Nevermindfulness Transcript

Rhea: Is mindfulness the same thing as meditation?

Liz: No. Meditation is a beautiful way to get in to your other bodies.

Rhea: When you say ‘other bodies’, you mean spiritual, emotional . . .

Liz: Physical

Rhea: Physical. Okay. Go on

Liz: But ideally, meditation would never remain just in the mind. You can begin there but it doesn’t end there. If it stays there, then it’s not meditation. That’s just you sitting in the loop of your own thoughts.

Rhea: You start meditating and your body relaxes and you calm down, so you notice differences in your physical and emotional being

Liz: Right

Rhea: That’s what meditation is, so mindfulness is just constantly being aware of what you are thinking.

Liz: Yes, and that drives me bananas because I think we are in our thoughts all the time, so when we are telling people mindfulness is the key. It’s the key to what exactly? I find that it’s really the key to a kind of insanity that we don’t need.

Rhea: Well, I’m a perennial overthinker. I can’t help it.

Liz: Well, you can help it if you want to help it, right?

Rhea: Yes

Liz: But you are quite the overthinker, or you used to be more so than you are now, I would say

Rhea: Really? I feel like I’m still. Now I just notice that when . . .

Liz: You are spiralling?

Rhea: When I’m spiralling, I tend to just shut it down

Liz: You shut it down

Rhea: But I still can’t help it. I still overthink a lot. That’s definitely something that is detrimental to me because we have been talking a lot in these podcasts about the story that you create for yourself and your perception of the world. I can take whatever information I have observed and mold it to tell me what I want to know

Liz: Yes

Rhea: So it’s actually very subjective

Liz: Highly

Rhea: But it’s sold as an objective thing 

Liz: Very much so, and that’s quite the problem is that the mental body has undergone, it’s pretty much damaged by the way we live our lives, and so with mindfulness, what you are doing is you’re understanding of your state of being which is informed by your limited experiences.

Rhea: You can’t help but see the world through the mind, the way in which the mind wants to see it, and the mind wants to see it in the framework of the stories you have been telling yourself.

Liz: Exactly.

Rhea: So all you are doing is perpetuating a cycle rather than doing what you think you are doing, which is giving yourself peace.

Liz: Precisely, and what happens often in that filter is we tend to apply some of the old scripts like what you were doing the other night, when you were texting me.

Rhea: I know. It’s not how I think now, but it’s all that I keep thinking about. 

Liz: The feelings that I am having are bringing this up, and for some reason, my mind I is just going and going and going.

Rhea: So I did what is my new coping mechanism, which is externalize it so instead of being mindful and just watching it in my head get bigger and bigger and bigger and more and more paralyzing, I literally start shaping my reality differently to what it could be. I now externalize it, so speak to a friend, ‘this is how I’m feeling’. Let’s stop it here, rather than letting it get to the point where I’m cancelling my plans or I’m feeling insecure or I’m feeling shit. Like let’s deal with it sooner. Let’s get it off my chest sooner.

Liz: Like engaging some kind of sabotaging behaviour. It’s interesting, because I think for a while, mindfulness . . . it is a great concept.

Rhea: And being in the present is fantastic. It’s just may be the application is not quite right.

Liz: Exactly, because I think that most people aren’t there. They’re not necessarily ready for detachment. They are not necessarily ready to grasp emotions where they can sort of see it as a witness, as opposed to being in the throes of it. I think we’ve gone too long denying our emotional states that mindfulness can often just be used as a coping mechanism or a default mode to say, ‘oh, but I don’t have to. I’m fully aware of what this means.’

Rhea: What you are saying is mindfulness in its true application is about acknowledging the emotion that you are feeling. If you have fear of your emotions, you are not going to be able to be mindful. Often we’re so scared of feeling the negative emotions that we don’t want to be present in those emotions. We prefer to push them down.

Liz: And I would even say emotions aren’t necessarily negative. It’s not about sort of saying, ‘I’m okay with feeling this narrow set of emotions, and not this other large set of emotions that I prefer to ignore.’ We’ve gone so long ignoring them, I can just rationalize I am just being triggered right now, so I am just going to be aware that I am being triggered, but not allow myself to feel that.

Rhea: And what’s funny about emotions is that they are the fastest way to knowing how you really feel

Liz: And what the truth is below that emotion. What is either the core fear or what is the block? It’s amazing what you can really do and accomplish if you are willing to get out of your mind and sit with those feelings.

Rhea: That’s why we’re calling it nevermindfulness. It’s not about thinking in the present

Liz: No

Rhea: It’s about feeling in the present

Liz: Yes, exactly.

Rhea: And those are two very different things

Liz: And being in the present

Rhea: Because one is going to make you continue going round in circles and circles. It’s going to keep you in behavioural patterns. Emotions don’t have those stories attached to them. They are just emotions.

Liz: They are 

Rhea: They are just experiences. That’s the freeing part of it, and I’m sure in the beginning when people talked about being in the present, that’s what they meant, but the problem is like a lot of things our fear of being vulnerable, of being open or experiencing things we don’t necessarily like has pushed the definition into something that’s controllable.

Liz: Very much, because we want that. We want that, especially in today’s society, we want the shortcuts because we don’t want to have to sit with it. It takes time. We’d rather be doing other things and it is so incredibly uncomfortable, and what we don’t get is that the emotion is really not as painful if you’ve been doing the work. The sooner you can get to that, the sooner you can be in a state of being where, ‘Oh. That doesn’t feel good.’ An hour later, I’m feeling better. 

Rhea: I am the queen of not wanting to be uncomfortable. Everything has to be pleasurable, sensual, on my terms. For so long, it was obviously holding me back because one of the biggest things was I didn’t want to feel any negative emotions because that was another way of being uncomfortable. My fear was always what happens if I get so low, I can’t get up, and then I remember I read that emotions are like waves, and actually if you sit with an emotion, actually sit with it, what you will notice is that it will just slowly dissolve, and then the ego will kick in and try to make you hold on to the fear of that emotion, because it wants to keep you safe, but if you manage to get through that bit, it just goes away.

Liz: And the story ends. Whatever the story that was written in order to support that fear or emotion then also has to end, and so you find that you get to move out of that pattern, out of that state of being.

Rhea: I used to believe that everything that was good would always just end up turning to shit, so there was an expiry date on everything, whatever what it was. So what would happen was I would be scared to feel any joy, excitement, trust because the minute I felt these things, I knew that I would somehow be betrayed, and that was the story I told myself because of bullshit incidents that had happened in the past that happened to fit that pattern. Whether or not that pattern was going to keep repeating, I made it repeat because I was convinced that it was going to. I was just as scared of feeling the joy as I was scared of feeling the disappointment. Once I became aware of that pattern, following mindfulness, I promised myself just to sit in the present and enjoy the joy.

Liz: Emotional Hack 101

Rhea: Don’t worry about the future. Sit in the joy. Ignore the fact that you have this undercurrent of dread

Liz: Push it down. Push it down.

Rhea: Push it down, push it down, push it down, but what I should have actually done was stop for a moment and sit in both of these emotions, because by not doing that, what ended up happening was it did become a self-fulfilling prophesy of the dread existing got louder and louder and louder, until disappointment followed, and I didn’t have a choice when it all fell apart that time, time to sit down and say, ‘what the fuck is going on?’ This was clearly the biggest pattern of all—avoiding being uncomfortable in these negative emotions, and so I did the opposite and if people listened to the Go Dark episode, they will hear about it in more detail, but I really sat in those emotions.

Liz: Yes, you did

Rhea: And allowed myself to figure out why I felt that way. That was the first chance I had given myself to break out of that pattern.

Liz: You were still not trying to figure it out mentally

Rhea: No

Liz: Not at all

Rhea: I tried to, initially

Liz: Yes, you did

Rhea: And for a very long time, I said, is it this? Is it this? And what happened was when I was trying to do it that way, I got exhausted because my mind just was on overdrive like a hamster wheel, going through it and it was making me more and more miserable, and once I sat in it, it was a horror show but it didn’t last very long. If you are using mindfulness to bypass the truth, you are literally going to drive yourself insane.

Liz: Which most people do.

Rhea: Just as a tip I read somewhere when I was really scared of all this stuff is that you don’t have to say I am angry or I am sad, you can just say a part of me feels angry or a part of me feels sad, and that allows you the objectivity that you can still allow those feelings without necessarily feeling like you have to embody them in the same way, because it allowed me to have two or three emotions happening at the same time, because it’s normal. Let’s say you go on a good date with someone, you can be really happy but you can also be a bit scared, or you can also be a bit nervous. Saying I am this, you are also minimizing all the other emotions that are also happening at the same time

Liz: And it’s so often because we don’t have a vocabulary. We are sort of 5-year olds with that emotional vocabulary, aren’t we?

Rhea: We basically communicate with emojis. I actually think emojis have more emotions than we do

Liz: They do

Rhea: That’s why people say they feel a mix of emotions is that you can say a part of me feels this, and a part of me feels that. It allows you to see the truth of what’s going on in that moment. I was allowing it, not surrendering to it

Liz: So often that is what creates anxiety. Anxiety was not really in peoples’ vocabulary when I was growing up and now everybody’s anxious, and it’s because they’re so overwhelmed with emotions that they can’t handle it, so they just tend to push it away. But the more they push it away, the more anxious they become. It doesn’t work to suppress or deny your emotions any more. I find that majority of people what they are mostly doing is convincing themselves to stay in the relationship, as opposed to trying to work on it, and that could be with a partner or somebody or with a job. It doesn’t matter. The fact of the matter is that we have just burned out our minds in order to support our stories and our lives 

Rhea: And mindfulness allows you to do that

Liz: It does

Rhea: Because it’s telling you to live in the moment, don’t think about anything and be that kind of impartial observer that’s just allowing things to happen. You are aware of your triggers. You are aware of what bothers you, so just accept them.

Liz: Yes

Rhea: This whole series that we have been doing has been about allowing people to come into their own power, and a lot of our power comes from our emotion. Allowing mindfulness to numb your emotions, it’s another way of losing your power. You are numbing the way in which you can see your truth

Liz: Which means that knowing yourself . . .

Rhea: . . . and numbing the way you can connect to other people, as well as connect to yourself. That is all through emotions. Yes, now I know this used to trigger me and yes, I still feel all these things sometimes and I still have to sit with them . . . again and again, and I deal with it, talk about it and all the rest of it, but when these things recur, they tend to burn through much quicker

Liz: They do. So separation informs our 3-D reality.

Rhea: What does “separation” mean?

Liz: It means . . . well, it’s part of our free will existence, and so in our ability to judge, we determine things are good or bad. It’s polarity. Because the mind has been able to develop a way to live in separation, and that’s how we judge from our minds and we are critical thinkers, what’s happened is that when it comes to our emotions, when it comes to living in this world which is just changing rapidly, our minds can’t manage it because our minds just really want to hold on to the separation, so that’s why we have exhausted it and that’s why if we are really looking to heal ourselves, if we are looking to expand in our consciousness, our minds can’t get us there. They won’t get us there. It is not the solution. 

Rhea: Because it can only see things in black and white

Liz: Precisely

Rhea: And it can’t feel. It can only put reasons onto feelings.

Liz: Exactly

Rhea: So really you have got to go through the heart 

Liz: Absolutely

Rhea: And when we say “heart’, what we mean is you have got to feel your way through it 

Liz: So that’s why I think it’s about replacing mindfulness with heartfulness

Rhea: Allowing yourself to look at something as it is, which is the concept of mindfulness but in order to look at something as it really is, you also have to acknowledge how that makes you feel

Liz: Yes

Rhea: Give yourself the space for that to be okay

Liz: Exactly

Rhea: Because I think that’s the thing you were saying about judging the mind. Definitely in my experience, when I would feel something, I would always feel like I wasn’t allowed to feel that way 

Liz: Oh no! We are so quick to judge our own emotions

Rhea: So again I was bypassing my truth because there could have been a really good reason why I was feeling that way, and it might not have been one that I needed to share with anyone, but it was telling me something. I spent so many of my years trying to find peace by numbing my emotions.

Liz: Yes

Rhea: I didn’t do it through alcohol or drugs or addictive behaviours. I was actually stone cold sober the whole time. I numbed in a different way. I numbed it by switching off. It was under the guise of mindfulness. I am just observing. I am being in the present. It’s called the present because it’s a gift. The problem is with that message, even if it has merit in it and there is a lot of merit in it, if someone’s heart isn’t open at all, they are processing that message through their mind

Liz: Oh, the irony

Rhea: Which means that they are perpetuating the cycle that they have always done, which is try and control the present. 

Liz: Which means then I think that the entire concept has lost merit. I just want to encourage people to really consider that there are other paths to healing, and often mindfulness is a go-to because it’s considered safer and I can honestly say that because as somebody who has been in this field for 15 years, even I cheated. We all cheat at some point . . . early on, I promise

Rhea: Was yesterday for me, so . . .

Liz: No, we are often struggling with it so even if you consider yourself spiritual and you do all the things you think you are supposed to be doing to make you spiritual and whole and peaceful and have this great relationship to your version of a God or whatever, are you really, if you are not there in your emotional body.

Rhea: Are you numbing your emotions, or are you feeling them? Are you manipulating mindfulness, or are you being nevermindfulness a.k.a. heartful?

Liz: I think we just need to be heartful.