Bloom Your Mind

Ep 128: Joy, Ease and Lightness

• Marie McDonald

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As I spoke at multiple events for hundreds of people this past week, I had a moments of deep gratitude for the tools available for us to use to practice presence. Some of what I teach on the podcast is content that I’ve invented and created, and other tools and concepts are things I’ve collected over time from brilliant thought leaders, authors, theorists and changemakers. 

In this episode, I’ll share a go-to tool that I learned almost two decades ago from Eckhart Tolle, and share the ways you can apply this part of his work- to daily life, big decisions, and the ideas that you’re trying to make real. I’ll also give examples of how I used his teaching this past week to reset for a public speaking event after getting one hour of sleep (!), to reframe my mindset after making a mistake, and how the concept of joy, ease and lightness has connected me to others in the least expected moments. 

What you’ll learn in this episode: 

  • Eckhart Tolle’s “Joy, Ease and Lightness” practice 
  • How focusing on the how and not the what is a hack for presence 
  • Why process instead of result thinking can calm the system
  • Why pulling our mind into the present connects us to feeling happiness and joy 
  • How this practice helps us side-step habituated brain patterns 
  • Three examples of how practicing presence overcame real-time mind-drama 

How to connect with Marie:

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We'll take all these ideas and apply them to our lives. Follow me on Instagram at @the.bloom.coach to learn more and snag a spot in my group coaching program!

Speaker 1:

Welcome to the Bloom your Mind Podcast, where we take all of your ideas for what you want and we turn them into real things. I'm your host, certified Coach Marie McDonald. Let's get into it. Hello, my friends, and welcome to episode number 128 of the Bloom your Mind podcast. What a week.

Speaker 1:

I'm talking today about a concept that has served me for 15, 20 years 20 years, I would say very effectively in read his books, my favorite of which is called A New Earth, his most famous perhaps, of which is called the Power of Now, and he is an incredible thinker and leader, and I've been wanting to record this podcast for you for a while, and while I did plan to record it and release it this week, I had multiple experiences that sort of embodied the actual content of this podcast, the concept, the practice that we're going to be talking about today. I have to say I'm not surprised. It is so fundamental that probably any week that I was living with the topic of this podcast in mind would present to me examples of how this content plays out in the day-to-day. That is, how poignant and how true and how applicable it is to all of life, all of the time, and the basic concept is called joy, ease and lightness. But before that, I'll just tell you why this week was such a wild one. I am very involved in my children's school just in helping to lead and run lots of different parts of it, and one of the things that was really fun that I got to do this year was lead our gala for the school, which is a big party that is so much fun, with lots of dancing and fundraising and all of that good stuff, and I had for a long time, for a year, known the night that this gala was going to happen.

Speaker 1:

It happens at this place called Lulu's in San Diego, which is at the Lafayette Hotel, which is a really hip, really just vibrant, amazing, artistic, soulful place, and we get to hold our gala at this place, luckily. So we knew we had this scheduled for a really long time and I have been planning towards it for a really long time. There are so many pieces to putting on a party like this All of the different fundraising, the auctions, the attendance, the marketing for the thing you know, getting people to attend, then just the decorations, the, you know what are you going to wear, what are you going to say, all the communication, all the pieces. I also this week had a retreat I was leading for two days with my partner for over a hundred people, with hours and hours and hours of content that I had written and was writing with my partner and slide decks, you know, speaking all the good stuff which requires also so much working in organization and communication. It was all going to work out until the retreat was moved by a week and was actually moved to the two days right after the gala.

Speaker 1:

Now the gala ended at 9 pm on a Sunday night this past Sunday night and I needed to begin my training in Oakland at 9 am the next morning. How is this going to work, right? So that was the past weekend that I had, you know, in the couple of weeks leading up to it, just months leading up to it, full of all of the planning and I set myself up for success and I had everything done in the way that I like to do when I can see something like this coming. We can't always see it coming, but when I can see something this complicated coming, I have all my clothes, you know, chosen and packed, everything that I need the wild outfit for Sunday night, the clothes that I need for the next couple day everything printed, everything loaded on my computer and charged up. I have everything done. Uber scheduled check-ins for flights in my calendar. On top of it, right, I have my sitters lined up all the things. But there are always elements that you cannot expect, and what happened this time is we had a beautiful time on Sunday night at the gala. So much love in dancing, so much money raised for children, so much community built, so many performances. I gave a talk. It was lovely.

Speaker 1:

I get to get home at about 10 pm, settled myself in, did everything I needed to do and got in bed and did not sleep that night. There were dogs that were barking and banging. There were children that had rough night sleeps. There was a rib injury that happened for one of my children. There was so much. There were visitors from out of town that were late to our house. There were all kinds of things that popped up that were unexpected, and what ended up happening is that I had one hour of sleep that night, my friends one hour.

Speaker 1:

If you've listened to my podcast before, you know that sleep is super important to me. It is my number one top priority, above exercise or eating well or whatever else I sleep and I sleep eight or nine hours so to sleep for one hour when I had so much responsibility for the speaking events, for organization, for all these things, really threw my brain into the arena for using my best tools for practicing setting a mindset and practicing thoughts that would create feelings in my body that would allow me to act in a way If you've listened to episode 18 and know the model, that was it that would allow me to act in a way where I could honor this super important content that I had created and lead these two days of training. It just so happened that in the first morning of training I was also presenting for the very first time a new feedback framework that I have been working on for months. It it compiles the best of my 20 years of leading companies and leading businesses and entrepreneurship, of leadership experience and so much learning and training that I've done in the realm of leadership with my training in communication, cognitive coaching, cognitive reframing and subconscious coaching and hypnosis. I've created a feedback framework that I say new. It's articulated in a new way, but we've been teaching it for a long time and I was teaching this framework that was going to be rolled out to hundreds of people.

Speaker 1:

I really my point is, I really really cared about what I was doing on this morning and I'd been looking forward to it for a long time. I had put a lot of time and love and effort into building slide decks, creating content, learning my content, and was so passionate about the impact that this really clean, strong leadership and communication was going to have on lots of kids that need strong leadership and communication. But here I was with one hour of sleep and communication. But here I was with one hour of sleep, caught my flight. I flew to Oakland. I was there at the training on time. There were some bumps with the logistics of the training, but I began my training at 9 am. Thank the Lord or, whatever you think, thank the universe that I was there on time. I was like okay, here's some relief.

Speaker 1:

The gala went well. Here I am on time and I start to train. I've you know this training is for over a hundred people that I've written and I'm in front of them with my, with my partner, and we're training and it's it's going great. But I began to realize that my brain is not holding on to words and sentences like it usually does? I usually have an almost photographic memory, in ways Like if I've seen something written, I can kind of picture it on a page and pull out the content or ideas or information from it. It is not photographic but it's so visual that sometimes it has elements of a photographic memory. That's not working.

Speaker 1:

This morning I'm looking out at people being like what the hell is the next thing that I was going to say In my head. That's what's happening. I'm looking at the slide deck. I'm just rolling through this content, feeling the presence and importance of these messages, but in the system of my physical body I'm also feeling like am I losing them? Is this obvious that I'm just not on my game, you know, and my concern is that this information will not get across successfully to these people. This is really important to me. So I'm going through my training content. I know that I'm getting the messages across.

Speaker 1:

I'm just feeling not on my game and we have a break for the participants to do some self-reflection and I walk up to my partner and I'm thinking in my head she is going to say what the hell is wrong with you? She's going to say hey, we can get. You know, we can get this back. We can totally pull this back together. And instead she says what's going on, how's it going? And I said oh, it's like. I think it's going great, I think they've got it. I'm really sorry, I'm so off my game this morning. She says what are you talking about? And I said I feel like my, like I'm not holding onto sentences in my head. She says no, you are completely fantastic. You're doing the incredible public speaking that you always do. I said wow, okay, so you can't see that I don't have any sleep. You can't see what I'm feeling inside? And she said not in the slightest bit. She said when you got that person up in front of the room and you coached them, that was some of the best coaching I've ever seen live. She said everything you're saying is landing beautifully. You are exactly as you always are as a speaker.

Speaker 1:

In that moment, two things happened. Number one I was so grateful to have a person next to me in a moment when I could use some support with my mindset, that I could ask for help. She offered me a different thought that I was having a hard time coming up with myself. Usually, I can really do that on an hour of sleep. That's probably my weakest point. With little sleep is my weakest mind body, everything. I do not like having that little sleep, and so I leaned on a friend and she gave me a different way of thinking about it. And the second thing that happened aside from the gratitude for her and the way that she answered that and the fact that I had her next to me was the minute she said it.

Speaker 1:

Everything changed. I was able to completely drop the thought that I was having a hard time letting go of, recognize that if I accept what she saw as reality in this moment, I was going to be a much more successful trainer for them. They were actually going to get this content from the best version of me. Even if this is a tiniest tweak that's not even visible to them, to me it feels huge. I can be filled with energy and filled with that feeling of motivation and inspiration and passion for what I'm doing. It shifted everything. So it was such a beautiful example, number one of the model. I let go of the thought this isn't going well, I'm off my game and instead replaced it with this is going great. This is exactly the training that I was hoping. It was Number one that shifted everything for me and brought me back into the present moment and into joy and into the passion of what I love to do. Secondly, it illustrated that sometimes we can ask a friend to help us shift our mindset. I'm usually the friend that people are asking. In this moment I was so grateful to have my friend next to me to say, oh God, in my mind I'm feeling like this is not going well, and she said, oh no, it's going great. She just helped me do a quick thought trade. That changed everything for me in my experience, an experience that was very important to me. So two practices that you can use for yourself. First, number one, practicing thought trades. Number two, asking for support when you need it. And number three I want to introduce the idea of joy, ease and lightness.

Speaker 1:

Back in the day in my mid to late 20s, I was leading an organization and scaling an innovation education organization and I was listening to Eckhart Tolle on my really long drives. Eckhart Tolle, as I said, is a theorist and an author and a thought leader and he's amazing and I used to listen to him on my drives to. Really I would listen to his books over and over to really let the concepts sink in and I would pause them and think about them and then listen to another chapter and pause and think about them. And one day, on this long drive, I listened to his chapter on joy, ease and lightness. And on this day I wanted to remember the concept joy, ease and lightness, which I'll talk about in just a moment. So I wrote it on my hand and something amazing happened with those three words written on my hand. First, let me tell you about the concept.

Speaker 1:

The first concept that Eckhart Tolle teaches is that when we are fully present in the present moment, we experience life fully and we experience it directly. The life that is actually happening now, which is actually all that there ever is, is this present moment, and we experience it directly. And what he means by that is we're experiencing the world and our life this moment, without the filter of the mind and its habitual patterns that it places our mind places in front of the world, that filter through which we perceive everything that's happening, that filter through which we get that 95% of our thoughts that are automatic, that are just going. Those are our habituated ways of thinking, right? So when we can become more present, when we are fully present, our struggles dissolve, our unhappiness dissolves, eckhart Tolle says, because in the present moment there are no problems.

Speaker 1:

The vast majority of the time when we can become fully present, we are, in this moment, focused on what is happening right now. The majority of our struggle or our unhappiness or our problems are created by the mind. Now we might say, okay, yeah, being present. I've heard this a million times. I practice presence no-transcript that we want yet, and so we lose our awareness and our experience of the present. So many problems are created in our focus on the future and the past, and so many problems are solved when we bring our focus back to the present moment.

Speaker 1:

Two ways that we can do that answer the question of okay, yeah, I want to be present, but how do I do it? The first way that Eckhart Tolle teaches is to shift our focus from the outcome of what we want to happen, with whatever we're doing right now, to the process of doing it. Shift your focus from the why to the how, instead of what am I doing right now and why am I doing it. Shift my focus to how am I doing it, paying attention to the process of doing rather than solely on the result we are trying to create, and this cultivates presence in the moment, and it also allows us to focus in on joy and ease, the joy and ease that come from the activity itself, whatever it is we're actually doing. So Eckhart Tolle says is there joy? This is the second practice and the reason that I'm talking today on the podcast. The main content is this question that he asks. The main content is this question that he asks In any moment of your life, you can ask yourself is there joy, ease or lightness in what I am doing?

Speaker 1:

The ultimate goal would be joy in a moment, the joy of existence, of presence, the nostalgia for now, the being in the part of the process that we're in, instead of overly focused on where we've been or where we're going, and in that full presence we can be connected to joy. If joy is not accessible in a moment, maybe we can just look for a little bit more ease. Can we find ease? If not joy? Where is the ease in what we are doing? If there is no ease accessible, how might we introduce a little ease? How might we search for or find a little ease in what we are doing? And ultimately, if joy is not accessible and if ease is not accessible. Is there a way that we can just find an edge of lightness, a little little bit more lightness in what we are doing, the conversation we are having, the work we are doing the drive, we are in the traffic, we are in the shower, we are taking the garden, we are walking through the public speaking event we are in the middle of? And he says if there is no joy, no ease and ultimately even no lightness in what we are doing, that means that time is covering up the present moment and life is being perceived as a burden or a struggle. So we can bring ourselves home to the real experience we are having, what is ultimately much more real, pull ourselves out of the filters of our habituated ways of thinking that the mind creates by asking ourselves this question is there joy, ease or lightness in what I am doing?

Speaker 1:

And in those days on that drive, on that day when I wrote joy, ease and lightness in ink on my hand in my 20s, I was driving down to oversee one of the educational programs and I stopped at a shoe store. I had to grab some shoes that day and I was on my way and I stopped there on my way down and the person that helped me to try on my shoes was in the middle of fitting my shoe and he looked at me and he said what does that say on your hand? And I said it says joy, ease and lightness. And he paused with so much curiosity and he looked up and he said why? And I said well, I've been listening and learning about presence and there's a teacher named Eckhart Tolle and I'm learning from him and he says that in every moment of life we can look for joy.

Speaker 1:

And if joy is too much to find, in that moment we can find a little ease. And if ease is too hard to find, what lightness, what little bit of lightness can we find in the present moment? And his eyes filled up with tears and he took my hand in his hands, this person that was trying on my shoes, and he said thank you so much for saying that to me right now. That is what I needed to hear on this day, in this moment. Thank you so much. And he let go of my hand and he finished trying on my shoe and I bought those shoes and I left. But it was such a fundamentally helpful concept that just the brief description filled his eyes with tears, touched his heart and helped him.

Speaker 1:

And then, when I think back to that training moment where my friend helped me organize my thinking in a way that was much more useful to me, and ultimately, if we're looking at the model, I was able to think this training is going great, I love doing this, and it filled me with joy and presence and I was able to be the effective trainer that I love to be and the public speaker that I love to be, because I was in my body and authentic and not distracted by potentially failing them right.

Speaker 1:

What it did was it introduced joy, ease and lightness all of them to that moment for me.

Speaker 1:

So, as you are going through the world, making your ideas into real things, as you are doing dishes, as you are combing your hair, as you are driving in traffic, as you're speaking to the people around you people that you love and people that you don't even know as you perceive the issue in front of you, as you read the news, as you think about the problem that you're trying to solve, what joy can you find in it? And if no joy, what ease? And if no ease, what little bit of lightness can you find in what you are doing in this moment, right now, which, ultimately, is all there is. That's what I've got for you today. My friends and I will see the Bloom Room. This is a year-round membership where we take all of these concepts and we apply them to real life in a community where we have each other's backs and we bring out the best in each other. We're all there to make our ideas real, one idea at a time. I'll see you in the bloom room.