Speaker (an integrative physician with 20+ years' experience) presents a guide to improving life quality by combining mindfulness with knowledge—'informed mindfulness'—and practicing intentionality across three domains: intentional thinking, intentional acting, and intentional connection. The talk emphasizes being present, aligning thoughts and actions with facts and values, and cultivating connections to self, others, and nature to reduce needless suffering and live according to one’s values.
I mean, as someone who's been an integrative physician for the last 20 plus years, I've obviously been exposed to this concept of mindfulness, the ability to be present in the moment. And we can think of mindfulness as just the ability to be present, be here, not my mind wandering to the past or wandering to the future, but being present in this moment and how important that can be in helping us to connect with people, to live our best lives. At least for me, often just being present alone wasn't enough to necessarily get me the outcomes that I wanted. And so, along with some colleagues, began to develop this concept of what's called informed mindfulness. You need to be present in the moment, but you also need the knowledge so that while you're present, you can make choices, right, that facilitate different kinds of outcomes for you. I began to think more about this and again, talk to friends and colleagues and kind of morph the thinking to. To this idea of intentionality. What am I really trying to do? What do I really want? What is this again? A lot of people like to talk about what is my why? What am I motivated by? What feels purposeful and meaningful for me as it relates to living my best life? You could break it down into this concept of being intentional with at least three main things. Intentional thinking, intentional acting, and then really intentional connection. We create needless suffering for ourselves when we don't sort of think with intention, when we allow our mind to sort of wander and tell ourselves lies about ourselves, about others in our lives, about a potential future that we're envisioning, and all the disasters and terrible things that could happen to us, or maybe things that happened in the past, and interpreting and putting a new meaning to them. So one of the keys in living a life that feels fulfilling and lessening, that suffering, right, is being present and. And actually being able to say, am I thinking with intention here? Is my thinking consistent with what I know to be true with the facts? Is my thinking consistent with my values and my beliefs on a deeper level that relate to sort of this vision that I have for myself and who I want to be in this world and how I want to show up in this world? Of course, that thinking often then also needs to translate into how do I act, right? And if I stop in that moment, how am I acting? And is that acting in a way that has intentions such that it is, again, consistent with who I am, who I want to be, and how I want to show up in this world? An example of that. The way that I speak to others, right? Do I lose my temper and lash out? And if I do, is that really intentional? Maybe there's times where it was. Maybe it was my intention to lash out. And so I'm not creating judgment or passing judgment around what those actions should or should not be. But the question is, is that action intentional? And then the third thing that really came up was this idea of connection and intentionally connecting. The reason that's so important is that we need to be able to connect to ourselves to be able to understand what's truly important for us. We really need connection to others and connection to nature and our environment as a way to sort of complete and round off an approach to living our best lives. And when we lose those connections or when we're not connecting in an intentional way, a piece of the puzzle is missing for living our best and living a life consistent with our values. Right, Because a value is what. It's really just a direction we want to take in our life that comes from what we believe is important and purposeful to us. And so we need to be able to think, we need to be able to act. We need to be able to connect with intention. And that stems from an ability to be present in the moment, be awake, be aware.
