👨‍🏫 Guest Masterclass: Expanding Your Awareness for Easeful Living w/ Michael Ashcroft

Foreign welcome everyone. Excited for this Q and A with Michael today? I don't really know how to. How do I introduce you, Michael? We are, we're good friends. Michael's obviously a fellow Brit, as you'll probably tell from the accent. We've spent some time together. I've taken his course on expanding awareness, which I'll just say out the gate is really fantastic. And I would wholeheartedly endorse and recommend. There's a lot of interesting overlap with awareness, what we're doing here at nsm and I imagine we'll get into some of that as well. But I think I'm just going to pass the mic over to Michael and he's going to hopefully give us like an experiential sense of what it is that he teaches and I imagine we'll get to play with some stuff. So Michael, over to you. I'm going to spotlight you as well.

Thank you, Johnny. Oh, you spotlight me as well. I'm going to make sure I can see everyone else, not just myself. There we go. Hi everyone. Thanks for joining. Looking forward to this. I was getting quite relaxed there with Johnny's piano music playing. In the beginning, it's like, no, no, I'm the one talking. I can't get too relaxed. So the idea for this session is I'll do something like just over half, maybe like half an hour given what the time is now of like introduction to the thing I'm talking about. And you'll have some tools to go away with. You'll have some kind of practices that you can actually play within your life and an idea of how this integrates. And then we'll switch to a Q and A to open up for questions. Anything else you might want to talk about. I'm also going to highlight areas where I think there's interconnection with no assistant mastery stuff. Some of this is evidence based, some of this is just in my brain and I won't make any claims as to like legitimacy, but I think there's a connection in these places and I'll point out why those things are. So first of all, what is Alexander Technique? For the benefit of anyone who has googled this, you may have come across posture stuff or if you've done this at kind of a university level, that kind of thing. You might think it's a postural thing. That is not how I teach it. I teach it as an awareness based practice that helps people change behavior in the face of conditioned habits if you like. So there are ways that you always do things, ways that you have always done things. And Alexander technique is a path to notice what you're doing and access real change. The reason it's often associated with the posture, that's the way it's mainly taught and marketed, in fact, is because the body and mind are one process called inzensible body. Mind in 80 is called psychophysical unity, 19th century term, but whatever basically meaning mind, body are one thing. So you can access and go into this state the thing we're pointing at via the body and you can use it for the body, but equally it's a mental thing at the same time. So that's how I teach it, particularly online when I can't get in there and put my hands on people and do one on one physical work, go via awareness based practices. So the reason I say awareness based practice is to differentiate it from most kinds of meditation type things that you may be aware or may be familiar with. So where meditation general tends to train something like concentration, attention, focus on one thing like the breath and that kind of thing, or mantras and objects, that kind of thing. Alexander technique trains broad open awareness and works with the dynamics of that to give you an insight into how you're functioning and how you're responding and caught up in habitual patterns of behavior. So what we're going to do is go on a little guided journey where I will show you some of these effects and these elements. You'll get to experience it firsthand. And then the real work is where you go off into your life and play with it in your own context. To begin with, I'd like just to invite you to turn down the effort involved in this workshop. So a lot of people, particularly people who take online courses and are very thinky and driven people, tend to try hard in most areas of life. So you might be trying to understand me, trying to listen, trying to learn, trying to make sense. And I invite you to drop that as much as you can, as much as is possible. The understanding will take care of itself and the trying often tends to get in the way. Something that Alexander, the origin of the technique said is trying is only emphasizing the thing we already know. So if you're going to learn something new, trying doesn't necessarily help because you're just emphasizing your existing patterns of doing and of behavior. So letting go of the need to get anything right, I also invite you to notice and trust that you're being supported by the chair right now. You don't need to do anything for the chair to hold you up. It Will do it. A lot of us have this kind of muscle tension, this doing of like, oh, I need to support myself in a sense. But no, your body evolved in the context of gravity. It will hold itself up. Just allow the chair to do the work. Nothing else you have to do. And then finally, just to set the scene, I know the joint put me on spotlight mode, but just you can slip around the room, maybe at the top of the bar, that kind of thing of the other people in the room. And I know that you can see pixels on a screen, but just take a moment to remember that these are people around the world who are having an experience of the world just like yours. And they are somewhere in real space. Right? They're not virtual. These are real people have an experience like yours, and we can very easily slip into a mode where we look at the world as like a game, almost like some kind of virtual reality. When actually, when we encounter people, they are having the experience of us as we are of them. And that can change how we orient by having that knowledge in the background. And then finally, as I guide you through stuff, just keep your eyes open. This is not a kind of meditative thing where you go inside and no, we're, we're out here, we're in the world. Cool. So with that, let me first go back to the different differentiation between attention and awareness. Because we're looking at awareness. So I may be saying obvious things here, but forgive me if, you know, it's already. Attention is the thing that we move from thing to thing to thing. Focus, concentration. It is the narrow beam laser, one after the other thing that you can choose to direct to things in your awareness, if you like. So I'm putting my attention now on the, on the camera. I can move it to my notes, that kind of thing. This is very familiar. This is how we are most of the time. Awareness is the landscape of space in which your attention can move. So I can move my attention from the camera to the notes, to my water, to whatever. But the important thing here is that awareness is a parallel process, whereas attention is a serial process, if you like, from computer science. You can be aware of multiple things at once. And there are different parts of your brain that do this parallel processing. And the awareness side is actually faster in many ways because it's doing things, many things at once. And then you can choose to put your attention on things within awareness. One of the important implications of this is that you can only notice. You can only pay attention to something that you already notice. So if Awareness is noticing. I can notice sounds in my environment. I can only then choose to put my attention on something if I've already noticed it. And only then can I change my behavior, my responses in relationship to it. The other thing is that awareness constrains attention. So if you imagine a situation where you're at an event, a party, a work meeting and someone calls your name across the room, there's one mode that you're in where you notice, like, oh, someone just called my name. And there's another mode where you don't notice even if the other conditions are the same, if the volume is the same, you just. You're not quite there enough to notice someone calling your name. So you can't notice it, therefore you can't attend to it. So part of this practice is increasing your. Your spacious awareness, shall we call it, such that you can notice more things as they arise, such that you can make new choices as they come up. And we will play with the. The mechanics of the choices, if you like, and how to make certain kinds of choices rather than virtual ones. So let's start with the awareness stuff, if you like. Johnny's been talking, I'm sure, a lot about interoception, noticing stuff coming up in your body. And that's one of a few domains of awareness. You could call it places where you could notice stuff if you like. So let's start with a little guided experience of exteroception. So this is the outside world. This is the stuff that comes in through your eyes, your ears. Physical sensation of the outside temperature, humidity, that kind of thing. So as you keep listening to my words, just notice that you're in a room right now. There is space above and behind you and to the sides. And this is a kind of a gentle knowing. I saw some of you looking around. You don't need to look around, you just need to know it's there. Right? A kind of, oh, yeah, I'm like a remembering almost like, yes, I am in fact in space. I am in fact in a room. And you can lay this in with sounds. So I know some of you have headphones in or in a quiet room, but play along. Like if there were, let's say, a distant harbor somewhere in the area, just check that you could hear the sounds from the boats in that harbor. And what about the harbour? In the opposite direction. Right. Just be aware that there are sounds coming from all directions and you could be available to notice them with the space and the sounds. I invite you also to notice the points of Contact that you have with the world. So the feelings of pressure on the chair, the temperature, all of that kind of thing. Now, one thing you may have noticed happening in you is kind of going from one to the other. So first noticing that sound or that feeling of pressure or that part of the room, that kind of thing. And I invite you to, as best you can, let all these things happen at once. So all of this world exists to you, and you're opening up your capacity to notice more stuff in the environment, if you like, in all directions. Now let's bring in interoception. So keeping or choosing rather that spaciousness in the world around you, allow yourself to notice patterns of energy in your body, tensions, emotions, feelings, whatever might be coming up inside, breathing, heart rate, that kind of thing. And again, this is integrated in the same kind of landscape of noticing as the outside world. So you might be tempted to kind of go in a little like this, which can be useful. But what you're doing then is closing off your exteroception a little bit. You're muting a once of the outside so that you can go in to some extent. And this can be useful, but it's not what we're doing here. You can also play with stuff like proprioception. So being aware at the same time of how your body is configured right now, your arms are bent, your knees are bent, all of that kind of stuff, you can get a sense of your body in space. So you have the internal landscape, external landscape, the interface, if you like, between those two things and proprioception, where your body meets the outside. And finally you can also notice stuff like metacognition, your own thinking about all of this stuff. What's he talking about? This is weird. I don't understand. This is great. All that kind of stuff. It's kind of this monologuing that's happening at the same time. And all of these things can be noticed almost in the same place. They're made of the same stuff, right? All it is is a field of awareness in which sensations, objects, stuff can arise and you can be available to notice. What we're aiming for essentially, is a state where your attention can move freely between all of these places without getting fixated, without getting stuck on anything. And this stuckness is quite a common experience, that very many things are sticky. And just to invite that, to show what that looks like. Again, take a moment to zoom out, if you will, take in all of your surroundings, all of your interoception, all of the stuff that you can Notice in all directions and then just let your mind drift towards the gnarliest object on your to do list. I'll just pause for a second while your mind drifts towards that thing you have to do that you haven't done yet or whatever it might be, that little hassle and concern, and just notice two things. First of all, give me a kind of gesture to show what happens to your awareness of space when you do that. Yeah, I've done this now dozens of times, this exact question. And this thing is like a universal gesture of like a little bit like the world kind of goes away. And all I did was ask you to let your mind wander to your to do list. This is not a strong trigger necessarily. Like, I'm. I'm a dude on the screen in the UK right now. There's not much I can redo to affect your awareness. But ask your question. And yet there it is. And if you think back to where you went, if you, like when you. This fum happened and you know, the world went away, where were you, right? There's a sense in which you weren't fully here. You were kind of off in a simulation, some kind of modeling in your head, something like that, that made the world around you a little bit less vivid, right? This experience where someone catches us in this moment saying, you know, call our name or ask a question and we were daydreaming or something, and then we kind of, oh, hang on, where was I? Let me just come back a little bit. And that's kind of the axis we're looking at here of turning down the experience of being off somewhere while living our lives. Because you kind of, once you stop paying attention, you realize how much of the time we spend living in the simulation that we spend not quite fully here and no judgment in that, but it is just a common state that we're kind of off in our heads a little bit. So that collapse, I call it, or contraction of awareness you can use as a sign or an indicator that you've been, let's say, triggered from a better word or something has come up that has triggered a behavioral pattern that is habitual, is a conditioned pattern, right? So this is what you always do in response to that kind of thing. And like I said before, when your awareness is contracted, your capacity to notice things goes away a little bit. You can only notice what's in the narrow beam, if you like, of the collapsed thing, which reduces your agency because you can't notice stuff outside of that. That little world that you are now inhabiting. So one way of avoiding this is to notice the collapse of awareness as it's happening or just after it happened. Pause and then consciously re expand. Right? So we're going to play a little game and it'll go like two parts. So once again, just zoom out and take in the world around you. Kind of get funny with that move. If there were a conversation going on behind you in the room, just check that you could notice it. There's a bit of a meme from my course, which is if there were an aircraft going overhead, just check that you could notice it. Don't go and imagine it. Don't go. Actually listen for it. Just be available to notice the sound if it were there in that direction. Body feelings, all that stuff. Just be aware of it. And then this time, I'm going to give you the same prompt again around the to do list. But this time I want you to fight. I want you to resist the urge to think about whatever that item is on your to do list and just pay attention to how you do it. Okay, so here it comes. Just let your mind drift to the most difficult thing on your to do list, that thing that's kind of keeping you up at night, and resist your mind from going there. How do you do it? What are you. What's coming up? Maybe put some stuff in the chat. Like, how are you resisting? How are you not doing the thing? How it feels like distraction. Focus on something in front of me. Other things. Stop breathing. That's interesting, Johnny, Want to pick up on pushing it away? Okay, so there's a couple of things that go on here. The main one, wow, you so engaged. I do this sometimes and people just don't say anything and that sucks. So thank you for, first of all, mostly having your screens on, your cameras on, and also engaging, because it makes my life so much easier. So, yeah, one thing we often do is hyper focus on something else, right? So I don't think about the thing. So I'm going to like, look at this thing really hard in this context. Or it might be I'm going to go on Twitter and scroll because that hijacks my attention quite strongly, you know, makes the world go away quite a lot. But what other people are pointing out is stuff like rigid. I'm seeing the word rigid. I'm seeing not breathing, controlled breathing, all that kind of stuff. Tension on the eyes. I think I saw somewhere. We often use muscle tension to prevent ourselves from going somewhere. Like, I will not think about the thing. Right. And I think there is some Research I've seen floating around that we can actually use muscle tension to inhibit emotions, particularly like crying. Like you might see, I'm feeling very sad. If I just tense, I won't, I won't cry. But this kind of thing is quite a thing that we can do. Because again, mind and body are one system. So this is. These are two things that go together, very common that I would encourage you to learn to step out of. Because while they work, they still either contract awareness onto something else. So, like, I won't think about the thing, but I'll think about something else in a narrowed way, or you introduce a whole bunch of tensions and holdings and not breathing and all of the patterns of life that show up. So instead, what I ask is to again notice and then don't do anything with it. Just leave the idea that you might think about this thing or do whatever it is hanging in your mind and choose to spaciously re expand your awareness. So what this looks like is. Let's run it actually. So again, zoom out. Notice the world around you. Sounds, colors, textures in all directions. Just know. I use the word knowing for this. So you don't need to go look for it. Just know that there's space above you, know that there's space behind you, that it's that easy. It's not a difficult thing. And it shouldn't take more than a second to reassert the spaciousness. It's not a thing that you do. It's a thing that you stop doing. In fact, you stop doing constriction to allow expansiveness. And this time I'll. I'll ask the question again. And as you notice that you start to get caught up, they start to contract awareness. Or you kind of start to do those things that you pointed out here. Pause, allow yourself to just not respond and stay spacious in the sense that you might respond to it. You might think about the to do list item, or you might go and get a coffee, or you might go and stand up like it's one of many options that you have. So let your mind drift to that thing that you don't want to think about. Let the stuff come up a little bit, maybe notice the contraction, pause, take a breath and allow it to be in the same space as everything else. This is something my teacher says, like, there it is, the thing, the habit, the behavior, and bears everything else. So allowing this thing to be in the context of the bigger space.

Because.

What this does is it allows us still to engage with the thing. You can still from here Think about that to do list item. You can still worry if you want to, but importantly, you have the spaciousness to engage with something else. And when you have this spaciousness, when you have the I could do something else, but I am going to think about the todist then the way that you engage with a to do list is different. It's not as forced, it's not as tense and tight. There's an easier feel to it because you can do something else. That's the important thing. And that kind of. It moves us to the next point. I want to talk about around agency and aliveness, which are two wonderful words. So agency being this thing where you can choose to say no ultimately. So this thing, the to do list. I. I want to encourage you to lose the word no completely. I mean, no is important, but I'd like to think about not yet instead. So it's not like, no, I won't think of the to do list. It's not yet. Maybe not yet, not yet. The other thing. And if everything is a not yet, that leaves you available, it leaves you open. It gives you the potential to say yes from a position of having already said not yet. And that gives you the freedom to choose. Rather than being caught up and going like, oh, I had a trigger in my head and now I'm half an hour on Twitter because I couldn't deal with the emotion or whatever it might be. I'm going, I'm not going to let that happen just yet. Now I have choice. Now I can make a new decision. And this happens over and over and over and over and over. And in fact, Alexander called this inhibition, which is not the same thing as Freud's being inhibited thing. Inhibition is the constructive non responding to a stimulus. Right. I won't respond the way I normally do, but not so I'm going to force it to not happen. I'm not going to do not the thing, if you like, pardon my weird language there, but it's all kind of doing forcefully, not doing a thing. It's I'm just not going to respond and I'm going to stay spacious why I don't respond. So this baseline of not yet as you go about the world allows for a different kind of yes. And that takes us on to aliveness. And there's this interesting experience that most people seem to have where we lose our sense of being able to engage with the world and actually take action within the world. I'm working on like a video game analogy here where there's some like, right Now I'm at a desk, for example. I can see a screen, I can see a cup and a keyboard and use you lot, that kind of thing. And it's almost as if like the, the amount of the world that I feel I can actually interact with has shrunk to this much. Right? This is my field of agency. This is my field of participation. I can influence and act with this much of the world and that bubble can expand and shrink. So as you listen to me, I'd like you to just remember that you and I don't actually do it, but you could stand up, you could go and get a drink, you could do a little dance, you could turn off and do something else. Don't actually do any of these things unless you want to. But there's a state of not being able to do these things and then being able to do these things, right? Knowing that you could go for a walk to the end of your road without doing it, it seems to open up a different way of being. It opens up a oh, yeah, I could, I could, I could. And this brings up a kind of energy and aliveness and liveliness that doesn't exist when we're like, well, I'm stuck here. The only thing I can do right now is, is talk at this camera. In fact, I'm, you know, I'm going to turn down my, my agency in this sense. And I, we call this. I call this couldness. So C O U L D ness how much could I do in any given moment? So if I turn down, my goodness. And okay, I can't stand up, I can't make a joke, I can't walk to get a. And I can feel myself just deadening and it's not very nice. Okay, I could stand up, I could go for a walk, I could interact with the world beyond this little bubble of this narrow stuff around me. So this state, as opposed to the not yet state, state I mentioned before of not yet that that stimulus cultivate a sense of maybe, maybe I'll go for a walk, maybe I'll have a drink of water, maybe I'll. And just increasing the set of things that are a maybe in your life again, doesn't have to be a yes, it doesn't have to be a full no in the same as before, but there are more options opening up. And then you kind of pick one, right? There's a sense of, oh, I could do anything and I'm going to do that one. And again, as before, the yes that you say from a position of Maybe is very different from the no that you say from a position of not yet. It's the same kind of idea. So baseline practice of not yet and maybe give you more agency and more of this aliveness. So I kind of actually want to start to pause my little thing here because I'm seeing some questions and I want to give space for that. But I want to make a link in my mind that I've been playing with to nervous system stuff. And like I said, this is not peer reviewed. Okay. I. This is me riffing on ideas I've been having. But I think that a lot of the kind of passive noting that you may want to do in meditation or do the beginning of like, yes, I'm aware there's a lot going on. And all that kind of watching stuff is probably something like ventral vagal. Like the safe kind of not much is going on. I feel safe. I feel like I feel grounded. And I'm watching the world as it unfolds.

Cool.

And I think there's something around the aliveness, the couldness. I could engage, I could participate. I actually could say something to people bringing in some sympathetic chain with the ventral vagal. I'm safe and I want to interact. I'm safe and I want to participate in the world. Like it's that key point of I can actually do things rather than just I'm watching the world unfold is a key and important difference. And this is where Alexander technique really diverges away from many kind of contemplative paths where it's not just passive noting. It's no, I actually want to go do stuff. You know, I am in the world, not just of it, if you like. So I think I will pause my little spiel there because I've said a lot and I'm very curious to hear if there are any questions and thoughts and. Yeah, over to Johnny to pick up, I guess.

Amazing. Thank you so much. Michael. My puppy is dreaming in the corner and he's making some really cute noises.

Awesome.

So before we jump into the kind of community questions, and there have been some really great ones. I've been writing them down. I'd love to. I mean, there's a lot that I want to mention, but I'd love to if you could you kind of like paint in a little bit more definition. Why? Trying kind of gets in the way of the things that we want to do. And this for me personally has been like one of the biggest, like unlearnings and unwindings, I think from my kind of like type A Patterning in my 20s and realizing how so much more can get done when there's not actually trying. And I listened to Joe Hudson recently. He gave the example of, he said like, try and pull your pinky fingers apart. Like really, really try. And it's like. And then he's like, just do it. Oh. And it's like there's just this, it's like, oh, right, I get it. So maybe you could speak to how trying less actually allows you to experience more freedom and maybe you can get more done.

Yeah, there's a few frames to think about here. The first thing that comes to mind is to give a kind of conceptual frame to all this is I have a theory that humans have something equivalent to the idea of functions in computer science. So a function is like, here's some code. Rather than saying the same thing over and over again, let's write it out somewhere else, call it. And then it saves time and effort and it's just a good energy saving thing ultimately. And we have a bunch of these, sit down, stand up, say something, drink water. Like most stuff we do is like functionable is contained in that repeatable code. And the thing about trying is it's something like when we try, we call the functions harder if you like. It's not, it doesn't allow us to make a non functioned thing because the function already exists to save us energy. And we try, we just like embed further into, into the loop that we already have. That's what Alexander said as well. The reason I think that stepping out of the trying harder works is that the part of the mind that does the trying doesn't in fact know how to do anything. If you like, there's a wonderful book called the Inner Game of Tennis. And as a series, in a game of work, in a game of something else, he's really made some money off that idea. And he has this idea of like two selves. One is self, one is self, two self one is like the internalized voice of the teacher society, the parent, you know, in the tennis context, get your racket back. That was a terrible backswing. Hit the ball over there. Like all that kind of commentary that you have in the head. And then self two is the one that actually does things. Because you know, if you have a ball coming towards you, you have no idea how fast it's going, what the angle it is, what the air resistance is, what the wind's doing, when exactly none of that enters your conscious processing. You just need to allow the, the racket to swing itself. And the more that you involve yourself in exactly when to do it, the worse your performance gets. The trick is to set clear intentions. I want to hit the ball and I will trust my system to do that. Right. Because another part of my brain is way better at calculating all that stuff that I just don't consciously know how to do. And this, this, that generalizes in so many areas. It seems like there's two sets of things. Like we try harder in like try to listen. I'm going to try harder to listen to someone that is completely useless because that's just muscle tension. You know, try and think, look how hard I'm thinking. That's a hangover from school. You know, like I remember being yelled at from a teacher saying, you know, pay attention. So I was like, okay, I'll pay attention, you know, all this nonsense. But there are other things. Like if I, you know, ask you to daydream or you know, wonder about something and then ask, you know, try harder to wonder, like what? Just, just try to wonder harder. Put more effort into wondering. It's like, what do I, what do I do? It kind of, it shows you the futility of the whole thing. And yet there are these, you know, so many areas where we think it actually helps. But my, my contention is that everything is better when you learn how to be fully engaged without the over efforting that comes with trying.

Yeah, yeah, I, I, I love that a lot. So pulling from some of the questions in the, in the chat, I love this one from Jim and he says, do you find this sort of awareness helps with emotional release? Feeling that creating that space, let's engage more with instead of routine reactions that have emotional charge. And I think this kind of dovetails to the nervous system stuff around like, what is the connection between maybe expanding one's awareness and then coming into that ventral safety and ventral ground? And do you use these practices when you get triggered yourself? How do you use this in real life?

Yeah, absolutely. And there's actually a link I should have mentioned to. So Andrew Huberman was talking about a similar thing where he said when you're feeling stressed, he said use your panoramic vision. So like notice stuff around your focal area and that turns down the fight or flight response. So there's a link there to turning down sympathetic activation in terms of emotional processing. Yes, it does help. And the reason it's helpful, I'm just trying to avoid going down like a whole tantric line of thinking here. But like when you have a strong emotion come up there's so many things that you might want to do to the emotion or respond to the emotion with, if you like. So, like, oh, I feel. I feel angry about something. Conditioning sets in. Like, awareness collapses around habitual defense mechanisms, shall we say, or coping mechanisms. So one, you know, once my. My boss yelled at me, and I didn't manage it well. My awareness collapsed. I let the motion take me over and I yelled back. Right. It was just gone. I wasn't fully there at that point. But if you can notice the. The hijacking happening as it's happening, you can stay spacious, not respond to the emotion, which does not mean not feel it. Right. Actually, you feel it more because you're not interfering or pushing it around. It's like, okay, there's a lot going on right now. There's a lot of emotion right here. And I'm just like, yep, cool, That's. That's a lot of emotion. Yep, there it is. Um, and you can notice all the ways in which you want to just interfere and nudge and stop and push away and involve and all that kind of stuff. And all of those are conditioned responses. And you can learn to not do that stuff and allow the emotion to run its course ultimately. And from a position of safety, you can create a felt sense of safety in the body of, actually, I'm fine right now. Turn down the stress response and, you know, allow the. The emotion to flow through you almost.

Yeah, that's. That's great. There's also a specific modality of, like, emotional processing called MREs and the PR. I'm not sure if you're familiar with this, but the idea is basically like noticing, let's say, like, the tightness or tension in your chest and then also noticing an area of spaciousness somewhere else in your body. And the idea is like, expanding your awareness to fill your entire body. So the area of emotional charge is there, but it's there, like you were saying earlier, along with everything else. So, yeah, there's so many interesting overlaps here.

There's actually a similar little game that I was going to play, but let's do it in, like, one or two minutes now is I just invite everyone to notice somewhere in your body, just somewhere, anybody is calling out somewhere, like, let your attention go to it. Okay. Put your hands up if your attention went somewhere uncomfortable. Okay. It's at least half. Yeah. A good number of you. So first of all, notice that, you know, I asked you to notice something and your mind went somewhere not great, shall we say? Now let your Mind, go to that. Go to somewhere negative, somewhere uncomfortable in your body. Choose something, if it wasn't arising already, and just let your attention linger on the discomfort, the pain, the. The thing you don't like, just a few moments. What does that do to your wider experience of your life in this moment, shall we say? How do you feel now that you're like attending to the shitty thing? Go and put some things in the chat. What's it like to attend? What does it do to the rest of you, if you like, when you attend to the uncomfortable narrows experience. Contract. Yeah, so hijacked. So it annoyed. Cool. So like, yeah. Attending and sustaining attention on discomfort tends to orient the rest of your system around discomfort. It's like what you attend to matters like your entire system will respond. Become aware of more discomfort. Yeah, exactly. And now just to liberate you from this, I'd like you to notice or put your awareness somewhere in your body that feels light and easy. Just find somewhere that feels good and it might be somewhat unusual, like wrist, finger, half, I don't know, something like this. It's a bit unusual, somewhat light, easy, open, spacious. And just linger there for a couple of moments. And now what does your life feel like now? How is this different from lingering on discomfort? Open, expansive, buzzing, relaxed. That took a minute, right? All you have to do is in this context, choose where to put your attention and the rest of your body mind will orient itself appropriately based on that. So if you're ever like stuck in a funk, you're like, am I just obsessing on the bad thing? What if I like just. It's like gratitude. Journaling is a version of this, but it really applies thematically as well. Like, my wrist feels nice. If I think about my wrist, the rest of me feels nice. It's really that simple. Sorry to like deviate there, but Johnny, but it's quite a nice little experiment to play.

Yeah, that's great. All right, so let's dive into Mel, do you want to share your question to the group? Bring you up to the front as well?

Hey, I'm not sure.

Are you referring to the question under Jim's.

Is there another Mel in the group? I thought someone asked about is Alexander's technique something we eventually aim to be doing all the time? That wasn't me.

That was me.

Oh, sorry. Let's do a little swap there.

Hey.

Okay. Do you want to share?

Oh, sure.

Hi, I'm Janai. Yeah, a few people had this question about like. Yeah, is Alexander technique something you want to be Doing all the time. Because when I was, you know, doing the exercise at the beginning, I was thinking, well, what if I actually do want to focus really hard and like, the tunnel vision is helpful. It seems like it would hinder that a little bit.

Yeah. So it's a good question. My. My answer is that Alice, on technique is a thing that you do all the time. And by that, I mean you're aware of the dynamics of your awareness and you are inhibiting the habitual responses to things right now. That doesn't mean that you can't narrow your attention, your awareness, if you want to. What I'm proposing is conscious control of awareness rather than never, ever contracting your awareness ever in your. Again in your life. So you could argue, I mean, there's a case to be made that, you know, narrowing your awareness makes it easier to focus. You know, hyper. Hyper focus, hypertension, kind of closing out distractions, all that. If that works for you to focus better, then by all means, I don't know whether that's globally true. Like, it might be the case that if you are sufficiently skilled at this, you wouldn't need to do that. But if it works, then fine. The point being that when you're done with the hyper focus, shall we say, that you can choose to put it down, you can choose to go into it and then choose to put it down and kind of go about your day. So, like, if you finish a writing session or a coding session, for example, and then stay contracted. The thing about the contractor state is that it also contracts and puts pressure on the body. So the whole, like, I will not thing from earlier, you have the whole breathing impact, you have muscle tension, generalized, that kind of thing. So being able to stand up and put it down and like, oh, I'm spacious again, is a good thing to be able to do. But if you want to collapse your attention to work on something, then by all means, just choose to do it, essentially.

Thank you.

Beautiful.

Tessa, do you want to go next? You got your hand raised. And for those of you who've asked questions, if you'd like to raise your. Your virtual hand as well. It's just easier to keep track of them that way. Thanks. All right, Tessa?

Yeah. Hi, Michael. So my question is, and this is something that I've been, like, confused about for a really long time, but essentially everything that you were explaining and the experiences that I had as we were going through it, when I'm already in a rel. Relatively regulated state, I get that expansion. I'm like, whoa, this is great. Like this makes so much sense. However, if I'm in a stress state, the experience of it is that there's too much going on and that I'm overwhelmed and that I can't make a choice because there's too many options. And it's like decision fatigue. And so it appears to be going in the wrong direction to open up options even further because the experience is an overwhelm of options already. And also my understanding of what trauma is for the nervous system is that the nervous system itself has been unable to put parameters on the amount of input that's coming in. So then the overwhelming situation Does. Yeah. Does that kind of make sense what I'm asking?

I think it does, yes. So a couple of comments, I guess same as before, like, if it feels unsafe to be spacious in that way, then don't, you know, do whatever feels safe and if it feels unsafe, don't do that. I think it's just general advice in that regard. But the thing I want to pick up on is there's a background to the question of being aware of all the things like overwhelmed with all the potential, all the possibilities. But there's an assumption there that you have to do something with it. And that's what 80 kind of helps you let go of a little bit. So I would call that caring or kind of excess involvement of like, okay, I could do this, I could do that, I could do that. I don't have to, right? Just because you can doesn't mean that it's expected of you or that you actually have to do anything right now. You can note and be able to without thinking that you have to make a choice right now, for example. And I think that's an important differentiation. So in training, for example, I help train teachers. Everyone cares too much. Everyone's like, what do I do? How do I do? This kind of that high energy thing that kind of goes up and up and up is you can just do nothing. You can just sit in the absence of doing in the landscape of possibilities, it's not necessarily easy. And if your nervous system is hyper activated, you might be better off kind of doing some grounding stuff first and then easing into this stuff. I think it's a good foundational practice. But just to say the, the spaciousness of awareness and goodness does not mean that you have to make a decision on stuff. And if that's the stressor, then the whole like not caring, it's like equanimity practice in Buddhism, like, okay, I'm just going to be a little bit in the space rather than engaging with everything because actually, like, oh, I should do this, I should do that, is a kind of narrowing of its own, but broadly open and available is what we're looking for. Does that answer some of your question?

Yeah, it does. Thank you. It's. I think what really clicked on it was this sense of like, I have to. Like I'm forced to choose right now is, I think, the link there for me. Thanks.

Cool.

Awesome. Thank you. Tessa Ocean, do you want to say hi?

Hello. I think it's not too windy. Yeah.

My.

My question is quite similar to Tessa's, actually. And listening to you talk, I sense I know what you might say, but I'm really curious to hear what you do. To me, I'm wondering what AT has to say about dissociation, because I. In line with what Tess was saying, I. I feel for me that a lot of the time my awareness is kind of outside of myself. And I spend a lot of time being very aware of the space around me. And it's very hard and takes a of lot. A lot of kind of effort and a lot of conscious awareness for me to bring my awareness into my body. And I've been spending years bringing myself into my body, but there's still this element of kind of no boundary on the space around me. And so I'm curious to know what 80 has to say about that. That's sort of what Tessa was asking as well, with the grammar.

Yeah. So in my experience, 80 is a inherently anti dissociative practice. Like the world gets more real and I feel more grounded within it when I practice it. Now it's again, tricky because there could be reasons for dissociation, a sense of lack of safety, a sense of kind of conditioned coping mechanisms, shall we say, for someone who experiences lots of that kind of thing. Again, Johnny's practice is good. Grounding in the body, good. Calming your nervous system. Good. But if you're very out there and not very in here, I would encourage the. The two things. The interoceptive awareness is really important. And the equanimity, the. The not caring so much. So the. The dissociation. I used to have a kind of baseline dissociation, like 5 to 10%. Just always, if you like. I kind of go up and down, but it was always there. And I realized that a lot of that was the kind of defense mechanism against stresses that I didn't know how to cope with. So when I learned how to like, just not respond, just watch, just be, while also not kind of Going off in that simulation I was talking about in my. In the head. So, like, I'm still here, but I'm, you know, also not having to respond. That seems to trigger a kind of increase in vividness of the world. Most people, it seems, have a bunch of these processes running, one of which could be a dissociative one. And the more you can learn to like, put them down, the safer life seems to feel and the more vivid the world gets. So, yeah, I can't comment on the therapeutic side, I guess, of dissociation and its utility, of which there is some. But this certainly shouldn't. This practice shouldn't encourage more dissociation, if you like. And if it does stop, I would say that's not the direction we're going in.

Great, thank you so much. I'll maybe add to that as well. A really great practice for those of you who do find yourselves dissociating a lot is breathing as low down into a diaphragm as possible. So like, not only into the belly, but almost imagine breathing into like your pelvic floor, like bringing that breath all the way down. And it, it seems, again, this isn't backed by research, but I've. There seems to be some correlation with breath down there and a sense of groundedness and like, rootedness and hereness. So that's something to. Something to play with.

There's a similar thing in 80 as well. So often the awareness gets too high up, if you like, with dissociation, like up here. And if you get dissociated, then be aware of depth beneath you into the ground as well. Like there is space beneath you. The ground exists. Right. The same way I was saying before, like that the chair support you is as you're, you know, you're walking right now, just really trust that the ground will hold you up and it goes deep, you know, like roots of a tree. And just go, go down as well as up. I would say.

Yeah, great. Okay, sky over to you.

Thank you. Awesome. So thank you for your answer earlier about choosing to enter a state of focus, for example, if that's what we'd like to do consciously. That makes sense. Though I have some questions about mechanically, what that might mean. I imagine as I'd start practicing this technique in the beginning at least, a novice might do a lot of conscious work adding conscious attention where previously there wasn't any. Where previously we're on autopilot in order to build new habits around shifting in and shifting our attention. But. So let's say I start building New habits. And if that's how I'm framing the goal, building new habits. But habits don't feel like choice in that, like a habit allows me to enter autopilot. Even if maybe it's an autopilot I, up front, at one point decided was the kind I wanted to be in, if that makes sense. Like, when we're driving a car, if we're good at driving stick shift, we don't choose to shift gears. We just do it. And so can you expand more on what you mean by choose? Choosing to shift attention?

Yeah. So there's two kinds of autopilot. I guess I want to pick up on that term you use, which is a good one. There's the autopilot of driving, for example, when you leave destination, leave origin to get to destination, you're like, how did I get here? Right. I wasn't really here while I was driving. And that's a pretty common experience. That's the autopilot we're looking to turn off, if you like. And the autopilot we want to turn on is being fully conscious of choices as they're happening, of behaviors as they're going on. So, like, I can see that I'm changing gear and I'm fully present with it, But I'm not really, like, doing it forcefully, or I'm not, like, kind of making the choice to change gear. It's just I'm allowing it to happen, and I'm still here while it happens. It's almost like, imagine a surface with a bunch of grooves down which ball bearings will flow or they'll roll. And these are all your existing habits. What I'm not suggesting is for you to carve a new groove, like, new habit over here, because that's the same thing as before. What I'm suggesting is to be able to step out of all the grooves and let the ball go somewhere new while being fully conscious as it happens, almost. So it's not like I'm going to establish it kind of atomic habits, like set a new habit system. Like, it's the way in which you do behaviors that are interesting here, not the specific activities. The argument being that as you learn to allow these things to happen, they will happen differently of their own accord. The way that will happen is we're surprising to you because you haven't said it will go here, then here, then here, then here. And that's a different mechanism operating at that point.

I see. Thank you for that. Super briefly, since I know there are a couple more questions I'm Wondering would you be able to describe and maybe you can't. When you say for example, shift from having more tunnel to focus on something you're really paying attention to to leaving that what happens? How, how aware are you? What does that feel like? It's probably very. Not at all something I do at all yet.

So, okay, the, the thing that I'm pointing towards, the feeling of it is vast perceptual awareness. So like really very much here. And the world is. I'm here with the world. The world is vivid and bright. Like things are literally like you turn the gain up on the world. Like there's more to see almost. The, the experience of depth is stronger. Like I can see the world is rather than a surface, like a projection on my eyes. It's like it's a deep thing that I can actually engage with. And there's a very strong sense of equanimity, contentment, happiness, just things are good as they are. Look at how interesting the world is kind of thing. It's an anti boring sense of being when you get to it. And it's a very non trying one. One of the main difficulties about this practice is that people always try too hard. That's the main thing. It's like, oh, I must be able to try to be aware, not the move. And then as you figure out it's less and less and less work than you think. You're just like, oh, this is gorgeous. Look at this kind of response is kind of where it ends up.

Well, thank you.

Beautiful. Michael, do you have a hard stop or you got time for a couple more questions?

I've got time, yeah.

Okay, great. Clayton, you've got your hand raised. Do you want to go next?

Yeah.

Thank you.

Thank you Michael, for everything you've shared. I'm curious what AT like says in regard to like, like really consuming emotions and like. Because I guess my understanding of emotions is you know, that they are energy moving through the body. And I think that like we all have our own ways of, of trapping that energy and redirecting that energy. And so like I've discovered a use in like going into those emotions entirely, right? Feeling the anger in its entirety, feeling the sorrow in its entirety. And I'm just curious like to someone.

Who.

I guess I could see like if someone. How someone unexperienced could use at to kind of trick themselves into, I guess it becoming its own form of resistance where you think that you're like achieving equanimity but you really are still trapping those emotions. Does that make sense.

So not quite. So do you mean that you're choosing to keep the emotions going or. I think I've missed the A concern.

Yeah, Yeah, I guess, like. I guess like, in encountering, like, a consuming emotion like that, like, would you say to go into that or, like, step back and try and cultivate that goodness?

I think the. The thing that 80 helps to avoid is getting caught up and losing consciousness with the emotion. So if something. If a strong emotion shows up, I think it's really good, actually, to. To the extent that you can feel it fully. Like, yes, there's all this going on. It's happening while maintaining two things. The full consciousness that is happening. So, you know, that's like on the. The pattern that's bringing up and a sense of spaciousness that there exist other things outside of that strong emotion. So one of the ways that I experience this internally is almost like there's a strong emotion, let's say, showing up. And it's just here in my awareness. Let's say, I know it's in my body, but let's say it's like, over here. And importantly, this space exists. Right. I am not exists. And I'm with it fully, but I'm not it. If you're familiar with internal family systems therapeutic mode, it's almost like the unblending move of, like, there's the part. There's the full emotion and I'm over here. And also there's the rest of the world. And I could, if I wanted to, put down my experience of this emotion and go to something else, and I'm choosing to be here with it. That just avoids the. The losing yourself to the thing, which I think is often unhelpful.

Got it. So it's like allowing. Without identifying.

Yeah. Essentially, there's a lot of overlap with Buddhist style thought here, but very different language. Yes, essentially.

Cool.

Thank you.

Yeah, these are great questions. I'll maybe just add a slight piece to that as well. From my perspective, there can be a trap of trying to feel a certain emotion, particularly when you start getting into emotional work. Would say anger. People try and feel the anger, they try and feel the rage. And when you're. When you're trying to do it, that is ironically, a way of inhibiting the actual emotional flow. So as Michael says, it's about being in and with. But it's almost like you're just witnessing it happening. You're not really doing it. And when you do find yourself doing it, that's a cue to just. I love the image of a closed fist that's just expanding. Just allow that to just open up. Yeah. But thank you for that question. Okay, Brad, second to last question. You are up. Thanks.

Can you guys hear me okay?

Yeah.

Yeah.

So I just wanted to say quickly, since listening to the conversation that you guys had, I've just been super aware of the collapsed attention. It's been like life changing for me. So thank you for that. And I just think there's an amazing synergy between the work that both of you guys are doing. My question is a little bit weird, maybe borderline.

Woo woo.

Brilliant.

A bit scared to ask it, but.

I really wanted to ask. Feels like the expanded awareness is almost tapping into a flow state of some sort. And I just wonder how much do you entertain the idea that expanded awareness is tapping into higher consciousness or. Or an area where there is no free will in a backwards way.

Oof.

So the first part of that around the. The higher consciousness stuff, what I will point to is that Alice on technique seems to point in the same direction as non dual practices. So the boundaries between self and world kind of go away and you realize that it's all a big the dao. Ultimately it's kind of. I'm using a very different language to describe Taoism, if you like. And in that sense, yes, while practicing this, I've had spiritual experiences arise spontaneously in the most mundane of circumstances. I'm like, whoa, holy crap, I am all of this okay, wow type experiences. I'd make no mathematical claims as to what's going on beneath that, but yes, that seems to be a thing that happens. Although one thing I would say is that you can't force your way there. So if you're not ready to go there, it just won't happen. Ultimately, regardless of the practice on the free will point, I mean, there's a big conversation to be had there and I'm not qualified to have it. What I would say though is that even if free will is an illusion, I think the illusion is important. There's a reason it exists, and there's two ways in which it doesn't exist. Right? So if you are completely caught up in your conditioning and you just go from habit to habit to habit to habit in this compressed state, then you have no free will, right? You can't make new choices in that sense because you're just flowing from function to function to function. In my earlier example, you can then go to the other extreme and say like, well, look, if I am one with everything and the dao is doing what the DAO does, then there's no free will there either, but there's something in between. You know, I think the Buddhist perspective on free will is that it's neither fully free, neither fully, like, fully deterministic. Like, there's something in the middle, and that's where the fun is, if you like. So I don't know, but it's fun to play with, I think.

Really great answer. It reminds me of the. There's a Zen saying of take the great backward step. And that seems to be very, like, kind of parallel with what you're speaking to Michael as well, around, like, not only expanding awareness, but being in that space where you're not identified with the sense of self. Beautiful. Well, James, did you want to share your. Your questions from the chat? Are you still with us?

I guess I could. I don't know if it was a question, as it was just me coming up, but I could share that if you want.

Yeah, that'd be great.

Yeah. So can you hear me okay?

Yeah.

Okay. I guess with the first two questions, I'm starting to get overwhelmed and overthink myself doing this. So with the first two questions, I really resonated with the talk with what they were asking, and I was thinking of same thing where it's. For me, there's so much coming up that I just get overwhelmed, and I either shut down or I pick up Twitter or Blue sky and I'm lost for hours. And what was coming to mind, essentially, was this idea of, like, masculine containment or that term, and something that I've kind of come to in recent, which is this idea that I think with other people, I've noticed that in them processing their emotions and myself, too, that it becomes so much that all of this energy, you have to either dissociate or shut down from it because it's. It's literally too much for you for your nervous on. The idea of the masculine containment was literally like two hands on your shoulder saying, okay, you can wriggle as much as you want here, but I've got you. And all of this energy will flow through you, this emotion, but there's like a sense of safety, like a back on the wall or something to push off against or lean against that has you held that will be like, you can experience all this, and you're held such that it can flow through you. I don't know if I'm articulating that well, but it's. There's something about that. Okay. You've got a lot there. I've got you and you, no matter what comes through you, I will hold you. If that makes sense.

Yeah, it's. It's funny. I. I was in Bali for six months last year on Johnny's recommendation. Got the chance to meet as well. And one of the things Johnny said was go to this workshop on. On tantra for two days, a weekend workshop. And at one point, they had us basically embodying the divine masculine Shiva energy, if you like. And it was a spacious, contained presence, a. An equanimity in all things that would allow the feminine to show up and play and be energetic and do its thing. And I had this moment of, like, this thing that they're getting me to do. To embody the divine masculine Shiva energy, if you like, is exactly the same as the thing that I'm practicing in 80. And I didn't understand what that meant at the time, but when they said, oh, embody Shiva, I'm like, all right, it's the same. Cool. It's that. The extent to which, to answer your question, I don't know. But there is something grounding about the pure witnessing presence that stays there, if you like. This in, in. In that model they were teaching us is the. The masculine creates a space for the feminine to create and dance and play. Right? That's the role of the masculine is to contain and keep the edges there so the. The feminine can. Can arise. So this. This state I'm pointing at is. Is pure presence. If you like, that doesn't. That doesn't interfere. You can make choices, but you're not suggesting things shouldn't be that way. Right. Anything that shows up is welcome, is okay, is allowed, and you don't have to do anything with it. Right. And then you find that things happen because they're allowed to just happen of themselves. There's a nervous system point there that you were saying, if it's too much for you, if too much is happening, then at that point you might have to turn things down. Fair enough. But I think the end point is you can contain everything if you just don't. Don't touch it. If you like, just allow it to be.

I feel like I'm trying to piece this together with a lot of things in my mind. When you said that, like, the looking, I kind of. It made me think of this idea. Like, again, like, for me, it was a memory of, like, a masculine presence. Someone just, like, staring unflinchingly. And I don't know what that provided, but there was something like a. I'm not going to look away I. I'm going to stare. A firmness, a real firmness, like kind of like a father figure, like, I've got you. But my experience of that has always been, oh, God, that's so much. That's confining. That's too much pressure. But there's also another version of that, which is like, what the father does is hold you to high standards. But is it standards that like, are honoring you and are meet your capacity? It's not like high standards that are too much for you. They're not lower standards that you can have. They're like, standard is like, this is. This is what you can do. Or a good coach, you can run that extra hill sprint, which is what I was doing here before here. It's like, you can do that extra hill sprint. You've got it in you. I'm not gonna make you do three more, but you've got this. And you're like, okay, I can do this. And then, you know, you can kind of feel that emotion or do that hard thing because it's like, oh, I'm capable of more than I think. It's not three hill sprints, it's one more. But this coach is kind of staring at me. And I don't know if that's related to what you're saying, but it's. That's what's coming up now. I just like, okay, you've got this.

I guess the one thing I would say, I don't want to go deviate too much into ideas around masculine and feminine stuff because it's not what I trained in. But you said something about the masculine energy kind of looking at you and like expecting almost like kind of the supporting gaze that was also quite intense, something like that. The. The point of at, if you like, is non fixation. So that's what the goodness is about. That's what the inhibition is about, is that, yes, I'm here fully with this thing in such a way as I could be somewhere else, I could do anything else. I have infinite pathways open to me. So the, the masculine thing you're talking about there, for example, is yes, I am looking directly into the thing that is scary and powerful and all of that and a lot to deal with in such a way as I'm not fixating it. It's still able to be its thing. It's still able to do something else if it wants to. I'm not expecting or forcing or requiring anything, and I'm looking directly at it, if you like. Right. It's not a Fixating gaze. It's a direct gaze. They're very different and I wonder if that will help unlock something of like the gaze doesn't have to require something of you. It's just presence in a sense.

Yeah.

That feels like a much more gentle or like if you want to say passive masculine instead of active it's like more. Sorry, not silly but it's like it's just more gentle. It's just more. Yeah, yeah that I think that's my like internalized version of it. If there's like this that I'm afraid of but there's this like open which is maybe it is pointing out. It's like.

Yeah.

What you said.

Yeah. One of. One of my guest teachers that we had on training says that 80 is the same as love. It's you know, it's just pure acceptance, pure love. Pure being with in a way that doesn't require change. So you might be able to say passive masculine, short or loving masculine.

Yeah.

Okay. Thank you for that.

Yeah.

I hope this helpful cognitively spinning because I guess if I, I could ask one last thing if that's okay.

Sure.

Feel free not to answer it because it might be too much but I kind of dwelling on this the last couple weeks and reflecting back on experience I had with Ayahuasca like three years ago. The connection I made there was one sec, I'll close the wind dogs barking was that a lot came through me and like there was a Maluka, everyone was in it. I was out of the Maluka. All around the place things were coming through me and the, the container wasn't like strong enough to hold it all or witness at all. And I was just, I was destroyed by it and I literally have been destroyed for the last three years after it. And I thought oh maybe I didn't have enough sort of containment to hold all that. But then I'm wondering what this version of that means. Is that a different sort of containment that I needed or that I am now thinking I needed like a more gentle thing like that? I'm not sure that's. I don't expect you to answer any of that because that's quite a curveball there.

But I'm just curious I guess again bringing about to the AT lens my, my meta commentary is I'm hearing a lot of trying language in your view of yourself. Like things I need to be the certain way or things should be contained a certain way or I need to do things that kind of energy. And I just wonder if you were to drop that gently a little bit and see what would come up. I don't know the answer to your question. I don't know what you need. I'm just reflecting that I'm hearing a sense of efforting in all this, which often is the cause of loops. So the answer often is not more effort as a solution, but global less effort and trust that what has to arise will arise and can flow through you.

Awesome. Thank you. I could go on and ask you many questions, but I think that's enough for now. So thank you so much.

Okay, thank you.

Yeah, thanks so much, James. All right, well, speaking of containers, we have gone past our time container, but thank you so much, Michael, for this. Before we wrap up, where would be the best place for people to learn more about your work? Find you on Twitter. What are some of the links that you'd like to point people to? And I'll write them in the chat and also share them in the email as well.

Cool, thank you. So all my at writing is@ expandingawareness.org and then you'll find me on Twitter mashcroft. And I'm on Bluesky as well at Mashcroft because they haven't got underscores.

Beautiful. Any final comments, closing words, things that you'd like to leave people with?

Just thank you so much for paying attention for this long and I invite you just to notice what your awareness does in day to day life and see what it's like to try less hard and see what happens.

Beautiful. Well, let's close by everyone who's remaining unmuting and saying thank you to Michael as we head off. So 3, 2, 1. Thank you so much, Michael.

Thank you.

Ciao, ciao.