing, a radical curiosity to want to know more about whatever is in front of us
* We develop an open heartedness, dropping the barriers between ourselves and others, ourselves and life, exposing our raw tender heart to the world, courageously
Part II: Questions and Answers
You can download this video here, or download just the audio. Or watch below.
Questions answered in this video:
- Is this similar to practicing equanimity as during vipassana meditation?
- How could this open hearted ness be visualized? Do you have any analogies, ie the ocean refuses no river?
- Talk about self criticism, anger frustration with self
- The difficulty I experience is the need to regulate my emotions that come up when I practice feeling the experience fully. For example, she for example, if I concentrate on being hurt and what that is like, I want to cry, but often it is not quite appropriate for the place/time I’m in or I am afraid and not comfortable to be THAT open