 Once again, welcome. I'm Ann Pernick. I'm with the Business Ethics Network, which is a program of Forest Ethics. And I'm very happy to welcome you to an Introduction to Mindfulness for Activists with our presenter, Angel Kyoto-Williams. So a little bit about the different organizations and programs behind the webinar today. The Business Ethics Network, or BEN, provides trainings, networking opportunities, and other resources to corporate campaign activists, people working to reform corporations in many areas, including the environment, labor and workers' rights, human rights, and animal rights. And BEN is a part of Forest Ethics. Forest Ethics is a non-profit that demands environmental responsibility from governments and from corporations. And we create solutions that protect communities, wildlife, wilderness, and our climate. And we are privileged to have Angel Kyoto-Williams as the co-chair of our board and to have her teaching us about many things, including how to bring mindfulness into our work. Mindfulness is a part of our working culture at Forest Ethics. We believe it strengthens our work and also our resiliency as people. And it's pretty well integrated into what we do. We do meditations and staff calls. We talk about mindfulness in our work a lot. And though I've only been with Forest Ethics a pretty short time, I can already see the benefits from having a mindfulness practice in the work I do in terms of being able to step back and get perspective on the work that we're doing and see different and more powerful ways that we can make change. And that's what today's webinar is all about. I want to also say a few words about Angel Kyoto-Williams. Reverend Williams is an author, activist, entrepreneur, master trainer, spiritual leader, teacher, and priest in the Zen tradition. She's the founder of the Center for Transformative Change and spiritual director of the new Dharma community. An early shaper and leading voice in the field of transformative social change, Reverend Williams' work bridges personal transformation and social change. She's the author of Being Black, Zen and the Art of Living with Fearlessness and Grace, which is critically acclaimed book. The book is called An Act of Love by Pulitzer Prize winner Alice Walker and A Classic by Buddhist pioneer Jack Cornfield. She brings a lens of justice for marginalized and impacted communities to her work on the environment. And she has been working with Forest Ethics through our board for 10 years. And we are so happy to have her presenting with us today. And with that, we'll make sure that we can hear and see Angel and we'll get going. There we are. All right. Thank you so much, Angel. And I'll move the slides along. Let me know if I'm in the wrong place. Okay. So, welcome and thank you so much. As Anne said, my name is Angel Kiotta-Williams. I'm very happy to be with you. Can you hear me? Okay? Yes. Okay. So, let me just make a little bit of a change here. I switched something and can't see what I need to be. Awesome. Okay. So, again, my name is Angel Kiotta-Williams. Our time together is fairly brief and I want to leave plenty of time in order to be able to respond to your questions because that's always really the juicy part. So, I'll just say that briefly, as Anne said, I've been sitting on the board for Forest Ethics for 10 years. I just became the co-chair and my other life is spent as a spiritual teacher. I've practiced in the Zen tradition and beyond the sort of pop culture relationship to Zen. Zen is really understood as the tradition that strongly focuses on sitting meditation. The reason that I come to bring meditation is not because I'm sort of fixated on meditation for my own needs. It's because as a person that was an activist before I was a spiritual practitioner or had any formal spiritual practice, I came to realize that the practice of meditation or mindfulness, the practice of bringing oneself back to moment awareness, non-judgmental awareness was extraordinarily impactful to my life as an activist. I spent time doing activism, different forms of activism on behalf of young people that were incarcerated for the rights of young women and voting rights and so on and so forth in my early life and I've never stopped being in direct relationship to activism as a way to express what's important to me and what matters in the world. So, I come to bringing meditation not from the perspective of I've got something to sell activists or they need to do something to fix them, but rather this is something that is going to affect the work that we do out in the world and I believe that it's important that the people that are doing work out in the world get access to the best tools and resources to generate their own personal and inner life resilience so that they can be effective for what matters to them in the world. So, that's how I come to this. I'm going to start with if you give me the first slide and talking a little bit about what meditation and mindfulness is more specifically. Some of these slides come from a dear colleague of mine who made them up so I may not say exactly the same things but you'll get the idea that meditation, as it's now more popular to say that mindfulness is the way that people feel comfortable to say like a non-religious form of meditation so I'll use mindfulness and meditation interchangeably but I'm referring to the same basic practice that is aimed at training your mind to be in the present so as I said that's to bring our mind out of the past which we're often focused on the past what happened at some other time or we're far ahead into the future. The result is that we actually miss what's happening for us in the current moment and we feel a sense of being out of sync because there's a drag when one is focused on the past and we have the events and the situations, maybe I shouldn't have said that, was that the best way to approach that or this is what I'd like to do, this is what I'm hoping for and in the meantime the only place that action can actually happen is in the current moment so if we're lost in the past or overly focused on the future we're not actually able to be as effective as we'd like to be as attentive as we'd like to be as attuned to what's happening in the moment so that we can bring all of the resources that we have to bear on the current situation and when we have all of our resources available to us we actually end up with more choice so that the part of us, the personality part of us that's functioning could actually serve us instead of us kind of falling into the trap of whatever the situation is that's happening, gaining momentum and kind of taking over and then we find ourselves doing things that we didn't really intend to do, we find ourselves behaving ways that we didn't really intend to behave. I'm sure all of us know what it is like to have been in a situation with somebody that maybe that you're working with, with a colleague in coalition in a meeting where you said something and it wasn't really what you actually would have chosen to say but you're kind of caught up in the momentum and the emotion of the experience and what meditation and mindfulness does is bring us back into the current moment of our experience and able to sense the entire situation so that again we can have more choice about what it is that we're up to. The other thing that it does is it helps us to be more aligned so that what we're thinking and what we're actually feeling and the mood that we're in are more in alignment and so for instance we get up in the morning and we're feeling kind of out of sorts and it's difficult for many of us to not allow that mood to kind of take over our day or take over our experience and the way that we're relating to people as a result of that. By doing mindfulness and bringing ourselves into the present moment, the kind of draggy energy of a mood, right, which a mood tends to be left over past experience that's being activated into the current and it makes what we're seeing in front of us quite foggy. So we're able to say I'm in this meeting now and what I need to do is to be able to be attentive, to be open, to be spacious, to be available to the situation rather than allowing the mood that I woke up this morning to kind of go on and on in the back of my mind and I'm halfway having a conversation with the experiences that I'm having in my mind and halfway having a conversation with the person that's in front of me, neither conversation being clear or satisfying. So it helps to actually cultivate our capacity for leadership by bringing us in alignment so that people experience us as we want to be experienced rather than experiencing us as the different parts of us that feel out of conflict and out of sync with the current moment that's happening. And it develops our, I want to say, we call them our superpowers, which is our ability to feel into the situation that is happening. So we all have an understanding of what it's like to say that a situation feels off. Well, that's somatic awareness that is to say that without even someone saying something and saying like, hey, I feel really off or a person walks into the room and you know that they're angry or there's a situation brewing amongst your staff and you realize that something is going on. Well, meditation by clearing out the kind of noise and clutter of our mind enables us to actually be more attuned to that somatic awareness, that fundamental human resource to be able to feel, which actually happens much, much quicker than our mind is able to process what's going on. It is what has alerted us to dangerous situations and helped us to maintain ourselves and to move quickly when we need to be able to move quickly and also to recognize when to slow down and pay attention to the surrounding environment and have our senses heightened. But again, if everything is cluttered, we can't actually do that. So that's a little bit of a hint as to what meditation is and some of how it functions for us in our day-to-day lives as activists and organizers and advocates for social change. Next slide, please. I like to say to people that the way that you can think of meditation is it's about developing a relationship with the inner you. So there's you and there's an inner you. And how do you know you have an inner you? Well, if you've ever had the experience in your life where you, I want to say, leave roadkill behind as in something occurred, right? You meant to behave a certain way, but all of a sudden you're looking behind you and you've got a mess of a situation. That can happen in your interpersonal relationships, your relationships at work, your romantic relationships, any number of places. We all have had the experience of, oh, looking over our shoulder and looking at the roadkill of a situation that has occurred in which we don't really feel like we were fully participating and yet we know that the aftermath of that was left behind. Well, that's because as depicted in the slide, much of our lives is actually driven by our inner awareness and our inner you, right? The self that is driving all of our emotions, that is receiving information and then taking control of how we actually behave and that distinction between us as we feel ourselves in the moment and inner us which is kind of having a little bit more control of what's happening. When those two are out of sync, we end up with roadkill. We end up with experiences and situations that we feel regretful about, that we wish we had done a different way and meditation allows us to develop a relationship between the outer experience and the immediate experience we have of ourselves and the inner experience that we have of ourselves which is our more private and internal thoughts, feelings and emotions that are undergirding all of the behaviors that show up to the world and express itself to other people as who we are. So that's the first half of what is happening in terms of our relationship of having an inner life. The other side of that is if we do not have a relationship between our inner selves, right? If we don't have a relationship with this underlying aspect of ourselves, it's really driving the situation and we want to make change in the world. If we're not driving our own lives, then who's driving change? That is to say, if we're not able to be in deep relationship and effectively drive our own behaviors where we have as much access to choice and resourcefulness in terms of how we show up, what are going to be the outcomes and the impacts on the change that we're actually trying to have in the world? And if you want some examples of where that misalignment or lack of relationship occurs and affects the impact that we have in terms of the work we do, you can just think back to the different times in your experience directly or that you know of where coalitions broke up because of high strung emotions where people couldn't work out the situation, where meetings are taking place and somebody blows up and they can't reconcile where ongoing conflict between colleagues, between partners, between bosses and staff, managers, directors, between foundation people and the development people where we just can't get along and we can't get ourselves aligned in order to move forward. And that's basically because one or more of the parties involved are not able to get in sync with their internal emotions and get aligned and clear with their purpose so that their inner lives are not driving the outcome of the situation. We want to be clear about the purpose that we have for bringing about change in the world and we want to be able to set aside the noise and clutter of moodiness, of mental chatter, of distraction. Distraction is a big one because all of us have far too much work to do. There's many things to change and that often actually presents a paradox for us because we think, well, I have so much to change and there's so much we can do. How could I possibly spend time sitting around doing nothing, which is often what people think of as meditation? My question back to you would be in that case, if you don't take that time, as many of us have not been, taking that time to get in alignment with the part of ourselves that's driving our behavior, are you willing to continue to accept the outcomes of situations gone astray of distraction, taking over your capacity to focus on the work that you have to do in front of you, on being disorganized, feeling unproductive and not being able to get yourself on track or simply not being able to establish a calm and clear break from your work at the end of the day so that when it's time to go back into your home relationships you're not bringing all of the stress and distraction and dysfunction of work into your home life and starting a cycle of upset there as well. So I'll leave that question to you and I'm going to bring us to start with just a basic meditation practice so that if you want to get some sense of what it might be like if you haven't had a chance to do it yet, I'll give you a little bit of an access to a meditation practice that will maybe debunk some of the myths that you might have about what meditation practice means. So we start with the body and we say sit upright and what that means is that you want to have your back upright but you don't want to be stiff and what helps to do that is to actually press your crown towards the sky and to make sure that your sitz bones, right? The bony protrusions under your buttocks are extended out behind you. I like to lean all the way forward and make sure my sitz bones are out behind me and then press myself up, pressing the crown with my head towards the sky and it causes my chin to drop a little bit. If I'm sitting in a chair, I want my feet, my knees just about level with my hips. If I'm sitting on a cushion or a rolled up towel, I want to make sure that my knees and my buttocks are actually forming a triangle for stability, right? So you want to have three points touching the earth, whether that's the two feet in your buttocks or your two knees and your buttocks or maybe have cushions underneath if it's a classic meditation posture. I can't really show you that. Maybe we'll have another session where we do a more in-depth so you can really see my body but if you have cushions propped up under your knees for those of us who are knees, don't go down and touch the floor easily. You can just prop them up but you want to have a stable foundation forming a triangle as you see in the slide. You want to have a stable foundation of a triangle because a triangle is the most stable posture. So then you want to place your hands on your thighs and broaden your body from left to right so that you're opening your chest nice and wide. And I like to teach this way of doing meditation for those of us who are in the world because it's really about sintering ourselves and we can do these same actions when we're actually going in the world so we don't have to think of meditation as some really tweaky off thing that's going to make us look weird. And in extending our body from left to right and we open ourselves into relationship and bring our chest forward in a gesture of really facing the world so that we also get to understand that meditation and mindfulness is not about hiding from the world but it's actually about facing the world and by expressing the full width and opening into the full width of our body we're extending into relationship with both the space around us but also the people and all of our relationships in the world. So we're not hiding and disappearing even though we're turning our attention inward but rather we're expressing the intention to be in a relationship with the world around us. And as I said, we're also extending into our full length and by extending into our full length we're expressing both the relationship through our width but also our own personal dignity through the length of our body and that means to not be collapsing kind of having your shoulders drop but to really feel your own sense of dignity and celebration of your best intentions to face the world and to take on the challenges of the world because it's truly a dignified role and an honored role to hold in society. It helps to take your tongue and just put it on the roof of your mouth which reduces swallowing. And so a lot of us are familiar if you've ever tried you feel like you're swallowing and swallowing so if you just a little trick take your tongue and just put it on the roof of your mouth just behind your teeth and swallowing would be reduced. And finally, casting your eyes downward you don't have to close them completely I like to say that when you close your eyes since most of us when we close our eyes it usually means we're going to sleep it's like having a movie screen and if you have a movie screen what's going to happen is you're more likely to make movies if it feels more comfortable to you close your eyes completely you can but the active style of meditation that I teach for people that are doing change in the world is to simply cast the eyes downward so that you remain in contact with and aware of the outer world as you're bringing your attention dropping down into your inner world. Next slide please. So functionally here's what happens in meditation it's really as simple as choosing a point so almost anything can be the point or object of your meditation I call it the point and all you're doing in meditation is choosing to recognize that you have one single focus one point that you're going to bring your focus and your attention on and anything at all that is not that point is what I call other than point so the idea is simply to bring your attention to the point and anytime you find yourself on other than point and I literally mean anything that's not the point is other than point you simply bring yourself back to the point so the point that is most often employed is our breath and the reason that is is because it's the tool that you always have with you and as I always say when you don't have your breath you probably don't care about meditation anyway anymore so we use the breath most often there are different things that you can use but let's use the breath in this case and the idea is that you're bringing your focus to the breath and you can feel the breath perhaps at your nostrils and the rise and fall of your chest or seated low down in the belly which is where you want your center of gravity to be often times we count the breath in order to give us a way to contain and know where we are so next slide the way we count the breath is as we count a breathe out we count one so on an out breath one on an in breath two on an out breath three on an in breath four the idea is that we count up to ten but if you find yourself distracted if you find yourself with your attention on anything other than point you start at one again and for those of you that think well I'm going to keep counting one I used to think my name might as well be one when I first started to meditate because I so often was other than point and the last thing I will say for this part of our introduction is to say a little bit about the whole thought we often have about am I getting it right the idea in meditation is not of course is not to be caught up in distraction and the noise of our chattering mind the distractions in the room and the space the running into the past checking out whether we're hungry going over the conversation that we had earlier revisiting old situations wanting to know whether we did the best we could or jumping into the future so clearly meditation wouldn't be that kind of space but here's a secret many people don't know neither is meditation staying perfectly perfectly still it's not staying perfectly still and it's not even staying on point meditation is the dance of coming from other than point back to point so as long as every time you notice that your attention is on something other than the point that you intend in this case the breath when your mind is focus has gone to prepare and dinner when your focus has gone to the pain that's in your knee you simply bring your attention back to breath if your attention goes to did I do that conversation right notice that that's happening bring your attention back to the point if your attention goes to I don't really want to be doing this that's other than point notice that that's okay bring your attention back to the point so for the duration that you've chosen which I recommend that if you're starting out don't go for half hour, 20 minutes not even 10 minutes go for 5 minutes sit down if you feel like you can't squeeze out put up 3 let me say that doing starting a practice with 5 minutes a day and being constant and consistent is much more effective than trying to have long periods of time set it up so that it's a consistent time so that you can do it at the same time because our body gets accustomed to that rhythm and if you can ask somebody to do it with you if they can't do it with you in person partner or kids or something do it with you then you can do something online we have a little online practice group that we do all the time and I introduce meditation to organizations and we engage in everybody in a 27 day challenge so you kind of build up the practice when you first start and as it happens if you miss a day as many of us it does happen especially as you're building a new habit you just start all over again don't get yourself tripped up about it because that's other than point you simply bring yourself back to the point of meditation you don't want to make this an irritant you don't want to make it painful you want to get yourself in a position where it feels like something that maybe has a little edge to it but you begin to look forward to it it should enhance your life it should fit you there will be some discomfort whether that's in the body or in the mind of course as we get to sit down and settle our mind our minds are not used to being settled and so they'll be a little agitated and they'll create a lot of distraction to keep us from being still but if you simply remember that all meditation is to recognize what is the point what is the purpose what is the place that I'm fixing my attention to and whenever I find myself other than point I simply, gently, non-judgmentally bring my attention back to the point and as long as I'm willing to do that over and over again for the period of time that I choose to do I am succeeding at meditation I'm going to open it up for questions I hope that was useful and let's see what you have to say about that wonderful, wonderful, thank you Angel well I go ahead and take a look at the questions and get myself a little organized on that will you please talk to folks about the 27 days of change practice that's coming up and I've included a web address for people to contact you about that and a little suggestion of what they write in the comments section so that they'll get some more information yeah sure thing so as I said I'm an activist like most of you and I personally found for a long time even as a person that had developed meditation practice and developed a strong spiritual practice that it was a hell of difficult to keep it actually functioning in my daily life and so over time I developed a program in which there are intent because we're not living, we're not monastics we're not living in a monastery we're not going to be able to go and retreat all the time drop at the hat at the same time we do want to be able to develop our capacity develop our skill set so 27 days of change is a seasonal 360 degree 6 point chain program it's a self-driven program that has what I think of as the three essential elements to bring about change in your life when I say change, any kind of change that you've been trying to bring hoping to bring and not quite getting it by the three essential elements to have some guidance to have a clear structure of support a clear structure in the form of a program so guidance, a clear structure program and also to have support around you the form of community of people that are actually engaging the same thing any of you know that if you tried to do something and you're the only one doing it's kind of a drag because you can't really talk to people so having a community of support is utterly essential to actually bringing about change the other people may not be doing the same kind of change but because we're all moving in the direction of change our own personal change together there's a great deal of momentum and a feeling of support and a camaraderie that is built where it has been really profoundly impactful for people where they've thought about the kind of changes in their life whether they're dietary changes, exercise just doing a writing practice daily getting up to speed on that starting a meditation practice developing more patience with your kids with your parents with your partner all kinds of things I've seen people use for 27 days of change we have a limited window of time that we let people come in and register it's a very popular program we're going to have to cut the registrations off this time so if you just at all please go to 27daysofchange.com and very soon I'll be sending out an email that gives more in-depth there'll be a more in-depth webinar all about the program so I'd love to see if any of you want to bring any kind of change in your life we also offer a mentor coaching for those people that choose that path so if you want to bring any kind of change in your life you want to talk to people and hear from people that have brought extraordinary change in their life sign up and we'll get you some information wonderful, terrific and I also wanted to note that several of you indicated you'd like more information about Angel's work about Ben and we'll be getting all of that to you too and for folks who requested more information about Angel's work there will definitely be information about 27 days of change in there too just about 27 days of change 27 days of change as an activist is my response to needing to bring a way to effectively deepen my own life and be able to move things forward in my own life recognizing that I didn't have another way of making that happen for myself and so it's the culmination of 15 years of experience both as an activist and as a practitioner it's most of the people that participate are just like you and so I invite you to check it out wonderful all right we have great questions here and I'm going to try to call on people so I'm going to try to unmute each person's line one at a time here and apologies if I say your name wrong please correct me Gailani or Gailani can you hear me Gailani can you hear me okay I will ask on your behalf you had two interrelated questions can you recommend a few ways to help youth recognize their power and abilities as it relates to activism can you suggest a few ways to bring meditation to youth specifically teens in ways that they fully engage or embrace a practice yeah let me start with the one going backwards first so to play the program to you you know we sort of get this idea of like somebody to do something and we want it to do us because we see all the benefits and so then we're trying to push it the best thing to do is to ask the kind of questions about what's going on with the youth that isn't working for them and to introduce a practice in that form right so if the young people are having difficulty controlling their emotions they're having difficulty clear if you are depressed like they want to improve their grades if they want to improve their game I mean meditation works for so many things it's just like pretty awesome and pretty easy to introduce like hey why don't you try this and I would say start off doing give them the kind of instructions that are really refile for that four line instruction sit up right extend yourself wide because that puts you in a relationship extend yourself long because that expresses your inherent dignity and give one full out breath to begin because we want to give more than we want to take and that kind of a simple four line instruction helps people a lot because they don't make it feel so complicated the nuances like toying on it you don't have to worry about that just get people started make it as short and sweet as possible that's really what works for the youth I want to say that I developed most of my ability to instruct meditation with incarcerated youth so that's totally where I got my chops at because it's got to be straightforward they're bullshit detectives they don't want to hear any kind of like foofy language and esoteric stuff that's the way to go my experience is that actually young people take to a quicker don't try to get them to do it a long for a long period of time but they take to it quicker than they start sneaking off and going and working on it by themselves and in terms of getting them to engage you know when we engage with ourselves and we're able to get clear about what we're experiencing we're actually we actually get more clear about what it is out in the world that we care about and that simply activates us towards wanting to engage and change in a meaningful way so I think it's a two-shot deal you get to I have a bird so I don't want to say kill two birds with one two challenges with once get people clear and in touch with themselves and our natural innate goodness and our natural desire to be compassionate and to be of service actually arises great we have a question from Ryan Green and Ryan I'm going to try to unmute your line can you hear me yes hi Ryan hi how are you my question was when your point is a question do you focus intensely kind of on the question itself or would you allow space for your mind to wander and maybe investigate some possible solutions for example if I'm feeling anxiety about some part of my activism like there's a question I don't know how to approach it would I think about that question explore possible answers and then come back to the point or I don't know I was just yeah interestingly you know all of the creativity study says like leave the question alone so what I would focus on in that case is actually the experience there's two ways to go at this first I would focus on the experience that you have of not anxiety right like those gaps in which you're not having anxiety and let that be the point right and then you know anxiety will kind of arise and notice it there and then you return to that clear place right listen I notice anxiety is there and I simply come back as the as the experience of recognizing that you are not your anxiety that anxiety is simply an experience that doesn't have to take over the noise that it's creating so that the answer to your question can't come through because you have the answers actually there for you but the anxiety is inhibiting your ability to access it so that's another thing that's awesome about these kinds of practices is it gets us clear about who we are and separates us put some perspective between the challenges that we're experiencing so that we're not caught up in them so I would go at it that way if the anxiety if you're feeling of anxiety becomes more intense or it like it feels very intense for you can actually turn your attention to a curiosity about the feeling of anxiety until it dissipates right because if you bring your attention directly to the anxiety and sort of like look at the anxiety and be curious about it right just be curious like what does that feel like and what happens when I'm having this feeling right and so you're sort of working with you're not actually asking these questions verbally but just feeling like what does that feel like again separation starts to arise so that you're no longer overwhelmed and then whatever answer and information is underneath the anxiety will begin to bubble to the surface but I wouldn't put my attention on the question itself turns out that the brain doesn't work like that it actually gets more tight and worn out and your most creative solutions can't come through that way. Thank you. Thanks Ryan. We have a nice nicely timed follow up here from Jesse Jesse I'm going to try to unmute your line can you hear me Yes hi. Hi Okay so my question was when you're looking at the inner and outer self how do you recognize that alignment or maybe lack of alignment between those two states or your being and like more pragmatically how does meditation help you achieve that alignment? You recognize it in the way that we all recognize a feeling of out of sortness right it's like we feel out of sorts we don't quote unquote feel like ourselves it's almost like you feel like you're spending a lot of time kind of watching yourself doing things and you don't feel in control of a funky word but I think maybe that's the best way to say it right you don't feel like you have a handle on how your life is unfolding that doesn't mean that you can control all of the aspects of your life and what happens is you don't feel like you have a handle on yourself in terms of responding so if you feel churned right you're not feeling a sense of flowing through even the difficulties and challenges so this is not about everything is going to be happy go lucky and you're going to have everything perfect but your experiences of even the challenge does not feel like drag and friction on you where you feel out of sync it's sort of like if you watch Star Trek or any kind of sci-fi but you feel out of phase with your life is this little like right and that's inner you and outer you are not together when they're together even the challenges that you face in your life are faced with an experience of flow again not to say that they're not challenging but you don't feel whipped apart you don't feel torn in the experience of the challenges just like okay here's what the challenge is I'm going to face that if there's a part of you that's kicking and screaming and dragging you know you're not a relationship to the inner you and the way that pragmatically that meditation helps that is because the noise distraction like ongoing chatter we start to think that stuff is us right and so it's like you got someone comes in the room they're annoying you're like I can't stand that person and they're going to really get on my nerves and oh my goodness here they come and we suddenly get caught up in all of that distraction or a feeling of judgment or like what are they going to think of me maybe I'm not doing this job really well and we're so caught up in that we think we begin to mistake the noise distraction chatter for who we are fundamentally as a result we feel disengaged like we don't feel at ease with ourselves and we let those conversations in that past fixation and future fixation drive us because meditation brings us in the present moment right because it brings our attention right back to point and back to point and back to point right where we choose to come back to point experience is felt as simply experience we're not trying to layer on what's happening now and what's happening before and what's going to happen all at the same time and all of that extra information makes us feel muddled and confused you know we call that state oftentimes like being in the zone it's just like oh I'm just on this and I'm focusing on this and even if it's a difficult thing to work with if it's a joyful and pleasurable thing to work with it feels like flow it feels like we're in sync we're in time sync with our lives rather than being stretched out and stressed out by trying to be in too many time continuance at the same time does that make sense yeah thank you very much you're welcome alright thank you Jesse there's a question from Kristen Kristen can you hear us okay I'm going to ask this question on your behalf any recommendations as far as mindfulness practices to manage feelings of frustration with fellow white allies she writes I am a white Buddhist practitioner who see the work of undoing white oppression as distracting from the Buddhist principle of non-separation I'm getting very tired of hearing that yet I also notice I am not all that skillful in managing that because my frustration mounts not frustrated in managing what's that can you I'm not all that skillful in managing I have to read into it for her a little bit so Kristen apologies if I get it wrong but I think she wants to manage this conversation about undoing white oppression as distraction because of the principle of non-separation I think she wants to bring I think she wants to align her practice with her activism and she's hearing from some of her fellow practitioners that that is not respecting the idea of non-separation Kristen I hope I am getting that right for you I'm just going to deal with the question of frustration and so in any in any case the feeling of frustration which is what I heard right at the top of the question the feeling of frustration is in any kind of out of control emotion we're something the experience that we're having of an emotion an emotion is just like over attention on experience we're having experience all the time hot cold comfortable uncomfortable all of that is always happening but then we decide to like overattach our attention to one particular emotion or feeling sense that out of the billions of them that we're having all the time and so simply bringing our attention into the present moment because the frustration of something that happens some place and at some other time right so we have an experience there's an emotional response to it and then the experience the situation itself is over the fact that we're feeling frustration about the thing after the situation itself immediate situation is over is because we're on replay right we're regurgitating that experience over and over again and it's overlapping our current experience and so simply coming back to the present moment over and over again is the way to deal with any difficult emotion and so I'll just leave that in terms of the overall question that that's the way in which anger frustration anything any emotion that feels like it's taking you out of yourself and it's taking control of you is we simply bring ourselves back to the current emotion I would let me speak the current situation feeling our bodies is a very useful way which to really tap into the current experience rather than to be winding off into what's going on in our minds our emotional minds right so feeling sensation noticing the feeling of our buttocks of our hands of the quality of the temperature in the room actually going getting down to feeling senses very powerful way wish to drop us into the current moment and get us out of the loop and regurgitation of an experience that has happened is another great and I'm seeing from Kristen that that she's finding value in your answer so we couldn't hear her but so it's good I'm able to give you that feedback Angel okay we have a few questions we'll get through as many as we can these are great questions folks I'm going to try to call on Alden or Alden if I can there you are can you hear us okay well I'm going to ask on your behalf see I lost here it is I think this is a really important one for us to get to what do you suggest to people who want to start but can never seem to actually sit down and meditate yeah okay soon as you get up sit down that's why that's the best way to start so I have this mantra it's a really esoteric mantra so you have to pay attention so that you can remember this no sit no brush teeth so no sit brush teeth that means when you get up in the morning I recommend changing out of your bed clothes if you can if you can't don't worry about it don't sit in your bed if you can help it if you can't don't worry about it don't brush your teeth until you spend I don't even want to say five minutes sitting until you spend time sitting there's what you do with the time right move through three clear experiences of I got to get out of here right so just sit down don't worry about a clock don't worry about a timer don't worry about any of that sit down get yourself in sitting posture upright broad in your dignity one full out breath retention on the breath something goes I can't possibly be sitting here acknowledge it attention back to the breath okay I think I should go make breakfast acknowledge it attention back to the breath third time you can get up it will lengthen on its own do that every day no sit no brush teeth and if you don't find the time the people around you will beg you to go and sit okay great we have a question from Carla let's try to do this question and we'll see where we are in terms of time Carla I'm going to bring you in if I can can you hear us hi Carla yes I can hi thank you so much I really am enjoying the presentation and the discussion you were mentioning flow and I think of meditation is really benefiting perhaps trying to replicate or make it easier for us to get to that place and my question is about other things that have that kind of quality for me personally it's yoga and in my yoga classes I'm asked in every class to focus on intention which sounds like the point that you're describing here and so I know people may get that during running or painting or doing something to get into that state so is there something that's particularly beneficial about sitting or about stillness that you think makes it important to try to do that in addition to days when I yoga or can I count that and some of it like check that one off I think there's something different about it and so what is different about it is actually you are training the mind to do it at will so in when we do physical movements and it's induced right like so in yoga or in running or for me swimming or riding my motorcycle it's the state of flow is induced that means it's brought about by the what we're doing that's not training the mind though to do it at will right so the meditation is about actually creating a training ground right like a training field and being able to bring ourselves to that state of focus and attention at will the value of that is when you're having conversation and you are about to go off somewhere first of all you will notice more readily that you're going off somewhere because when you're doing it in meditation and you notice distractions or anything that's other than point come up you get better at noticing like oh I'm off point and then you start to notice oh I'm about to head off point and the distance between being way off point and needing to come way back and being on point is actually shortening over time so meditation is really truly training the mind to be able to come to attention and to present moment at will which is different then in state that comes as a result of putting the body in a repetitious pattern does that make sense a lot of sense to me thank you great Angel do you have time for a couple more questions or you do okay we're going to squeeze a couple more in thank you my assistant would probably say something different okay well wave your hands at me when it's just too much but we have another question about activism and mindfulness and non-attachment um let's see this print is really small on this which is going to make it more likely that I say your name wrong Melia I'm going to try to bring you on correct me if I'm saying your name wrong can you hear that hello can you hear me yeah go ahead please my name is Nalia thank you yes so this is in response to another question that was asked before and my question is working on behalf of social justice issues can elicit a lot of emotion so how does one care and practice non-attachment at the same time and is that even the goal to practice non-attachment in this work yeah you know non-attachment is funky terminology that we have that has been translated and so it gets misunderstood quite often just you want to think of it as not getting bound up right like not being in it's like you go to pick up a net right and we have a kind of like massive net of like interrelated challenges social issues, social ills that are in the world and we want to get our arms around that be able to work with them right does that make sense different things are related and so it's great to get our arms around it and get a hold of it and so we can like make, we can move that situation and kind of unfurl it so that the net is actually all smoothed out and not one big jump but if you get caught up in it when you go to get your arms around the social challenges of the world if you get all up in it you're not very effective it's not so much non-attachment as much as it is not being caught up not getting stuck so that your emotional responsive and reactivity to the situation getting bound up so that you're not able to see clearly and you can't really you don't have your arms around the situation you're caught in the situation interesting thing many people don't know on a sort of scientific scientific level is that meditation induces the parasympathetic nervous system which is to rest and relax and on the other hand we have the sympathetic nervous system which is like fight or flight the thing is is that when you induce, it's not an either or, having parasympathetic nervous system does not mean you no longer have attention and focus it just means our attention focus stays relaxed so we're able to see the whole situation rather than narrowing down into a small part of the minutes our sense of choice and creativity that was helpful, thank you great we have a couple more questions but I think, I know Angel I know you've got a lot on your plate today can you say the questions give me one second I just want to see what my okay, I see who's being called by I'm going to have my assistant just check in read off the questions I'll see if I can can I, maybe I can push them together a little bit so I won't be able to call on folks but that'll help us get to more of them one was about suggestions for people who find that they get sleepy to meditate and another is can your point be external like a physical object yes yeah, that's cool for me so sleepy so breath, right in-breath, stimulating creates alertness out-breath, calm if you are sleeping don't count in-breath and out-breath count whole in-breath so in-breath and simply let go and let out-breath come so no attention to the out-breath in-breath let go so bring all the attention to the in-breath that's one thing absolutely you can have an object of meditation or a point outside of yourself here's what super value and transfers about that style that I developed point other than point for activist is this when you're in a meeting you still have point other than point who's speaking they're the point who is what is the work that you have in front of you while everything is going on in the office well that's the point and when you find your attention someplace else back to the point so this is active and functional meditation that you can bring doesn't have to be just sitting down stillness meditation it transfers immediately into your active life so that it's really about developing your capacity to stay present and have your focus on your point of attention be whatever it is that you want it to be great so Angel we have two options there are two more questions I could email them to you and then they can be part of what we go ahead and do it okay so one of them is about okay Vivian I'm going to ask this on your behalf how can educators connect contemplation and social change in students in higher education this is the same as the response to the team question the reason that people ultimately are going to want to engage in meditation is because they're going to find the value to what's up with them so you just really have to invite the questions of what's going on for people often for people in higher education distraction the ability to focus on the work that they need to focus on is pretty right the feeling of overwhelm being able to do one thing at a time instead of being pulled in eight different directions at the same time is a very sure way to present the potential for people and again simple instructions not overwhelming make it relevant to their life let people take it or leave it because it's really up to them I would invite people into something really short really quick really brief when people have the direct experience this is not a Buddhist practice not a Hindu practice is a human practice to simply sit down on the earth and allow your mind to rest and relax and be restored we all can benefit from it it doesn't answer everything but it answers enough that it makes it a value to a great number of us Angel who were some of the practitioners that you I was just thinking in relation to this question that you would point to people like yourself other people now or people working over the last 100 years who the students might have seen connect their own mindfulness and their activism and so if the question had an academic component who could we point to academically that the students might also study would we point to academically you mean like which practitioners might they learn about who who've done that who've combined their their own social change and their mindfulness work you know certainly we know right but Gandhi is certainly one of them it wasn't spoken about often but what King absolutely did have a meditation practice Alice Walker is a phenomenal example of someone that brings a deep meditation practice there are many closet meditation people that don't talk about their practice but they are absolutely engaged in the practice and you can kind of feel it actually you'll feel that like steadiness that comes through that doesn't dampen their passion and their fire but they're steady and they're clear and their capacity for resilience is increased and enhanced so Alice Walker certainly comes to mind Angela Davis is a yoga practitioner as I said King I'm a little worried about like outing me there's a bunch of folks that whether they're active surf writers or creative folks have meditation practice one of them I put a list together my brain is not accessing names quickly so I'm happy to put a quick list together for people to know people into that great there's a good find folks that run Forest Ethics there's one last question and before I go to it I just want to thank you so much Angel for this today and for the ongoing help at Forest Ethics with all of this I want to thank everyone for being here today I want to thank your team at Transformative Change for helping get the word out I want to thank our team at Forest Ethics for helping get the word out and everybody who shared this with friends and colleagues and family and brought together a wonderful big group of people today thank you awesome to see so many people take some time out of their day to talk about mindfulness I mean that's just amazing it says so much about where our movements are going it says that we're wanting to be smarter not harder it says that we want to be more creative we want to be more compassionate we want to be more courageous and we want to do the things that allow us to do this without murdering ourselves and giving ourselves up and oh and tell everybody eliminate the word struggle from your language this work the work of changing the world is the work that we're meant to do it's about bringing ourselves to be we want to be more effective but we want to be in a way that is generative that supports who we are and what we love in the world that allows us to be more available to our friends to our community to our family and allows us to win win right on here's our last question it's from Erin and I'll ask it on your behalf mindfulness seems to have become a fad as of late how do we keep the white power structure from co-opting meditation capitalist efficiency yeah you know that's such a it's a reasonable question I have this sense that if you if we all relate to mindfulness as dropping into is developing our capacity to become present in moment awareness of self and other this is key moment to moment awareness of our self and other that the natural innate relationship quality of human beings cannot be overpowered if we keep mindfulness as something that's about more about focusing on me me me me me and me alone rather than me and my relationship to the world my relationship to anything outside from myself my relationship to other then the natural ethical foundation of mindfulness and heartfulness shows up so when you hear mindfulness think of heartfulness at the same time and there is no amount of corporate takeover that it will ever be able to undermine the power of the human relationship and our love and compassion and willingness to be present to each other and to ourselves great what a beautiful note to end on thank you so much Angel thank you everybody and we will get you more information via email shortly and just a pleasure to be with you all today thank you thank you so much you rock Angel thank you bye