Fierce Encouragement

The Art of Staying Present (Part Two)

• Mark Walker • Season 2 • Episode 43

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Mark Walker explores how we can return to ourselves after ghosting and develop practices for staying present in our lives, even when faced with challenges that might pull us away from our authentic selves. This episode focuses on practical techniques for coming back to ourselves through awareness, breath work, and cognitive flexibility.

• Ghosting ourselves happens when we give away our awareness and attention, often by numbing out to our truth
• Our brains are wired to take shortcuts, creating blind spots and cognitive misframes that cause us to disconnect
• Catching yourself before you ghost is a powerful practice for interrupting negative loops
• Journal prompt: when was the last time you caught yourself about to ghost? What helped you stay present?
• Insight feels good but is not integration - true transformation happens in our bodies, breath, and actions
• De-centering by speaking about yourself in the third person creates cognitive flexibility and wider perspective
• Community support is essential for transformation, not optional
• Staying present isn't about perfection but about practicing coming back again and again

Check out the links in the show notes for the Awareness Lab, a community focused on putting these awareness practices into action.


Speaker 1:

Hey there, this is Mark Walker and this is Fierce Encouragement. Thanks for joining us. Again, this is the podcast where we talk about real things, especially in and around how we can develop ourselves personally, for our work, for our families, for our friends, but, most importantly, to have that mindset towards encouraging ourself more fiercely, especially when it gets tough or we might feel lonely. Again, I'm a certified life coach. I love helping people work through this stuff and coach them through that stuff by asking them questions so they can facilitate what they really want in their life and not what we've been told or programmed with. So thanks for joining me today and let's get right into today's episode. This is part two of the podcast. We talked about how we ghost ourselves and how we do that frequently in the last episode. If you didn't listen to that, go back and listen to the immediately last episode if you want to catch up. But this second part will be on how we can work on coming back and actually how we can stay in our life and really have that kind of sense of living our own life in an authentic kind of returned way, not just snapping back for those moments or we might read a good book or listen to some good music, but that ability to stay and stay present, wise, and inhabit our body even when things might pull us asunder. You know life events and ups and downs, so coming back to yourself is at once very powerful and very difficult, if we've done any practicing at all with meditating and holding your mind kind of focusing on an object, that staying well, that's kind of the spiritual jujitsu, right. And that's where most all of us slip up at some point, and we do. We ghost ourself, like I said in the last episode, we ghost ourselves when we give away our awareness, when we give away our attention, and we're doing this every time, obviously when we're plugged into media and maybe overindulging our media. But it also kind of comes down to our needs, right, when we numb out the things that might be true for us, the things that we need to spend some time on and think about accepting a reality for real. And in a sense, when we create those boundaries and accept that reality, we need to do it internally as well. Sometimes we can numb out to our truth, and what I mean by that is we work all around the thing that's bothering us, but we don't kind of directly go to the core. This is what we're talking about when we're living from authenticity. So I just want to remind you that these ideas that we have about returning and staying while this is where those micro habits or those micro returns we get on practicing for a minute with meditation and breathing, getting really good.

Speaker 1:

As I said in an earlier episode, indulging ourselves and practicing with that healing power of focus. When we reduce the oscillations or the hyperactivity of our mind, our thinking mind, the deeper reality becomes a little more clear. It helps ground us and balance us in our own way. It doesn't come from outside, it's being at home with ourselves. So what makes us leave all the time? Right? And maybe how do we practice staying a little longer next time, not out of punishment, but out about feeling better and having that better momentum or that better balance in our lives.

Speaker 1:

So the mechanics of ghosting. You know why do we leave again and again, and again. So when we ghost ourselves or ghost others, well, I don't think it's just emotional. I don't think it's just emotional. Of course we decide with our emotions, but it's also a cognitive or thinking misframe.

Speaker 1:

Our brain loves to take those shortcuts right, it loves to hide and sometimes those blind spots kind of we don't see them right. Our brain can get flooded and there's a lot of modern philosophers and thinkers that talk about it as just being a systemic error. We're really good, you know, or I am good. I don't know about you. Maybe check yourself here. Are you, do you have difficulty with taking it personally when it's an argument with your, your boyfriend or girlfriend or your husband or your wife? Do you have a difficult time disconnecting from getting laid off from your job? It feels like an abandonment, right, it feels the anger and the threat comes online. But I think in those moments that's where we can work on cognitive restructuring and having that flexibility and not be kind of fall into those natural patterns, those emotional negative misframes, like again that I'm good at. So check yourself is your brain getting flooded and can we just see those as systemic errors and choose to reframe it?

Speaker 1:

So when our brains are wired to kind of filter reality in that way to look for the negative things and point them out, when our stress kind of moves up or spikes, those filters can go really small, meaning that our thinking space grows smaller because it just becomes a survival mechanism in a sense. Right, we're fighting to survive, we go narrow in our vision. It's understandable and it's actually helped us evolve for a long, long time. But that also means we can get caught in those low-level or low-energy mental loops, especially around shame and that idea of losing that ability to be uncritical with ourselves for a few moments. Right, this throwaway fierce encouragement when we can't even come from negative to neutral state. It's almost impossible. When we talk about shame, we talk about that intrinsic feeling of not belonging and not feeling any value, and it's a hard place to be. But we can also have distraction, right, we can have cravings and addictions come online. These are the systemic errors. When our brain is overloaded and it's kind of like a negative misframe, I think insight or some type of again balance or reframe or cognitive flexibility, if you will. They're all talking about the same thing, but it almost needs this difficulty or this disruption. When we can get good at seeing the disruptions or the difficulties or the stressful things as opportunities, we have an opportunity or a chance to interrupt the negative loop, to see the loop when we zoom out and see that we're negatively looping. When we zoom out and see that we're negatively looping, that's big time value add for somebody that might be struggling and staying in one spot.

Speaker 1:

So this is my prompt for you right now and I really want to challenge you to think about this or break out your journal, if you have an opportunity to When's the last time you caught yourself about to ghost? You caught yourself about to ghost kind of like, maybe on a mid-scroll or a mid-anger binge or maybe that kind of middle of that dead inside grind at work. When's the last time you've gone through that and paused Truly? What helped you stay for a little longer in that moment? Anger, frustration numbing out. Is there anything that helps you stay and come back? Maybe even come back and then stay and sit in that moment and maybe to kind of finish up that thought where do you ghost yourself most often? At work Parenting, maybe even in your silence. Call it out. I want to bring this into the light and I know it'll help you if you pull that out into the light. Honestly, I've been ghosting at parenting lately and I've been ghosting at work and I've been ghosting at work. So those are the things I need to work on. Those are the things that require that disruption, require the shakeup. I have to interrupt those loops and then just put 10, 20 minutes of work in.

Speaker 1:

When we have that insight, we have that space where, like this, is where I'm dropping the ball. Well, it sometimes isn't enough. And if you're in a personal development and kind of like a junkie, like I am, well you realize I keep coming back and taking the medicine. Why can't I just fix this damn thing? And then I don't have to listen to this podcast anymore or the books or work on myself. Well, insight feels good. I love learning, so insight feels like a win.

Speaker 1:

I think it's really important to distinguish. Insight is not integration. Integration is what can change our life, and integration really lives in our body, in our breath and in our actions or behaviors. So we have to have that disruptive strategy, that kind of like ability to check ourselves and get a little bit better at that every day, because that transformation we seek, that requires cognitive flexibility, as it's been expressed. It can also be mindfulness. It can be focus, attention, reflection. It is learning to get relaxed under pressure. The paradox of that right Relax. But you'll see this in athletes, right. You'll see this in great artists or great musicians. They have that flow, they have that embodiment, they have, in fact, a stillness to their presence, a great actor or an actress. This is integration and maybe it's a good thing to know that, that mastery that they might have that person, that flow. It doesn't come from a place of mastery all the time. In fact, they're very good at changing or having that cognitive flexibility great artists are, have that ability to take a punch and keep going.

Speaker 1:

And when you start to do that, we start to move into kind of this, what I've heard philosophers talk about as kind of insight cascades, not just those aha moments but even deeper ways of seeing and integration. So if you want to kind of like white knuckle your way into staying present all the time, I think and I know from my experiments you will definitely burn out. You will definitely burn out. But if you practice this returning gently, setting timers, working with your calendar but most importantly checking yourself again and again, having that ability to catch yourself when you're a little angry or a little disconnected or a little zoned out, but come back over and over we build up our awareness fitness when we try to stay present. Without practice it's kind of like trying to stay balanced on that tightrope during an earthquake. Maybe right, you need more reps. You need that rhythm and you kind of need a net, sometimes a net of a community. So the secret weapon for coming back is really this the core idea is this One of the fastest ways we can return to ourself is just to shift that perspective we have.

Speaker 1:

This is de-centering. When you look at our lives from the outside, like you would for a friend or a client, we see ourselves differently. Would for a friend or a client we see ourselves differently. That wisdom is an ability to take multiple perspectives. It truly is. And so here's another practice prompt I want you to say your name in the third person, say it out loud, and then say out loud what you're struggling with. Go ahead, I'll wait, or go ahead and pause. Say your name is overwhelmed, right. Say your name wants to give up. Say your name is still here fighting and listening to this podcast and working, and then now I just invite you to breathe and then asking yourself what advice would you give that version of yourself?

Speaker 1:

This isn't a disassociative practice. It's more like training your mind to widen the lens, having that cognitive flexibility, so while we're really trying to stay on point and own it, when we're driving like 100 miles an hour in a flat tire in the rain with our blindfold on. Well, it isn't easy Oftentimes. We need a community, we need a container. Community isn't just optional for our transformation, it really is essential. So many experiments and studies have been shown. There's people, you know, that hit a wall when they're going at it alone because they just lack that external feedback and kind of those integration rituals or those hubs. So I do a lot of things, from the Brotherhood of being to the Awareness Lab to one-on-one coaching. I just want to ask you, who do you train your awareness with and who helps you, kind of see when you might be slipping into the fog. I say that personally. I needed it today.

Speaker 1:

When we feel alone, it's so much more important to get out there and kind of put that pressure on ourself to admit that we're slipping into the fog and ask for a little help. So this isn't about enlightenment, really. It's just about remembering to come back to your damn body, right, it's about parenting on purpose and, you know, not getting frustrated too much. It's about parenting when you're tired, right, maybe it's about breathing and taking the breath or two instead of snapping right away. Maybe it's more about telling the truth to ourselves, even when you know we're ashamed two thumbs pointing at this guy.

Speaker 1:

Staying doesn't mean that we have to be perfect. This means that we work on our presence and it means training. We do not need to go to a monastery or a mountain, but we do need to look in the mirror, not with fierce hatred, but fierce encouragement. We need that rhythm of talking to ourselves. We need that ability to come back again and again and again, so you are not a ghost, you're not ghosting yourself, you are not a mistake. That happened when we want to take it personally. Remember, it's just a system error, a systemic error that we can correct with a little work.

Speaker 1:

You're here, you're listening and you can come back practicing your breath, practicing your awareness, and really don't try to do this alone. Come train with us in the Awareness Lab. Check out the links in the show notes for the Awareness Lab. It's a great community, it's a small investment and it really is talking about putting these awareness practices into action. Until next time, please stay with yourself, stay in a fierce encouragement mindset, take care of yourself and those around you, and thank you for sharing your time with me. I hope you have a good evening, a good day, wherever you're at, give these journaling prompts and these practices a shot, and I can't wait to connect with you next time here on Fierce Encouragement. All right, be well, take care. Bye-bye.