Focusing on the Present and Near Future - Episode 16

Awareness That Heals, Episode 16.

We all have the capacity to focus on the next minute or two. It's just not something that we've been trained to do.

The Awareness That Heals podcast helps its listeners learn to develop the capacity to have a more healing response to emotions and situations rather than becoming stuck. Your host, Robert J. Strock, has practiced psychotherapy for more than 45 years. He wrote the book, Awareness That Heals: Bringing Heart and Wisdom to Life's Challenges, to help develop self-caring and the capacity to respond in an effective way to life's challenges, especially at times when we are most prone to be critical or to withdraw. Together, we will explore how to become aware of our challenging feelings and at the same time, to find alternative ways to live a more fulfilling and inspiring life.

Thanks again for tuning in today, and I hope Friendly Mind is really getting your attention as we're going through the depths of it. And today we're going to finish the final touches. Again, joining us are two of my dearest friends, Dave and Shelley. Dave is co-president of the Global Bridge Foundation, and Shelley is a board member and therapist, and Mark is our engineer. And as he has the last few episodes, he's going to be invited into the conversation about Friendly Mind because he's just somebody that has been practicing it for quite a while and has a depth understanding and experience of himself emotionally to where it helps catalyze a deeper experience of the benefits of friendly mind. So we just covered the importance of really not focusing on the impossible and how common it is when we have a malady or an issue or an emotion that we don't like, that's very difficult for us, to kind of get grandiose and, how do I solve this? And then our mind goes to the other extreme, which isn't very useful and helpful. And friendly mind beckons us as our friend to deal not with the impossible, but really to focus on the sixth and final step. Implied by the fifth, which is to focus on the possible. And what that really means as a starting point, as always, is what are the most challenging emotions in your life, situations in your life, where if you really honor those as being potential pregnancies or potentially being able to be supported, it would be the good news more than the bad news. Because we see that if we're challenged and we keep them underground, they're going to fester in our unconscious and make our life a lot more difficult. And Friendly Mind is a vehicle that can allow us to feel safer, to bring the challenging situations and emotions in our life above ground, because we are gaining resources and we can build the trust that when we bring it into our awareness, we have tools, we have strategies to be able to guide ourselves in directions that are going to improve the quality of our life. So like we talked about in the last episode with the stroke, the anxiety, spinal surgery, the dumping tendency emotionally, or the suppression tendency If we focus on the possible, then literally in some cases the next step or the next word or the next slight guidance or the next question or the contemplation of the question of how do I become balanced becomes the next step. And when we're zoomed into And it really is like we're zoomed into the very near future or the very moment. It could be how are we breathing, how are we thinking, what do we want to do the next minute. When we're really focused on that existentially practical step, we can't help but feel a much greater sense of hope because that's possible. We all have the capacity to focus on the next minute or two. It's just not something that we've been trained to do. We like bigger solutions. We like bigger plans. We want to have it be finished. But in the real world, we really learn that the small steps with stability is like the tortoise and the hare. It's like the, the one that takes it slow steps at a time wins the race. And we really want to be that being that can slow our life down into baby steps, which paradoxically are grown-up steps. So as I'm saying this, look for your number 1 and 2 where you have a challenge and you have a tendency to focus on the impossible, but you want to challenge yourself because you care for yourself, you care for your quality of life. What's my number 1 and 2 steps that I would be taking if I was to care for myself? And if you come up with nothing, don't let that be the final answer. Let that be the catalyst for another question of, okay, I can hear that you haven't come up with anything yet, but you know you're human. So we all have areas where we're not completely blissed out. So even if we're spiritual, even if we're, you know, in the best of life circumstances, we're still going to have something to identify with. And as you do, identify what your standard operating procedure is for coming up with impossible situations. And as we visited a little bit in the last episode, it may be to do with money, or your appearance, or your sex life, or how popular you are, or how many friends you have, or your family relationships. And all of those might be ones that seem impossible. But if you break it down to a baby step— well, what can I do? And of course, sometimes the answer might be do nothing. But what can I do or undo? How can I be to optimize this situation in my life? Now, as you hear this, notice how you feel. Does this lead you to an uplifting feeling? Does this leave you flat? Does this depress you? Does this feel like you're being invited to a birth or a death? And hopefully, if you really hear the message, you're being invited to your own wisdom that can identify what's challenging for you with, with a real optimism, because we're not going to ask you to go through a grinder to solve something you can't solve. We're gonna, we're gonna encourage you, and the we is really Friendly Mind, to inquire as to how you can take step 1 and 2 to improve your quality of life. Now, one of the most common areas where this is almost omnipresent for probably 90% of us, maybe 95% of us, is in relationships. Where, especially our relationships with our partners, where, gee, I want our partner to be prettier, smarter, more sexual, less sexual, more intelligent, more ambitious, less ambitious, and see the tendency on a day-to-day basis that that will go through you. And as we focus on that, if we really pay attention, it bums us out because we're focusing on the impossible. And we want to bring ourselves back with friendly mind to focus on, A, what is it that's bumming me out? And B, what could I realistically do if I was willing to lower my grandiose standards and start to focus on the next moment? So a very simple example of that might be, gee, I want my wife to be more affectionate. And instead of waiting for your wife, you just— next time you walk up, you just get the edges of your fingers and just, you just hold her hand for a little bit and say, 'Hi, sweetheart.' Now she might look at you and go, 'What the hell? What are you doing? No, you've never done that to me before.' So you might want to be on the chessboard and have a second move ready and say, you know, I was thinking about it and realize I haven't been as warm to you as I'd like to be. And so is that okay with you if I express a little bit of affection that way?

Uh, this is Mark here. I'm a little reluctant to share this, but you, you hit it right on, right on there. Bullseye, Robert, with what you just said. The other day my wife was looking in the mirror and I was behind her and she was looking at me and she's going, look, my arms, they're just, they're fat. How can I get my arms to be skinny? They're just fat. And I thought to myself, oh man, well, what do I say to that? And then friendly mind, I swear it was friendly mind, comes in and gives me this sentence. And I said, yeah, but I still really want to fuck you. And I have never said anything like that in my life. And I will tell you, it worked. It really worked. I swear to you, I've never said anything like that. Changed my relationship.

I love it. I love it. I love it. Well, that's, that's what you might call a home run. And that's going, that's the rare moment where you had a radical intuition. And obviously, there are some women where I'm not going to use that as a general strategy for everyone, because some men might get slapped. But you tuned in and you were aware of what your wife needed to hear. And what's beautiful about your example is it used intuition. You knew your wife, she wanted to feel desirable by you, and you gave her in spades.

It was a really good moment.

I, I have a feeling it was more than a moment.

It was.

It's—

I want to It was truly a friendly mind moment, I guarantee you.

Yes.

I've never said that.

Followed by a reward.

Yes.

For both of you. You're blushing, Mark.

I am.

And there are many people who might have that same situation. And it might have to be a touch on the shoulder. It might be a conversation. You know, saying, I'm aware of feeling this way, wondering if you feel that way. The thing about friendly mind is there's no pat answer. Everybody's circumstances are unique. So my way of interacting with people is to continuously ask them questions. It reminds me of my early I won't call them exploits, but let's say my early experimentations with being sexual in my 20s. And at that age, I was aware, you know, watching movies, and everybody knows exactly what to do. And, and that, you know, no words have to be exchanged. It's not like, I like it slow, or I like it fast, or please touch me here, please touch me there. But it was like, I just naturally said to the woman, I said, You got to give me some hints. You know, I'm young, I'm somewhat clueless, and from what I gather, every woman, I think, is a little bit different. So somehow, friendly mind needs to honor not only the uniqueness of you, but the uniqueness of anyone else that you'd be talking to. And trying to tune into, well, knowing her or knowing him, what's friendly mind suggesting to me? And after a while, it really does become— if you're not feeling terrible and you're just feeling kind of bummed a little bit, friendly mind becomes like good music, the kind of music you like where you just, you, you get you get a sense of being in gear, or you get a sense of being in a flow, because you know you're asking the question that matters, because you're trying to do something with your life in the very near future, in the present, that's, that's very doable. You're not stabbing yourself with impossible standards. You're gracing yourself with invitations to ask, what's possible? And when we ask that question, it's like inviting ourselves to be ourselves, our best selves, our best realistic selves. And we clearly don't know the answer. And as I alluded to a few minutes ago, not knowing the answer actually means it's a great question, not you're screwed up because you don't know the answer. So the more questions we can ask where we don't know the answer, we know we're on the right track, and it means it's worthy of as long as it takes. If I don't know how to make my next move, I'd like to know how to make my next move. So I'm going to keep asking. So the more we can, the more you can find the feelings that are challenging and ask for the next steps. And again, it's twofold. One of them is, how do I take care of the feeling? And the other one is, is there a response that I need to make that's going to help me with the feeling? That's not going to hurt anybody else unnecessarily. As I even say that, I can feel a certain peace recognizing that whenever I'm there, I feel like I'm alive. I feel like I have potential. I feel like nothing is hopeless because I'm not going far enough out to make it hopeless. I might feel a little bit hopeless because I haven't found the answer, but I have a sense because there's not a demand in it that I'll come up with something. I could at least say, breathe gently, or as gently as you can. And then when you fail at breathing gently, you say, okay, I know that was hard. Yeah, give it another try. That's about as, let's say, preliminary and frequent that a lot of us need to do is to just take a breath that is going to be a slightly more sensitive breath to ourselves. That's possible. May not even be probable because a lot of people can't breathe below their Adam's apple, but maybe I can get down to the bottom of my atom dump. And you can hear this as being almost like a cop-out, like, well, you're really lowering your standards, so you're not going to accomplish very much in life. And, you know, I'm into bigger things. But the way to bigger things are to take a lot of small steps. So hopefully you won't let yourself be deluded By that. And one of the keys to being able to develop this is to recognize that for everyone, and I do mean everyone, this is a practice. This is a practice that requires as much as you're willing to dedicate to it. But you could practice this 300 times a day. Guiding you to the moment. And if you do it for a while, you won't have to do it consciously. Your unconscious will pick it up and you'll just naturally on a feeling level be interested in a next step. You won't be guided way out in the future.

Yeah. You know, you said in the last episode, you talked about kind of compartmentalizing. But taking a moment at a time or an hour at a time or a day at a time. And that's the way that I think about it, about friendly mind. I think I can pretty much deal with today and I can ask or inquire to my friendly mind what I need to do to do that. And that becomes acceptable to me. And then each day I feel like— this might not be the right word, but I feel like I'm making micropayments. To my friendly mind and that it's growing and growing and growing until hopefully, and I think it's a spiritual thing, hopefully one day there isn't a whole lot of difference between my friendly mind and me. And that's kind of the way I look at those. What seems unimportant is important and it's as little micropayments.

I love the word micropayments. And I like the association— I mean, I really like the association with it can really be a part of you. And I like to say that it can be the central you, that it actually can be more you than your feelings. And your feelings are of secondary importance. They're important because they give you the clues of what you need, but friendly mind is the mechanism that you want to feed. You can't do that much about your feelings arising, but you can respond to them with friendly mind. So those micro payments is really a beautiful touch.

Dave here. As always, thank you for the participation opportunity, the important things. And Mark, thank you for sharing very much have had some opposite experiences in, in the same circumstance. Um, won't go so far as to say I've been slapped, um, but close.

And just as important, I, I've—

yeah, I've tried a lot and been rejected a lot and, um, learned a lot, but Hang on, I want to clarify that Dave is happily married.

He's not talking about present time.

Yeah, I'm now 32 years in, but it's— and this is something actually I wanted to bring up in that context, because in the earlier part of the relationship when I am always learning, but knew a lot less, a whole lot less, and had the idea that the way I was and the way I responded to a particular situation would naturally be and obviously be the way it would come back to me. And was shocked and surprised to find out that no, that it doesn't work that way. There is no person— I'm not married to myself, I'll put it that way. And in certain respects, that's what I expected. That's what I wanted, especially when it comes to stressful circumstances. And again, in particular, caring for For whatever reason, the difficult— some of the difficult— there's areas of my life that we haven't spoken about, but the ones that we've spoken about more about health and looking after and taking care of family in our house became something that was natural to me but not natural to my spouse. And for reasons I had no comprehension of it seemed like just an automatic, just automatic. And it was, it was, uh, not something where I, I would say I had any friendly mind around it. I had no part of me that could relate to that being okay. I simply rejected it, and I simply thought it was flat out wrong. Um, and it was so stressful that it was a threat to the relationship at that point. And we had to do a lot of work to have each of us understand and be able to really see each other from each other's points of view enough to forgive, to let go, to— yes, Some things felt at the time unforgivable, certainly, but over time and with understanding and recognizing now, in fast-forwarding quite a while ago, from maybe 13 years ago, for a personal health scare with my wife. And difficult time, difficult time for me. And this is not— this is in the last year where, again, watching and now much more awareness, much more capacity to see what I was doing, much more thankfully learning, listening to As Mark said, you know, the micropayments to friendly mind had— I had a pretty decent friendly mind bank account buildup. And my capacity to see what was coming towards me and the package that came towards me being different than I would have given it was okay. It was okay because I recognized, hey, Hey, I am not going to be able to control how my wife responds as much as I would like to have it packaged and come at me in a certain way. It wasn't going to come at me in a certain way, but I could, as Robert, as you just said, I could work with how I responded to what did come my direction. And And that made such a magical difference for me. It made things that were otherwise very difficult into almost a capacity to say, okay, it's seeing how it's coming at me, seeing how I'm reacting at the same time and just being, breathing into it, not being hard on myself. As much as I otherwise would have been because of this aspect of friendly mind and because of the capacity that it built up. And it is a miracle.

So just to make a transition there that I know you made, but it's sort of one of the holy ground statements of friendly mind as it matures. When you're looking at relationship. Friendly mind asks you, how can we best take care of both of us? How do we understand both of our needs? And that's a lot more complicated than just, what do I need? Requires a lot more maturity to realize, like you alluded to, where some of the needs that she had didn't make any sense to you. They weren't comprehensible unless you outed them and had a better sense of where they came to. So I think it's very important as you, the listener, are taking this in that statement as you're looking at your relationship, how do we take care of both of us? What is it that both of us need? And if that doesn't happen, it's gonna create a limitation in the relationship. And that is friendly mind asking that question. And it's clear that's gonna need to create a dialogue or there's gonna be, as Dave said so articulately, we all expect a copy of ourselves to be showing up. And it's humbling. That's why relationship is such a great humbler, because we just think that we're gonna look in the mirror and there's our partner. So really summarizing and finishing up, this series of episodes on Friendly Mind and understanding that it took so many episodes because Friendly Mind isn't as simple as it appears. That it starts off with being aware of our challenges, which eliminates a pretty high percentage of people unless they dedicate themselves to it and take the time to say, what are my challenging emotions and situations? And then learning how to think empathically, which is quite a skill because you have to get through the step of feeling like it's a booby prize because you want to feel good. You don't want to just think good. To realizing that when you're really in a hard time, you don't even have to be friendly to think friendly when you're really wiped out. And then you recognize that there's no frosting on garbage, that yet you really have to make your best realistic effort, and that there's a tendency to go into the impossible, which will keep you suffering forever. And then finally, where we are in this last episode, by focusing on the possible, we all have endless potential to improve the quality of our lives. And I truly hope that you are taking this personally and maybe listening to it as much as is needed to let in the subtlety, but yet the incredible support of developing our friendly mind. So thanks so much for joining us through this key part of the whole series of episodes, because friendly mind, as you'll see, is really visited in every episode because it is an assist to all the other practices that we'll be going into. So thanks again.

Thanks for listening to Awareness That Heals. Please click subscribe so you won't miss an episode. If you love the podcast, the best way to help spread the word is to rate and review the show. This helps other listeners like you find this podcast. We're deeply grateful you're here and that we have found each other. We encourage you to download our introspective guides at awarenessthatheals.org. They will be helpful to you while listening to our podcast.