The One You Feed - How to Embody Awareness with Martin Aylward

Episode Date: August 23, 2022

Martin Aylward has practiced meditation intensively since the age of 19, spending four years in Asian monasteries and with Himalayan hermits. He’s been teaching worldwide since 1999, leading retreats and courses in mindfulness, meditation, and inner freedom. Martin co-founded the Mindfulness Training Institute with Mark Coleman, which runs year-long professional mindfulness teacher training in Europe and the U.S. In this episode, Eric, Ginny, and Martin discuss his book, Awake Where You Are: The Art of Embodied Awareness. But wait, there’s more! The episode is not quite over!! We continue the conversation and you can access this exclusive content right in your podcast player feed. Head over to our Patreon page and pledge to donate just $10 a month. It’s that simple and we’ll give you good stuff as a thank you! Martin Aylward, Ginny, and I Discuss How to Embody Awareness and … His book, Awake Where You Are: The Art of Embodied Awareness The habits of “Grabby Mind”, “Resistant Mind”, and “Check Out Mind” The good news that can learn to meet our experience more kindly and more spaciously How aging can be humiliating or humbling depending on how much we try to hold on to our younger self-image The distinction between what is true vs. what is useful to focus on How to recognize and work with the deficient age gap The way our life experiences are stored in our bodies Sometimes meditation isn’t quite psychological enough. It can help dissolve inner states in the moment but further understanding is needed in order for them to really resolve Waking up, growing up, showing up, cleaning up No rehearsal, No replay Inhabiting this moment is the best way to prepare for the next moment Martin Aylward links: Martin’s Website Twitter Instagram By purchasing products and/or services from our sponsors, you are helping to support The One You Feed and we greatly appreciate it. Thank you! If you enjoyed this conversation with Martin Aylward, check out these other episodes: Mindfulness in Nature with Mark Coleman The Heart of Awareness with Dorothy HuntSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

The best rehearsal for the future moment is the way you take care of this moment. And then you'll find, oh, here you are in that so-called future moment, and you're able to take care of it. Welcome to The One You Feed. Throughout time, great thinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have. Quotes like, garbage in, garbage out, or you are what you think ring true. And yet, for many of us, our thoughts don't strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self-pity, jealousy, or fear.

We see what we don't have instead of what we do. We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction. How they feed their good wolf. I'm Jason Alexander and I'm Peter Tilden and together our mission on the really no really podcast is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why the bathroom door

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Follow us on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks for joining us. Our guest on this episode is Martin Aylward. He's practiced meditation intensively since the age of 19, spending four years in Asian monasteries and with Himalayan hermits. He's been teaching worldwide since 1999, leading retreats and courses in mindfulness, meditation, and inner freedom. Martin is the co-founder, along with Mark Coleman,

of the Mindfulness Training Institute, running year-long professional mindfulness teacher trainings in Europe and the U.S. Hi, Martin. Welcome to the show. Thanks. Hi, Eric. Hi, Ginny. Hello. I am excited to have you on. We're going to be discussing your book called Awake Where You Are, The Art of Embodied Awareness. And I'm sure we'll also talk about many of the roles you play and you're in Ginny's relationship as her teacher and lots of different things. But before we do all that, we are going to do the parable and I am going to let Ginny read it. So I forgot to mention listeners, Ginny is with us this week for a

special episode. So welcome her and she's going to read the parable to Martin from here. Yes, so happy to be here. All right, so Martin, as you I'm sure are familiar, the parable goes, there was a grandparent talking with their grandchild, and they said, in life, there are two wolves at battle within us. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love, and the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love. And the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandchild stopped and thought about it for a second and looked up at their grandparent and said, which one wins? And the grandparent said, the one you feed.

So I'd like to ask you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work that you do. Well, when I first heard it, it reminded me so much of something quite similar that I say often to students, to meditation practitioners, which is whatever you feed, that's what grows. And I use that to illustrate like where their mind is going, basically. Because I don't want to lay down the law like, this is where your mind should be. You should be in the present. You should be attending to your breathing. It's like, no, I want people to really explore their mind. I want them to explore where their attention goes.

But I also want them to be very clear that whatever you know, whatever they feed, that's what grows. And so to take pause in that moment, you know, it's like when your attention's gotten seduced by some pleasant fantasy, for example. And it's like, oh yeah, I realise that, you know, I'll wake up to that and I should kind of go back to my breath or whatever's the focus of my attention. But actually, this is much more interesting than my breathing. So I'm going to just stay with this sort of spacing out in this fantasy for a couple of minutes, and then I'll go back to my breath. And it's at that point that I remind people, so, OK, but remember, whatever you feed, that's what grows. And at that point, you get the choice. Do you want to feed investing in this kind of abstract reality of something you wish was happening?

of abstract reality of something you wish was happening? Or do you want to invest in how skillfully and wisely and spaciously you can connect with what is happening? So, you know, it's very close in a way to that key line that comes up in the parable. Yeah, I would love to ask you kind of a follow-on question to that, because I think this speaks to a really important question I think comes up in this podcast a lot, which is one interpretation of what you feed grows means I've got to banish negative thoughts and negative mind states or they're going to grow. So talk to me about how we don't fall into that trap of banishment of something because we know that leads to lots of problems, and we'll probably talk about that. But I'd love to hear your thoughts on that. Yeah. Yeah. So, it's not so much about the content of mind. I mean, we do have some choice, right? You can see your mind going off in some directions and just be like, oh no,

that's not helpful. That's not skillful. I've been down that road many, many times before. And you know, you drop it. You consciously redirect your attention to something more skillful, you know. And there's plenty of good examples of that. But, you know, various addictive going down a road that I know leads me to compulsion and to comparison and to misery in some way, right? But it's not just about the content. It's really about attitude. The attitudes that you feed are then the attitudes that grow. So whether you feed an attitude, for example, that is continually, I mean, what are the three main attitudes that we get stuck on, right? And listeners can see for themselves. I mean, we all have all three, but listeners can see which is their sort of primary suspect, as it were. And the first one is the grabby mind, right? The one that's just always pursuing what do I need? What's out there

for me? What's next? next you know the mind that's convinced that what i want in some other moment some other place and i'm just always trying to get there trying to get there trying to get there and then the next one is the opposite of that the sort of resistant mind the mind that's always looking for what's wrong what's the problem and for some of us you know that can be our primary orientation to life is scanning for what's not okay what's not okay about me what's not OK about the situation I'm in, what's not OK about my family, what's not OK, etc. And then the third one is an attitude where we just sort of check out. And the first attitude happens around a particular shiny object.

It's what I want. The second attitude happens around is also around a specific object of what I want. The second attitude happens around us also around a specific object of what I don't like, what's wrong. And the third tends to happen when there isn't a specific object. There's nothing particularly pleasant nor unpleasant that's happening right now. Things are pretty just ordinary. And then we tend to either get spaced out or bored or restless. And for other people, that can be their primary motivation or primary attitude, right? They're just going comfortably numb. You're going to sleep in various different ways.

So those tend to be the kinds of attitudes that we have been feeding most of our lives, just by internal habit, plus education, plus the kind of societal encouragement that we get from advertising and everything else. And then if you come into an intentional transformational practice, then that question, what are you going to feed, you know, becomes very alive. Like, given that those three pulls, if you like, a shorthand for all the different pulls on our mind, you know, most people just go through life being pulled around more or less unconsciously by those things. And so the parable is pointing to the fact that, oh, I can actually

start taking charge. I can't choose the content of my experience very often, but I can start to take charge of what do I feed in terms of how I meet the content. And I can actually learn to meet my experience more kindly. I can learn to meet it more spaciously And I can actually learn to meet my experience more kindly. I can learn to meet it more spaciously. I can actually learn even to recognise what those internal habits are, actually, as a first step. Because most people don't actually really know what their habits are. They're so busy pursuing the shiny or freaking out about the uncomfortable or just spacing out in general, that the stories we tell ourselves is it's all about what's happening to me rather than actually, it's all about how am I going to

meet it? In your book, I love how you explore this whole idea through the terrain of growing older and growing wiser. I think we can all look around and maybe notice this with some of the people in our lives. I know I can with like my parents who have grown older or some of the important figures in my life as they've grown. You say that if you look at older people who have done no liberating practices, like you just talked about, that physical tensions, views, beliefs, they all get more reinforced or more rigid. And then you go on to say, as you age, your patterns get stronger. And if it's not love that feeds your heart, patterns get stronger. And if it's not love that feeds your heart, then inevitably it will be its opposite. If your heart can't give itself up into caring and kindness, it will be left in the prison of suspicion and grump. It's that last line that just encapsulates it perfectly because I know we

have all known someone that unfortunately that is the end of their story. But the good news is we can feed the opposite with caring and kindness. Yeah. Yeah. That might sound like a kind of bleak assessment of people growing older. It's like if they haven't got a transformational practice, they're destined to become suspicious and grumpy. And, you know, that's not altogether true. course there's exception and also sometimes even very late in their life like people can go down one road very very far until right near the end even and there's something about the proximity to death actually that sometimes like some people just harden even more into denial and fear and stuff. But sometimes in a very beautiful way, it's like suddenly confronted by the specter of death. Sometimes people really soften and become very sweet

and it's somehow like the work that hasn't been done their whole life by grace or something somehow gets done very beautifully and powerfully in that proximity to death. But I would say to anyone, that's a big gamble to take. You know, you want to wait till right at the end of your life and hope that you'll suddenly be able to soften and open, you know. Much better to not wait until you're at death's door.

Better to soften and open now and be able to live a life in the benefit of that softening and opening. A life then that's animated by ease and kindness and fluidity. And that's a much better recipe for then when one gets to the end of one's life, being able to drop it graciously, you know, when the time comes. I read some really interesting things recently talking about, similar to what you just said there about near the end of life, some people change in really strong ways. And we certainly know that proximity to death or perceived proximity to death tends to wake many of us up in many ways.

But here's the interesting piece I saw. We have a tendency to look at old people and they don't engage in new activities. They don't want to go to the rec center and meet new people. And one reading of that is their lives are closing down and they're not interested in new experience. And I think there's an element of that. But the thing that I saw that sparked my interest was for many of them, what they wanted was deeper connection with what they already had. And they thought, I don't have enough time left to go build brand new friendships. Like I want to be with the people who matter. What I've seen happen in practice,

though, is if those people who matter aren't around, then you're left with the worst of all worlds. You're not out engaging, you're not making new connections, your life is shrinking, but you don't have enough of the type of connection you want. I just found that sort of fascinating because it was a different angle on a phenomenon I've certainly seen and read about. Yeah, makes sense. Makes sense. And it's interesting, you know, we've all maybe got a few more decades left to experience the aging, but I'm 52, right? And in Buddhist teachings, reflecting on death is very central. In my 20s, I got into Buddhist practice quite intensely and seriously as a teenager. In my 20s, I got into Buddhist practice quite intensely and seriously as a teenager. In my 20s, I was very glib about aging, sickness and death.

It's like, oh, yeah, everything ages and dies. We're all going to die. No problem. It's kind of easy to be. However much I thought I was sort of staring into the eyes of death and ready for Lord Yama to come and whisk me off at any moment. You know, it was far away. And then, you know,

30s is basically the same. 40s, you start to get the first whisper of the realities of ageing. And 50s, really, it's still very early on, really, but it's like, oh, but it's nevertheless unmistakable. What I think about ageing is it can be humiliating or it can be humbling. It just depends how much you're going to hold on to your self-image. The more you hold on, the more it's humiliating. You know, I was just doing some yoga today outside the deck this morning. And I don't do a great deal of yoga, but my wife practices it a lot and she teaches yoga and she kind of managed to cajole me into doing some with her this morning. And I was just doing a downward dog and I looked down at my hands on the deck and it's like, oh man, whose hands are they? You know, they're wrinkly

ass hands. They're old man hands. I've done a lot of building. It's like, oh, my hands have really worked for me in my life. You know, I've seen my hands being good agents of activity and creativity and action and i look down at them on the deck down like oh dear it's actually important to take in those moments so you keep updating just the reality the reality of the ways things are seizing up and wrinkling and sagging and graying and you know all that and yeah it's like you're going to be humiliated by that you know that can feel like there's something wrong with aging. Whereas actually it's the most right thing. It's the most natural thing in the world, right? Or you can end up being in denial of it. And then, you know, in the various

ways we see people in a rather kind of clumsy or desperate way trying to recapture youthfulness, et cetera. Or you can go graciously into it. I think that's a real practice. It takes work to actually accept the increasing limitations on one's energy and to kind of be willing to progressively, gently, gently let go of what one takes for granted in one's youth and that starts to change as we age. I have to let you know that what you just shared reminded me of a passage in your book that really touched me deeply and opened up a new kind of frame for me about how I view my mom's current experience. So listeners may know, and I mentioned to you before we started the recording, that she's in the end stages of dementia and Alzheimer's, and she's in such a way that she's bedridden.

She's vegetative. She's non-responsive, you know, and we have hospice coming in and caring for her. And it is very difficult to see her need everything done for her, you know, to be washed and wiped and changed and fed. And that has been a very sad thing for me to witness. And while it is still sad, you write in your book

that you had a student once who had a stroke and after that stroke was unable to look after himself physically in this way that my mom is. And the counsel or the encouragement you gave him was this, hang on, I told him, and this will feel humiliating. Let go and you can be humbled by all the care and love and attention you're being given. And when I read that, I all of a sudden saw, in addition to the, of course, sadness that I feel and the limitation that's there with my mom, I was so deeply touched by, yes, indeed, she is being loved and cared for. And in fact, one of the real hallmark qualities that I think of when I reflect on my mom's life is that she was the quintessential caring for others always, right?

And thinking of others first always. And it's almost like now all of those seeds that she sowed, you know, are coming back to her so that she might be cared for completely. That connects to this idea that you also mentioned as these heavenly messengers, right? These things that we witness or things that happen to us, or as we see death coming potentially closer as we or someone we know ages, it can wake us up to a deeper way of life. And I just have to thank you for that reframe. Yeah, beautiful. And it changes not just your mum's experience, but here it changes your experience, right? To see her that way rather than helpless in some way,

to see her as, oh, as the recipient now in her last moments of life, of the care and the love that she's been such a giver of in the rest of her life. Beautiful to be able to look on the situation that way. And then, you know, suddenly then the carers are like these divine beings. And the whole situation then is somehow redolent of the beauty of human nature. It's also sad to see her losing her autonomy and losing her cognition and fading away. But, you know, in terms of the title of your podcast and what you feed, it's like you can feed seeing that through a cynical lens or a disappointed lens or a resentful lens, you know, or you can

feed the seeing it through a lens where you emphasize and you recognize the beautiful human qualities that are also at play there. Yeah, it's so much that lens, right? Because both are absolutely true. It's absolutely true that seeing her in this state is hard and difficult and she's missed so many things in life and she suffered so much. That is unquestionably true. And there are these other elements. And oftentimes it's not about making one of them not true or not being willing to acknowledge it. It's about how do I hold both these things and where do I give a little more attention? Yeah, as well as what's true and what's useful.

Yes. So both of those things are true, but what's useful? Is it useful? You don't have to be in denial of the aspects of it that are painful or difficult, but which one do you want to feed? Do you want to feed the appreciation of human nature and the appreciation of the kindness of the carers, etc., etc.?

So it's like, oh, they're both true, but one is more useful to focus on than the other. Sometimes I say, yeah, that may be true, but it ain't useful. We've kind of fetishized the truth. One, as if there is a truth. And, you know, that's not always the case. And secondly, if something's true, then the fact that it's true pulls all the attention. And the fact that something's true sometimes just isn't the most important thing about it. What's useful is sometimes much more important than what's true.

Yeah, I've always loved Buddhism's framing. I heard it as a different term, although I now use the phrase useful. But that framing of things is skillful and unskillful. Right. I just found it to be helpful to me when I was younger to take it out of right and wrong and good and bad and really just kind of go like, this is a skillful response to life and this really isn't. Yeah. Yeah. And the Buddha puts those two together, right? True and useful or skillful,

just in terms of what we say. He says, don't say something. The fact that it might be true is not good enough reason to say something. It's like, is it true and useful and kind? And then by all means say it. But you know, this sort of crept into our language a lot recently. People talking about my truth. Well, this is my truth and therefore I'm going to spit it out. But you know, maybe what you're saying might be hurtful to somebody else. Maybe you're actually, it might be true, but maybe it's coming out of your own reactivity and your own incapacity to hold your own emotional life,

et cetera, et cetera. So don't be seduced by the fact that something's true. You know, check if it's got a few other worthwhile attributes as well. Yeah. With the heavenly messengers, the phrase I heard the other day, really for the first time, I'm sure you've heard it before, and I don't remember which Buddhist teacher said it, but it really resonated with me, which said that we are all brothers and sisters in old age, sickness, and death. And that's just such a beautiful reframing. Like, that's all of us. You know, we're united in that thing. Yeah. The idea of a heavenly messenger. Like, it's a pretty heavenly messenger if it gets you to see your commonality with all humanity. It's a pretty good message. just that seeing everybody as a skeleton, which can seem a little hardcore, right?

But it can appear an exterior view of that. It can even appear a little life denying or something. Like any true practice, you have to know it from the inside to see what the benefit is. And actually, one benefit of that practice is what you just said about all being siblings in aging, sickness, and death, right? Against all the ways we

divide people up whether it's through political affiliation or age you know attractiveness and etc etc and then oh yeah this is where we're all headed we're all headed to the same boneyard you know so it really increases one's sense of empathy for others and it's also seen in the in the monastic practices as a kind of counterweight practice to lust in various ways. So, you know, you see somebody and you're, wow, and, you know, you're inflamed with desire for their young, firm, attractive, radiant countenance. And then you imagine their hair falling out

and their teeth falling out and their skin falling off. And, oh, yeah, it's like the sheen kind of rubs away a little. I think you've written the term corpses in waiting. We're all corpses in waiting. I love that. That's what I saw when I met Eric. I just thought, right there. Yep, yep.

I'm looking for the new skeleton filter I can put on my Zoom. Actually, you saying that made me in a roundabout way think about somewhere else that you go, because it made me think about the public speaking advice, which is sometimes imagine everybody naked, which then made me think about the situations in which one of the ways we divide ourselves from others is by they're not good, they're bad. But another way we divide ourselves from others is that they are better than us. And you talk about something called the deficient age gap that I really love. When I read it, I was like, yeah, that describes my experience. Share a little bit about that. Got to remember what I said about it now. But as far as I remember, there's various ways we sense an age gap. And in some ways, it's quite natural. It's quite natural, certainly, as we go along to feel like, oh, my inner sense of self, sense of image, you know, I forget that I'm the age I am. And I look in the mirror and then, oh, I'm suddenly reminded

because actually I feel more vital and young and energetic than that. And that's quite natural and healthy even, I think, to even though one slows down in various ways, that the sense of inner interest and brightness and vitality can be intact. That's one way of experiencing oneself as younger than one really is in terms of feeling more vital. So that's not deficient. But the deficient part is where this happens basically in areas of our life or in situations where we tend to feel not so confident and competent. And what people will notice if they pay attention is in those moments they often feel young or small the sense of self right is young and small so if you feel awkward in a social

situation for example or at work you feel intimidated by colleagues or in dating anywhere you're ill at ease it's like check in not just with the feeling you're having and the stories you're telling yourself. It might be some sort of uneasy story about what's happening or what are they thinking about me right now, etc. But really tune in. What's the sense of self like? And you'll probably find that you literally feel smaller than the people around you and that you feel young. and that you feel young. And the reason it's important or helpful to find your way into that inner sense of self is because it's a way of recovering the ways

that early on in life, certain situations made you feel lesser than, smaller than, deficient in some way or another. An example of that, if you got shamed very much as a child for being stupid, for example. Don't be stupid. Come on, you're told consistently that. Or it might not even be you're told you're stupid.

It might be you're told, come on, you're a clever boy. You ought to know the answer to that. You know, that's easy for you. That sounds like a very encouraging thing to say to a kid. Come on, you're a clever girl. You should, that's easy for you. That sounds like a very encouraging thing to say to a kid. Come on, you're a clever girl. You should know that. But the inner experience of the child is there must be something wrong with me then because I don't know the answer to that.

And they're saying it's easy. So I must be. So either you're shamed or you're encouraged. But either way, those two situations can give rise to this sense of, oh, no, I'm not. I should know something that I don't. I'm basically deficient in some way. And we get stuck there in some way. When that kind of situation replicates itself as an adult, and we find ourselves in that kind of situation where I feel like I'm supposed to know the answer here, I'm supposed to know what to do, I'm supposed to

know what to say, and I don't, what comes off as insecurity, and we take it to be just about, oh, I feel insecure in this moment or in this situation. But if you feel it's very often you can recognize either by the inner feel, the sort of atmosphere of your experience, or actually by the image that's there or the association, or if you really sense in sometimes the direct memory, it's like when I was whatever, six years old. Oh, it's like when those adults used to say that to me, etc. And so that's the first step is actually recognising that deficient inner self image so that you can then see what does it need, right?

Mostly what it needs is need some care and attention, need some love and reassurance, which is exactly the things it didn't get then. It got shamed or whatever. But what we tend to do, because it's uncomfortable to feel insecure in that way, we push it away or we try to compensate for it or we avoid the kind of situations where that insecurity comes up. And so what we end up doing is more of the same. We keep pushing the feeling away, just like we got pushed away or rejected early on. By trying to avoid feeling like that, we keep doing the same thing now. So finding your way into that inner self-image is a way to actually recover what that really needs.

It's like, oh, poor little one, that six-year-old feeling lonely, feeling confused, feeling rejected, feeling deficient in some way. And actually, it sounds maybe simplistic, but the work is often in the recognising where that structure is and how it is. But very often, all it really needs is to be taken in to our field of attention. It just needs to be held a little kindly. It needs to get now, that feeling of insecurity needs to get the love and care and reassurance that it didn't get earlier on. And then it can kind of integrate.

And then those things can become actually just distant memories of that thing that happened to me once. And they don't really have any power left to show up in the present. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together on the Really Know Really podcast, our mission is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why they refuse to make the bathroom door go all the way to the floor. We got the answer.

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Find it on the iHeartRadio app, on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. So in a practical way, let's pretend we've got someone, and at certain meetings at work, they notice this feeling. Yeah. Okay, anytime there is an older man in the room who's slightly grumpy, I suddenly feel very insecure. I noticed it's this deficient age gap. And so the thing that I always think is challenging for people is they are a in the meeting. So they kind of have to be in the meeting a little bit, you know, so what's a way of working with that kind of a in real time? And B, is that something that you can then take with you to your meditation and work with when

you have more time like what's a practical way of kind of really putting this into action yeah well I'd say it's a little the other way around okay so the meditation part comes first and it's not that you can take the office experience to the meditation cushion you can but much more that you take the meditation experience to the office because if you don't have so much of an inner grounding in actually being able to meet your moment-to-moment experience and steady your attention in your moment-to-moment experience, which is sort of what you're learning to do in meditation, right? And you're learning to do that in a pretty neutral situation.

You're just sitting down quietly, right? If you don't learn to be able to stay with yourself when you just sitting down quietly, right? If you don't learn to be able to stay with yourself when you're sitting down quietly, then the chances that you'll be able to stay with yourself when you're suddenly triggered in the meeting by the old grumpy man and you're suddenly feeling insecure, it's like you're dreaming, you know? You can't suddenly come into wise, steady, curious, clear presence when you're being impacted by something that's really difficult for you. So if you want to deal with that difficult situation at work, I know it sounds like a few steps removed, but my first advice would be, okay, let's first develop some skill

in how to be in a non-charged moment, like sitting down quietly at home for 20 minutes in the morning and noticing how your mind is bouncing around all over the place and realising that, hey, whatever you feed, that's what's going to grow. So if you just let your mind keep bouncing, that's what'll grow. And that just gentle discipline of again and again and again, you know, thousands and thousands of times, you're not forcing your mind back to the present moment or something, but you're just realizing, oh, there goes my mind again by its habit.

And here's the opportunity to actually choose to learn how to bring my attention to where I am, to settle it into the simplicity and the naturalness of this breathing body, and to relax into being here. I'm certainly in the last 30 something years of doing this practice, the most central, important, profound and transformative benefit that I can point to in all of meditation practice, and you can look at all the kind of expansive experiences and deep insights and all the rest. But just that, the capacity to actually be where you are, the capacity to actually have your mind and your body be together and here and somewhat harmonized and you're basically relaxed in your skin.

You're okay to be with your own mind and your own body wherever you are. That's not only a profoundly transformative skill, but it's also then incredibly portable. Then when you're in the office, already you're developing the habit of actually just being attuned to your experience before the grumpy, triggering old bugger comes in the room. You're just used to being with yourself in a non-triggered way. And so then when something potentially painful or disorientating or difficult happens, you tend to notice it much, much earlier. You notice it before it gets to crisis levels, right? Because you're attuned. So when you start to breathe

faster or your shoulders get a bit tense, you notice, hold on, something's weird. It's like, oh yeah, I'm starting to get activated. And then the habit is not to compensate, not to run away, not to distract, but to be interested, to be connected. And so I've got a lot more faith in doing it that way round somehow. Yeah. That sounds like a long, frustrating way

to deal with the office problem. Then, you know, by all means, try to tune in, you know, even to notice where are you tense, right? So rather than the story, what's happening and why is that person like that? And what am I thinking about me? And what should I say next? And then you've got that racing mind with all of that. Just where am I tense? And that can feel like I haven't got time to think about that. I've got to think about what I'm saying. And, you know, I'm scanning for danger.

But just try it once. Just try it once. Instead of all the drama and detail that's going on in the scenario around you, where are my tents? And is it possible, even just a little bit, like 5%, 10% to soften a little bit of where I'm tense? And what does that do to change my perception of the current situation? And if it does something, then I would say, good, now go and learn to meditate.

And you can change it a whole lot more. I think this idea that you're pointing to of cultivating an embodied way of experiencing life, tuning into the body, tuning into bodily sensations as they connect to the way we're experiencing the world, which really is experienced in the body, right? But all of this has been just central in my experience of your teaching, both as my mindfulness teacher or trainer, the one that I have studied with to become a mindfulness teacher. And also in the book that you wrote, you know, you say something interesting. You say your psychological past is not actually behind you. It's in you.

It directs your thoughts and feelings. It plays out in the defenses and desires and distractions that make up your habitual responses. It is stored in your bodily experience. And it's just so, pardon the saying, but mind-blowing to really discover that for yourself. I think everyone probably has a slightly different flavor and slightly different personal experience of this. And depending on your history of trauma or not, but the body might be a quite scary place to dive into. And that's okay. That can be worked with, with the support of another person, et cetera. For me personally, diving into the terrain of the body to meet what is arising with some space and kindness feels much less complicated than if I meet it in my head,

you know, where there is all that drama and the storylines like you're talking about. It just seems so much simpler to go down and meet it in the body. Yeah. And I think for whatever reason, partly it's some of the wonky presentations of meditation, partly it's just the ideas that people generate, but people have an idea of meditation as predominantly wrestling with their mind or trying to silence their mind or shut it up in some way. And then they might refine that a bit more. No, I'm not trying to shut my mind up. I'm just trying to kind of be with my mind, but in the background, they mean so that it'll mind up. I'm just trying to kind of be with my mind. But in the background, they mean, so that it'll shut up. And I've even heard a lot of meditation teachers often say, oh,

meditation is about a lot more than relaxation, as if relaxation is some sort of minor thing that you might do in a yoga class. But meditation is much more deep and special than that. But no, meditation is a lot, a lot, a lot about relaxation. There's many subtleties of relaxation. So partly it is learning to actually just muscularly relax. Often we're not as relaxed as we think. Jaw is tense or forehead is crisped or shoulders are up or hands are... You watch people's hands, man. It's like, what are they doing? You know, people are incredibly tense and agitated in their hands often. So firstly, just that actual kind of muscular softening. And that's already, oh, you know, learning to actually consciously soften, relax just physically is already freeing.

And then, of course, that tends to soften the breath. And then there's a sort of energetic softening as we notice tension patterns that we don't even have access to in our ordinary lives because they're a little more subtle, but they start to appear. And then we can see that also as emotional relaxation as we actually start to digest some of our emotional patterns and avoidance strategies, etc. And that goes all the way to, you know, I think of the essence of Buddha's teachings on liberation as really about existential relaxation. You know, in other words, that very sense of taking oneself to be someone.

I mean, you can only take yourself to be someone with tension. What we call ego really is just attention patterns, right? And so, and we might, some of us might think, oh yeah, I love to just relax trying to be somebody. It's such a hard job trying to go through the world, trying to be someone all the time. But actually, when we come into touch with that, on the one hand, we long for a kind

of peace from our mind. But on the other hand, we defend against it because it's like, who are you really without your thoughts? Actually, when your mind goes quiet, it sounds good. But when you get there, it's very confronting because you're losing your sense of who you are. So to actually learn the art of existential relaxation means you can just soften the whole sense of who you are. So to actually learn the art of existential relaxation means you can just soften the whole sense of being someone, that you have to defend somebody, you have to promote somebody, you have to keep telling other people who you are, etc. And that doesn't mean that any sense of self disappears. It certainly doesn't mean that any personality disappears. But it means that personality becomes a means of expression that can be bright and it can be creative and it's unique. We've all got a unique personality.

But it's no longer something that we're needing neurotically to prop up. And it's just not the centre of our experience. And that's a profound relief when the sensory reality around us, the sounds of the world, the feel of the world, the miracle of being conscious, the very fact that there's seeing and there's hearing and there's touching and there's feeling and all that's happening, then there's room for all of that to become more central when me, me, me, my, my, my can soften and relax. And then it's just, oh, the capacity to engage lovingly, creatively, playfully, the capacity to do all this stuff we call life without taking oneself so seriously, so personally, and then we have access to that. I'm Jason Alexander.

And I'm Peter Tilden. And together on the Really No Really podcast, our mission is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like... Why they refuse to make the bathroom door go all the way to the floor. We got the answer. Will space junk block your cell signal? The astronaut who almost drowned during a spacewalk

gives us the answer. We talk with the scientist who figured out if your dog truly loves you and the one bringing back the woolly mammoth. Plus, does Tom Cruise really do his own stunts? His stuntman reveals the answer and you never know who's going to drop by mr brian cranson is with us how are you hello my friend wayne knight about jurassic park wayne knight welcome to really no really sir bless you all

hello newman and you never know when howie mandel might just stop by to talk about judging really that's the opening really no really yeah no really go to really no judging. Really? That's the opening? Really? No, really. Yeah, really. No, really. Go to reallynoreally.com and register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast or a limited edition signed Jason Bobblehead. It's called Really? No, Really? And you can find it on the iHeartRadio app on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. I'd like to pivot here to something you talk about in the book about waking up, growing up, showing up. And I want to just read something that you wrote, which is that spiritual work is often spoken about in terms of waking up, seeing through our defenses and delusions to a clearer sense of reality. This clear seeing can dissolve our patterning in the immediacy of the seeing, but the patterns are dissolved in the moment rather than fully resolved. And you describe sort of some early experiences you had where you really were able to touch this transcendent dimension of life. You know, you described sitting

and being at one with the birds and the sounds and then the bell would ring, you know, and so talk a little bit about, you know, how we start to integrate waking up, growing up, showing up. Yeah. Well, in terms of the dissolving and resolving, and maybe I'll add another one, which is just solving. So that's the main way of the world. When we have a problem, we try to solve the problem, right? For some things that's totally appropriate. You know, you've got a maths problem, you can solve it. If you've got a logistical problem, you can solve it. But when it comes to more the inner or the psychological problem or the existential problems, an existential problem can't be solved. meet experiences and we might learn that various practices meditation but other kinds of things various things that lead to trance states as well can dissolve problems right so rather than fixating on it oh my mind just can open up and realize there's a whole other universe going on

here and my little problem isn't the main thing and and it drops away and that's a very powerful and beautiful thing to experience and actually to develop some skill in the capacity to dissolve problems by realizing that just because a problem arises it doesn't have to pull all my attention yeah right so i can have a problem that I'm angry, for example. Right. Just because I'm angry, it doesn't mean that I have to keep focusing on why I'm angry and who I'm angry with and why they did that and how bad they are and what I should have done and what I'll do to the next time. You know, it can be dissolved by realizing, oh, this is the anger and it's hot and it's bubbly and I can give it attention and it can cool itself out. If you really give anger itself attention, rather than giving all the attention to who you're angry with and why, you know, the story of the anger, and give the attention to anger itself, it'll be hot, it'll bubble energetically, it'll burst and then it's done. It's dissolved in that moment, right? So that's fantastic, beautiful skill to learn but by doing that you

haven't necessarily resolved the patterning like what do i get angry around why do i constellate so much around anger how come i've got this strong need for me to be so right and for the other person to be so wrong right and sometimes it's like we only get as far as the dissolving. And sometimes meditation can be not psychological enough, I would say. You know, we hear a lot about, oh, just let go of the story. And that's beautiful, powerful advice. But it's good for dissolving, but not for resolving. So at some point, it's like, oh, I guess I'm going to have to get back into that anger

stuff and actually understand more about it. If you dissolve things a few times, some things, you dissolve them, they're done. But the stuff that's very core patterning for us, the stuff you've actually got issues with, however much or however often you dissolve it, it'll just keep coming back around the next time. There's a suitable trigger. So if dissolving doesn't work, you need to do some resolving. And that means that's that process of actually opening to, you know, a bit like we spoke about earlier with the deficient self-image. That's the place to become genuinely curious about my anger, right? What are the kinds of situations that trigger it? And who do I take

myself to be when I'm angry, right? For some of us, it might be, I become the one who's absolutely right and I won't listen to anybody else and I have to affirm my view and everybody else is stupid because they won't listen to me. You know, there's a kind of arrogance to anger. Oh really? Where does that come from? And then for others of us, it might be the opposite, that we feel actually very small and powerless and the anger is in our attempt to get hold of some strength or some agency, a way of reasserting ourselves because we don't actually feel strong. So those things have their antecedents in our psychology. We learned our emotional styles. We learned our emotional patterns. And the ones that exercise us the most, the skill of dissolving them probably won't be enough

long term. And that's certainly what I found. I did a good 10 years of pretty hardcore meditation practice before I realized that there were some areas of my life that just hadn't gotten touched. You know, some things had opened up incredibly. In some ways, my understanding of reality had really, really deepened and developed developed but my capacity to go home and be with my parents for three or four days hadn't um hadn't developed very much at all you know so it was like oh how come i still feel like i'm a rebellious teenager and i get all kind of reactive and angry it's like oh there's some parts that i'd learned to dissolve some of that emotional stuff but i totally hadn't learned to

really recognize where it was coming from, why it would keep coming back, and how to actually really explore it and care for it so that it would resolve itself. And now I can report a much happier relationship with my parents. Did that happen for you primarily through mindfulness and meditation or was there other psychological work? You know, there's all kinds of modalities of therapy. For you, was it a multimodal approach? Yeah, it was for me. I think there's more, this is like 25 years ago, and I think there's more psychological skill within the meditation world these days. Like a lot of my friends and colleagues who teach dharma and teach meditation retreats are just a lot more psychologically skilled and

have done more psychological work themselves than some of our own teachers and particularly you know some of my asian teachers is like they didn't have the same kind of psychological framework so i wouldn't say that can't happen just within a meditative framework, particularly if you have a teacher who's a bit more psychologically attuned and skilled. But for me, yeah, it wasn't enough somehow what I'd been doing in meditation. And I was a student of the Diamond Approach for about 13 years. And that's a school started by somebody who called Hamid Ali, who writes under his pen name, A.H. Almas. And I found the weaving together

of spiritual depth and psychological skill that whole school holds, I found really, really helpful. And the spiritual depth bit, I had that covered, right? Buddhist practice and teachings. But to have that model of the kind of far-out dimensions of the mind, but held within a sense that sometimes there's a sense that we need to do our psychological work

in order to access those depths. But in the Diamond approach, there's really the sense that actually meeting your own psychological fears and blockages and deficiencies is actually a very direct portal to that spiritual depth. Because you meet the ways you compensate, the ways you shut down. And if you can meet the ways you shut down, that's really, really cool, right? Because right where you shut down, that's exactly there where you can open. So rather than avoiding those places, they're portals. The places you've shut down, the places you've learned to go tight or go unconscious are exactly the places where things can really open up. So I was hugely appreciative of that whole body of teaching and the whole school

and the 13 years I practiced in it. And my wife actually teaches in that school as well now. The understanding of that school has very much flowed through and informed the way I teach as well. I don't in any way teach that work, but it's definitely informed some of the way I work with students. Yeah, we've had Hamid on a couple of times. He's a fascinating guy. It's interesting because my journey in some ways is reverse of yours. I got sober at 24 from a heroin addiction, and I got sober in a 12-step recovery program. And my growth years were all about growing up, showing up, cleaning up. I mean, that was really where the orientation was for a long time. Even my Buddhist inquiry was very focused on the psychological elements of it. It's really only been in the last, I'd say, seven years that I really started tuning

into the waking up side of it, that dissolving that you speak of. So mine's been kind of reversed in that way. But I think my experience, it sounds like yours and most people that I admire and I think are wise have said, the reason we talk about all those things is because you need to do them all. You need to do all those things, waking up, cleaning up, growing up, showing up. We got to integrate it. Right. Yeah. Ideally. I mean, I'm not sure you've got to do it all. If you don't do it all, you'll make a mess in some of those other areas and we can see the mess is being made yeah like you you know in the spiritual scene is the mess of people that sometimes actually have got great potency and clarity of mind and can teach really authentically about the wide open

spacious liberated free mind but they've done a lot of dissolving and not enough resolving and so their unresolved material then leaks out in various ways, usually by having sex with their students, it seems to be the most common one. It's a favourite, yeah. Right. Oh, goodness. Some of the great sages of the 20th century,

think of people like Ramana Maharishi, etc. I don't think of some of those people as very integrated, for example. I don't think Ramana was very integrated in some ways, but it doesn't matter. I don't think you need to be actually skilled in all those areas to be of great help and support to people in one or two of those areas. But I do think, ideally, you at least need to have an awareness that they're distinct, that the growing up is distinct from the waking up. And that somebody can be very awake and not have done much growing up, for example. That's really important. Otherwise, people can get very confused and discouraged

by the fact that a teacher might have blind spots or might behave badly or might not have all of their worldly shit together. And it's like, oh, but they're supposed to be enlightened. It's like, yeah, but they might be very awake. But some teachers in a very renunciate lineage for example they just don't have very much experience of the worldly stuff and because there's this sort of froth and fog around ideas of awakening or enlightenment somebody's supposed to be a realized being as if they're supposed to be omniscient and i they supposed to be able to tell me about everything should i invest in crypto you know and what

what does that person know you know it's like going to a celibate and asking them for sex advice you know what do they know but you see that all the time people getting getting kind of seduced i think it probably happens less now because there's more understanding of these different areas than it did a generation ago. But the idea of you going to the guru or the wise figure and asking them for all kinds of things that were outside of their wheelhouse. And sometimes the teacher themselves, you know, being a little enamored of their own teaching throne, that they were qualified to dispense advice about anything and everything. And so I think it's Ken Wilber that first coined those terms, right? The waking up, growing up, showing up and cleaning up.

And just the recognition that those are each distinct areas is really important, even if you don't have to get that good at all of them. The showing up piece, you know, it's not for everyone. The Buddha talks about the Pacheka Buddhas, you know, some people who are really, really awakened, but they can't teach. Just showing up isn't their skill. They're not good at communicators. They don't really like people, maybe. You know, they just better sit in the cave,

you know, wish all beings well, develop deep, radically beautiful mind state, and maybe one or two other people might learn from them. So I think it's also cool that there are specialists i think it's brilliant that people do three-year retreats or 10-year retreats you know there's some people that don't necessarily show up so much they're not they don't do the psychological work but they might go super deep into the awakened presence stuff. So to the extent that we want to be active and clean and a force for good amidst the stuff of the world, then at the very least need an awareness of those things. And yes, great if you can have a more integral approach, but I don't want to

dismiss the specialists and the eccentrics and people that go really deep down one path. Changing directions yet again. One of the things I read in your book that I was really struck by was a framework you talk about called no rehearsal, no replay. Can you share what that is? I think it's really useful for those of us who tend to spend a lot of time in our mind. Yeah. You know, most of us convinced somehow that we can rehearse the future, you know, and so we spend a lot of time imagining that conversation and how it's going to

go and what I'll say. And then, you know, you can plan what you might say with a certain degree of confidence, but the idea that you can then imagine what the other person's going to say, you know, the max you can imagine, the absolute max is your first line. You can't go beyond that. But if we're honest and we see how much we invest in imagining future scenarios as if we can actually insert ourselves, as if it's worth the rehearsal. Now, of course, I'm not suggesting there's no future planning. You know, if you need to take the train to Paris next week, better buy a ticket in advance, you know. But the actual rehearsal we need to do, it's like simple logistical stuff.

When you invest in that planning for a moment, you sort of give away your ease and stability right now. And the rehearsal you do tends to be filtered through the mind state with which you're rehearsing, right? Which is usually some variation of anxiety or excitement, you know, or a combination of the both, neither of which give you a very clear view. So the best rehearsal for the future moment is the way you take care of this moment. And then you'll find, oh, here you are in that so-called future moment, and you're able to take care of it. You know, speaking is something that's very amazing. We think we're in charge of speaking and therefore we rehearse what we're going to say.

But actually, we never, like all the while we've been talking and while we continue to talk now, we never know really what's coming out of our mouth next? And yet we're more or less coherent with each other, right? And so actually learning to inhabit that and realise that you can just make it up on the spot and not even make it up. You can just inhabit the moment and you've got what it takes. The capacity to speak and be intelligible is an already acquired skill early on.

So that the rehearsal you need to do is very, very minimal. And of course, if I was going to come here and talk to you about a bunch of data points on something, I'd need to have the information, the data points. Yeah. But that's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about the way we try to rehearse the self. I try to imagine myself in a future moment.

And it's pointless and it's impossible and it's just anxiety provoking. So don't rehearse yourself for a future moment. And it's pointless and it's impossible and it's just anxiety provoking. So don't rehearse yourself for a future moment. Take care of yourself here and now. So that's the no rehearsal. And then the no replay is just, you know, don't lay that on yourself. Afterwards, what did I say? What did they think? And you replay through it through the distortions of the mind state with which you're remembering, right? The very reason you feel the need to go back and see how it was is because of some habitual anxiety.

So it's like, once it's done, drop it. And like when people are speaking in groups, for example, which sometimes, you know, understandably, people can feel a little anxious. And I really give them that encouragement, especially when people are anxious speaking in groups. And I say, okay, so when you pass the mic to the next person, don't go back and replay what you said. You'll be scanning for that thing, that bit there that I said.

Was that a bit weird? Did they think that was a bit... It's just like, just drop it. And the more you drop those things, the more you have access in the present while you're speaking and listening and showing up to just actually sense. And if you sense you're going too fast, slow down a bit. Or if you sense that you're starting to ramble, stop. So you can take much better care of what you're doing by being alive in the present than you ever

can through the rehearsing and the replaying and there's something about just that framing or phrasing of it you know no rehearsal no replay that kind of can cut through some of all that stuff that we tend to do i think too though as listeners are hearing you say that there may be a bit of a yeah but don't we need to learn from what we do? And as I read your explanation of no rehearsal, no replay, of course, that popped into my mind. And then I turned the page and you said, and yet sometimes we need to learn from our experience. But you make a wonderful kind of way to do that skillfully. You say that wisdom reflects on your behavior, right? Otherwise, you know, Mara, which is the Buddhist ideology of

kind of all the things that trouble us, judges your identity, right? So, can we look at our behavior rather than making an identity statement about who we are or aren't as a human, right? Yeah. If you're looking at your activity, what happened there? Oh, maybe that was a bit unskillful. Oh, I might want to apologize to that person. That's really helpful. But when you're measuring yourself and past, oh, how could I do that? How could I say that? Why am I such a, you know, that's never helpful. And that's the difference, whether you're evaluating the activity or whether you're judging the self. Yeah. And I think your earlier framework of, is this useful, is really a key one in that too. Like, you know,

if I'm thinking about something in the future, am I covering new ground that's actually knowable and usable? And sometimes it is useful, but we all know a point where we have gone past useful into, you know, rumination. It's just, we're thinking the same thing over and over and over and over again. At that point, it's not useful. Well, Martin, I just want to take a moment before we wrap up, you know, sort of personally and publicly to say, like, thank you for your teachings. I mean, they have been such a great blessing to me. Your work has been a treasure trove for me, especially in these last, well, it's almost a year now that I've been your student as a mindfulness teacher in training,

your book, your Sangha Live, the way that we can connect with you there and the teachers that teach through that platform at the Mulan where you host retreats, you have a way of teaching, a way of phrasing things that has brought alive aspects within my experience that had been untapped before and somewhat inaccessible. And so first of all, thank you. Thank you so much for what you do and for putting that out into the world. And to that end, I'm sure that listeners, after hearing this conversation, have felt inspired to connect with you more.

How can they do that? Well, that's lovely to hear, Ginny. It was a delight to get to know you over the last year, and it's just very nice to hear your appreciation. Thank you. So through my website, martinalewood.comcom and there you can link to the moulin which is the center where i live and teach retreats in southwest france and the various social media and propaganda and things about my teaching activities are all there so that's the kind of one-stop shop for the variety of

different projects i'm involved with. And yeah, that's the best way. So Martin Alewood, that's a funny Scottish name, but A-Y-L-W-A-R-D.com. And the Moulin, I must say, is a dreamy property. I mean, it is beautiful. It is, think French chateau type building and such comfortable accommodations, delicious food, and then just beautiful surroundings of nature in the Southwest of France and to sit and to hear really liberating teachings. It's a dreamy place to be. Yes, it is.

It's beautiful here. Well, thank you so much, Martin. It has been a real pleasure to have you on. As you mentioned, where people can get ahold of you, we'll have links in the show notes and a real pleasure to get to talk with you. Thank you. Yeah, thank you both. I've enjoyed it. If what you just heard was helpful to you, please consider making a monthly donation to support the One You Feed podcast. When you join our membership community with this monthly pledge, you get lots of exclusive members-only benefits. It's our way of saying thank you for your support.

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And together, our mission on the Really Know Really podcast is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why the bathroom door doesn't go all the way to the floor, what's in the museum of failure, and does your dog truly love you? We have the answer. Go to reallyknowreally.com and register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead. The Really No Really podcast. Follow us on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.