Episode 23 - Exploring Mental Wellbeing

Keith to taking conscious action as individuals and creating a better world to raise awareness and inspire meaningful action by sharing stories, knowledge and conversations with thought leaders and change from sustainability to wellbeing and everything related to conscious living our mission is to empower you to be the change that you want to see in the world. Welcome to episode of the conscious action. This is Brian Burnham and your.

And sort of this episode, we're going to explore the world of mental wellbeing and trying to unpack a little bit our understanding and our experience with mental health. So to start that conversation, I wanted to just start talking a little bit about how most of the time this is Stockton. So I hear it a lot. People talking about mental health as if that is a negative or that is a problem.

So one of the first things that I wanted to talk about is that, that actually we need to shift the way that we are talking about it in terms of saying just our mental health. No someone perhaps is having some challenges or some issues or their mental health is not in a good place, but mental health. It's an intro thing. So you either have a good or bad or however you want to call it. Just like when your body you can have good. You can be fit.

You can be on field, you can be healthy, you can be on calcium physically. So for me, one of the first things to talk about, then the other thing is that there is no difference really in putting all of the different aspects of our being and our wellbeing.

We try to a lot of times dissect and just focus on one aspect in this case, mental wellbeing or mental health as if that is completely separate from your body and your soul or spirit, or however you want to call it, all of the different aspects of your building. For me. I learned that when I started it. The focus on my body that actually had what that would say side effects or benefits on my mental would have been. So I remember living back in nursing as a teenager and I was super stressed.

Um, I was on love the time living with what now, looking back, I would describe as anxiety, um, without it being obvious at that moment. And of course, I didn't know. I didn't know at the time that I was a little bit paranoid, uh, in terms of, I always thought that there was someone that was in going to. Steal from me or Rob me or something like that.

So I will walk down the streets or I would drive on my car and I will look everywhere and just trying to make sure that I knew everything that was around. Um, it wasn't really a good way of, of living my life. Um, one of the reasons why I ended up living in the country, I felt that it was very insecure. So that's why I had that experience.

Um, I started noticing in different aspects of my life when I started doing some practices like meditation and Tibetan yoga that I started doing, how that impacted my mental wellbeing. So I remember driving on, if you haven't been in places like when a Citus, um, The traffic gets really bad people. Most of the times don't follow the rules. I didn't follow the rules. Um, I was a super stressed out angry driver. I had road rage. I would get so stressed. I would yell at my car.

Um, you get so frustrated with. And I remember a few weeks after I started practicing Tibetan yoga for the first time, how someone cut me off. I said, what's the driving? And I would and I didn't. And I just remembered in that moment and noticing that I was like, what's going on? This is. Um, then if there really isn't, ah, perhaps this has to do with that.

The fact that I've been having a practice, that's allowing me to create space, to move the energy that was stuck to create new habits in myself, not through my mind, but through my body and my energy, but that had a huge impact on my mental world. Um, I truly don't remember the last time that I was stressed for what I think stress is in the negative sense of stress. I kind of don't remember it. I have lived through a lot for the past 15 years and I actually did.

I remember one day talking with my parents, um, telling them a few years ago, how I felt like I hadn't been through enough challenges in my life. Um, my mom was like, well, actually this happened to you. That happened to you. That's happened to you. Um, you didn't allow them to become. From now, and this is one of the key shifts that I wanted to talk about on this public. this, that we, through our conditioning and the way that we see our life, we create and learn from times our experience.

Now, of course we are condition and it's not easy to do. Yes, it's doable. It's possible. And I am proof of that. I realized through my practices that the way that I was reacting and experiencing the world what's happening in the world on my control, I had control over that. So I was able to start seeing and noticing and acknowledging what was happening to me without it becoming really a problem. I could see the situation and this situations were still happening.

Like I had to live countries because of resales or breakups or different situations that happened throughout this last 15 years. But instead of. Getting completely stressed and overwhelmed and anxious or whatever my experience was, our first writer instill for allowing that to happen as just experience what was happening and they experienced it, not sort of the judgment in my mind, experienced it as well. That happened. And for me here is the key, the world of.

I wasn't in touch with my feelings when I was younger. And I started developing that now is the main way that I experienced my life through feelings and sensations in my body. So I started noticing how, when something was happening, I have an experience, a reaction as well. And I started noticing that when certain situations happen, I. Same experience, like feeling on my belly, on my chest and then it reaction. So there's these patterns that were happening to me.

And this is something that happens for all of us. And I studied to actually catch myself before that happened. So when something what's happening and stuff and allowing that automatic pattern and reaction to happen, I was catching myself before that I was feeling. What was happening inside of my body. I was noticing that self-talk in my head, but it wasn't allowing that to consume me and to have a grip.

So, because I had allowed myself to actually take the time and create space for the experience to be processed. I didn't allow that to become a problem. That it's something that happened. So. I remember, for example, I was living in the us, um, one day I got the news that my visa renewal was denied and they have to live and everybody was like, oh no. And I was like, okay, let's just go ahead with this. And then let's okay. It was out of my hands.

I learned that this situation was out of my hands. And if there's nothing that I can do. What I can do is focused on how am I experiencing it. So focusing on the feelings for me has been one of the main ways to actually create more space for my mental wellbeing. There are one of the things that I mentioned just a few moments ago that is understanding myself. I love on the book, the untethered soul by Michael singer, he talks about the, in a roommate, some other people call it the critic.

However you relate that it's the voice, his voice or voices inside of your head. And I relate so much today in their roommate because when I was reading that it clicked. I realized that I didn't have a relationship with that voice in my head without being a critic in a roommate. Um, on that book, I understood that there is this voice inside my head. And if I look at it as a room, It's it shifted my perspective.

So think of your inner voice or in critic as a roommate, and it's a roommate that you perhaps don't get along at all, but you kind of move out. He or she cannot move out. You have to live with. If it would be a person for most people, like if you actually create a person based on your inner voice, you would tell them to get away very fast. You wouldn't want to deal with them. So I realize that's not possible. I cannot do that. I need to stop. Developing a relationship with that roommate.

They started listening. I started to question instead of to understand where is that coming from? So I started noticing when I was doing something or meeting someone. And I noticed that there were that started to come up, like I'll look at their t-shirt or their shoes or the way that their care is. And instead of to judge them, I was catch myself and ask who says that? What is that coming from? And most times there was nothing there, or I couldn't see how that is what I was conditioned.

By my culture by my family, by whatever it was that conditioned me. I studied the relation. That's coming from them. That's not me. So I studied to actually listen, I studied to duck with myself, something that I was already doing, but completely unconsciously and unaware of how I was doing it and how it was impacting me. So. I studied to take control of what was happening in my experience, what was happening inside of my head inside of my mind, I started choking.

I started understanding and I started to create space. We are able to actually create space for our thoughts, our feelings. We are allowing ourselves to experience over the life in a different way than what we're usually doing. We are living a very fast pace, rhythm going where I don't know most of the time, nowhere, but we feel that pressure that we need to continue doing that most of the time. So how. Are we creating those spaces for what are our songs?

How are you creating space for you to experience and to notice, and to analyze your experience? Are you allowing yourself to find where that is in the morning and evening, as soon as you wake up or as you're going to sleep or sometime during the day, This has been a practice or something that allows you to chef to create space, just notice. And this is something that most of us haven't been taught. This is why I feel very strongly about having Monday education system, this tools to learn how.

Meditation mindfulness, yoga and the way, any shape that we want to give it when then to learn how to have the skills, to be able to deal with ourselves and our lives, because life is not easy. We are living this year on a very strange. And how you are dealing with it. It's up to you. Yes. Your situation might be more challenging than other persons for enough, but your experiences, your experience, my experience is my experience and I could be getting into fear and stress and depressed or.

I can choose not to. I can choose to stay grounded, create space, state, perhaps positive. And again, this is not easy. This is not a magic pill. This is not something that you can do like that. If that's not what you've been doing, this is why I always feel like when then support and connection from. And went into understand who those others are, because it's not always easy to be. And to do the things that you want to do. If your environment doesn't allow for that.

And we want to fit in, we want to belong. That's something that we as humans, we have, we want to go along with living communities. We want, I would own a truck. But if you're living in a circumstance and environment that is not allowing you to do the things that you want to do to explore a different way of being, it's going to be super challenging. If I can meet, you're able to change your environment. I encouraged that as a way of actually exploring yourself that work for me, I left home.

I traveled, I went to live at the listed center for a few years. I wanted to explore myself and I wanted to explore myself in a different environment. I wanted to explore the life within and outside without. Um, being one of the time challenged by loving people, but that didn't have the same views. So it's not always easy to change the environment. If you cannot change their alignment, can you create pockets of time during the day where you can be by yourself?

And create those practices, disciplines, or way of being that that allows you to actually do something differently. It's a very challenging time on this Arab. There's a lot of things happening there, especially for younger people. With so much information, so much access to our technology, our phones, we get a lot of times lost in that and not enough connection with ourselves and with nature with other people, real people. In-person we need to understand that there's a. Technology is important.

Technology is amazing. There's so much information out there. How are you doing that? How are you doing that unconsciously? Or are you doing that consciously? Are you choosing how much time you're spending online, how much you're actually putting on investing of your energy and your emotional world and your mental world into what you're saying? Are you comparing yourself to others in there? What are the resources, the social media fence that you're looking that you have control over that.

But for most of us, we haven't developed how to construct our selves, how to control our oranges. So. We need to be careful on the way that works. And when you to understand that it's not about judgment, it's not about pointing fingers to others or blower sense, but the F looking yourself in the mirror, seeing whatever it is that's, you're seeing.

Can you have kindness for yourself and you love yourself regardless of your circumstances, regardless of all of the challenges, all of your so-called shortcomings, can you allow with that? Can you love yourself? Because that is key allowing ourselves. To love us and others based on who we are, regardless of what would think of it. When we started shifting a little bit, the chats from the complaining and we focused that. I love acceptance. we can create something new.

If I open my eyes and white come to the possibility that life can be different, even if my work or school or whatever I'm doing in the relationships around me, it's all the same life can be different. And this is one of the things that I aim to share with everyone, how to discover that there is a different way of living being. And sometimes that does require a lot of changes and sometimes it doesn't in the sense of our environment, but having that curiosity. Is there something else?

Is that something that I'm missing? Is there a different way of relating to the world? This is where for me, it's pretty trended to a religion. Faith is really important because regardless of whatever condition we haven't judgment of those aspects, especially if relations organic relations. People can connect to something beyond them. That sense of belonging, sense of purpose, sense of perhaps oneness, unity, something bigger than yourself. That is huge to be able to create.

That change in side effects. So regardless of if you want to focus on a specific religion or non-religion Mentone spirituality or a non-spiritual science or no science, whichever it is, what is the way that you connect to that, which is bigger than you. For me, a lot of times, it's just nature. It's interesting. That is the way that I experienced it. What's the way for you.

I really connected with the Buddhist teachings from a perspective of seeing that as a philosophy of life, based on my experience and my truth and understanding that there is nothing wrong with them. Opening myself to possibilities, but Olin noon and exploring who I am not trying to fit in into someone else's mod now trying to be someone else being me. So my invitation for you is how can you allow yourself to be.

How can you allow yourself to be open to the possibilities that life has in store for you, but not touching it? Not thinking less. If you do something quote, unquote wrong, no thinking less of you as you start getting stressed or anxious or depressed, I'm allowing. What it is being curious to see what is behind that. So this is a very big topic. I'm looking forward to bring in more conversations with some of our guests on this topic, exploring some more, because there's a lot of nuances there.

I lot of very important issues and topics inside of what would being a mental being that we can touch on. I, lot of them are very touchy ended out for them are scary to talk about and to touch on, but they are important because the more open that we are, the more conversations that we have about. The easier to disperse others to realize that they are not alone. They are not the only ones living through what they are going through.

When we understand how connected we are, how it's not wrong to be you, I have left can shift. So I would love for you to share. What if this episode resonated with you share with us your experience on your own personal journey with your mental wellbeing. Right? That thing, that comments I would love to know. And I would love to explore some of that in some of the upcoming. So until the next one, I am Brian. I have a beautiful day. What did you like the most about this episode?

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