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Success Story with Scott D. Clary
Lessons - What 6 Months of Silent Meditation Taught Me About Anxiety | Cory Muscara - Former Monk
00:13:41
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- [00:00]
A
In this lessons episode, discover why humans are wired to think about the future and how this instinct can create both opportunity and anxiety. Learn how to distinguish ambitions driven by fear from those rooted in joy. Explore practical ways to align decisions with presence rather than pain. And understand why mindfulness and awareness are key to building a life grounded in wholeness instead of wounds. I don't know if that's a correct assumption. You can tell me. Do you feel like this is a. The stress of what's to come is a modern invention? Or are humans sort of genetically or historically coded to always worry about what's to come? And whenever we try and focus on the present, we're actually pushing back against the way that we were built?
- [00:53]
B
Well, there's a very strong scientific argument, evolutionary argument, that our orientation is to focus more on the future. The psychologist Dr. Martin Seligman, he wrote a book called Homo Prospectus, which is making the argument that at our core, we are future thinking beings. Our unique capacity is to imagine a future that hasn't yet happened and then organize resources to help bring that future to reality. No other animals that we're aware of, and maybe this has changed in recent years, our understanding, but, like, have that same capacity to do that, to imagine a future that doesn't exist and then create it. So I would argue that at our core, that is more a capacity than to just be present. We can also talk about in a bit how they're not necessarily contradictory, because anything, anything. The future doesn't exist in the future, and the past doesn't exist in the past. They just exist. They're all arising in the present moment. And so where so many people get stuck with meditation and mindfulness is they. They think they shouldn't have these thoughts about the future in the past. And then they end up judging themselves for having those thoughts and then judging themselves or judging themselves. And they're just like, I suck at meditation. Why did I even try? So the big thing is, like, make space for all of. But when. Like, when I, as someone engaged in this work, like, I have to have future thoughts all the time. I have a kid now, and we had to, like, plan for his future. We have to save money. And I have a teaching business as well, so I'm planning things. The question always for me is, like, it's the thought about the future that's pulling me into the future. Is it coming from a place of fear, anxiety, trying to get safety and control, or is it coming from a place in me that is more free and spacious and I'm often tracking, like, the. The decisions that I make that inform especially big things that I do with my life. I really don't want them to have the resonance of being a decision. I almost want them to have the resonance of being a receiving. As if I'm just like, relaxing into myself in the deepest, most spacious place in myself and then see, like, what arises from that place when I'm not acting out of fear, anxiety and worry of like, am I going to be okay? And many people think that when they do that if I just meditate and I let go of everything related to the future in the past, that I'm just going to devolve into a puddle of nothingness and I'm not going to get anything done. That's not true. Like, you're you. There's energy that moves through you. And even the most awakened enlightened state, right, that has to express itself through your body and through your mind. It just expresses itself differently than the energy of what do I have to do to get safety, praise, love and connection. And so the exploration of what it means to build a life from presence and even like, from the resonance of wholeness and happiness rather than emptiness, pain and desperation, is really the exploration of how do I rest in that most spacious, aware place in myself and then listen for what wants to come through and then use the resource of me, my human capacity and agency, to help usher that into existence. So that's a way that we. We blend this work of presence and mindfulness with our capacity to create a beautiful life. But we want to create that life on the foundation of the place in us that is already whole, rather than the place in us that feels empty. And. And if we do the latter, this is where you get people who build businesses to try to get a sense of worth and praise because they have a wound that their dad didn't love them or their mom didn't love them unless they worked super hard. So they're constantly just playing out that pattern. And then you build an entire empire that's on the foundation of pain and not actually coming from the truth of you or a place in you that really gives you joy. It's just helping to protect you from having to feel the trigger of that discomfort and not of not feeling good enough. So, yes, well, the first response, the original question is like, no, I think our actual state is to be future thinking. Are we more. Do we have more hooks to get caught in that future thinking now in a negative way? Yes. The psychologist Alberto Alberto Vallo says we experience More stimulation in one week than our ancestors experienced in their entire lives. Which is not too hard to think about even just like in the context of what I'm looking at right now. I have a screen, I have a ring, light your sounds in the background. Like most things around me are artificially built versus like being in the forest. So instead of having like one lion that you're contending with every couple of weeks, like it's just constantly coming at you. And there's so many things for the mind to get hooked on to addict, to get addicted to. And that I think creates a lot of noise that makes it difficult to parse, like what are the thoughts that are actually gonna, that are future related, that are coming from a place of presence and rootedness and my inherent wholeness. And which ones are just coming from my mind, attaching to things that it's scared of or, or craving in my environment. And I'm building my life from there.
- [06:34]
A
My question really is when we look into the future and say we're ambitious and we want to build a company, we want to be an entrepreneur, we want to, I don't know, think about all the things people get excited about. They want to be in better shape, they want to be in a great relationship, they want to get a promotion at work, is there a way to tell if those things are being driven from a place of fear or true happiness and excitement? Because that to me would be the. And maybe you have to do the work. Maybe you have to look inside and be more mindful and to meditate, to truly know. But I think that people that are bought into met, bought into meditation already. And I say that meaning that some.
- [07:22]
C
People don't do it.
- [07:23]
A
Just to be very candid, some people don't do it. Is there a signal they should look for when they think about how they operate through their day? That should be a sign, hey, I'm not doing this. I'm not doing this trauma free. I'm doing this from a place of hurt or a wound or something that I don't quite understand. And that is a great signal for me to maybe look inside, be, you know, alone with my thoughts a little bit more. Is there something that people can sort of tap into that helps them understand why they're doing the things you're doing and if it's in a positive way or a negative way, if that makes sense.
- [08:01]
B
Yeah. I'll give you a few things. The first is you can ask yourself the question, what comes up for me when I think about not doing this if it is a motivation coming from a wound, you will probably notice a lot of fear arise in your system and it will be loud and anxious and buzzing. It will almost have like a. The resonance of survival in it. Like, no, you need to do this. That is typically what could be referred to as a protective part of you that developed a belief, emotionality, and behavior around who you need to be and what you need to do in order to get certain needs met. And so when you confront that part with the question, well, what if we just didn't do that? It will usually come online in a loud way and convince you why you need to. And it will. It has very clever ways for doing that. But the thing you want to track is, does it bring a lot of noise? Is it really trying to convince me? Does it make me feel very scared if I weren't to do this? That is one in general telltale way to know that this is coming from something that is guarding a lot of pain. Another thing you can start to do just to get a sense of, like, what is the resonance of things and motivations that arise from the place in me that is grounded, happy, excited, inspired versus a place in me that's scared, in control, fearful, is to just track throughout the day the moments where you feel most grounded, most present, most connected and most loved. Maybe it's a walk in nature. Maybe it's when you're with your partner. Maybe it's like a few. Few moments, like while you're in the bathroom at work and nobody needs anything from you and you're just like, you don't have the fear in your system that's coming online that's constantly gripping and telling you what to do. When that subs, you just pay attention to how does my system orient in those moments? What do I think about? What do I desire? Where does my energy want to go? And then throughout the day, track, what are the moments when I'm most stressful, where I feel the most amount of fear? What does my system orient to in those moments? What does it think about? What does it feel? What behaviors tend to come online as a pattern? And you'll start to see typically that there's a difference there. And in my most relaxed state, it's just like, oh, I feel more possibility. Like, I feel a draw to start that business. In my more fearful state, I feel like, no, I really just have to stay in this job. Or like your patterns of control come online in a big way and it feels very compelling and convincing. In the early stages of deciphering, this, you're just trying to sense that there is a difference there. Because most of it, when we're living on autopilot, it just feels like noise. A thought is a thought as a thought. There's not a thought coming from wisdom, there's not a thought coming from fear. It's just noise in the system. A lot of different emotions. Sometimes they're happy, sometimes they're not, and same with sensation in our body. So this is a way that you can start to break down the category of like, oh yeah, when my system is relaxed, when I do feel good, this is what wants to come through. And when I'm helping people try to figure this out. Or what it means to, like, build a life that is not only an extension of your wholeness, but also allows you to live in a space that reinforces you being in that place.
- [11:52]
C
Thanks for tuning in. If you found this valuable, don't forget to hit that subscribe button so you never miss an episode. And if you want to dive deeper into this conversation, check out the links in the description to watch the full episode. See you in the next one.
- [12:05]
A
Sam.