Sit,Walk,Work (SW^2)
Live a Life Have An Awakening (Dharma Talk)
Ladies and gentlemen, may I have your attention, please? Information can inform you and maybe it can encourage you to take action. Or you can just drown in a sea of knowledge and never, ever change anything. If we start just at the body, right, we all get one, they're not all created equal, but where they do meet is in their resilience. Body bodies are remarkably resilient. If you're not careful, you might take the very first job you get and devote more than half of your life to doing it, to stumbling into it, to it being good enough, and good enough just becomes manageable, and manageable is good enough, then you're just in that cycle. As it goes back to that original thing, I was talking about a moment ago, right, if I am capable of training my mind, you mean to tell me all this negative thinking that I've been doing is something that I'm responsible for, but most of us won't even sit in a quiet room with ourselves, because we don't like what's happening between our ears, or maybe we're just simply afraid of it. Welcome to the Sit Walk Work podcast, a show about paying attention. I'm your host, Dominic, and in today's episode, we will be discussing the idea of having an awakening, getting an insight, having an epiphany. There's lots of language you can say to kind of encapsulate this phrase of what it means to have an awakening, and there's a subtle implication there that to have an awakening means you must be asleep in the first place, maybe just taking something for granted or moving through this life without a purpose really directing you towards your fullest potential. Inevitably, we cross this bridge of having an awakening, and it can range anywhere from realizing our capacity to hold and meet all of life, or on the flip side of that, noticing that you lived a life that mattered to others, but really didn't matter to you, and it can be dangerous, especially when we have that type of awakening, to realize that we've put off our greatest desires at once in the hope that it would do something for someone else. And here's the thing, this episode isn't going to help you to answer which version of an awakening is true to your life and your experience, but really, we're going to kind of get into the mechanics of having an awakening, the conditions required, the mindsets, and really the things that you can control. So if you've been asleep in your life, I can't answer what you've been asleep to. I mean, it might be a combination of things, your work, your relationships, your mental and physical health, not any one exclusive thing, it could be all of these simultaneously, or it could add and flow. But I do know that with some clarity and objectivity, when you realize that you've been asleep, you can then start to change, you can start to grow, you can wake up to the opportunity you have every day, and you can start to build a foundation for growth. And some of the ways that you can build that foundation are through the body, through your craft, and through your mind. When we look at the word foundation, Webster's dictionary says that it's a basis, a tenant or principal or axiom upon which something stands or is supported, an underlining base of support. And so you need to have a foundation in order to have an awakening. Because if you're not on solid ground, how can you focus on something as subtle as having any type of awakening? You know, when you don't have your basic needs met, like I grew up making ends meet. And the last thing on my mind was this topic or this idea. The only thing that I wanted was to consistently be able to have a good meal every day. I didn't care about elevating, being my greatest. I just wanted to get away from the suffering that was in front of me. And we all know this principle to be true, right? Think about building a house. What is the first thing you consider prior to building it? It's going to be how do we set a good foundation? What materials are going to be needed to prep the soil? What reinforcements might we need? What type of concrete will we use? Even in the Bible, Matthew, verse 7, 24 through 27 says those who hear his words and do them are wise builders. They have built their homes on rock solid foundations. The winds how old the rains come, even a flood comes but the house stands firm. Those who hear his words but fail to live by them are foolish builders. Here is something you won't hear in any spiritual or philosophical circles. It is a luxury to focus on having an awakening because it implies your life is in a place where you can even afford to think about spiritual life. In spite of where you may be or any steps you've taken to begin creating your foundation, like I listed in that metaphor, there is going to need to be some prep work done. One of the ways you can begin to prep your foundation is to focus on the things that you can control. There are three areas that I would consider controllables. I picked this idea from Dr. Michael Gervais over at Finding Mastery and I think it's a lovely framework to use because it's an internally focused one and really that is the only world you're out here controlling. The foundational pieces to start your awakening are your body, your craft and your mind. All three of those areas can be influenced by you. You don't need any outside sources. Sure, you can get some outside information, but let's be clear, is this really an informational problem? We are drowning in information and abundance of information that surrounds us. Information doesn't lead to action, but action is what is needed to lead to change. Information can inform you and maybe it can encourage you to take action, or you can just drown in a sea of knowledge and never ever change anything. If we start just at the body, we all get one, they're not all created equal, but where they do meet is in their resilience. Bodies are remarkably resilient and it's because of that resiliency that we can begin to shape and mold it, to make it something greater, better, more than what we originally received, what we came with. We live in a culture that highlights this, right? Think about our sports culture, our sports culture. Think about weightlifting, Olympics, horseback riding, tennis, all the disciplines that a lot of us have participated in and learned valuable life lessons from doing so. To include that we can improve on the things that we're good at, but we can also improve on the things that maybe we're not so good at. If we carry the skills we pick up in these disciplines that we learn through our body and fold them into other areas of our life, we start to see patterns emerge. The other thing you have to consider is that a lot of us will turn to our body when we reach certain thresholds, stress, for example, is one of them. As we are on our path to create our craft and our job and to really build a career as we call it in society, we do that often at the expense of our bodies. Our bodies take the hit for us when it comes to those pursuits. As the stress begins to build, we try to come up with ways to burden the load, and one of the ways is through the use of our physical body. We begin to train. We begin to physically train in the gym. Maybe we start running. We pick up a hobby that we think is going to help us to kind of de-stress a bit, getting back into shape again, because often we'll throw those things to the side while we're trying to focus and build our careers. I mean, one of the ways we see the resilience of our bodies, in addition to not only being able to manage the loads that we intentionally put upon it through our stress, but even if you look at an area like a recovering addict of some sort, when you're in those states, the last thing that you really are concerned with is the overall health of your body, and so the body really takes the back seat. But if you're fortunate enough to find your way back from an experience like that, you then get a front row seat if you're lucky to how your body is able to even figure something out as complex and damaging as that experience and make it so that you can move forward with a new life. And really, whether you are damaging your body, over-stressing your body, or completely ignoring your body, it will respond to the conditions presented in front of it. And if we choose to put good into it, then the payoff can be more than we ever imagined. But you know to deal, if we put it through hell, the reverse happens. And if we do nothing with it, we get exactly that back. If anything, if we do nothing with it, it atrophies, and it begins to degrade, because the body doesn't believe in keeping around anything that it isn't using. It's perishable in that way. It's efficient in that way. And so I guess the question I would put to you is, what is your intention with your body? How are you choosing to use that controllable to set your foundation, to create your condition, to have an awakening? When we look at work, that's what we tend to call it. We don't often call it our craft, because we think of work as the thing that is going to pay our bills for us, going to help us get through to the next thing, buy things in our life, kind of make it so that we can be as active and participatory as possible in the world around us. But when we really look at the meats and potatoes of work, we spend a large amount of our life working. I mean, I started working when I was like 12, because I wanted to make money so that I could have things. Because again, we were strapped for cash growing up. And look, that isn't the path all of us take, that we get into the workforce as soon as we can so we could start to provide for ourselves. But for a lot of us, it's how we measure ourselves in society. And the tricky part about working in society is if you're not careful, you might take the very first job you get and devote more than half of your life to doing it, to stumbling into it, to it being good enough and good enough just becomes manageable and manageable is good enough. And then you're just in that cycle. There are subsets within this idea of working, one of which I just described. Your job kind of starts off as a job and molds itself into a career. And once it begins the mold itself in your career, you put some purpose on it. You choose to give it purpose and by giving it purpose, then it kind of elevates beyond just this idea of putting food on the table. It becomes a measure of the purpose you've chosen to attach to it. Now in the best case scenario, this can mean you're becoming a master of your craft. And in the worst, well, your self-worth gets wrapped up in this career and you have no idea who you are without it. And you end up simply chasing the bag and growing your financial wealth, thinking somehow that by doing that you will grow your personal wealth. And the third category of work or craft is kind of our hobby section. There's somebody right now running the McDonald's that never woke up and wanted to be doing that. Maybe they were a really good piano player. Yet no one showed them how they could craft a life playing piano and they started working at McDonald's and now they're a general manager and they live a really good life and the path was pretty clear and all they had to do was keep showing up and working hard. And it got there and they don't really even know how they did it. Now, it doesn't have to be McDonald's. It could be a lot of, I mean, hell, it happened to me. It could be a lot of jobs, but we live in a new world. One where the golden handcuffs don't have to hold us any longer. Where the things that we thought were hobbies that couldn't pay the bills can. Thank you internet, thank you podcasts and YouTube and a million other things like TikTok and Snapchat where there are no gatekeepers to customers. Those with good products, hard work ethics and a willingness to put themselves out there into the public arena can turn anything into an income. But that's a lot of courage and a lot of inner work to get there. So when you put that against a clear cut path of a job where if you just put your head down and work hard, you can succeed. You can see why some people might just leave their hobbies in the hobby closet and not turn your hobby into something greater. In that situation, choosing to lean into your hobby or your skill rather than an already predetermined path puts all the onus on you. And part of our spiritual growth is recognizing that the onus has always been on us. It's just a choice as to whether or not we decide to carry that burden. And we look for ways to kind of shuttle it, right? Oh, well, if someone loved me, like, then I'd be okay, or if I put my faith in this company or core corporation, then I'll be okay. Or it's someone else's fault that I didn't live out my fullest potential. There's a lot of ways that this idea of just giving up our responsibility to be the best version of ourselves, giving that to someone else and letting them carry that load because it helps us to feel better. But here's the thing. If we use our talents the right way, then they, again, like our body, become the foundations for which we can have an awakening. And that's really how we take ourselves from just mindlessly moving through life to really living and enjoying this life that we have, this one precious gift that is very short. We don't think about that often enough because we're lost in the minutiae of day to day living, but we are complex dynamic beings that are capable of so much, so much good and so much evil. And the only thing that shows up is a matter of where we put our attention and where we put our attention could also be said on what is the quality of our mind. In the words of James Allen, as a man, think if so, they become. You can replace man with whatever pronoun works, but the idea is that who we are is shaped by what we think. We all live in a very subjective world, meaning my reality is different than your reality and your reality is different than my reality. And our realities are based on the way we think. Now, here's the thing about mind. Mind is probably the least trained skill of all. When I was talking to you about, you know, focusing on developing the body, nothing about that is weird. We all understand how that works. When I tell you that we spend a lot of time trying to be good at our jobs, not a strange, not a strange concept either, but when I tell you to train your mind, that's one that not everybody is really happy to hear about because it goes back to that original thing I was talking about a moment ago, right? If I am capable of training my mind, you mean to tell me all this negative thinking that I've been doing is something that I'm responsible for? That's a big one, not already for that, not at all. And that my motivations, my determination, my ability to handle grief, my ability to handle love, my patience, my kindness, all of that is all of that's within my control. That's what we're saying when we're saying that you can control your mind. And when you think about the best of us, quote unquote, right, societally speaking, and I'll use athletes because it fits this analogy best. Athletes hit the gym. They work in their body because their body is a tool that helps them perform their sport. No questions about that. Their craft, their job is their sport. So those two kind of intertwined and they do that simultaneously. But they also work on their mind. They focus on creating conditions of the mind that are most beneficial to potentially put them in position to succeed. And if you look at anybody who's great at anything, I would argue they probably have some type of body, craft and mental training simultaneously aligned to a purpose and they wake up every day and they set their North Star and they get after it, period dot. But most of us won't even sit in a quiet room with ourselves because we don't like what's happening between our ears or maybe we're just simply afraid of it either way. If we don't pay attention to it and we try to appease it as best as possible, maybe it won't create any discomfort for us. But I would argue that's not true. And look, I'm not exempt from the things that I'm saying in this talk. There was a time in which I did like everybody else does. I just wrote everything off to the conditions around me. And as a part of my journey, my awakening, I have gradually learned that everything I needs within me, that the amount of joy or sadness in my life is directly proportional to me and how I think and then no one is responsible for me being happy or sad or angry. These are, this is me doing this is my mind and I doing it. And that part of my responsibility is taking in what happens as I move through the world and then choosing how I'm going to let that land on me. And for me, I try to make choices that are more empowering than disempowering and that means letting go of a lot of stuff because I don't want it to rock my world or to spoil my dessert, the power of choices, but then it's all. Now, here's the thing about training your mind, visualizations, meditation, affirmations. Those are all ways to feed your mind. What are you reading? What are you watching? What are you paying attention to? Always to shape your mind. What are you listening to? These are the things that formulate the actions that come out of your mind. Here's a crazy thought. Look around wherever you are right now. Pick any object in front of you and think and recognize this, that object that sits in front of you right now, before it ever became the physical manifestation that it is, was a thought that someone's head. It did not get here without someone thinking it here because every action is predetermined to a thought. Now, sometimes the thought happens so quick that you don't even notice it, but there is no action decoupled from a thought. So it makes you wonder, why aren't you taking more care of this mind that you have? Because it's a powerful thing, and it sits above the body, and it sits above the craft. And maybe above is the wrong word. It sits right in them, actually, and you need it to kind of be better at the things that you're doing. And so whether you have an awakening in your body, whether you have an awakening in your craft or your job, or whether you have an awakening in your mind, remember that there is something to awaken to, that your life is not the worst thing you've ever done or the missed opportunity or the fact that you have a dope job or a big bank account, or you look amazing or you dress fly, like this is not your life. None of those things that I just described are your life. Your life is a lot more subtle than that. It's how you love. It's how you support the people that matter to you. It's how you try to serve and give back to the community you're a part of. It's how you set your own foundation, how you plant the seeds, the positivity, growth, kindness, success, and then water them until they blossom and grow. Your life is short, so I guess I'll ask, what are you going to choose to awaken to? Thank you for listening to today's episode. I invite you to check out my sub-stack where we are building a community of like-minded individuals to discuss all topics related to the idea of paying attention. I hope to see you there, but until then, with META may you be well. [BLANK_AUDIO]