AIF Week One: Mindfulness for Today with Josh Reeves

Josh Reeves (0:01)

Hey, this is Josh Reeves, you're listening to the Mile Hi Church Podcast. On Friday, October 23rd, we're thrilled to welcome Lyssa Rankin and Jeffrey Rettiger. They're going to be speaking on the topic of their new book, Relationsick, and it's about how toxic relationships can affect our health. The next day, Saturday, October 24th, they're going to bring all their great healing wisdom that we've read about in their many books to a workshop from 9 AM to 12 So you can get tickets to one or to both of these events on our website, milehichurch.org. There was a woman who was once on a hike with her spiritual teacher, and she fell and skinned her knee, and she grabbed at her knee, and her teacher said to her, don't grab your knee, grab your breath.

Don't grab your knee, grab your breath. And it speaks to something of the human condition, that so often we run to where the pain is.

We absorb ourselves in the injury, be it physical, psychological, emotional. We can run into the chaos, the drama, the franticness. So I like this advice. Don't grab your knee. Grab your breath. Doesn't mean don't stop the bleeding.

But when we grab our breath, we're embodying our mindfulness. We're embodying a kind of soul awareness that doesn't allow the pain to possess us, but allows us to possess it. I think it was Voltaire who said that medicine occupies the patient while nature cures the disease. In the same way, when we own our wholeness, when we can get back to our breath, we can allow nature to work through and help us heal our pain, heal our broken hearts.

Don't go where the pain is. Go to your breath. Don't go where the injury is. Go to your breath. Breath is the perfect analogy for mindfulness. I also like this word breath with a D in it, which means to make order of. What our broken hearts often need isn't smothering, but space to burn. Our pain doesn't need our smothering. It needs space and breath to work itself out, to heal. We just need to hold ourselves in sanctuary. Speaking of the breath and of mindfulness, the great Buddhist teacher Thich Nhat Hanh said, Breath is the bridge which connects life to consciousness, which unites your body to your thoughts. Whenever your mind becomes scattered, use your breath as the means to take hold of your mind again. Use your breath as a means to take hold of your mind again, your life again, your soul again. You are that powerful.

However, if you are like me, just paying attention to your breath can be challenging. I'm easily distracted. My mind is in a million and one places. So I want to share and invite you into actually practicing with me a few ways to practice breath as mindfulness for today. The first practice I like to do with my breath is to breathe in and out in awareness that when I am doing so, I am cultivating harmony between my outer reality and my inner world. Sometimes those aren't in connection. And so, how I like to do this, I like to breathe in life as it is, and breathe out myself as I am. Breathe in life as it is in this moment, and breathe out yourself as you are.

I breathe in life as it is, I breathe out myself as I am.

Life as it is, myself as I am. Life as it is, myself as I am. And as I continue to do this, all of the stories, the narratives, the judgments, the labels, fade away. There is nothing else but this life that is, and this me that I am. And I think if you do this long enough, you'll begin to experience a harmony. You will return yourself from that which you have given yourself away to that no longer serves you, and find your soul awareness again in this breath. A second practice is to bring as much attention as possible to this subjective intelligence that is breathing your breath, a uniting of two minds, the conscious mind and the subjective mind. And I don't know about you, but my conscious mind gets humbled when it runs into this intelligence, this part of my being without conscious control that breathes my breath all the time, without me even having to give it an inkling of attention. This intelligence that is within me feel that intelligence that's within you, and it's the same intelligence that's in this whole sacred earth, managing the seasons, moving the water and the rivers along, holding the stars in their places. This intelligence that's within me is in all of the universe, and my conscious attention humbles itself in relationship with its nature. And what happens for me is my conscious attention, as opposed to thinking it's this isolated, trapped thing separated from the world, I realize that there's some of that intelligence and that conscious attention, too. Oh, thank God, I can be myself again.