Linearity, the Ego and the Authentic Self

The speaker discusses the importance of lifestyle choices and how they affect our emotional health. They mention that stress, negative media, and numbing behaviors can lower our energy levels. They suggest uplifting activities like random acts of kindness, listening to music, exercising, and spending time with loved ones to raise our energy and live in the present moment. The speaker also talks about the battle between our ego, which wants us to dwell on the past or worry about the future, and our authentic self, which strives to be mindful and fully present. They discuss the benefits of mindfulness in work and express their desire to incorporate mindfulness into their life. I've talked a little bit about lifestyle and just how we live our lives on a daily basis and what we choose to do in terms of our health habits, our spiritual habits, our relationships, how we conduct ourselves at work and how all of this sort of builds into our emotional health and our heart-centered living. What often happens is we live stressful lives and we feed our ego and we feed our ego and we feed our ego. We listen to negative media, we go to work, we have our insecurities, and then we numb ourselves. All of these things, alcohol, drugs, even sitting down watching TV, they're numbing, they're kind of managing our emotions but at a very base level of energy. The idea is lift ourselves up, do a random act of kindness, look at the energy that will give you. Listen to a great piece of music, watch an inspiring movie, exercise, pray and meditate. Have a great conversation with a friend, catch up with your family and feel that unconditional love. Go to the beach and go for a swim with the waves. There's so many ways to lift our energy and elevate ourselves and it's about bringing that into our lives at an emotional level. But I think the other thing about this concept of mindfulness is that the authentic self wants to live in the present. They want to live in the right here and now because really that's the only moment that exists. The future isn't here, the past is gone. In the dimensions we live in and the way we look at life, we give a life to the past and the future, but that's not reality. The reality is just living in the absolute present. It's called mindfulness and it's from Buddhism and it's modern psychology and it's the big thing of the day. So understanding, the ego doesn't want us there. It wants us either living in the future or worrying about things in the future and fearing them, or regretting over the past and what you've done in your life. The ego wants to drag you back there and relive the pain of the past or the regrets, or it wants you to worry about the future. That's the battle that's going on. The battle is the authentic self trying to bring you to the here and now. See all the beauty around you, all the opportunity, all the inspiration and the ego saying, no, let's go back to the past and bring some of that pain, let's go into the future and worry about things and how things are going to turn out. Now I suppose with the authentic self, there are times where it's good to go back to the past. If we're going back to the past in order to learn from it, and to learn the lessons and to reflect and understand, in some cases we might be going back to the past to lift our emotional state because we want to remember somebody, or we want to remember a really good time we had, but most of the time, and the same with the future, with the future sometimes we want to go there when we're being strategic and we want to carve out a vision or set some goals. So there are some times where we draw on the past and the future, but the authentic self wants to do that, it wants to quickly move from the past to the future, but then once you've done your work, you come back to the present. The ego doesn't want us in the present, so we've got this battle going on, and that whole battle, probably one of the biggest battles in our lives, is really called mindfulness, the ability to be in the present, and just experience everything that there is to experience. So it's sort of, our left brain, our ego, has this linear view of life, past, present and future, all of them, whereas in the right brain, the authentic self, it's just the present. So, you know, for me, the application of that is, in a lot of ways, I can see how that plays out in work. You know, I think the best way to spend a work day, or your eight hours at work, you want to plan out your day, write out what all your tasks are, and there might be an enormous amount of tasks, some of them might be quite stressful, but then you put all that aside, part that, and you're fully engaged in the job you're doing. And then we have these other distractions, like emails and phone calls, that kind of take us out of the present and get us exploring either the past or the future, so that mindfulness, applying mindfulness, is something I really want to carry into my life.