Enjoy this short teaching from poet, philosopher, and bestselling author Mark Nepo, on the journey of inner courage. No matter where we are in our lives, we all have an edge that we’re being asked to grow at and explore. In order to make genuine contact with life, we must learn to listening with our hearts and to somehow stay open to whatever life presents.
In this video, Mark shares his understanding of courage along with a simple practice for opening to its presence in our daily lives.
Tami Simon speaks with Matthieu Ricard, an author and photographer who earned a PhD in cell genetics. He is also a Buddhist monk who has served as the Dalai Lama’s French interpreter since 1989. Matthieu has written several books, including The Monk and the Philosopher, The Quantum and the Lotus, as well as The Art of Meditation. With Sounds True, he has released an audio learning program based on his book Happiness. Matthieu speaks about the skill of happiness, as well as the conditions for happiness. He also discusses the physical and psychological effects of meditation, along with the ways to track the progress you make in your spiritual practice. (37 minutes)
Tami Simon speaks with Dennis Lewis, an author, teacher, and practitioner of natural breathing, qigong, and meditation. After leaving the corporate world, Dennis studied a number of healing arts traditions, including Taosim, Advaita, and the Gurdjieff work. He is author of the books The Tao of Natural Breathing and Free Your Breath, Free Your Life, and with Sounds True he has produced the audio program Natural Breathing: Teachings and Exercises for Health and Self-Transformation. In this episode, Tami speaks with Dennis about the relationship between our emotions and our breathing, how we can let go into the unknown as we exhale, breathing as a metaphor for living, and what it might mean to “breathe space into space.” (56 minutes)
Robert Thurman is a prolific author and professor at Columbia University, where he holds the first endowed chair in Indo-Tibetan Buddhist Studies. A close friend of the Dalai Lama, Robert is a cofounder of Tibet House in New York City, a nonprofit organization dedicated to preserving the fragmented culture of Tibet. In this rollicking installment of Insights at the Edge, Robert and Tami Simon discuss how bliss is a fundamental component of our being, as well as how we can tap into that bliss in our everyday lives. They speak on how people can choose a career that keeps them close to their spiritual tradition and some of the pitfalls involved with becoming a full-time spiritual teacher. Finally, Robert and Tami talk about what exactly continues after reincarnation, and Robert clarifies some of the Dalai Lama’s recent comments about his next life. (90 minutes)
Dr. Friedemann Schaub is a physician best known for his breakthrough programs for the treatment of fear and anxiety disorders, which combine his medical expertise with Neuro-Linguistic Programming, Time Line Therapy™, and clinical hypnotherapy. He is the author of the Sounds True book The Fear and Anxiety Solution. In this second half of their two-part conversation on Insights at the Edge, Tami Simon and Friedemann discuss cellular memory, our “blueprint for wholeness,” and how to root ourselves in our essence instead of continual, low-level anxiety. They also talk about the inner protector at the root of our negative self-talk and a “Parts Reintegration Process” for working with this sometimes fractious guardian.
(62 minutes)
Pain is a normal part of human life. And pain hurts. Although pain feels like a threat, pain is not attacking us. Pain is designed to help us survive. Pain and pleasure are signals. Pain is a signal that something is out of balance in your emotional, mental, spiritual, or physical life and that something needs attention. It is meant to be unpleasant, for a good reason: to bring our attention to a potentially dangerous situation until the issue is treated. The sharp, unpleasant signal is designed that way to make sure we drop everything else and attend to the situation immediately. When pain continues unabated after our best healthy efforts to tend to it in a physical way, we look for ways of stopping it, reducing it, or escaping it in any way we can.
For example, if you’re walking barefoot, thoroughly engaged in a conversation with a friend, and you step on a piece of wood and get a splinter, the strong unpleasant pain signal is meant to get you to immediately stop all other interests and attend to the wound. If you had a sharp piece of wood in your foot and it didn’t cause pain, you might not bother to take it out, resulting in infection or worse. Once you take care of the immediate problem, or source, the nature of pain is to eventually go away. Pain by itself is not an entity or an enemy that has any motivation of hurting you. It is an important survival mechanism of our body—a communication tool.
By way of our senses, we have contact with experience in and outside of our body that tends to feel either pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral. We tend to like pleasant sensations, which leads to craving what we like and trying to get more pleasure, and we tend to dislike unpleasant sensations, which leads to rejecting what we don’t like. When that strong craving or rejection happens, there is a contraction of our greater sense of self into a specific identity of “craver” or “rejecter”: we configure our consciousness into a “me” that is a “thinker” or “manager” that has a strategy to get its goals and desires met, and believes that that strategy is real and right. Craving and rejection are a normal part of our physical survival, like craving food when we’re hungry, but they also become our primary source of suffering when they become our identity.
Rather than reacting to the pain, we must treat the underlying condition that is causing pain in order for it to subside. It is important to first check out the cause of the pain in every way possible so as not to ignore, overlook, or deny a potentially dangerous condition. In some types of chronic pain that we know the cause of, like arthritis or sciatica, the nerve signal system is alerting us of an issue, but there’s no splinter to be removed from our back or foot. If we’ve attended to all the medical and alternative diagnoses and treatments, and the pain still persists, we still have the opportunity to learn some approaches using our own consciousness to relate to pain differently. Effortless mindfulness is a wonderful approach that does not in any way attempt to replace or deny diagnosing the cause of pain and working to cure it through any and all means. I am simply sharing this practice as a suggestion of what can be done in conjunction with any medical treatment.
With effortless mindfulness, we can learn to become present with the unpleasant—an important skill that we often avoid learning until we experience inescapable pain. We may already have experienced, through effortless mindfulness, how chattering thoughts recede into background awareness or can be met by open-hearted awareness. The great news is that we can do this with pain signals as well! They can become like thoughts and go into the background of awake awareness. When the pain signals recede to the background or significantly lessen, we no longer have to suffer silently or try to escape the pain through behaviors of shutting down, numbing, addiction, or acting out. By changing how we relate to pain, we can find a doorway to a freedom that allows us to respond to pain from courage and intimacy. We can learn to be present with the unpleasant, remain sensitive without being defensive, and be responsive but not reactive. When the intelligence of awake awareness knows directly that there is no immediate danger, the pain signal can go into the background.
In this video below, join me as I guide you through this practice of using effortless mindfulness to help you be present and work with your pain for lasting relief.
Loch Kelly, MDiv, LCSW, is a leader in the field of meditation and psychotherapy. He is author of the award-winning Shift into Freedom and founder of the Open-Hearted Awareness Institute. Loch is an emerging voice in modernizing meditation, social engagement, and collaborating with neuroscientists. For more, visit lochkelly.org.
What Is Pain?
