← Living Well with Multiple Sclerosis
Living Well with Multiple Sclerosis
Bonus from the archives: Top hacks for getting into a meditation habit with Alison Potts | S2E15
00:43:43
Loading summary
Transcript28 lines
- [00:00]
Alison Potts
Basically we're dealing with a disease of the nervous system or a vulnerability within our nervous systems, our mind body systems. You know, societies and cultures of all kinds from all over the world have worked with meditation in different ways, but essentially it is for the nervous system, it's for our mind body system. And it's, it's an approach that connects us to our emotions and our minds and our physical bodies and our energy bodies in ways that not only tune us up and make us feel better, but but they also inform us about the choices and the directions we want to take in our lives. We get to sort of see what's going on in the inside welcome to
- [00:37]
Regina Beach
Living well with Ms. This show comes to you from Overcoming ms, the world's leading multiple sclerosis healthy lifestyle charity which helps people live a full and healthy life. Through the Overcoming Ms. Program, we interview a range of experts and people with multiple sclerosis. Please remember, all opinions expressed are their own. Receive monthly tips and ideas about living well with Ms. By signing up for our newsletter@overcomingms.org Newsletter and now let's meet our guest. Today's episode is a replay from the Living well with Ms. Archives. We're revisiting some of our favorite episodes that break down the Overcoming Ms. Program and and feature doctors, facilitators and community members with top tips and personal stories about living well with Ms. All the advice and information was accurate at the time of recording. You can listen to the entire back catalog at www.overcomingms.org podcast or wherever you listen to podcasts.
- [01:48]
Jeff Alex
Today's guest is Alison Potts. Alison is from the UK but moved to Brisbane, Australia in 2010. She was diagnosed with relapsing remitting Ms. In 1994. Having had symptoms since her final year at university, Alison had a 20 year career with the BBC in London and for the last 10 years has been a meditation, self care and well being coach, teacher and teacher trainer. Alison also creates guided meditations for SoundCloud, OMS and the app Insight Timer and has had over a quarter of a million listeners to date. So Alison, tell us about yourself and your experience having Ms. And following the OMS program.
- [02:25]
Alison Potts
Well, I live in Australia now but I'm British originally and I've lived in Brisbane for the last 10 years. I'm now in my 50s but I was diagnosed with Ms. When I was about I think I was 26 or 27 having had symptoms for a few years. So actually I can trace back symptoms to my final year at university. So all my adult life and What I do now is I work in the field of well being and inner practice and meditation and I'm a coach and a teacher and a teacher trainer and I do workshops and run courses online and in the flesh. But before that, when I was in England, I worked in the media. I worked mainly for the BBC, both in production and publicity.
- [03:11]
Jeff Alex
So did you find out about OMS quite early on?
- [03:14]
Alison Potts
I found out about OMS a few years ago. Basically my trajectory was that when I was diagnosed there was no medication and there was a tendency for neurologists and medical people to just kind of leave you to get on with it yourself. And because I was young and very interested in. I just got married, I just started my career at the BBC. You know, I had a lot of drive to do things. I felt that I was having all these setbacks, obviously with, regarding, regarding my health and I didn't really want to surrender to them. And what I wanted most of all was some sense of how I could look after this myself, the things I could do for myself. It being the case that, as I said, in terms of medical people, there wasn't much they could offer. There was no, there was no treatment, there was no, there were no disease management, drugs and so on. So I looked quite, quite early on. I looked into things like diet, obviously exercise, managing fatigue and the usual kind of strategies that one needs to work with these kind of symptoms. And I started learning for myself and of course there were some people, I don't know if you've heard of Judy Graham, who's a real veteran in this area. She's amazing. I mean, I got her book, she also was working for the BBC and as soon as I was diagnosed, my mum sent me her book and that got me more on the path of understanding the implications of diet in particular. It took me longer to learn things about, things that I, I work with and now with other people, you know, about understanding your emotional life and your feelings and looking after your mental health as well as your physical and so on, which I think is a big part of wellness, to be honest. But I was sort of making it up as I was going along. I was experimenting, I was exploring and when I found something that was useful, obviously I applied it. I was working with my lived experience. What I didn't like in the world of Ms. In terms of once the digital space opened up, because bear in mind, there wasn't any Internet either when I was diagnosed. What I didn't like was when I first looked at websites and forums, was there was so Much negativity. And I can understand that. I can understand that people are going through a lot and they want to vent and express their despair. But I don't think it's particularly healthy to read a lot of stories of people's despair when one is on a path, you know, in terms of healing and recovery and finding meaningful paths in life, no matter that one has a condition or something going on with one. And I felt the bias was, was particularly negative. And I think that can be the problem with the Internet, is that people who are happy and getting on with life don't tend to write about it, whereas people who are going through a hard time are looking quite understandably. This is. I'm not saying there's any judgment, you know, looking for ways in which, that they can get things off their chest and express how they're feeling. I didn't find this a healthy place to be. I didn't want to be in that kind of environment. And I found OMS actually, because I approached him with a blog I'd written. I realized on World Ms. Day a few years ago that, wow, it's been 24 years since I was diagnosed and I wanted to write, I wanted to reflect on what I had learned in my journey. And so I offered them the blog. And then after you guys published the blog, I got very involved with oms and I, I supply meditations and so on. But what I really love about overcoming ms, it's not only are you covering exactly what my approach has been, I never did end up taking any medication, you know, approach that involves diet, a holistic approach that involves diet, exercise, mental health, strategies, so on, meditation and so on, but also tells a very positive and hopeful story, which is a fuller picture of what having Ms. Is. And I think particularly for people when they're first diagnosed, a lot of people have these stereotypes about illnesses like Ms. And they're frightened and they're worried about what's going to happen to them. They're already dealing with a lot of, of difficulties. And exactly what you need at times like that are spaces like Overcoming ms, which are full of information, practical, tested information that you can use that will change things for you. And also read those inspiring stories which aren't happy spins on things. People can talk about problems, but you can talk about problems and also successes and strategies and solutions in the same conversation, can't you? And I think that OMS does that really well.
- [07:35]
Jeff Alex
Okay, so you mentioned meditation quite a bit then. And what is your specific relationship to meditation?
- [07:42]
Alison Potts
Well, I think like a Lot of people. It's something I discovered for myself quite early on in life, but probably didn't call meditation. I've always been. Since I was a child, I've always been very imaginative, very dreamy, very love nature. And it's been very easy for me to relax into that space of dreaminess and driftiness, which is essentially the space of relaxation and the meditative space. Somewhere between sleeping and wakefulness, we have this nice mending state where our minds can. We can sort of release and relax and be with all our energies. When I was young, what that looked like to me was I spent a lot of time sort of drawn, I think, at the end of a school day and times like that, to be outside in my garden, whatever the weather, walking around. We had these apple trees at one in each corner of our garden and sort of map a path and go into other worlds and be in my body and be aware of the air and the quality of light, all of those things which actually make up a good meditation. And I. And I'm very, very interested in these kind of instinctive calls. We have to go into those sorts of spaces. So I actually pursued it into my university degree, which was in comparative religion and spirituality, which looked a lot at psychology and neuroscience, as well as the history of religions and aspects of spiritual experience. And so it's always been like something I've been fascinated by. And I realized with Ms. That one of the key ways the nervous. Basically we're dealing with the disease of the nervous system or a vulnerability within our nervous systems, our mind body systems. You know, societies and cultures of all kinds from all over the world have worked with meditation in different ways. But essentially it is for the nervous system, it's for our mind body system. And it's. It's an approach that connects us to our emotions and our minds and our physical bodies and our energy bodies in ways that not only tune us up and make us feel feel better, but they also inform us about the choices and the directions we want to take in our lives. We get to sort of see what's going on in the inside. We get to listen to our bodies and what our bodies are telling us. We get to listen to what our emotions are telling us. And I think with something like ms, it's just priceless to have that time and space to keep up really with what's happening and be kind to yourself, be nurturing in that, in that space. Because I know that in my early years with ms, I had an experience of feeling like I was losing my identity I was losing a connection to the self I thought I was, you know, the one I used to be when I was healthy. And I was worried also about my future self being able to deliver on all kind of plans and dreams I'd had. And in that respect that's I think where we can often go into these spaces where we're afraid and we're stressed. And of course the stress state is exactly the state that we're trying to avoid because we want to stay, soothe and repair our nervous systems and in any case collaborate with healing, not with getting more wounded or injured, which stress can do. So I realized that there was a great connection between the sort of self care aspects of meditation and taking that me time and being connecting to the inside. Meditation also connects us to nature and the things we love. I realized there was a connection between that and healing. And I got interested in the work of particularly Herbert Benson, who was a person who first coined the phrase relaxation response at Harvard Medical School and their Mind Body Institute. I got very interested in the biology of the process but I got also interested in how people meditating and in what ways. And we hear about standard methods of meditation but there are many more than the ones we hear about. And I was lucky enough I was very interested in yoga. I was doing yoga regularly and when we moved to Australia 10 years ago with my daughter who was then six I think, and my husband, I forgot to mention my family who I'd left the BBC. Here's an opportunity for me to start a path doing these other things I'm interested in, including yoga. And it was through my yoga practice that I met someone called Dr. Lauren Roche who's quite well known for his work in the field of instinctive meditation. I'd studied mindfulness as well when I was in England and I love mindfulness but it does have some limitations that can put some people off and make it hard for people. So it's nice to kind of enhance mindfulness and evolve other ideas and experiences into people's experimentation with meditation. So Lauren, I learned a lot from him. He's actually in California but he'd come to Australia a lot and he trained me and we, I had one to one sessions on Skype. We had sessions when he was here. Certified me 200 hours yoga alliance meditation training. I've also got a yoga teacher training and from then on I just, I developed my own business, I started coaching people but of course at the same time I'm exploring things for my own practice. And I think one of the wonderful Things about meditation is you can kind of invent and create and discover particular ways of practicing and gateways into meditation that work for you specifically and for your body and for what you're going through and for what you need. The people I coach just find it comes as I have this really welcoming space. It's. It's delicious. You want to do it, and when you do it, you've got a variety of ways so you don't get bored, and you can keep evolving those ways and you feel better and the feedback comes into your life. Because not only have I discovered I used to get very, very fatigued, and now I get less fatigued. And what I used to do was I'd have these big swings where I'd. I'd be so fatigued I couldn't do anything. And for a long time sometimes, you know, I wouldn't know for how long. And I know everybody listening to this will probably relate. You know, is it going to be a day, a week, months, you know, half a year and. But then I would eventually crepe my way back up again. And then when I was up again, I'd be like, I want to do this, I want to do that. I want to use this energy before I lose it. Which, of course, would bring me back down into burnout. And one of the things about being in a regular practice of meditation is you get to be with your inner rhythms and your inner healing rhythms. This just happens automatically when you're in your space of the relaxation response, and it gives you more of a sense of what is in balance for you. And, you know, believe it or not, Jeff, it's really helped me in ways in which I can think. I'm not in touch with my energy. I feel tired, I feel restless. I think I need to do things, and there are demands on me. I don't know where to start. I can meditate on, you know, for about 10 minutes and come out knowing, right, well, I'm going to cancel that appointment. I'm going to prioritize doing this today. I won't meet up with so and so next week. I think it'll feel better to me to have a space in my diary. But I'll see if I can meet up with it the following week. I'm going to take a nap this afternoon. I'm going to get some, you know, go for a walk. You make these very crucial decisions that we who are looking after our energy bodies so carefully need to make in the outer world. And it's something that I'd love people to understand about meditation. It's not really in any way about escaping from life for a while and then just going back into all again, having had a little bit, maybe a bit of a rest or relax. It really is about cultivating ways of tuning into what is imbalanced for you.
- [15:08]
Jeff Alex
So actually, that time spent meditating could be. You're not wasting the time. You actually could more than gain the time back because of prioritizing, doing things properly.
- [15:19]
Alison Potts
That's the skill. That's the skill. You know, meditation. In meditation, we learn. We can learn certain skills, and that's exactly right. It's, it's, you know, there's a reason we're wired for these states of meditation. You know, if you think about our early ancestors, they were living these highly stressful lives trying to keep everything going, and they were physically very active, and they needed very quick ways to rest and repair their body and at the same time, their whole energy body, you know, and they were very vigilant people, when you think about it, because they had to be, because they were in genuine danger all the time. But at the same time, we know they were very hearty, well, people, which is obviously how we have a planet and a population now. And what we know from archeology and oral narrative and all the ways that we can find out about people in prehistory is that they did have huge appreciation, for example, for nature. And they did have time to do the sorts of things that we love doing, like gaze out at a body of water or play with our children, or the women would be rocking the baby. They looked up at the stars. They managed to create whole astrological maps. So we know they had time to really feel into those kind of connections we have with the universe that is meditative. And while they were having those special experiences of intimacy with life in the background, their bodies were going through the cycles of rest, repair, recovery, renewal that happen when we're in the state of relaxation and priming them to be alert for what they had to do. You know, the important and difficult lives they. Physical and mental lives, they had to go back into. You know, it's a very elegant thing that our body thrives in. So you, you know, you said a waste of time. And I do think people worry about it's kind of doing nothing or it's kind of a waste of time and knowing that it isn't, and knowing that it actually is everything you need in one package and that if it feels like a waste of time, there are things you can do to make it more interesting and feel less wasteful. I think that's very powerful.
- [17:26]
Jeff Alex
Ask people what are the hardest things with implementing the OMS program. And by far the most common response, it's people saying that meditation and mindfulness is the hardest thing to implement. So what do you find are the main obstacles that people find in actually having a regular meditation practice?
- [17:52]
Alison Potts
I find from what people say to me, and bear in mind, I've talked to hundreds of people about meditation over the years, and I can tell from the chatter on the Internet that the main obstacles really fall into two categories. One is that people have all these ideas and stereotypes about meditation. They've read things that there's this kind of one size fits all thing that should work for everyone, and it involves sitting and blocking your thoughts and feelings and focusing on your breath. And it involves work and it involves discipline, and you have to concentrate. And the second prohibitor, I think, barrier for people tends to be, which you alluded to earlier in a kind of doing nothing and wasting time idea, is that they shouldn't be taking time and space for themselves. That self care itself, that this could be seen as being lazy or idle, or other people need them, they should be looking after other people. So the barriers that are sort of external ones and internal ones, and I can address those briefly if you like, because it gives you. I think it's really helpful for people to understand where some of this meditation chatter comes from and then forget about it. Meditation has existed all over the world, and people have been meditating in their own way and having their own techniques since time began. But the meditation that we know about in the west came through a very enthusiastic branch where a lot was recorded. But it was certain practices practiced by certain people, and that these practices were practiced mainly by monks. These practices come through monastic Buddhism and more of the kind of priestly parts of India. And what you're looking at then is that people were describing and developing techniques for their lives which involved being celibate, not having a job, not having a relationship, not having any possessions, living away from home, not having a home, living in an ashram, not even making a doing anything creative like putting a picture on the wall. And they dedicated their lives to this. These were respectful men. You know, we can honor the tradition, but what has happened is that some of the language that we see floating around the meditation scene about witnessing and detaching and blocking comes from specifically the techniques that were developed through these lineages, which absolutely involve sitting in lotus and thinking, focusing and anchoring your attention to the extent you wouldn't be thinking about what you could be doing if you weren't a monk because you'd made vows, you'd made vows to never make money, to give up all your possessions, never to get into a relationship. What we're talking about here is natural impulses of being a person, aren't they? Our sensuality, our desire to build things, our desire for pleasure, these are all healthy things that we have that are life enhancing. And what these practices were there to develop was a way of ascending or transcending from any of those feelings, which is hard work and almost impossible, easy for a monk because they were away from towns and places where things were going on. But we people our lineage. If you want to think about in terms of what our lineage is, right. Where in yoga we call householders, where people who do have jobs and we have lives of love and we're interested in doing things and we're interested in being healthy and we're interested in pleasure and we're interested in connections and helping people and building relationships and buying houses and building a life for ourselves. And that requires a different kind of practice for us to be able to engage with life requires different practices than for people who require disengagement.
- [21:36]
Jeff Alex
No, I agree. Even now, a lot of the guided meditations will still have gongs sounding and there's sort of some carryovers, if you like, from.
- [21:49]
Alison Potts
Yeah. And you know, some of the, these traditions, some of some of the things we can be informed by these traditions. I quite like a sound bowl, a singing bowl. And some of these things are very beautiful. The practice of yoga is beautiful, just as the early martial arts practices like Tai chi are beautiful. We're not knocking the tradition, but what we're talking about in meditation is our mental health, our inner life, our personal private space. And what we do there and what's imposed from the outside on there matters. You know, there's an amplification of our experience. We all know that. And just unfortunately, people are reciting scripts and guiding meditations using language which is beating people up a little bit. It's saying, be quiet, sit still, calm down, you know, shut up. And so if someone's feeling restless, if someone's got pain in their body, this is information. I think one thing we learned from ms, we're very skilled at this. We're very skilled people. We learn to really understand how our body gives us information. We know more about this than a lot of people who are, you know, quote, quote, healthy. And why would we go into a space an inner world space, and take this time to then block all those messages out when we could be going into our instinctive beings to listen more to our body's intuition and to what it's telling us. You know, it's like our bodies are saying, I'm tired or I'm sad or I'm. I'm, you know, I'm really, really frustrated taking those notes. We can be like, if, if I'm restless in meditation, I move, I do some kind of movement, I meditate while I'm walking or swimming or, you know, doing some yoga or even if I'm too tired to move, then. But I still feel like my body needs some movement, just some stretching, just some wriggling. You see kids doing it, they just wiggle if they want to wriggle. Animals wriggle if they want to wriggle. People should wriggle if they want to wriggle. And there's this idea that the meditation space is like, you must be still, you must calm down, impose all these demands and conditions on. And I think what puts people off is they see these are more demands, more requirements, and I have to get up at a certain time. And it's just another, it's another stress. And this is like, this is such a disconnect because actually, meditation is about de stressing. And your body knows how to do that if you collaborate with it. So if you invite your body in delicious ways into de stressing ways, which all of us know because we do them naturally when we take a lovely warm bath, or when we take a walk on the beach, when we make love, when we sit and sip a beautiful drink for a while, slowly, you know, we are then cueing our body to do what it knows how to do. And we can take a note from that. We can either decide to be taught by monks and lose our vibrancy and lose our sense of connection to ourselves, which is important, very important, or we can offer ourselves up to our wise, instinctive beings. Our bodies are intelligent. They know how to go through this healing and repair even bodies with Ms. And we want, we do want to harness that and we do want to build those strong neural connections, don't we? We want our body to get very familiar with the state of ease, the state of relaxation and the state of pleasure and those sorts of highly healing states. Do we want to get our bodies familiar with a sense of demand and concentration and focus and blocking, which I, as a person who has dealt with so much physically and mentally in my journey with ms, certainly do not find appealing. So that's people's idea of meditation or those are the kind of practices they're being taught or listening to on guided meditations, then they are quite right not to do them. I would say you shouldn't meditate in a way that makes you feel bad because you also hear people saying, fail to meditate on a bad meditator. And what they're doing is they're just using the wrong technique. There's nothing but what they're then saying. You know, they're making themselves feel bad for no reason. They were just taking. It's sort of like taking medicine that was never made for you. It's not going to make you feel better and it'll probably make you feel worse and you shouldn't really do that.
- [25:59]
Regina Beach
Do you want to live well with MS? Join the Overcoming Ms. Community in the LiveWell Hub. It's your place to get support, find connections and feel motivated to make positive lifestyle choices. Download the LiveWell Hub in your app store today or visit hub.overcomingms.org to join. We hope to see you there.
- [26:24]
Jeff Alex
Yeah, and there are so many guided meditations now that it may even just be the sound of someone's voice. And they've done nothing wrong at all. Those perfect meditations, it just may be a little bit great. And you think, okay, well, there's so many more that you can just, okay, I'll find another one if it does.
- [26:39]
Alison Potts
Great. If you feel you're getting grated on by a voice or the words are making you feel bad in some way, stop doing that meditation. Be rebellious. You're allowed to be rebellious. Be yourself. This is your inner space, right? There are no meditation police. No one's watching you on the inside. You can do anything you want in there. And I think people trust that every script is, you know, this one size fits all. A meditation that I don't like might be balm to another person. This isn't so much about the meditation itself, it's about what do you need and what do you respond to and what do you like. And you know, one thing I recommend is you don't even need to listen to a guided meditation, but you might make a playlist of the, of music that, you know, really shifts your mood in. You know, music that has playlists that might start really upbeat and then go down into relaxation. They've done some really interesting research to say that if you, if your body is stressed and your mind is stressed, which is a perfect state to decide to meditate from because it's time to de stress. A great way to help yourself unwind is make a playlist where the music at the beginning. This is an experiment done at Stanford, by the way. The music at the beginning is. Kind of echoes your mood, you know, like lots of drum and bass, I guess, or whatever, whatever it might be dramatic orchestral music, your hyped up mood, and then gradually moves from piece to piece or song to song of going into more chill, more, you know, sweeter, slower, whatever, tender music. And they found that it kind of maps the relaxation response. And also that people. Then people get, you know, the whole. They flush that stress out of their nervous system. And because their body's kind of aligning with music, we know that music is. Works very interestingly on our brains and our minds.
- [28:28]
Jeff Alex
Stepping straight into the relaxation, you're actually mirroring your current mood.
- [28:33]
Alison Potts
And then so that's the way that we biologically relax. You can't tell. Has anyone ever said to you, Jeff, you've been stressed and annoyed, and they said, just relax, take a chill pill. And you're like, does that work for anyone? You know, like, does that really work? We know it doesn't work, but that it doesn't work. Because the body, what happens when we go into a state of relaxation is imagine we've. We've been doing lots of things in the world, but we've been busy doing them. We're in the action phase. We're in sympathetic nervous system. When we slide into parasympathetic, which is the state of relaxation and healing, what we're doing is the outside is quietening down, right? And our body is beginning to feel the noise of everything that's been going on. But we haven't really had a chance to take note of. We're in this heightened state of awareness. So, for example, you know, if you ever, like relaxed for a minute and thought, oh my gosh, my neck hurts, my shoulders hurt, but you didn't notice it until you relaxed or your brain gets particularly busy or full of thoughts. And you see, that's some meditators think, this is a problem. I'm relaxing. This shouldn't be happening. But it's exactly what should be happening. It is exactly what happens in the relaxation response. While we are witnessing our background tension being flushed through our nervous system, as we begin to unwind, we feel the tension that has been going on all the time. We're just feeling it like a massage. You know, when you go for a massage and at first it's like, ouch, ouch. And then it's like, ah, the muscles release or acupuncture. I've had quite a lot of acupuncture with Ms. And when they first put the needle on, your muscles actually tense. And then there's this amazing release that feels so good, is your energy unblocks. And it's the same process that happens in meditation and relaxation, which is that we feel this kind of ouch at first. It's a bit hurty. We're having all these thoughts, maybe stressful thoughts. We're feeling the aches and pains of our body. And the advice to the meditator is don't worry about that, that things are going, things are working. And the more you can just enjoy hanging out with a good thought, enjoying your breathing, feeling into your body, feel the feelings in your body, just take a bath in them. The more you will begin to feel that massage effect, things will find their rhythm. Meditation is integrative. Our bodies are integrative. You know, that means all the little parts of us that have been separately feeling things and thinking things, they're coming together like they're on Facebook and they're all making Facebook friends and their friends are making Facebook friends. And you're kind of creating kind of in a forum like an inner democracy. Everything's catching up with each other. But this is all background processing, which we're showing up for. And we're showing up agreeing that we'll tolerate this unwinding process. And I really like that music. I think that technique's a really easy technique for people to learn and use. I mean, it might not work for you, but it's worth trying to.
- [31:27]
Jeff Alex
And I think you've given us quite a lot of tips already. But do you have any further tips for getting into a good meditation practice?
- [31:34]
Alison Potts
The first thing I would recommend is make it personal. This is about what you like. You're going into your inner life greeting yourself, and no one knows you better than you. And you know, you've journeyed with yourself since the beginning of time. So as you begin to, you know, find, explore this meditation groove that you're trying to find, think about what you really need and what you really desire, because that helps orientate you towards using meditation as a way of meeting your personal needs. So an example of that could be you need to feel some space. So your gateway into meditation might be literally taking yourself outside and being under the sky for a while and looking up at the sky and the clouds and feeling the vastness or remembering a time when you were. You felt very spacious. You were In a beautiful land. You know, the summer here, like Australia, or you were, you know, on a boat, looking out over onto the water and just feel that into your body for a while. It's very clever how we can shift into the state, the desired state, just by not just thinking about it, but feeling it, breathing with the sensations, revisiting it in our body. And then a second tip would be similarly to that, really just become acquainted with your natural, spontaneous meditation moments, you know, and they can be moments like these are these moments we have in life which are naturally meditative, where we're just suddenly drawn to something to linger with it. Sometimes just for a few seconds. Like you might be walking in a hurry down your garden path to jump in the car to pick up the kids from school or whatever. And you're a bit stressy about it, but as you go down your garden path, you get a nice strong scent of some jasmine that's growing in your garden. And for a moment you just stop and take a breath of that jasmine infused air and your body just feels, it shifts away from those stressful thoughts for a moment. Same. And it shifts you as you go forth into life. Maybe you slow down on your way to the car and so on. Same thing if you love the moon or a sunset or the ocean, or get lost in a piece of music that sends you to another world, or you know, when you're eating or drinking something that you just want to go, oh, I just want to. I want everyone to be quiet so I can just taste this last bite of cake or whatever. There's this feeling of personal intimacy. We're in our happy place, something's affected us. And those moments are spontaneous and they're meditative. And if you understand that, and you understand that during those moments, you're not blocking your thoughts, you're not worried about all these meditation instructions that some boring meditation instructor has told you to follow. You're just in the moment. If you can bring that degree of personal preference and naturalness into your more formal practices. I don't like the word formal. I usually say your more intentional practices. You know, I know I need to meditate now and use me time, that is, you know, a brilliant way of feeling into how wonderful and delightful meditation can be. In instinctive meditation, we call those meditation gateways. So you might indeed make your gateway sitting outside and looking at the stars. If you love the stars, if you love your morning cup of coffee, then it's being really devoted to enjoying, hugging the mug, letting the steam touch your face slowly Sipping that coffee, you know, it's opening our senses to what we love and allowing our bodies to do that amazing shift they do. When we do that, we can go through any gateway into meditation. Can be a bath, can be a shower, can be a memory you cherish. Think of meditation as a space where you look after yourself. You're paying attention to yourself and be really loving and warm and kind. So rather than going into the space thinking, I'm going to abandon and detach from myself, or just watch myself from a distance, or try and not think or think or feel, go into the space with this thinking. How loving and compassionate and curious can I be? The kind of space you would want to offer if a friend came to see you who just wanted to either fall apart or celebrate something with you. No, they don't want to hide their big emotions. They want you to share in them with them and hold space. It's that kind of attitude. And it's like, this isn't easy. Anything isn't easy. For some people, it's being nice to themselves when they tune into the inside. But what we're doing, Geoff, is we're cultivating skills in meditation. So if you can decide, well, for two minutes, I'm going to try and be nice to myself, you know, and then you can. Because some people have problems with that, right? They don't. They don't like what they see. And then. And then you can breathe with yourself and agree to feel and send loving thoughts, even talk to yourself out loud, say sorry. When you hear yourself beating yourself up, you can say sorry and forgive yourself a million times every time you have a thought that beats you up. No, if you can do it for two minutes next time, do it for three minutes. Next, do it for five minutes. It becomes intuitive and we find we're nicer to ourselves as we go around our lives. And I think most people with Ms. Know that. You know, if you can capture this inner nurturer and have your own back, that feeling that you're an ally to yourself, you can deal with what you have to deal with in a condition like we have, let your body have its own experience. Like, it's not a performance, there's not an outcome. If you look for an outcome, you probably won't get it. If you allow your body to go on a journey, you are going to get some lovely experiences. I mean, I. I got the privilege of hearing the inside of people's meditations. My clients tell me what's happened and what looks like drifting off and daydreaming to one person is someone else meeting their grandmother who died last year, but having a chat with them, it's remembering something they've forgotten about themselves or about life that's uplifting. It's feeling a sense of remembering that, you know, they're loved or that life is lovable. You know, when we drift and dream, we get these good intuitions, don't we, that are truthful and helpful. And so I say, go on the journey. When I guide people in meditation, I always say at the beginning, you know, don't attach to my words. But it's nice to help people. It's nice to give people a bit of progressive relaxation. It's nice to offer people some invitations of things to try. Invite people into their breath and their body. But once you're there, then I go, at some point, I go, you won't hear my voice again until the end. And it's time to transition. Have your own private journey. And that really does mean see what happens. And don't worry about big feelings coming through, passionate feelings. We should enjoy those and let them. There are circulation inside of us, and repressing them is not helpful. Not helpful to us psychologically or physically. It's perfect.
- [38:23]
Jeff Alex
So you don't necessarily. I think a lot of meditation, they're saying, if thoughts come up, you need to put them to one side. Or you feel that there's something wrong with having feelings and thoughts while you're meditating, but you're saying that's not. That's not always the case.
- [38:38]
Alison Potts
I mean, that brain shaming, that brain shaming. You would never say to someone in a yoga class, you know, your thighs are really fat. You know, why? How dare you come to class with that saggy belly? But we put out these instructions, or I don't personally, but people do, saying, you know, bad mind, naughty mind, thinking mind, drifting mind, monkey mind. And it's like you're. If you want to make people artificially suffer in meditation, tell them not to have thoughts. Because it is natural for us to have thoughts. We have billions of. How many billions of neurons do we have? Trillions, probably in our brains. And we want to have them. And it's, you know, our minds are magnificent things, but the other thing is they have things that they want to tell us. And because we're often so busy or we're beating ourselves up or, you know, we're often sort of saying, go away thoughts. Go away thoughts, you know, or your bad thoughts anyway, we don't want to bring that into. Into this space. Of healing. And so the main attitude to have in meditation is welcome, welcome all your energies, what they are all a circulation of life force energy inside you. Your thoughts are not bad things. They don't need to be swatted away like flies. They don't need to be squashed. But you know, and you can drift away and drifting away is a sign you're going deeper. So really, I mean a simple way of thinking about it, if you start to get those thoughts, ideas, when thoughts come into your head, that something's gone wrong is to A, recognize this is a healthy part of meditation and B, to also say, look, I'm not a monk, I can think, I can think if I want to. You know, my practice is not to abandon myself in meditation. And what we find is as soon as people realize it's okay to think, they get very relaxed about thinking. And then you get that lovely kind of headspace where your, your thoughts aren't really, they're not bothering you, they're giving you some information and you're engaging with them in a way that's friendly and helpful, you know, which, you know, our self talk is sometimes not aware of how we're not very nice to ourselves in the way we think about ourselves or talk to ourselves. We get aware of that in meditation and we can literally engage. We can talk to ourselves in meditation and send love to those. Those places are just wounded places. You know, for some reason something happened to us or someone says something to us and it set up these ways in which we fight ourselves internally. It's a great place to make peace with ourselves. You know, there's some lovely forgiveness meditations, there are some lovely loving kindness meditations. There are apps like Insight Timer where you can literally look up under what you need and find a meditation. If you want a guided meditation to help you with that thing where you can meditate on your own and you know, do a wonderful job without with your music or you know, your cat purring on your lap or what makes you feel comfortable and good and able to go into your inner space.
- [41:28]
Jeff Alex
And could you just to wrap up, is there any final words of wisdom for our listeners?
- [41:37]
Alison Potts
I would like to just speak from my personal experience really to say that I know that a lot of people think of meditation as either something that's hard or a bit of a luxury item or something that some people can do and some people can't. And I just hope that you will consider it something you already do in your life. You know, you have these moments and your mind body knows what to do. And it's really about choosing ways in which you want to give yourself space to be with your body and your breath and your feelings and get excited about exploring that. And you don't have to, you know, at first, you don't have to spend a particular amount of time on it. Really, when you're starting any practice, you want to remain in love with it. So give yourself the amount of time that feels right for you. Don't force yourself to stay. You've got all the time in the world, and the more that you find you love doing it, the more you want to do it, and you'll just find that you naturally want to spend more time doing it more often.
- [42:35]
Jeff Alex
Thank you and thank you very much, Alison for joining us on the Living well with Ms. Podcast.
- [42:40]
Alison Potts
Thanks so much and thanks for all you do and good luck everyone.
- [42:45]
Regina Beach
Thank you for listening to this episode of Living well with Ms. Please check out this episode's show notes@overcomingms.org podcast. You'll find useful links and bonus information there. Don't forget to subscribe to the podcast so you never miss an episode. And please rate and review the show to help others find us. This show is made possible by the Overcoming Ms. Community. Our theme music is by Claire and Navdine. Our host is Jeff Alex. Our videos are edited by Lorna Greenwood and I'm the producer, Regina Beach. Have questions or ideas to share? Email us@podcastvercomingms.org we'd love to hear from you. The Living well with Ms. Podcast is for private, non commercial use and exists to educate and inspire our community of listeners. We do not offer medical advice. For medical advice, please contact your doctor or other licensed healthcare professional.