Hey there, it's Susan Peirce Thompson, and welcome to the Weekly Vlog.
So this week, I have a lovely, delicious practice to introduce you to. I got introduced to it about two months ago for the first time in a training that I participated in from the Xchange Group. So Xchange is spelled X-C-H-A-N-G-E, Xchange, and they teach leaders how to do a better job of helping people connect deeply in the groups that they facilitate. It's wonderful training. And they held a three-day online immersion called ACLE, I think it stood for Awakening Conscious Leadership Experience or something like that. And they taught this, what I'm going to teach you right now, right here in that ACLE training. They taught me about the unified mindfulness approach to meditation. Super widespread, super well-respected, used by Harvard Medical School and Carnegie Mellon University among tons and tons of other universities as their core mindfulness meditation training that they do research on around the efficacy of mindfulness meditation.
The other major form of meditation that I know of that's used in research like that is taught by Monique Rhodes, who we of course have in our Bright Lifers program. We have her mindfulness meditation training, and then of course there's the John Kabat-Zinn work. So there's many approaches to meditation. This is the first time I'd experienced unified mindfulness, and it revolutionized my experience, mostly of being able to carry meditation into my moments of living and waking and moving through the day. I had never really succeeded, I don't think, as fully as I can now at practicing mindfulness as I live my day, as I wash my dishes, as I drive my kids hither and yon, as I make my bed, as I sit at the table with my family and just experience moments, I can slip into this form of meditation.
You'll see how when I teach it to you right now, it's very, very simple, very easy to learn, very easy to explain. I can't wait to clue you into it. And then you can practice it once or twice and you'll go, oh, this is amazing.
Okay, so Unified Mindfulness was created by someone named Shinzen Young. And let me just use Zen's words for who he is. So this is how he describes himself. I have this on a piece of paper because this is not easy to memorize, okay? He says about himself, "I am a Jewish-American Buddhist-informed mindfulness teacher who got turned on to comparative mysticism by an Irish Catholic priest and who has developed a Burmese-Japanese fusion practice inspired by the spirit of quantified science." I read that and I was like, "Oh my God, I love this guy. I love this guy." Raised in Los Angeles, Jewish, and already an unusual soul. By the age of 14, he'd made the decision on his own to go to Japanese school, and he did end up spending three years in Japan studying and living as a Japanese monk.
He got a Ph.D. in some sort of Buddhist studies, and he's a mathematician and scientist at heart, which of course is right up my alley. I just love this guy. And he endeavored to distill mindfulness into its mathematical atomic elements. And he essentially said, when you really look at it, there are three units of experience. There's what we see, there's what we hear, and there's what we feel.
Now, smell and taste would be wrapped up here in feel right, what you feel, whether it's on your skin or on your tongue or in your nose. It's a feel, okay? So see, hear, feel. And then each of those also can be outward oriented or inward oriented. So let me go through them and explain.
So a see out, something that you're seeing on the outside would be your eyes are open, you're looking around and you see something. You see a sunset, you see a bird, you see the sink, you see your hand and the veins on it. You see the wall across from where you're sitting. You see, right? Or your eyes are closed and you see patterns of red. That might be from the capillaries on the back of your eyelids, right? You can still see out if your eyes are closed. You're just seeing those shapes and things that fall off the back of your eyelids. That's see out, see in is when you have an image in your mind, right? Not everybody has these, but about 95% of people see images in their mind's eye. So you might be imagining a scene, you might be remembering something you might be projecting into the future. Many people can close their eyes and imagine a beach, imagine a sunset. Imagine a conversation that they're going to have with their spouse, and they could actually see them sitting there in their mind's eye. That's a see in.
So we can see, we can also hear in and hearing out. An outward faced hearing is anything we hear a sound, even the sound of our own breath, the sound of our stomach grumbling, the sound of a clank or a creek in the house, the sound of someone outside mowing their lawn. The sound of a loud bus going by, right? Hear out. Or hear in would be you hear a monologue or a dialogue in your own head because you're having a conversation with someone imaginary in the future. In the past, remembering or projecting. That's hear in, that's an inward faced hearing. You're hearing in your own mind's ear.
And then feeling out would be any of the sensations again, whether it's smells or a taste on your tongue, or you could feel the feeling of your feet on the floor. You could feel the feeling of your clothes on your skin. You could feel the coldness as you breathe in through your nostrils. You could feel your back hurting. You could feel, yeah, anything that you feel that's a physical sensation, an inward feeling is emotional. It's a tightness of anxiety in your belly. Your belly tied up in knots over a wave of anxiety that's in there. You could feel a pressure on the back of your face. That's actually tears wanting to come out. You could feel a big empty sadness in your chest cavity. You could feel a lightness and a joy in your heart spreading outward into a smile on your face. Those are inward feelings. Any sort of emotion is an inward feel. Okay? So see, hear, feel, see, hear, feel.
Now, what the meditation practice is comprised of is simply meeting the moment with curiosity. It's kind of a relaxing into the moment, and then just noticing whatever comes up and then labeling it. So it's two parts, noticing and labeling. So the noticing is you just meet the moment with curiosity and you just notice what captures your attention. And then you label it, see, hear, or feel. Or if you want to do the fancy version, see out, feel in, hear out, hear in.
Okay, I'm going to do it right now for, I dunno how long? A minute, A little stretch of time. A tiny stretch of time. I'm going to do it right now. I'm going to drop into a see, hear, feel, practice myself. I'm going to do my labeling out loud so you can hear it. And then when I stop, I'm going to go back and explain what was going on in my mind. So you can witness a tiny little, see, hear, feel, practice. Okay, so here we go. I'm going to start. See out, see out, hear out. Feel out, see out. Feel in, feel out. Hear out. Hear in. Hear out. See out.
Okay, so I may not get all of these perfectly in the right order, but basically what happened is I started the practice and I saw, I'm staring into a camera right now, and I saw the color of the outfit that I'm wearing reflected in the lens. It's creating a line of my tan skin and the burgundy jacket. And I saw that line and I just noticed it. I said, oh, there's quite a line there in the camera lens. So I labeled it, see out. Then I saw the bright red, my eyes flipped up for a second. You may have noticed, I saw the bright red. The camera is rolling light, and I labeled that. See out. Then I just heard the sounds in my room. There's hardly anything, but it's not perfectly silent, and it's almost like a faint buzz or just kind of the hum of silence. And I labeled that hear out. And then my ankles feel heavy and my feet feel heavy. My feet kind of hurt, and I felt this weight in my ankles. So I labeled that feel out. At some point. After a little bit, I laughed and I said hear in, and I grinned and laughed. That was, I heard myself say in my head, kind of rehearsing what I would say in the vlog next. I wonder if that was weird for you. And I heard myself in my own head say, I wonder if that was weird for you. And so I said, hear in, that was me imagining saying that. So I said, hear in, yeah. And then I think I kind of just a little bit more of the same. I said, see out? That was again, looking at the camera lens. I said, hear out. That was again, just hearing the silence in the room and feel out again, my ankles are feeling kind of heavy and my feet are hurting. So I just said, feel out. And that was pretty much it. That was pretty much it. That was my experience.
So when I first learned to do this, I, I don't want to say addicted to it, but I got fascinated by it. I enjoyed it so much. It was such a little game. I wonder if there's a little dopamine hit that comes every time you successfully label something, right? And it's like, oh, I know what that is. Yeah, I was doing dishes and I would just do it. The see, hear, feel thing. It's so interesting to be pulled into the present moment that completely and successfully it heightens focus. Meditation increases happiness. So practicing things like this increase happiness. It increases clarity of thought, sensory awareness, the ability to be present in the moment.
There's a free little online course on this. If you go to unified mindfulness.com, there's a free little course you can take. It's like 10 little videos and they'll teach you how to do it. I mean, it's just a little bit more of what I just did here with you. It's pretty simple. It's pretty fabulous, and I've really been enjoying it. So I think a lot of what we do in Bright Line Eating is finding new ways to engage with the present moment, right? When we stop eating sugar, we stop eating flour, and we limit our eating occasions to just meals. We create all of this space in between meals where life shows up and we're not eating over it. And so what are we doing instead? How are we engaging with the present moment? And mindfulness meditation is a way to make friends with a present moment. It's a way to learn that it's safe, that it's soft, even warm, welcoming, comfortable, familiar.
And mindfulness meditation increases the pause that gives you agency to choose your response. Not a reaction, not a knee jerk. Putting something in the mouth to stuff down the feeling to quiet the emotion, but the ability to try something different in that moment and not eat over it. We were eating over all kinds of stuff. Stuff that was happening in the moment that we didn't want to face, that we didn't want to see. And mindfulness meditation gives us such a lovely way to interact with the present moment differently, right? Because we need new tools. When we're not using food as our strategy, we need new options. So in this vlog, I offered you one. You can learn more at unifiedmindfulness.com. It's free. I get no kickback for saying that I have it to be in full transparency. I haven't even watched those 10 videos at unifiedmindfulness.com. I just learned the quick and dirty version in that exchange training, like I said, and now I'm just passing it along to you because it's working for me and I'm loving it. And I think Shinzen Young is awesome, even though I've never met the guy. And all I know about him is that little blurb that he explained about himself. But I just think it's coolio.
So there you go. If you want to try it, give it a whirl. See, hear, feel. That's the Weekly Vlog. I'll see you next week.