How To Use Mindfulness In Daily Life - Cory Allen

We are in nature, and we're a part of nature. So the idea of saying, "Well, I'm not gonna respond to my environment," like, you are the environment. The way of looking at reality is as if you can just create this wall between reacting completely to what's happening out there, it's like, you're out there too. You know? It's like someone that's in traffic, and they're like, "Oh, I hate all this traffic." It's like, you're traffic as well.

You are the traffic.

(laughs) Yeah. And so that way of thinking, to me, is unrealistic and doesn't really follow through all the way.

(wind blowing) Corey Allen, welcome.

Yes, sir. Thank you.

Thank you for having me in your city.

It's my absolute pleasure. Thank you for coming to the city.

I know, man. It's been very good. It's been a shame that we haven't got to see each other until now for professional purposes, but we've, we've made it work. We've spoken previously a lot about mindfulness. You've got, still, my favorite ever guided meditation course. And I wanted to try and have a discussion today where we can help people who are into mindfulness, who practice it when they can or pr- practice it regularly, to try and take their theory and the work that they do during their mindfulness practice off the cushion, so to speak, into the real world, try and get some practices, some triggers, some examples of how people can stay mindful and create the mindfulness gap in their everyday lives, whether that be with family, when emotions arise during situations, to help them feel more present and mindful and live a life which is richer, and also to be able to distance themselves from their emotions, to stop themselves from identifying with things. So where would you start? Let's say someone comes to you and says, "Corey, I want to try and take my practice off the cushion." Where would someone even begin?

Yeah, um, well, I think that the, the first place someone would start would just be focusing on their actions, more, like, their physical actions more, uh, with more intention, right? So just paying a, a bit more attention to, as you're going throughout the day, like, not just letting your hand do something sort of by its own, but actually, as you're going to pick up your coffee mug or whatever, just notice the fact that it's happening. Just notice it happening, and notice the feel of the cup and tap more into the sensory experience of your experience more often, you know? And by doing that, even, you know, of course, uh, doing that with your own breath during, throughout the day, um, but even wh- whenever you're walking, just note the fact in your mind, "I am walk- oh, I'm walking. There's a foot, you know, planting, planting, planting. Interesting." You can s- and you, whenever you start w- by doing that, what you're doing is basically tuning yourself in to the sensations within your sense doors, you know, all of your, your five senses plu- and then the plus one, which is the sense o- consciousness. You know, in Buddhism, there's, uh, they add that as a, there's a sixth sense. There's mental formations, and for a good reason, which I can share later. Um, but essentially, yeah, getting tuned into how you're, you know, ju- just being in a body in the world and being aware of what you're experiencing when you're experiencing it. That would be step number one, because even focusing on that alone, that simple thing, like, take, make it completely secular, take away all of the, all of the other stuff that meditation or mindfulness may have to offer, and even take away all of the insights. Pluck some random person off the street, and say, "Hey, try this as an experiment. Pay a little bit more attention to just the, your, your sensory navigation of your day, and just see what happens." And what happens is that in a, a person can't help but not, you know, the mind begins to train and begins to focus more on that as opposed to being caught in this, this, what most people are caught in that live an unexamined life or this automatic causal type of repercussion momentum of, of life to where they have all of their, their, you know, their programming, the chance of their life, the, the happenstance of where they were born, who their parents are, the experiences that they've had and so forth and so forth. And what happens is that in all of that conditioning, you know, the conditioning of kind of what you should think, who you should be, how you should whatever, um, you just go along kind of reacting to everything that you experience. And in that, um, people spend a lot of time unfocused in their, their mental area, just their general conceptual view and connection with their, the present moment of experience. And because of that, because there's no focus on this, it's all kind of this drifting sort of, um, uh, mental kind of junkyard of stuff that's happening up there, just lack of, uh, focus ultimately. Um-