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In this episode we dive into the third aggregate of the Zen Stoic Rendition of the Buddha’s Noble Eightfold Path: Meditation/Concentration.
We discuss how to live in a meditative state through practicing the 3 components of the Meditation/Concentration Aggregate: Integral Effort, Integral Awareness, and Integral Concentration.
You are here because you believe that it is better to be a warrior in a garden, than a gardener in a war.
You want to conquer your goals without sacrificing your well-being, while also enjoying the things that matter most -- like spending time with people you love and pursuing your interests without guilt.
The Zen Stoic Path will guide you along the path to unshakable inner peace. You’ll be ready to conquer any challenge life throws your way -- while being peacefully present to each moment.
This unique approach blends the timeless wisdom of Zen Buddhism and Stoic philosophies--while integrating modern techniques of emotional mastery.
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The Zen Stoic Podcast will give you the power to use your emotions as a compass to guide you to supreme liberation. Nearly 100,000 listeners have benefited from this wisdom, and you can too.
Create unshakeable inner peace with the Zen Stoic Path today.
Welcome to the Zen Stoic path. This is going to be part three of our three-part episode on the Zen Stoic rendition of the eightfold path. So in this episode, we're talking about the aggregate of meditation or concentration as it is described in the noble eightfold path by the Buddha. Now this particular aggregate of the eightfold path is all about.
How we are practicing in our everyday life. Now, when the word practice is used [00:01:00] in Zen, it is typically referring to meditation. But as we're going to be talking about in this episode, meditation can take many different forms. It doesn't just have to be seated meditation in a Lotus. There are various ways to meditate and various ways to live in a meditative state.
And that is what we're really going to be focusing on here. In this episode, in the previous episode, we went through the aggregate of conduct and morality. So this was all about how do you act around other people? How do you act with yourself when it comes to your interaction with the world around. And the reason why we talk about conduct and morality is because we can often create a lot of unnecessary suffering and emotional friction in our lives.
If we're not treating ourselves or others in a good way, if we're acting out of malice, if we're doing things to deceive others, if we're doing things to deceive ourselves, we get, we put ourselves in a position where we create a lot of emotional friction. [00:02:00] Regret and different things that we're thinking about in our lives that we're not really accepting about ourselves, which is why our morality and conduct is so important.
If our morality and conduct is in question, not necessarily by other people, but by ourselves, it makes it very difficult for us to actually practice and go into a meditative. Because at the end of the day, like we talked about what the intentions and delusions that we did in previous episodes, the one thing that you can always feel that you can never hide from yourself are your actual intentions.
And even if you don't necessarily know what they are consciously, if you can't verbalize them, we can always feel when our intentions are. Misplaced. If they're placed in a place of delusion and they're pointing us away from our humanity, or if they're pointing us back to ourselves, we can always feel the difference emotionally.
And in today's episode, one of the pieces of this aggregate that we're going to be talking about, one of the components of it [00:03:00] is going to be what is called integral awareness. And we're going to be getting into that because that is really where we're going to be able to bring more of a, a consciousness or a noticing to.
The actual emotions that we're feeling and how to tell the difference when we're feeling an unpleasant feeling versus a pleasant one and the subtleties that can come up that way, if that ever does come up for you, you'll be able to actually discern what the feeling is. So in this episode, we're going to be going through three parts of the eightfold path, which are integral.
Integral awareness and integral concentration. And these are all key when it comes to meditation and to be in a meditative state. So the first thing that we're going to go into is the integral effort part. Now integral effort is going to be really important when it comes to any kind of practice that we're doing, because what this means.
He is basically putting forth an amount of effort in your everyday life and the activities that you choose to engage [00:04:00] in that is sustainable for the entirety of your life. Now, that sounds a bit grand. That sounds like a lot, or like I'm putting it on a very large scale, but the idea is to live life in a way that you can sustain the amount of effort that you're putting into it continuously without having to necessarily.
So there is a sweet spot when it comes to how much effort you're giving to any one activity, especially a meditative practice of any kind. Now, the reason why we talk about this is because if we give too much effort thinking that we're doing good by working really hard, Then we can end up burning ourselves out.
If we give too little, then we can become bored and jaded with the things that we're doing. We're not feeling necessarily challenged. So it's about finding that zone of flow and we'll be going into flow state and a few other different topics along those lines in this episode. But when it comes to integral effort, I'm going to start off by sharing a story.
Zen story that really helps put this into perspective for me. And the story is called working. [00:05:00] Now the way that this goes is that a student goes to his master to learn martial arts. And he says to him, he says, master, I'm going to work as hard as I can. I'm going to put all my effort and I'm going to put all the, all the time that I possibly can to train days and nights to master this martial art that you've taken so many years to master.
How many years will it, will it take me to do this? And the master says, well, it'll take you 10 years. And he goes, okay, well, what if I work twice as hard as everybody who's ever done this, then how long will it take me? The master stops and pauses for a moment. And he thinks to himself and he replies to the student.
He says, 20 years. So the whole point of this story is to recognize this principle of integral effort. The reason being is because just because the student thought that he was going to work harder, it didn't necessarily mean that it was going to go faster. And that's one of the problems that we all face when it comes to the amount of effort that we're [00:06:00] putting into something IE, how hard we're trying or how hard we're attempting to get a certain way.
The thing is when we become attached to the result, when we become attached to the outcome. When we forget about the process, we end up engaging in the delusion of expediency and sometimes control. We're trying to control the process. We're trying to be expedient because we want to get there. We want to have that feeling of arrival and the problem comes.
We attempt to do that. We end up burning ourselves out and we end up missing a lot of what is actually learned in the process. So one of the reasons why I love this particular Zen story is because it illustrates that, right. If we're just going as hard as we can at something and trying to learn it, what we're going to do is we're going to actually miss the whole process along the way, because we're so set on the outcome.
The idea here is that whole saying of stop and smell the roses. And this happens when you're practicing anything. If you want to get good at anything, if you're trying to rush the [00:07:00] process, if you're trying to be expedient with it, what's going to end up happening is you're going to miss it. And you're going to Ms.
Key components or key lessons that need to be learned along the way. And as someone who is a martial artist, myself, I've been through a lot of that. That that that's talked about in that story. Right? I've had periods of time where I was just trying so hard to get to the next level, to get good, to be competition ready that I've actually ended up hurting myself for getting injured in a lot of those times, because I wasn't present in what I was actually doing.
So integral effort is about being present in the process and working as hard as you can giving the amount of effort that you need to give into a process. I'm open to the point where if you went any more, you'd have to stop. So it's this idea of sustainability. It's this idea of creating a flow. One of the ways that at least I use this in my own life is I follow the protocol of for Raza Hobie, who was [00:08:00] George St.
Pierre, his coach when George St. Pierre was champion in the UFC. And for us, a hobby believes in training in this. Where he'd nest. He doesn't necessarily have his athletes go to a 10 out of 10 in exertion and being in the martial arts culture, being in jujitsu, uh, being an athlete myself, who's going to the gym.
There's this whole trope about, you know, be smote or no days off or all these different things that. Would cause you to push your body to limits and red line your body. Every time you went to work out and train, and for us, the hobby actually goes against this. He doesn't believe in doing this. He believes in creating a scent, a whole volume to your training, through consistency, and through going to a seven out of 10 in your training, rather than a 10 out of 10.
Now this is different than if somebody is. For referring to the martial arts example, somebody is training for like a UFC title fight, and they're going to do a camp that's eight weeks long, right? A two, two month camp. There is a [00:09:00] container there. So one thing to remember about integral effort is that when you are engaging with an intention of discipline, rather than expediency, the way to think about this is the amount of effort that you're putting in needs to be one in which that you can recover from.
Based on the amount of time that you're actually executing on it. So if let's say somebody's going to a 10 out of 10 on most days when they're doing a training camp for a fight, but it is in a container of eight weeks, let's just. That is very different than just going up to a 10 out of 10 every day, every single week, just because you want to achieve this status of beast mode in your workouts.
Totally different. Because what that container is accounting for is the actual recovery time that's going to come afterwards. It's not saying I'm going to train this way forever because that wouldn't be integral effort that wouldn't be engaging in intention of discipline. Rather that would be engaging [00:10:00] in a delusion of control as well as expediency at the same time.
In that type of training, but instead if there wasn't a container, if there wasn't a specific thing that somebody is training for and they instead decided, okay, well, I'm going to maintain a flow and a consistency and, and increase my volume. Like for, as a hobby would suggest for his fighters. That is a totally different way of training.
So again, A lot of this is not just based on the intensity that you bring, but what is the container of, in which you're placing that intensity of training or of effort? It could be the same, the same thing. If we took this out of the martial arts example, we put this into maybe a creative or business example.
If there was a person, let's say they're, they're writing a book where they're creating podcasts, like, like we're doing now and you're preparing for a big series. Uh, person is, is creating content over and over and over again in order to actually create this output or to create a launch for a product [00:11:00] or a show, or let's say a book and they're working really, really hard.
They're working kind of days and nights putting everything into it within a specific container of time. That's okay. But if somebody is just working like that for the sake of working with. Eventually that person's going to burn out because what we're doing is we're not giving ourselves a chance to recover.
We're not creating a sustainability because putting in an effort that is driven by expediency driven by the desire to get there and the attachment to the outcome of that feeling of a rival. So the idea here is to put in as much effort as you can, in a way that you can continuously do it. And if you do need to put in more effort than that, for something specific, the idea is to use a container or a fixed period of time where you know what the exit is, you know, what the out is, and that way you can practice integral effort in whatever it is that you do at whether that's physical training or whether that's doing something with work.
Or [00:12:00] something with, uh, something else with your health using a container is one way to mitigate that sense of effort. So there's a really key quote here that I wanted to make sure the, to, to read on this episode. And it's from Shunryu Suzuki, where, when he talks about right effort, as it's talked about in Buddha, He's referring to the practice of Zen, which is seated meditation.
And a lot of the time people who practice seeded meditation, people practice Zen will often get frustrated because they're not necessarily using right effort or integral effort, as we say, on the Zen Stoic podcast. And so what he, what he said here was this all difficulties you have in Zen, which is seated meditation should not take place outside of your mind.
Your efforts should be kept within your mind. In other words, you have to accept the difficulty as not being other than what you are Shunryu Suzuki. So what he's saying here is often time when we [00:13:00] experience difficulties, what we're doing is we're attaching to an outcome, something that is outside of us, not realizing that the very difficulties that are actually being experienced or the difficulties that we are creating.
By not being here in the now by somehow validating ourselves our identity, our, our identity in things outside of us. And when it comes to meditation, what people are attempting to experience when they're practicing Zen is people are trying to attain enlightenment, a state of enlightenment. And weirdly enough, this state is something that occurs internally, but.
Most of the time when people have this frustration is because they're putting it outside of themselves. They're trying to get something. They're trying to get some kind of external validation as to what they're experiencing. So what Shunryu Suzuki is saying here is that the difficulties that somebody is experiencing are not because they're not attaining the thing outside.
It's not because their obstacle outside of [00:14:00] them is so difficult. What it is, it's that it's the noise that we're creating internally. Pointing away from ourselves. In other words, engaging in those delusions that we talked about in the previous episodes. There's another quote from Seneca. That's also really important here that speaks to this idea of being able to just be in the process and not trying to jump from thing to thing.
And sonnet goes, quote, goes like this. You don't tear from place to place and unsettle yourself with one move. After another restlessness of that sort is symptomatic of a sick. Nothing to my way of thinking is better proof of a well-ordered mind than a man's ability to just stop where he is and pass the time in his own company to be everywhere is to be nowhere.
So this one from Seneca really hit home for me because working as an entrepreneur, as a business owner, a lot of the culture around business these [00:15:00] days is centered around hustle culture. Working as much as you possibly can doing as much as you possibly can, always trying to do more than the next person.
And there is some merit to that. It's not completely, you know, unfound, but when we get into this idea of trying to hustle for the sake of hustling and trying to be everywhere for the sake of being everywhere and doing as much as we can and. Consistent output. What we end up doing is we never end up being present in what we're actually doing in the process.
We're trying to jump from thing to thing. And when Seneca says this is symptomatic of a sick mind or a restless mind, what, what he's saying is most of the time, what we're doing when we're not practicing integral effort is we are not being able to actually sit with ourselves and our thoughts. We're not actually able to be present and.
That is usually indicating is that somebody is [00:16:00] running away from something. Sometimes we're running away from our own fears. Sometimes we're running away from our own emotions, our own ability to just sit with ourselves and practice some sense of self-awareness, which this brings us into the next aggregate, which is integral awareness.
What we want to ensure is that when we're putting effort towards something, we're not putting effort towards something because we're trying to run. That would be an intention of expediency. That would be an intention to run away from the bad feeling and get to the thing that we perceive is going to give us that sense of comfort.
So that moves us into integral awareness. Now integral awareness. One thing that really needs to be talked about when we start going into this idea of self-awareness is to first begin with an understanding of the. The ego is something that is talked about a lot by many different spiritual teachers, many different coaches and gurus.
Everybody has. Different view of the ego. But what I've noticed is [00:17:00] the one common denominator that people have when they're talking about the ego is they always seem to point to it as if it's this negative thing as if it's this bad thing. So on this podcast, we've talked about the ego before and how it's actually much more neutral than people give it credit for than it is bad.
So we're going to start by defining the ego and exactly what it is. At least from a Zen Stoic perspective, right? I, I can't sit here and claim that this is the absolute definition, but this is the way that's helped me most as well as has helped my clients most in understanding and being able to work with their own ego.
So the way that I define the ego is that the ego is not some evil thing that you, that is your enemy that you have to fight against. It's not this consistent rival or, uh, adversary that you have that you can't run away with because it's with you all. And a lot of people they'll say things like the ego is the enemy.
Like your ego is your biggest problem, all this, that, and the other [00:18:00] thing, and the truth is your ego is just a part of you. However, the ego is built by social institution. It's not necessarily a real, tangible thing that exists in you, what the ego is and the way that I've always defined it. The ego is the pointing and measuring device for your subjective individual experience.
So what that means is that we are having, each of us, you are having, I am having our own subjective individual experience of this life. Meaning you're seeing it through your own perspective. Now what the ego does. Is it points to that. It says here is the individual experience. Here's the individual perspective that you have and it measures the quality of it.
It doesn't necessarily define it at [00:19:00] all. All it does is point to it. It just says here is the individual experience, but it, the ego itself is not the individual experience. It just points to it. It's a C. For your individual experience, but it is not the experience itself. It's like words. You, we could say the word food, but food, the word food is not going to satiate you.
If you're hungry. It is just a simple. For the thing that will say shit, you, when you're hungry, which is the actual food itself. So the ego very similarly is just the symbol for our individual experience, but it is not our individual experience. It merely points and measures to it. And the ego has about as much existence.
Uh, one example that I really like is Alan Watts, example of this, where he talks about how the. Exists as much as the equator on the earth exists. It's not that the equator doesn't exist, but there's not a physical line going through the earth that somebody has painted or drawn on. It [00:20:00] exists because we agree that it exists.
It is the midpoint is the symbol for the middle point of the planet. And the ego in the same way is the symbol for the individual experience. But it itself is not the individual experience. So this is really important to remember because the ego is not something that you need to fight. It's not something that you need to get rid of.
And a lot of these practices, a lot of spiritual practices and teachings that are available these days. Uh, many people seem to be saying things like, oh, I, I ha I had an ego death from trying to get rid of my ego or, or I'm trying to destroy my. And the funny thing about that is that the most egotistical thing that somebody could say is something like getting rid of their ego.
It's the biggest ego trip out there. It's something that makes somebody feel most good about the symbol of themselves. So we don't need to be fighting this. This is not something that we need to necessarily get rid of, but it's important to understand it and to work with it, not to identify through it and think that this, the symbol of me is the entirety of [00:21:00] me, but also not to.
Diminish it not to demonize it necessarily, or the ego is very important to live. It's very important to function. It's how I know to bring this drink to my mouth versus to someone else's that is that symbol for ourselves. And our individual experience gives us the ability to have that. And it's absolutely necessary to have an individual experience.
Now there's an interesting quote here from Alan Watts that I really like around the. So, what he says is this is about trying to get rid of your ego it's related to this. So what he, what he had had said in one of his lectures was the following repeated efforts to one to one up the universe may eventually reveal their futility.
Don't try to get rid of the ego sensation, take it so long as it lasts as a. Or play of the total process, like a cloud or a wave, or like a feeling warmer, colder, anything else that could [00:22:00] happen in itself? Getting rid of one's ego is last resort to invincible egoism. It is simply confirms and strengthens, strengthens the reality of the feeling.
But when this feeling of separateness is approached and accepted, like any other sensation, it evaporates like the Mirage. This is why I am not overly enthusiastic about various spiritual exercises in meditation or yoga, which some consider essential for release of the ego for when practice, in order to get some kind of spiritual elimination or awakening, they strengthen the fallacy that the ego can toss itself away by a tug on its own bootstraps.
So when I first heard that. I remember getting chills because it's something that I had tried in the past. I thought to myself, the same thing that my ego is my enemy. My ego is the problem here, and I just need to get rid of it. [00:23:00] And the reality is like, you don't want to get rid of it. This is it. It's like trying to get rid of an organ in your body.
It's it's a integral piece that it functions with. You it's like saying, oh, well, I don't like, let's say somebody has. Uh, a bad heart or a bad kidneys. And they're like, you know what? My kidneys are the enemy. I just need to get rid of them. Like, no, like maybe you can replace a transplant, a kidney. Sure. But you're not trying to get rid of these parts.
Like if you, if you're upset at your hand, you're not going to try to get rid of your head. So the idea is not to have an attachment towards, or a demonization of any one part of yourself to understand that all parts work together. But if we isolate it, if we let the, the symbol of ourselves lead the charge or be the thing that is at the forefront of our consciousness and our identification of ourselves, then we begin to engage in a limited identity, right.
Something that we referred to in a previous episode. Looking at yourself, the entirety of [00:24:00] yourself for defining yourself by your ego alone will severely limit your perspective of you and the world around you. So the idea is to remember that the ego is not all of you. It's simply points to you. It's a snapshot, a symbol for the current iteration of who you are to.
And not in any way, the entirety of the experience of your individual experience, but merely a specific angle, a snapshot of who you are right now at this current iteration. So that's a different way to look at the ego. Now, the reason why we bring this up is because looking at this symbol of ourselves, when it comes to our awareness is really, really key.
One of the biggest problems with self-awareness that people will often have is the attachment to this egocentric. And only being able to see life through the ego. So it compromises even that second aggregate of the eightfold path that we talked about around morality and [00:25:00] conduct, because anything that threatens the individual symbol of someone is going to be something that the individual, if they're attached to their ego is going to be unable to look past.
So it becomes very difficult to. Be sincere with others or ourselves. When we are attached to this symbol of ourselves, it becomes very difficult to compassionately or empathetically. Listen to another person, especially if what they're saying, possibly threatens the symbol that you have of yourself. So it makes it really difficult to listen.
And one thing that at least I really put a lot of effort into practicing. Is this idea of when somebody is giving me feedback or somebody is giving me some telling me something that I don't necessarily want to hear. What I will typically do is for a moment, if I start to feel myself, get triggered emotionally, I'll stop.
And I'll remove myself like my [00:26:00] perception of myself in that conversation. And I will just focus on listening to what that other person has. Obviously, I'm going to feel things when somebody else says something. If they say something that can be emotionally triggering or emotionally sensitive for me, the way that I'll look at that is like, that's just something that I need to deal with on my own.
I need to reflect. But in no way, is this person defining me with what they're saying? And instead of taking what they're saying, personally, what I'm going to do is instead listen to what is actually happening. I'm responding to the now responding to what's in front of me, rather than responding through the defense of the perception of myself.
It's not necessarily the easiest practice in the world. It's very easy to take things personally, especially when we're very wrapped up in our ego or individual symbol of ourselves. But as a practice, one thing that can be done is if you're getting feedback from somebody, if somebody is complaining to you about something, being able to stop and [00:27:00] listen and appreciate what's what's coming at.
Is going to be a good step in not taking things personally, as well as having better interactions and conversations, being able to better listen to others. So again, not the most, not the easiest practice in the world, but definitely worth doing right worth doing because it frees you from having to take things personally and whatnot.
So going into another piece here, the thing that we're going to be, be discussing is emotional awareness. When it comes to integral awareness, if we're going to be. Practicing a life in a meditative state or having a meditative practice in the way that we live our life. A big part of it is this sense of awareness and emotional awareness is really, really key.
You've noticed that if you're watching this podcast or you've been listening to this podcast, we talk a lot about emotions. And one thing that we always say is how emotions are not positive or negative, good or bad. They're simple. Pleasant or unpleasant emotions are. And sometimes they feel good and [00:28:00] sometimes they don't when they feel good.
Typically it carries with it, a reinforcing energy of some kind it's reinforcing what we're doing or telling us that, Hey, keep doing this, or there's a satisfaction, a contentness to. Our perception of life and the external reality matching that perception. And we feel good about it, right? When things are aligned, when there's an unpleasant feeling, it typically indicates that there needs to be a change in perspective, right?
We may need to change the way that we're looking at something. Our perception of life may not match the external reality. So either we can change our perspective and how we're looking at it, or we can take an action to solve a problem that would make the external reality reflect. To our internal perception of things, which one is the right way to go.
It depends on the actual situation. Sometimes in life, there are things that you cannot actually change. So just as an example, if a loved one passes away, [00:29:00] there's not an action that you can take to bring them back to fulfill your perception that they shouldn't have. So in that sense, a change in perspective would be a required because again, we want to keep in mind the dichotomy of control from Epictetus and keep in mind that there are certain things that we can control and certain things that we cannot.
And if we want to take an action to change the reality, we need to make sure that that action is within our control and having that sense of discernment to be able to, to know that in that moment in time. So when we have that unpleasant. Let's use it as an indicator that either there needs to be a dialogue for a change in perception, or we need to come up with some kind of action and execute in order to solve the problem that has triggered this unpleasant emotion.
That could be a conversation, or that could be some kind of a tangible action that we're doing in order to move ourselves from the problem into the solution. So emotional awareness, keep in mind, the emotions are not good or bad, but they are [00:30:00] simply pleasant or. Now, one of the biggest problems that we have with emotions is that for the most part, we don't allow ourselves to feel emotions.
And some people may think that they're feeling their emotions, but there are various ways and I've come up with four that people actually avoid feeling their emotions. So before I actually get into this, I'm going to jump to our next section just for a moment, because this is how I really learned this.
So if you've been listening to this podcast for a while, Uh, you'll have remembered the episode that I've made. When I found out that I had a herniated disc and I had this back injury now I've had chronic pain in my back since I was 11 years old. So it's been like almost 20 years of back pain throughout my life.
So as for, as almost like for as long as I can remember, I've had this pain in my back and it's always been something that I carried with me that has bothered. Time and time again, that's, you know, coming waves in and out. Some sometimes very [00:31:00] severe, sometimes very mild, but always lingering there. Now physical pain is a really interesting thing.
It is a at least what I've, I've come to realize that physical pain is actually a great teacher. And I had this pain in my back and I had always wondered what it was. Right. I had done a lot. Yeah, exercising, massage, physical therapy, stretching, everything like that. And it would never go away. So chronic pain, interestingly enough, according to tad James, who he had he'd passed away recently, but he was a creator of timeline therapy and timeline techniques.
Todd James talked about this and timeline therapy and timeline techniques are something that are. Part of the structure of liberation session I do with people when I helped them to accomplish a lifetime of therapy in a day. And one of the things that tad James talks about is chronic pain and chronic pain is really interesting because [00:32:00] what he had said about it is that chronic pain that lasts more than eight weeks is often emotional.
It's not physical. And the reason being is because the body knows how to heal itself, provided that there's nothing in the way the body will do its thing. How will. If the body decides to hold on to pain, chronic pain is really, and truly chronic dissociation of emotion. It's something that we'd never let ourselves actually feel, which is the reason why we continue to experience pain.
So instead of feeling the emotion that we've judged, that we've demonized, that we've said to so bad, what we do instead is we hold tension in specific parts of our body. Now, for me, it was in the, the L five S one. On my left side. Now what's really interesting about this is that before I was able to alleviate my chronic pain, I had been doing a bunch of exercises, a bunch of stretches every single day.
I changed my whole workout routine. Like [00:33:00] everything that I, the way I operated my entire day completely got transformed and changed. When I got the news of this. It was a hit on my identity because I was somebody who trained twice a day. I was always going beast mode. Like I had referenced earlier, I was red lining my body and I wore that as a badge of honor.
And when I got this herniated disc, it kind of turned all that upside down because I couldn't like I was in pain all the time at like an eight or a nine almost every day in my lower back. And this went on for about a year, some parts, more intense than others, but point is I had this pain. All the back pain in general started when I was 11, but I had it, you know, at this point in my life, maybe this was probably like six or seven months ago where it was like really, really bad.
And when I had this pain, I remember talking to a friend and she was telling me about this idea of where we hold certain emotions in our. And when I told her L five S one, she had said to me, she said, oh, that's interesting. I read something [00:34:00] recently that L five S one is unexpressed anger, or it's linked to unexpressed anger.
So I thought this was really interesting, especially weighing it against what I had learned from tad James and the NLP and timeline therapy techniques. And when I thought about chronic pain is chronic dissociation from emotion. So I thought, what am I dissociating from what emotions. Am I actually not allowing myself to feel.
And when she had mentioned that, I'm like, well, what anger have I have I not allowed myself to feel? And what was really interesting is that when I began to meditate on this out of nowhere, it hit me. I realized where that anger was coming from. And for the first time I actually felt the emotion that I hadn't let myself feel.
And from what I gathered, it was something that I had felt since I was a kid and I was actually experiencing. Towards my own mother for getting sick and for passing away now as a kid, and even saying that as an adult, [00:35:00] what's crazy about it is it seems so wrong to be angry at somebody for getting sick, to be angry at somebody for dying.
It seems preposterous and I felt guilty my entire life as a way of covering up my. Now what's interesting is as I like to do this work on myself and I reflect is that that guilt was covering up anger. And that, that guilt was causing me to engage in a delusion of performance all the time, because I was always operating from a place of guilt that I was bad.
Something was wrong with me for feeling that. So I wouldn't allow myself to feel the actual anger. And instead I started operating from guilt my entire life as a way of covering that up. And as a result, I had physical pain in my. But the moment I realized that I felt anger towards my mom. And I was able to accept that within myself and allow myself to feel that two things happen.
Number one, the anger actually dissipated, right. It came in [00:36:00] and it went, it's not something that I held on to and I dwelled on and I was like sitting there upset at my deceased mother for passing away over 20 years ago. No, the moment I felt it, I remember getting very, very present to the. Forgiving my mom, because obviously this is something that was out of her control and for, you know, a five or six year old when this developed it's something that I, I couldn't comprehend.
So the moment I actually felt it now at 30 years old, I was able to feel it, release it, forgive my mom and forgive myself for even feeling that for, for that matter and upon doing that the next day. But I will. I had zero pain. It was gone. Now I had also been doing a bunch of exercises and changed my whole routine.
Like I was saying to support this process, but the last little bit, the last, like 10 to 20% of the pain wouldn't release until I had that [00:37:00] realization. And so one of the reasons why I tell this story is because of its importance and what it points to when it comes to our actual physical pain, physical pain can be an incredibly good.
After I had done this on myself, I did it in a few of my liberation sessions with some of my clients where we started with their most, their, their oldest pain, their, their chronic pain. And I remember one of my clients was really like, it was mind blowing. What had happened during that session. She had a pain in her left trap that had been there for 15 years and she didn't know why, no matter how much physio or massage she did it, wouldn't go away.
And we sat with. For about two hours going through the process that I use for chronic pain with people. And not only did her pain go from a seven to a zero within two hours, but it also revealed the most important breakthrough that she needed in her life. To actually be able to allow herself to feel happy about her accomplishments and achievements.
And this is a woman who has achieved an [00:38:00] incredible amount in her life and is as it was admired by countless people. And yet wouldn't allow herself to feel happy or like she was deserving of that happiness because of the root of that pain. And once she allowed herself to feel the emotions that were rooted in that.
All of it dissipated. It went from a seven out of 10 to a zero within two hours. And she also was able to actually feel happy about what she was doing, actually feel content and fulfilled. So our pain can be an incredible teacher as it points to some of the deepest emotional wounds that we have. Now, the reason why I bring this story in, before I teach, I talk about how to actually feel your emotions and how to have an entire awareness of it is because oftentimes.
We may not feel an actual emotion, but what we are feeling is physical pain because the body, what the body does to avoid feeling is it does pain. It triggers chronic pain, it triggers pain somewhere in our body where that emotion is actually being held. And if we're [00:39:00] feeling it consistently, if it's a pattern, then it's covering something up and it's worth exploring.
So the way that we typically will avoid pain is in the, is in the following form. So the first way is to suppress the pain. Now, suppressing of the pain is going to lead to things like this chronic pain, right? That's just literally acting like you don't feel it at all. Pretending it's not there not facing it, not dealing with it, just avoiding it.
So suppressing the pain is obviously probably the most common thing that we might think of when we think about how we don't feel emotions. So we put the emotional way. We pretend it's not there. We avoid it. We resist it. Now, when we do that, when we resist them, They persist. Because again, if you remember in previous episodes, emotions are attempting to signal something.
Once they've signaled what they need to signal, and they no longer need to have a purpose, they don't need to be there anymore. So if we don't receive the signal that the emotion is trying to give us, it'll keep [00:40:00] going. And emotions are timeless. Meaning that even if something happened 30 years ago, that you didn't allow yourself to feel.
What's going to end up happening is it's going to keep coming back over and over and over again, no matter how much time has passed, because the emotions have no frame of reference when it comes to time all, if they could talk, all they know is that they're trying to tell you something and you haven't received it.
And so they'll keep coming back. So when we resist it, the emotions will keep coming back. And if we resist it enough, then it might come up as pain. It might come up as disease. It might come up as some kind of a chronic condition or recurring dreams or nightmares. Facing our emotions are really, really important and not resisting them so that they don't continuously come up and cause all these other problems.
The second way that we avoid feeling emotions or we avoid feeling our feelings is to identify with them. Now, this one is really tricky in a sense, because identifying what the emotion feels or seems like you're actually feeling the emotion, [00:41:00] but it's not. When we identify with the emotion, it's as simple as saying things like I am angry.
I am depressed. I am anxious. Anything that follows the words I am is identifying with it. It's linking it to the identity. So the words I am are really, really important. And if. Been familiar with other spiritual teachings, other personal development teachings. You've probably heard this before of this idea of anything you say after the words I am is an extremely powerful association and anchor to your actual identity.
So you want to be very careful about what you say after you say I am, because what you're doing is you're taking the ego symbol that we talked about before, and you're now placing a definition. You're now putting it in a container and you're saying this symbol is this. My experience is. So that is a very, very important thing to keep in mind that when you are trying to feel your emotions, you don't go to, I am sad.
I am angry. I am scared. I am anxious. I am depressed. I, any of that. [00:42:00] If you follow it with, if you follow, I am with whatever the feeling is, what we're going to end up doing is we're going to create a limited identity in that moment. And we can all handle feelings. What we can not handle is a severely limited identity by a single emotion or a handful of emotions that are unpleasant.
That is what will get us trapped. So if we identify with our emotions that we think that we are the emotions, it's just as bad as thinking that we are the ego. And basically what we're doing is we're just putting it with the actual emotion or feeling of self we're, just putting a mask or, uh, you know, uh, clothing on the ego and saying, now you're this.
Now the symbol is this. Now the symbol is anger. Now the symbol is sadness. So we want to be very careful not to identify with our emotions because that's actually not. Feeling the emotion it's actually not being present to the emotions. It's just putting them in the symbol of the actual ego. The third thing that we do to avoid actual feelings of emotions is we indulge in the [00:43:00] emotions.
So again, this one can be tricky because it feels like no, no, no. I am feeling this emotion. That's why I'm indulging in it. So indulging could look like this. Indulging could be, you're sad about, let's say your significant other or about your romantic life. And you start going and listening to emotional music, like love songs and breakup songs.
That would be a form of indulging indulging could also be like, you're feeling very angry too. You're going to go on Twitter and you're just going to sit there for two hours, arguing with people online and just indulging in that feeling indulging in the anger and the righteousness. And. Based on the beliefs that you have.
That's not actually allowing yourself to feel it. What that's doing is that's just magnifying the emotion. That's just making it bigger and perpetuating the emotion more and more and more without actually being present and feeling it. And then the fourth way that we avoid feeling our feelings is when we wear our [00:44:00] feelings, which is very similar to indulging in our feelings.
When we wear our feelings, this is the external expression of emotion. You're sad and you need everybody to know it, or you're upset and you need everybody to know it. So you wear it on your sleeve. You put it out there into the world. You act in ways that are, let's say angry, or you act in ways that are scared or nervous, or you act in ways that are sad.
And you attempt to draw attention to yourself. You attempt to perform with your emotions, right? And when you're performing your emotions, you're wearing your emotions. You're still not actually feeling. So these are the four ways that we actually avoid feeling emotion is we resist them. We identify with them, we indulge in them and we wear them.
And all of those ways, Are going to prevent us from actually feeling the emotion and could be the reason why maybe we have chronic pain. It could be the reason why we have recurring thoughts, um, that never seem to shut up or recurring dreams or nightmares that seem to keep going. So what we want [00:45:00] to do instead is actually get present and feel the emotion.
And it's really, really simple. It's so simple that it actually seems like it wouldn't work. Every single time I've done this, it's allowed me to actually alleviate the emotion by feeling it by understanding it. And it starts with simply saying to yourself out loud or in your head, I feel, and then the emotion.
So it could be, I feel sad. I feel angry. I feel depressed. It's okay to feel these things. What's not okay. Or what we cannot handle is being these things. We don't want to be our feelings. We don't want to indulge in them. We don't want to resist them. We don't want to wear them. That's not actually feeling them, but sitting there and feeling it and attempting to bring your awareness deeper and deeper into the feeling and becoming very present to the feeling will actually allow it to dissipate much of the time.
And whenever I'm doing this with clients or with myself, when I'm feeling these things, sometimes [00:46:00] what you feel is not just one. And that's why identifying with the emotion can be so dangerous is because when you identify, you actually fail to feel all the other emotions. Most of the time, you're not feeling one feeling most of the time, you're feeling a multitude of things.
Sometimes it's like 30 or 40 emotions or different feelings that you have all in one moment. And by saying, I am angry now you're missing scared. You're missing sad. You're missing hurt. You're missing anxious. You're missing all the other feelings that are existing in that. And in a way, dissociating from them.
So the practice is very simple to practice that awareness. When you have an emotion come up, you can simply stop and sit there and say, I feel whatever the feeling is, right. It could be like, I feel angry. I feel sad. I feel scared. I feel kind of excited. I feel happy and I feel, I feel depressed. I feel anxious.
And you can go through this cycle and allow yourself to just flow through those emotions rather than letting them stick to you. Remember, it's okay to feel these things, even if they're, even if they're negative. If you just feel [00:47:00] them there, they're going to go away. They're going to dissipate. But if you hold on to them, if you try to wear them, if you try to identify with them, they will stay around until you felt them and learned whatever you needed to learn from them until you've gotten the signal, emotions will stick around so long as they have that there so long as their signal or their message hasn't been received.
If we don't receive the message, it'll keep coming back. Well, you can remember what this is, that what you resist persists and all of these forms of not feeling emotions are forms of resistance. And if we continue to resist the emotion, you'll keep coming back. And sometimes the first step or the easiest thing that you can do is just stop and say, I feel, I feel, I feel, I feel you can feel, but you don't have to be.
The final section here is integral concentrate. Oh, this refers to meditation and is often translated in the full path as right. Meditation or right concentration. [00:48:00] Now, one of the reasons why this is so important, especially in conjunction with our self-awareness around our emotions are the amount of effort that we put in.
Is that right? Concentration is all about.
Focusing in and being in the present moment, which I'm sure at this point, you're hearing that, and it's sounding like cliche to you at this point, because we all hear that we all hear, you got to live in the moment you got to be present and this and that. However, the present moment is the only thing that truly exists is the thing that we can respond to.
We can respond to right now, we can't respond to the past. Can't respond to the future, but we can respond to. And there's a Zen story that I like to tell whenever I'm teaching any kind of meditation or this particular aggregate of the full path, which is the story that is called washer bowl. Now, the way that the story goes is there was a monk who was traveling around to different monasteries, trying to learn from the best Zen [00:49:00] Master that he could possibly find.
So he's going from temple to temple. Basically doing what Seneca was saying in the, in the previous quote earlier in this episode, not to do right, trying to go from place to place. And he goes to one temple and they're all eating. So he sits down, he eats and he runs over to the master and he says, master, please teach me.
And he goes, have you eaten your rice? And amongst says, yes, yes. I've eaten my rest. I finished it. And he goes, then wash it. And suddenly in that moment, the monk is enlightened. Now it seems like a pretty simple story. However, what it's pointing to is this idea of following through on what you're doing now in the present moment, not trying to live out in some future.
The reason why this is important is because if we're going to concentrate and focus. A big part of it is living a life of sincerity. If we're [00:50:00] living a life with sincerity, if we're moving with that sense of sincerity and not necessarily doing what we think we're supposed to do, as we have alluded to in a previous episode here, it's going to be much easier to actually focus on one thing at a time to be in the moment to do what you're doing.
And then that story what's important about it is. The monk had not necessarily finished the process of eating right. He had eaten, but he hadn't finished the process of eating and washing the bowl, which is something that amongst would do every time that they ate. Now, the reason why that's important is because if we're just jumping from thing to thing, leaving things unfinished in our lives consistently leaving open loops because we're trying to jump to the next thing all the time.
That is what's going to prevent us from being able to be here. Is we're being expedient. We're trying to jump from thing to thing. We're not practicing a meditative state and the meditative state and meditative activity is simply being able to find [00:51:00] that that zone of flow and that zone of flow comes with a few things.
Number one is it comes with doing something that you genuinely want to be doing. If we're doing things that we're doing out of obligation, it's going to greatly diminish our ability to actually conduct. And what it's going to tempt us to is saying, well, I'm doing this out of obligation because it's going to get me this thing.
And then you insert the outcome, the attached outcome there. And when we get into that habit, we start to lose the process. We start to violate our integral effort. We start to dissociate and resist our emotions because they're just in the way. And again, if we're feeling unpleasant feelings, when we're doing something that we feel obligated to do, rather than something, we sincerely feel.
It's probably signaling us. That may be, this is not something we should be doing for ourselves from a genuine perspective. Now, of course, that's a very vague and general way to say it. Obviously there are responsibilities in [00:52:00] life that we don't always like, but are very important because other people are involved.
That's not what I'm talking about here. I'm speaking about doing things because we're attached to the outcome because we feel like we're supposed to. 'cause we feel like we're supposed to work this specific job where we're supposed to go to school and get a degree in this specific major and not in the one that we want to be getting, just so that we can live a life that everybody tells us is the right way to live.
Because, you know, we have the specific house or the car or the money, or we're able to take the trips. That way of life is not a meditative state. That's going to make us keep jumping from place to place without actual. Focusing on what's truly important in our lives. And one book that really describes us very well as the book essential ism, and to focus on what is truly important to you and what is the most meaningful in your life.
And by doing that, it creates a natural meditative state on what it is that we're actually doing, what, what it is that we're [00:53:00] actually focusing on and creating that natural meditative state is effortless when we're focusing on what is actually essential to. If we're focusing on things that, that are not genuinely essential to us, but instead something that we feel like we're supposed to like, or we're supposed to strive for.
And we're always going to meet with distraction and not be able to have a meditative or present state on what it is that we're trying to create in our lives. So with that being said, the easiest way to actually practice integral concentrate. It's the first and foremost, check in with your intentions and ensure to yourself that they are sincere, that you want to do the thing that you're about to do, or say the thing that you're about to say simply because you want to, and for no other reason, you can bring in justifications and all that afterwards.
But if the first reason is not because it's not just because I want to do this, because [00:54:00] this is what, what I want to do with my time here. And we're always going to meet with district. We're going to meet with complications. We're going to meet with things that seem to be in our way. And it's going to be very, very tempting to resist our emotions, to not allow ourselves to feel them.
And then we don't feel them. We create all kinds of emotional friction and we create unnecessary and excessive suffering for ourselves by not having that awareness. So when we think about this accurate of integral meditation or concentration, we want to think about. Having the integral effort, right?
Going the speed going the speed that we can sustain going, the intensity that we can sustain forever. And if we do need to increase that intensity, to be sure to do it within a container within something that we can exit within something that is concentrated for something specific and then letting it go and going back into it.
We also want to keep in mind that integral awareness to be [00:55:00] paying attention to what we feel, paying attention to our pains, to the thoughts that keep reoccurring to the things that we seem to chronically experience because within those contain some of the most important lessons that we need in our lives.
And finally to have that integral concentration of being able to focus on one thing at a time and to follow through the finish, whatever it is that we're. Not worrying about the next thing or not trying to jump from thing to thing. So hope you enjoyed this episode. If you liked it, please like subscribe and we look forward to seeing you on the next episode of the Zen Stoic path.