Mindfulness: How to Feel Comfortable in Your Own Skin, with Jon Kabat-Zinn

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Transcript - When you sit down and observe your own mind on purpose just for fun as a kind of scientific inquiry into what drives you it doesn’t take long say if you focus on say the breath is the object of attention and you’re riding on the waves of your breathing. It doesn’t take long before you’ll notice that some kind of want comes up. Some kind of desire. And maybe it’s because your body’s uncomfortable. So maybe you just want to fidget a little or shift posture, you know, and just do it this way or that way. So it’s very hard to sit still. Why? Because we’re antsy. Why are we antsy? Because we want to be comfortable and we’re not comfortable. So rather than holding the discomfort in awareness because why should we privilege comfort. Comfort, discomfort because there’s no ultimate comfort. That’s why we shift from one leg to the other and we’re very shifty. But if you actually train yourself to be embodied you get less shifty. I mean the mind just naturally settles. The body naturally settles and you can be like comfortable. Just at home in your own skin. But when you’re not and you want something we call that greed. I mean that’s like, you know, it’s greedy, it wants something. Now that one thing to just be comfortable that’s fine. But when you start to watch the mind you’ll notice that it’s got a lot of agendas on the greed spectrum.
I mean it’s – and greed is not quite the same as ambition. It has to do with – greed has to do with more for me. More of what I want for me. Then there’s this other thing that you’ll also notice which is you’re sitting there and the opposite will come up. What I don’t want. What I’m afraid of. What I need to keep at the door. Keep at bay. To push away. And that’s collectively referred to as aversion or dislike or hatred, you know, when it’s really strong and directed often at other people or whatever. So we’ve got greed on one hand and it is toxic. The more you’re sucked into greed the more egotistically you become, the more it’s all about me, the more you’re willing to lose your own ethical foundation to get a particular result only to find that even that result is not really satisfying so you’re on to the next result. And it’s a never ending trajectory. But nevertheless we have to admit it’s here all the time. It’s not like oh, I’ve transcended greed, you know. I don’t think we do transcend greed but we can transform how we are in relationship to it. And with awareness the greed doesn’t have to run us. And even if it’s attenuated five or ten percent – wow that would be its own form of liberation. Never mind 30 or 40 or 50 percent. And the same with the aversion. Like what I don’t want. It’s so bloody boring to sit here and watch my breathing. Read Full Transcript Here: