This 2-minute video clip is about making sense of the implicit movement. It is part of the 25-minute video about embodied relational mindfulness.
Transcript:
We’re talking about paying attention to this implicit movement as a way to understand the situation as a whole.
I mentioned the example of fear. Fear is often something that’s going to be very strongly present in situations where we have difficulty. We have a very strong impulse to experience fear. And fear is a good thing. Fear is the reason why I’m here, why you’re here, why we’re all here today. It is because our ancestors, and not just our human ones, but the animals and even before them the much simpler organisms, had the ability to have fear. This allowed them to escape danger. And it was better to escape a false alarm than to stay complacently in front of something that actually turned out to be a danger. So the fear mechanism is very good.
However, in our current life, it’s sometimes counter-productive. So it’s good to have the possibility to override it. But we cannot override it without understanding what’s happening. If you’re in the grip of fear, tight, like this (visual of tight face and body), and you want to force yourself to move… it’s going to be hard to do that when you’re very tight.
If you have a sense of the situation, you say, “Oh! I am tightening. I – OK – well, I’m perceiving a danger. Is there actually a danger?” And, from that place, you’re able to actually slow down. You’re able to absorb, little by little, a bit more information. And I said “little by little” because in fear, it’s hard to really be open to allowing new stuff.
So it’s going to be a slow process. But it’s the kind of process where being aware of what that implicit reaction is makes us able to add to our information, to come back to mindfulness. And mindfulness is not about disregarding the fear. It is about: “Here is a more complete picture”, so that the fear circuit can be closed down in a way that it can actually be really closed down, as opposed to pretending to be closed down.