Hey, everybody, it's Eric from the one you feed with this week's mini episode. Before we jump into that, I just want to say thank you to all the listeners. I don't know. Some of you may have noticed this, some others may not, but we were recently named as one of the best podcasts at two thousand fourteen by Apple, which is in this industry sort of like winning a Grammy. So we were very excited and very honored about that. So thank you to all of you who are listening.
Without you, guys, there wouldn't be any point really in doing this, notewood there. So this week's mini episode is going to be titled Notice, Don't Resist. What I've noticed is that my brain has a tendency to take a stimulus that has occurred and over dramatize it and tend to hype it up and repeat it over and over. Most recently, I noticed this when it came to being cold. So I would go outside and all of a sudden it would be cold, and my brain would start saying
things like, oh God, I'm cold. I'm so freaking cold. God, it's damn cold out here, and it would just sort of subconsciously be going on and on, and I would very much have a strong I don't want to be cold. This is awful mentality about it. And what I learned in the past was that if I can catch that and turn my thoughts to become more curious or more noticing about the cold and less resisting, and I'm better off. And so what does that look like? It looks sort
of like becoming interested in it? Well? Where am I cold? Is that? My nose? Is that? My hands? Is that my whole body? How does it feel? What's that like? Where's the wind coming from? Just getting really interested and curious in the moment itself, and by doing that, I tend to lose a that sort of crazy hyped up self talk and be I try and not resist it. In the phrase I is for myself is notice, don't resist. And so this works really good with things like being cold.
It also works really well if you have to go to the bathroom. But we can extend this out to any part of our lives. I remember a long time ago, it seems like a long time ago, when my son's mother and I split and I was in an enormous amount of pain, and I read a bunch of books. One of them was Pemma Children's When Things Fall Apart, and her insight that I got from that was to learn to sit there and notice the pain, notice what it was like, become curious, and just stop trying so
hard to make it go away. And remarkably that helps. It doesn't necessarily make the pain go away, it certainly makes the pain of being in pain better, if that sounds if that makes any sense. We talked on the show about layering on all these additional levels of suffering on top of the base things. So the base suffering and the example before was I'm cold. All the additional suffering I'm giving myself is that I'm telling myself how cold I am. I'm hyping it up, I am resisting it,
and by doing all that, I'm making it worse. And the same thing was true in a lot of cases with emotions. And so I've learned to do this or learned to strengthen this muscle by using it in meditation. And one of the things I do in meditation is try and focus on what are the body sensations I'm having? Uh. If I have an itch, I try and get curious and interested in the itch. Although the truth is even after doing that, the only description I can come up
with for an itch is God damn it itches. But with pain there is the ability to get a little bit more curious or interested. Where is it? Is it burning? Is it throbbing? Is it deep underneath? I mean you can, you can get interested in what's happening there, and for some reason, that process of doing it and not resisting
it so much makes it less painful. Now, I'm not going to pretend for people who are suffering from chronic pain that this is some sort of pantasy and I'll just get interest in your pain and everything will be fine. But it is a way that I found to deal with unpleasant sensations that I'm having where I'm not making them worse. So that is this week's many episode. Notice don't resist, and I hope you have a great week. We'll have another episode out on Tuesday, which will be
our before Christmas episode. So happy holidays to all of you and uh AS always stay in touch and we'll talk soon. Bye.