Returning to the field within being mindful when it matters most
Transcriber: TED Translators Admin
Reviewer: TED Translators Admin
“Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing
and rightdoing, there is a field.
I’ll meet you there.” - Rumi.
I always believed in that field,
but I didn’t know it was for me.
And had it not been for that one
difficult decision 23 years ago,
I won’t be standing here.
So one quiet morning,
when everyone was sleeping in the house
with one suitcase in hand,
we tiptoed down the staircase to the car.
My husband was dropping
my two-and-a-half-year-old son
and me to the airport.
We were going to Kuwait
to visit my family,
and we did that every year,
except this year was different.
I wasn’t planning to come back,
and I hadn’t told anyone
in the family about it.
I wanted a divorce,
and that was a really difficult decision,
I’d been avoiding it for six years.
I remember crying in the bathroom quietly
and then stepping out
and being a good mom, being a good mother,
a wife, a business person.
And I kept doing that till I numbed out,
and I couldn’t do it any longer.
On that particular day,
I walked away from that life.
And it wasn’t until many years later,
when i came to the United States
with my son and experienced mindfulness,
that I realized that all my life
I had been living on autopilot.
I wasn’t aware of the choices
I was making and why.
How about you?
Are you aware of the choices
you’re making that are on autopilot?
Are you aware of the decisions you make,
like the career you’ve chosen,
relationships, your choice of school?
Now, I used to teach marketing
and on the first day of class,
I would ask my students,
“Why are you here?”
And you know what?
Many of them didn’t have
an answer for that.
And now if you’re thinking,
“’That’s not me, I’m deliberate,
I know what I’m doing,”
stay with me.
So once I started researching mindfulness
and consulting people around the world
that’s when I realized it wasn’t just me.
We’re all living on autopilot, huh?
In fact, there’s a seminal paper called
“The Unbearable Automaticity of Being.”
And in that the authors claim
that up to 95% of our decisions
are made unconsciously.
So what that means is
that even the big decisions,
many of our motivations, judgments,
emotions underlying those decisions
are hidden from us.
Now, there’s a good reason for that.
You see,
we have limited cognitive resources,
so the brain tries to automate everything.
And that’s a good thing, right?
Because we don’t have to relearn
how to write, how to read, how to drive,
how to brush our teeth every day,
except the brain automates
or wants to automate everything,
including our conversations
with loved ones,
and how we deal with conflict at work.
We like to create shortcuts to most
of our decisions, good, bad, right, wrong.
I like to think of that way of thinking,
this autopilot way of thinking
as “the treadmill”.
As we grow up, we tend to spend
more and more time on the treadmill.
Now, when we were children,
we actually spend more time in the field
beyond wrongdoing and rightdoing
that Rumi talked about.
We have creative minds, curious minds
that were willing
to play with ideas, to connect.
And in that space, there was imagination,
there was creation,
there was connection and magic.
And even as adults, we have a capacity
to return to that field,
to that spacious mind
that is free from stress,
from distractions, from judgments.
And I like to call that spacious
mind “a field within”’.
Now, you may have experienced that
in a flow activity, like skiing,
or painting, or playing music.
And you know what?
It’s also there in the ordinary moments,
like when we hear the birds sing.
Or i personally love to dance
under the stars.
And you know what?
It doesn’t have to, we don’t have to do
anything special for that.
This capacity is in us,
in all of us, like right now.
So let’s try this together.
If you already have a way to return
to your field, I encourage you to do that
or please join me.
So just taking a moment to return
your attention inwards,
lowering or closing your eyes,
if that’s helpful.
And just becoming aware of this breath
moving naturally in and out of your body.
Now, with each inbreathe
feeling the spaciousness in your chest.
And with each exhale,
allowing your shoulders
to drop down just a little bit more.
For this next breath,
letting go of your judgments
and expectations of how
this moment needs to be.
And seeing if you can receive
the gift of this breath in this moment.
And when you complete that cycle,
opening your eyes.
Were you able to let go of your
judgments and distractions,
and reach your field within?
And if you didn’t, that’s OK.
And that’s actually the challenge we have,
is that we are not able to reach that
field within when we wanted to.
And I’m here to tell you that mindfulness
is your capacity to step off the treadmill
and to return to that field within.
Mindfulness is a practice.
It disrupts our autopilot thinking
and supports us in returning
to our awareness, to the field within.
And mindfulness is also
the field of non-judging awareness.
That actually allows us
to see things clearly.
So if it’s a natural capacity,
why are we not able to access it?
Because there are three hindrances
or three tendencies of the mind:
to push, to pull, and to run in circles.
Now, I thought I knew what this was about
as a mindfulness teacher and a researcher.
And it’s only when I joined politics
that I really understood
what these hindrances were.
So, I remember my first political debate
when I was running for town council.
I was waiting in a line
with five other candidates,
hundred people packed in a library,
waiting for us.
And my campaign manager
comes over, seeing my nervousness,
“You know mindfulness,
you know what to do.”
And I’m like,
“I have no idea what mindfulness
looks like at this moment.”
Because my heart was beating really fast,
my mind is jumping from topic to topic.
And I was feeling, like, really anxious,
so I take a deep breath in.
So that helped some.
And then came in doubt,
“I don’t belong here. I didn’t have
any experience in politics,
and some of the candidates
had many years of experience.”
So I pushed my negative thoughts away
with some positive thinking and breathing.
And at the end of the debate,
my campaign manager comes to me and says,
“You were not yourself.”
And you know what?
He was right.
Because I was so disconnected
from myself and the audience.
So in that one critical situation,
I encountered all three hindrances:
my mind was running in circles,
I was pushing away what’s uncomfortable,
and I was grasping
for audience validation.
So, what happened here?
Well, public speaking is hard,
and even though I do this a lot,
what is particularly difficult
about that situation was
that it was different.
It was a new context for me.
So what happens is that when we go
into situations that are difficult,
our brain goes “clunk”
and it sees that as difficult.
And it’s natural in that situation for us
to experience anxiety, nervousness,
and that’s actually a brain preparing
us to get focused, to get energized,
but it feels uncomfortable.
So what do we do?
We turn away from it.
We avoid it with negative,
with positive thinking,
breathing, Netflix, whatever.
And what we’re really doing is
we are turning away from ourselves.
We’re turning away from how we’re feeling,
what we’re thinking
and you know what else
we’re turning away from?
From our purpose, from our passions,
the gifts that we wanted to
and could bring to that situation.
And that was the reason
I felt disconnected from myself.
And because I wasn’t connected to myself,
I couldn’t connect with the audience.
So the invitation here is
that we are willing to meet ourselves
with the good and the messy.
And when we do that,
we are able to examine our emotions
and our thoughts with kindness.
And we’re able to see to look closely
what’s true and what’s our default.
And you know, when I did that
in the subsequent debates,
my campaign manager came and told me
I was a thousand times better.
And you know what?
How much better can our lives be?
Thousand times better if only
we can learn not to avoid the discomfort
and to be able to return to ourselves.
However, we never grew up
learning how to do that, right?
And here is where mindfulness comes in.
Mindfulness can be practiced
with three steps:
meditate, contemplate, and act.
So the first step is to meditate which
is returning to nonjudgmental awareness.
The meditation allows us
to retrain our brain,
to focus on the object we’ve chosen.
So it could be a breath,
your body’s movement
And here’s the thing.
You can even do this
with any regular activity,
like swimming, or running, or Zumba.
And in fact, I encourage people
who have a problem or difficulty sitting
doing sitting meditation
to try any of these activities.
The second step is to contemplate,
so once our mind is stabilized,
now we can contemplate
what is my experience right now
and what are my intentions
for this situation.
We can ask ourselves what’s here now
and what would I like to see happen,
what’s important right now?
And the third step is to act.
It’s not enough to just have
good intentions, right?
So the more we can practice acting
skillfully in non-critical situations,
the easier it will be to act skillfully
in critical situations.
Now, you can see
why it is really important
to think and reinvision mindfulness,
to include meditation,
contemplation, and skillful actions.
Now, I forget this all the time,
and I need reminders.
So I put these sticky notes
around and put timers,
which remind me:
it’s different, not difficult.
And now, at this point, if you’re already
pushing this idea away
because it seems hard
and you’re thinking like,
“Wait, I’m supposed
to meditate and do what?“′
Let me just remind to you, and you can
remind yourself, even for your practice.
It’s just different, not difficult.
And the more you do this,
what was different
becomes the new default.
As a society, we have many big decisions
we need to make
as we come out of the pandemic,
we can step back on the treadmill
and we can forge a way forward
or we can return to the field together.
I understand, there’s an urgency
to get back to normal.
But the pandemic has forced us
to see normal is broken.
We have insurmountable challenges,
racism, poverty, climate change
to name just a few.
Staying on the treadmill
mostly provides us
with quick fixes,
efficiencies and strategies
that favor some, but not others.
We need a new way of thinking,
we need a new way of working together,
of finding solutions that emerge
when we’re willing to struggle together.
I believe that mindfulness
builds our collective capacity
to move through a resistance
and return to the field together.
And in this space, there’s a creative
potential to solve any problem.
Maybe not right away, but it supports us
in making this journey together possible
and even worthwhile.
Moving forward.
When you encounter difficulty,
at home, at work, or in the community,
remember, don’t walk away.
Return back to yourself.
And remind yourself and each other.
Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing
and rightdoing, there is a field.
Let’s meet there.