Women are not the content of their thoughts or feelings or memories or actions. Whether we are the consciousness, experiencing or observing our thoughts and feelings and memories. This is my definition of our observing self, and that's what we'll be talking about today. Welcome to the modern creative woman exploring the art and science of creativity. I'm your hostess and creativity expert, Doctor Amy Backos. Let's get started.
Welcome. Thank you so much for joining the modern creative moment today. And we're going to be reflecting a little bit more on presence, not the kind you give and receive. You know, the kind you cultivate inside. This month I'm having so much fun inside the Modern Creative Woman membership. We are making so much art this month, and we're making sure that we really take the time to be gentle with ourselves this holiday season. And for me, that means slowing down and making time. My family decided to go visit my parents at Thanksgiving this year, so we could stay home for the December holidays, and I'm looking forward to watching movies and knitting, making art. Don't tell my family, you know, but we will all be in matching pajamas. Here's what else is happening at the Modern Creative Woman headquarters. If you have yet to join the 21 Day Gratitude Challenge, come on over. This is for you. It would be a great way for you to end the year focusing on gratitude so that you could start during the holidays. Finish up in the new year to all about working on your own inner peace, cultivating that space inside you that allows you to be present and aware and it will shift your perspective tremendously. You can pass on the Gratitude Challenge workbook as well. And it's great for tweens and teens and women who are interested in working towards their inner and outer peace. You can find it in the show notes. You can find it at Modern Creative Woman. Com Gratitude Challenge.
Aurora Duvall and I just hosted an incredible treasure hunt class, and we're going to offer another one again before the end of the year. And I would love for you to join. It was so much fun. If you want to watch sooner, you can catch the replay at Modern Creative Woman. Com or you can find it in the show notes.
If you have yet to listen to last week's episode, I encourage you to go back and listen to that one first. Last week we talked about presence and that means fully conscious of and engaging with your current experience. Presence happens when we are able to relate to and accept our emotions, especially the difficult ones. When we make contact with the present moment, we are mindful and we are able to make change. From this point of time. Think about our values, make action towards our values and it's where we live our life. There's nothing we can do in the past. There's nothing we can do in the future. All we have is the present moment. And the more we make contact with that exact experience of right now, the more success, satisfaction and happiness we have at our disposal. In the last episode, I gave you five reasons why you really want to cultivate present moment awareness. And this week, I want to talk to you about a concept called yourself as context. And I've never heard this phrase used in any other. Psychology or popular psychology. It's not part of any other theory.
This is a unique term to acceptance and commitment therapy. Self as context. This is about making contact with your observing self. And that's the aspect of you that does the noticing and observing of your inner. You can think about it as a meta awareness. I read about it as pure awareness. Essentially it's awareness of your own awareness. It's noticing the part of you that's noticing. It's the consciousness of where you're paying attention. Another way you can think of it is behaviorally, because Act is a contextual behavior science. We like to describe things in behavioral terms. So when we're calling it a self or a part of us, that's really a metaphor for technically the self is context is a repertoire of behavior. It's a way of observing our mind. That's the behavior. We don't have to go find it. It's more of an action that we take on the idea of observing that aspect of our self.
Another way that you can think of it is the place where you can take perspective. Flexible perspective taking is really one of the goals of Act. Psychological flexibility allows us to relate to ourselves and what's happening within us. That's our feelings, bodily sensations, and react accordingly to what's happening in the outside world. Cultivating that inner awareness so that we can very deliberately and consciously make choices about our behavior. And at the modern creative woman, I'm talking about creative behaviors, thinking new thoughts. Once you're in contact with the present moment, working on your mindset, stepping back from old thoughts and asking yourself what else might be true? When you think of self as context, as perspective taking, there's a lot of research that demonstrates. Taking a flexible perspective on what's happening around you is the key to your own psychological well-being and your life satisfaction. How cool is that? That you can relate to your thoughts in a way that can just increase your life satisfaction. You have that much power by changing your thoughts to increase your satisfaction.
This self as context, or you taking perspective on what's happening, underlies our entire mindset, how we relate to our thoughts. It also underlies our ability to accept what's happening. It influences if we can make contact with the present moment at all. And it's also about some really important concepts, like our self-awareness, how much empathy we have for others, how much compassion we have for humanity. Let me give you some examples. So you can understand what I mean by yourself as context or your observing. So right now you're listening to my voice and you're using a part of you, you know, that's your ears. You're using the part of you that hears to listen to my voice. If you're on a walk while you're listening, you're using the parts that we call your body, your legs, maybe your arms. But there's a part of you that's noticing all this. It's really this observing self that's noticing my voice. There's part of you that's aware of it. There's part of you that's aware of whatever else you're doing. Going for a walk, walking the dog, driving your car. And we don't really have a language that helps us understand this. Observing self is the ACT term: yourself as the context, and you can call it whatever you want.
Essentially, it's diffusing from your thoughts. That means not believing your thoughts to be facts. They're just thoughts. They're one neuron firing across a synapse to another neuron. They're not facts. Remember, if I ask you to think of a cute little dog, there's no cute little dog that emerges in front of us. It's not a fact. It's a thought. If you think of a upsetting memory, it's not a fact. It's a thought to. In reality, something may have happened that upset you. However, your thinking about it is not a fact. Your thinking is just your brain doing what a brain does. What we want to do though, is increase our acceptance that this stuff exists in our mind, and we want to make flexible contact with the present moment. It also helps us really get in touch with a stable sense of who we are as women, so we're able to anchor into what's important and solid and real about us. It also gives you access to more this transcendent state of. So now we have a lot of changes in our life. And if you just think about the month ahead of you, there's probably a lot of changes. You might have disruptions in your routine. You may have special events to attend. You might experience something amazing or something sad. All of that can change our idea of ourselves and what's happening. How we respond can influence how we think about ourselves. However, your self is context you are observing. So is the constant. You are always there. In researching for this episode, I also found it to be called a calm center I love that where is your calm Center? See if you can access that right now.
And that's the place where you observe everything that's happening your thoughts, your feelings, your actions, everything that's happening outside of you, your response. And when we're in contact with that part of ourselves, we are able to make healthy choices about what's important to us, and we're able to take action in inspired ways to do what feels important. I mentioned a moment ago a transcendent aspect of yourself, and I just want to come back to that. You already know this. Then there is more to you than your body, your thoughts, your feelings, your memories. There is so much more to you. You are more than the roles you play parent, teacher, wife, mom, worker, friend, neighbor, daughter, sister. You're more than these roles. That's not all of who you are.
All of these things will change throughout our life. If you have children, you raise them. Eventually they move away. That role as mother changes. You begin in your career and you grow and evolve. Maybe you change jobs, you get promotions. All of your roles have changed. But you are still there. This aspect that notices and observes is always available for you when you make contact with the present moment, you can also make contact with this transcendent part of you. There are two different things though. Present moment is what's happening right now, and yourself as the context to your transcendent self is inside of you. Presence is on the outside.
I have some more examples for you as you notice whatever happens to be in front of you right now so you can be aware that you are noticing whatever's in front of you. There's whatever's in front of you right now. It's in front of me is my water bottle and my microphone. And I am here noticing those things in front of me. There's a part of me that's noticing that I'm speaking to you. What else do you notice about that part that's observing?
I think for women, it often becomes the very critical voice that we've internalized that judges our self critiques. Our cell thinks were not enough. We're not doing enough. We're upsetting people. That narrated voice. Um, judgment and criticism is not yourself as context. Those thoughts about feeling unworthy or not good enough or insufficient, or something's wrong with you. Those are just thoughts. You have to make contact with the part of you that transcends all of those thoughts and just observes them. I want to make sure you separate that kind of inner mean girl voice from this part of you that I'm encouraging you to make contact with today. That self is contacts, that transcendent self, the observing. So you can give her a name even.
There's some really fun exercises that you can try that focus a lot on creating an alter ego. And many performers have an alter ego that they call on. I think many teachers have an alter ego. I've heard people call it, “I have to go put on my teaching hat” as if there was someone different or something. They had to be different to teach. Rather, they were embracing that aspect of themselves and that role. But the person who's noticing that they're putting on their teaching hat, they're in contact with their observing self. I've talked a lot before about attention, and staying in the present moment. And presence is a core pillar inside the modern, creative woman, all about making contact with the present moment and self as context. But what happens is our mind wanders all over the place.
Have you ever been so caught up in what you were doing you didn't hear what someone said to you? It happens to all of us. But here's where you can notice that self as context. There's some part of you that notices that your mind wandered and that you didn't hear what they said. That's yourself as context. That's your observing solve. Who alerts you that you've drifted away from the present moment, and you stop listening to the person you were talking with. That is the part I want you to keep making contact with. Imagine you're playing tennis or pickleball or soccer or volleyball and the ball is coming towards you and you see you've got your eye on it. That's what we're told to do. Keep our eye on the ball and out of the corner of your eye. You see your friend waving at you, and then you notice someone is filming the match. And then you notice that someone dropped their coat as they were walking by, and you start to get really distracted. All these things are happening. Where does your attention need to be? It needs to be on the ball that's coming at you.
These kinds of distractions can really trip us up. But that part of you, that observing cell that notices, oh yeah, I'm keeping my eye on the ball. This other things are distractions. That's your cellphone context at work when you can keep your eye on the ball, metaphorically, whatever that is, whatever you're doing, you're focusing on yourself as context can help you stay in contact. I want to remind you that there is safety in making contact with this part of you. That part is always there. You don't have to be worried that if you look too closely, it won't be there. It's always there. It's a part that we've been experiencing our whole lives. And now that you have a name for it, you can start to make different conversations and observations in your mind to settle yourself, feel calm, feel collected and really be enjoying the present moment. I want to give you a few ways that you can start to cultivate yourself as context. The first is a mindfulness practice. Set your timer for two minutes and sit quietly. You can also do a little bit of journaling afterwards to just see what your mind noticed. Art, of course, is a wonderful way to make contact with yourself and your observing self. You can make art directly about this aspect of yourself, or you can simply observe what's going through your mind while you're making art. In art therapy, we think so much about the concept of flow. When we're in the present moment, we're experiencing a detachment from time or worry or preoccupation with other thoughts, and we're focused completely in the moment, making art. So when you can get it to flow and you can do it in all kinds of things, you can do it in your work, in exercise, in conversation, and then in artmaking. S
imply observing what your process was afterwards can help you make contact again and again with yourself. As context. Nature is another incredible source for making contact with yourself and being out in nature looking for stillness. Scanning the landscape for parts of beauty that you can appreciate and admire. This is a wonderful way to just observe. You can narrate what you're observing and then narrate the observation process. Certainly, exercise is a place where our mind might wander, and you can catch yourself thinking of things, or getting distracted, or losing contact with the present moment, and observe every time your mind returns to the present moment. Oh, there's myself as contacts. There's my observant self. You can also find this part of you when you're doing repetitive work. And I love knitting, and the repetition of it allows my mind to wander. And it's a great place to just notice my thoughts and catch myself thinking different things. Another place you can do that, of course, is while you're washing dishes, cleaning the house, tidying, making the bed. These are all great places to observe your mind when it's something that you do repeatedly. It's a habit already. That's a great place to observe your mind.
I hope you have a wonderful rest of your week, and you keep making contact with the present moment and your observing cell. So now that you know all about your observing cell and yourself as context, what will you create? Do come join me in the Modern Creative Woman on Instagram, Facebook, and Pinterest at Doctor Amy Backos. If you like what you're hearing on the Modern Creative Woman podcast, I'd love to see you over on Instagram. Every Friday at noon Pacific time, we'll have a conversation to continue talking about each month's topic. You can grab your free copy of the 21 Day Gratitude Challenge in the show notes, and you can learn more about the Parris experience and check out Aurora and my creativity class. That link is also in the show notes, and you can find all of this on Modern Creative woman.com. Have a wonderful week and I cannot wait to talk with you in the next episode.