Here is the complete transcript of the podcast
Welcome back, happy Sunday morning to you. Today’s podcast is definitely not going to be long. But then maybe this is going to be deep. This is coming from a conversation I had yesterday with a friend of mine about life and things that he is facing right now, his life. And he was telling me how it has become very hard for him, emotionally hard, situationally hard. And he has to make some choices about his life and all, that casual discussion over coffee. And that reminded me of several other conversations I had been having with people in different contexts. So I thought maybe I should highlight this on the podcast today.
I asked my friend yesterday, I said, knowing what you know now, can you tell me what is the biggest lesson you learned? So far? If I ask you, what is the biggest lesson you learned in your life? Depending on where you are, your answer is going to be different. If you ask me, I’ll tell you, my biggest lesson is, I got to have great health. I will say that if I have gone through a lot of hardship with my health, if I ask you, you may say your career, maybe business, maybe relationships. But then there is one big lesson at the end. When I say and that means as you grow, we start to realize, in fact, life had been teaching this for a long time, since the point we were born. But then we never had the mindset to see this. Now with all the time and all these experiences, we can now see it. Hopefully, some people never see it. That’s a whole different discussion. But with whoever is a little bit aware, they will see it, which is that life’s biggest lesson is detachment.
What is detachment? Detachment is detached from material stuff, detached from emotional stuff, detached from things that don’t make any sense. Now, if detachment is the biggest lesson that life is teaching us, why is that? That we become angry, frustrated, we become jealous, we become self-centered, all these questions come in. Why is that? Why is it that we take everything around us personally? So detachment is the game, then why take everything personally? Well, that tried to address why people take things personally. There are so many reasons. But I’ll tell you, deep within us, all of us, we are seeking approval. So by default, all of us humans, crave approval, some people crave it at a higher level, some minuscule level, but we all do. So we want people to like us, we want people to appreciate us all that is there.
Now as a part of that, naturally, we are attached. And we have to take things personally, when that sense of approval-seeking is there, and we don’t get that approval, then we have hurt means we are taking things personally. Some people also over-identify themselves with their thoughts and emotions, they lose their identity. They think their thoughts and their emotions are who they are. No negative thoughts are part of the mind. It’s one of the brain functions. So we are supposed to experience both the positive and the negative. So if you’re experiencing too many and only negative thoughts, then that is a problem. But then casual negative parts are a part of the human mind to be okay, no, I have negative thoughts. So maybe something is wrong with me. That’s the frame through which they talk to me about how to work Maldis if the goal is to detach, and the goal is to stop taking things personally, what can be done? What is a strategy or technique? Well, turns out there are two things that need to happen. First and foremost is that you need to start practicing internal compassion, that has to be an element of compassion by you for you, internally.
Some of that include, “I’m good”, “I’m complete”, and “I have what it takes.” This is my definition. This is my understanding. This is my life. This is who I am. These are my beliefs. These are my values. This is my identity. This is my purpose. This is my pursuit, internal compassion. And then some external boundaries. See, when you start doing things with others, for example, let’s say integrity is one of your values. But if you make friends with somebody who constantly lies, how can you stay loyal to your value and your value being integrity? How can you have fulfillment How can you wake up in the morning? Look yourself in the mirror and say yeah, this is where I am. See, it doesn’t go It doesn’t work that way. So I need to have boundaries when people tell me things that I am uncomfortable doing or those things that do not go along with my values and beliefs, I should say no. And say no is the boundary. Saying no is not an insult. Saying no is not an ego statement or any of that it is a boundary. That means you’re honoring the boundary.
So when you have external boundaries, when it comes down to things, because it is what happens, everything that’s happening around you, somebody is having issues detaching from things. Somebody who takes things personally, what’s happening is, things are happening around them. And they are put in a position to blame themselves, for everything that is going wrong around them, they blame themselves. So when you take things personally, everything that goes wrong around you, you blame yourself, when you blame yourself, what happens, you experience stress, or along with suffering, some level of stress, anxiety, overwhelm all that happens. But then, definitely, depending upon the quantity of that, or the intensity of the stress or anxiety, you will experience suffering. So suffering, and some kind of other psychosomatic disorder. If you keep on blaming yourself, which you will, because everything around you, you’re taking back personally, that is why we need external boundaries. And all this also leads to self-judgment and self-criticism and one of the most effective ways to deal with all this is mindfulness. And one specific technique that is very effective, is imagining yourself as if you’re standing on the side of a road, a busy road, on which you have numerous vehicles going, cars, trucks, buses, all that. Each bus, each truck, and each car on this busy freeway, or highway, could be an emotion that could be thought could be a feeling. You stay on the side of the road, and you see these vehicles crossing. That’s how the mind should operate. That’s the level of detachment, we are talking.
We are observing our thoughts, our emotions, and our feelings, pass in front of our eyes, without attaching ourselves to them. Because you can’t catch a bus on the freeway unless it stops. And these things are not stopping. They’re not meant for you. They’re moving. Why try to attach, imagine attaching yourself to every bus, every truck, every car on a freeway that could jump from one vehicle to the other, it impossible cannot be done. So every word expression, anybody saying anything to you, and anybody expressing anything to you, it’s not about you. Most of the time, when people express something to you, in anger in haste, criticizing you, it’s not about you as much it is about them, the words they use, not about you. It’s about them. They say that our emotions are caused by our judgment, not by events. So I was telling my friend, I said, events, they’re done, they happened. So your judgment of that event that happened 5, 10, or 15 years ago, is causing the feeling that you’re experiencing today. You need to detach from that. And you stop judging that event, this late in your life, at this point in your life, when you are approaching the last 10, 20, 30 years of your existence here. And the message on this podcast today’s podcast is that if detachment is the game, eventually we all will be detached. You will be detached from your job, you will be detached from your loved ones to be detached from, from the car, you’re driving today from the house that you’re living in today. All these things are going to go away, then “why not do that now?” is a question.
And I’ll leave you with that question. I want you to think over it, ponder over it. And then I’ll catch you tomorrow on the podcast and hope this is helpful. Okay, that’s all for now. Talk soon. Bye.