Modeling Mindfulness, with Sean Fargo

Speaker 1 · 0:04Sharing mindfulness is not reserved for mindfulness teachers. We all can share mindfulness with others simply by acting mindfully, by remaining present and embodied. For our behavior is just as influential, if not more so, than our words. In this episode, we hear from Sean Fargo on what it means to model mindfulness, and how we can better do so as mindfulness teachers, or as anyone with an interest in helping others feel safe, supported, and accepted.

Speaker 2 · 0:43Tichnat Hahn, the famous Vietnamese monk, was famous for saying something like, you know, on the stormy seas, if there's a boat of like fifty people afraid of capsizing, if there's like just one person who is calm and peaceful, grounded, present. Even that one person can help influence the mood of everyone else. And that one person can make such a huge impact on those around them. And as mindfulness teachers, a lot of how we teach is by how we are. You know, when your daughter reacts to the situation when she does something quote unquote wrong, that your calm may feel like acceptance. They pick that up, and we pick it up from our parents, you know, and a lot of our mindfulness work can be of noticing patterns, tracing our patterns back to our parents. This is the grounds for making amends, forgiving them, forgiving ourselves, forgiving our daughter, asking for forgiveness, and expressing love.

Speaker 1 · 2:29Each of us has the capacity to exude this type of embodied mindfulness presence. The teachers we admired serve as examples of what's possible when we exemplify non-judgmental presence. Just like Tik Nathan, or as in the next example of Byron Katie, we can change lives when we model a caring and compassionate acceptance for what is here.

Speaker 2 · 3:00I remember I was at a Byron Katie event at Spirit Rock, and I was in the back of the room, sort of organizing and stuff. And normally for like a day-long event, it takes like you know two or three hours for people to feel settled and situated and safe and real. And about 10 minutes into the event, someone raised their hand and said, You know, lately I've been feeling some thoughts that I feel deep, deep, deep shame about. And Byron Katie asked, Well, what are you thinking? And the woman said, Well, you know, I have a six-month-old baby who won't stop crying, who is really difficult to parent, who has these tantrums, they just won't stop acting out or crying. And sometimes I have thoughts of violence to this baby, to my baby, and that scares me, and I feel horrible about it. And I thought, wow, that's something deep to share, just 10 minutes into something. Byron Katie met her with presence and acceptance and care, and the whole room was silent. And then Byron Katie said, For all the parents here, how many of you also felt this? Raise your hand if you feel comfortable. I was like, whoa, more than 50% of people raise their hand in that room out of like 350 people.

Speaker 3 · 5:11No one was looking around, like who raised their hand?

Speaker 2 · 5:16But there was such a feeling of safety, non-judgment, and acceptance for what's real as a part of our human condition. I'm not saying this is like what we necessarily want to be doing in organizations, you know. The point, though, is to model this non-judgment, this acceptance, this care for what's actually here. And that feeling of safety will arise more than if we just use certain words or say that it's okay, but can we model it? And some of that is just being authentic yourself, sharing your own difficulties, really being humble, remembering the common humanity of this.

Speaker 1 · 6:28Recall the last time you felt an overwhelming sense of safety and care in the presence of another. What did that feel like in your body? Familiarizing ourselves with those sensations can help us better embody them when teaching. Or when in the presence of someone who could use some grounding through co-regulation.

Speaker 2 · 6:59You know, I think embodying mindfulness can teach as much as what we say. So embodying mindfulness, even just looking at the word embody, the B-O-D-Y, to really embody your own body. So mindfulness of the body is the primary foundation of mindfulness practice. And so, as we teach, can we bring mindfulness to our body? In fact, the mind itself encapsulates the body. And our heart. So if we are embodying mindfulness, are we mindful of our body? Including the body in our awareness. The more we sense into the body without judgment, the more we're actually increasing our ability to do that more and more, and with more nuance. In other words, we're strengthening the muscle of bodily awareness, the more we practice it. We're strengthening, building the insula in the brain that's responsible for proprioception, being able to sense indivisceral sensations, opening to the energies in and around the body. And the more we practice this, the more we actually sense, the more we notice, the more we feel, the more sensitive we become to the different energies of the body, different elements of the body, movements, temperatures, elements, locations of sensations. So, like mindfulness of sounds, a lot of people think that mindfulness of sounds is mindfulness of the sounds out there, but rather mindfulness of sounds when you really tune into the nuance of it is actually sensing or feeling the sound waves entering the ear, which is a physical practice, smells, noticing the sensations entering the nose, sights, receiving sights into the retina. So not looking out at that, but rather receiving the pixels of sight entering the eyes, a very different experience. So as we're teaching, it's easy to kind of get caught up in the sad thoughts and strategies and like the energy people around us to the point where we lose ourselves, lose connection with the ground or the experience of our own internal landscape.

Speaker 4 · 11:13And so, can we stay connected with our experience as we relate with others and encourage them to do the same?

Speaker 2 · 11:31And so mindful communication and mindful teaching is tricky, it's not easy, and so I don't pretend to like simplify this for the sake of making this sound easy, it's not easy.

Speaker 4 · 11:47But the encouragement is to see if we can kind of have like this 50-50%, 50% like awareness of our students and their experience, as well as 50% awareness of our own experience in our bodies, so it's not easy.

Speaker 2 · 12:08But my point is to stay in the body, stay embodied with this non-judgmental moment-to-moment awareness. And so that's sort of the other piece here. When we're embodying mindfulness, we're embodying non-judgmental presence.

Speaker 4 · 12:30So, can we refrain from judgments of ourselves or the situation or the students?

Speaker 2 · 12:43That's not easy either. But the more mindful we are, the more we notice the judgments arising, and the more we can be with that, and we can even use that as the object of our mindfulness and not judge the judgments, stay with the experience of the judgment and soften around it by being present for it.

Speaker 1 · 13:10To embody mindfulness is simple, but it is not easy. It takes practice and consistent curiosity and self-awareness. The best place to establish a foundation in presence is during formal meditation practice. Here we can dedicate time to working with the senses and familiarizing ourselves with what it means to be grounded, even as distractions, thoughts, and emotions arise. We can then take the practice of embodying mindfulness into each and every moment just by asking, can I be open to this?

Speaker 2 · 13:55As a mindfulness teacher, a lot of what we're encouraging is just to be, and so we can model that through our own presence and our capacity to be with however they show up through the waves of emotion and mental gymnastics, yes, this too. Can we be with that? Yeah, what is this like? Yeah. That's okay. Can we open to this? Can we sense this? Can we breathe with this? We're not judging, we're not forcing, we're not fixing, we're just being with this, too. So remembering it's not necessarily about all the words that we use or what models of growth we're using. It's most of it, in my opinion, is just yes, being with this, including the suffering.

Speaker 1 · 15:20Simply being present with suffering can be a challenge. Often we are interested in sharing mindfulness with others because we want them to heal, to help people grow and change. But it's important to be mindful of our attachment to outcomes. What might it be like to soften around our need to fix a situation or heal another's pain? And instead, to just offer that person our caring presence.

Speaker 2 · 15:59You know, if we want people to notice whatever's in their experience and not judge it, then we're teaching or we're helping them to not attach to anything. We're helping them to not attach to an outcome that they want, or we're helping them not to attach to certain thoughts or emotions, but rather we're encouraging a loosening up a little bit by just noticing whatever's here and softening judgments and replacing those with curiosity. And by that very nature of mindfulness, we're just kind of like taking a back seat a little bit and just noticing what's here. And so, as mindfulness teachers with guiding meditations, can we model what we're guiding by kind of loosening the script a little bit, you know, softening around what we think we should say, or detaching ourselves from this viewpoint of what's the best way to guide this, or the right way to guide this, but rather just kind of speak more from the heart. You know, a songwriting metaphor is that all you need to write a good song are three chords and the truth. I don't know who started that phrase, but like that's all you need. You don't need anything complex, you just need three chords and the truth, and similar to a guided meditation, you know, you need your feet on the ground, your heart to open to the people you're helping, and something sincere. That might be an over-simplistic way of viewing it, but can we soften around some of our attachments to how we think it should be, or this is the best way I can help people? Can we kind of loosen into the moment and just encourage myself and them to notice what's here?

Speaker 1 · 18:17We can only meet the pain of another to the extent that we have met our own pain. As those who wish to help others, the best thing we can do then is to embrace the work of healing ourselves and expanding our capacity to be present with our own discomfort. As our personal mindfulness practice deepens, we become ever more capable of holding space for the truth of this moment and everyone in it.

Speaker 2 · 18:53That's an invitation to welcome me what's not exactly invited, and so may all of you feel comfortable enough to tell me what you want or what you could use more of or less of topics that you want to talk about or whatever. Like try to be as welcoming as possible, honoring what's real for you. And may all of us do that to some degree with the people we're teaching as well.

Speaker 1 · 19:41Thank you, Sean, for modeling this welcoming presence and for reminding us that to effectively share mindfulness with others, we need not become anyone other than the most authentic, mindful version of ourselves that we can be.