Staying Present Longer: The Interplay of Mindfulness & Concentration

In this episode, Sean Fargo explores the deep relationship between mindfulness and concentration — two practices that are often taught separately but in reality support and sustain each other. 

Drawing inspiration from his teacher Ajahn Chah, Sean reflects on how concentration serves as the foundation that allows mindfulness to stay steady with the unfolding present moment.

Through personal stories from his years as a Buddhist monk and practical concentration exercises, Sean highlights how simplicity, stillness, and focus can help us extend the duration of our presence. 

From visualizations in the belly to counting breaths, focusing on external objects, or repeating loving-kindness phrases, concentration practice becomes a refuge from the busyness of modern life and a gateway into joy, clarity, and perspective.

Listeners are invited to experiment with lengthening their meditations, stringing together multiple sessions, or even holding mini at-home retreats. 

Sean Fargo also shares candid reflections on challenges like the five hindrances, the difference between grasping and genuine focus, and how deep concentration can lead to profound insights, stillness, and even some of life’s happiest moments.

What you’ll learn in this episode:

• Why mindfulness and concentration are “two ends of the same stick”
• Practical techniques to stay present longer, from breath counting to visualization
• How concentration fuels mindfulness and supports choiceless awareness
• The role of concentration in overcoming the five hindrances
• Insights into stillness, joy, and clarity that arise with deeper practice

Resources & Links:

• Watch the full session on YouTube: Staying Present Longer
• Learn more about Ajahn Chah’s teachings: ajahnchah.org
• Explore free meditations, courses, and trainings at MindfulnessExercises.com

Become a Certified Mindfulness Meditation Teacher: Certify.MindfulnessExercises.com

Email: Sean@MindfulnessExercises.com

Mindfulness Exercises with Sean Fargo is a practical, grounded mindfulness podcast for people who want meditation to actually help in real life.

Hosted by Sean Fargo — a former Buddhist monk, mindfulness teacher, and founder of MindfulnessExercises.com — this podcast explores how mindfulness can support mental health, emotional regulation, trauma sensitivity, chronic pain, leadership, creativity, and meaningful work.

Each episode offers a mix of:

• Practical mindfulness and meditation teachings
• Conversations with respected meditation teachers, clinicians, authors, and researchers
• Real-world insights for therapists, coaches, yoga teachers, educators, and caregivers
• Gentle reflections for anyone navigating stress, anxiety, burnout, grief, or change

If you’re interested in:

• Mindfulness meditation for everyday life
• Trauma-sensitive and compassion-based practices
• Teaching mindfulness in an authentic, non-performative way
• Deepening your own practice while supporting others

…you’re in the right place.

Learn more at MindfulnessExercise...

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

I'd like to talk about how we can stay present longer. One of my teachers in our lineage, Ajahn Cha, who is, I think, one of Rick's uh teachers in terms of inspiration in this lineage, um, would often talk about how mindfulness and concentration are two ends of the same stick. That it's difficult to separate them completely as separate practices. You know, on the one hand you have the noble eightfold path, and you have mindfulness and concentration as two separate things. But they often work in tandem. Concentration meaning a narrowing of attention, narrowing of awareness, narrowing of focus onto um something say smaller and smaller, excluding a lot of your experience. Some teachers will say that it's like having a bulldog mind of biting down on one thing and one thing only and not letting go. Forgive me if that image is unsettling. Um, but the point is, can we kind of lock in on one part of our experience and stay with it at the exclusion of anything else that's happening? Um, a lot of mindfulness practice is more open in the sense that we're noticing things changing over time, opening to the rising and falling of emotions and uh sensory stimuli and uh mental chatter and reactivity and all sorts of things that may happen in our experience. Kind of opening to this unfolding wave with the fullness of experience. Um stay mindful with the unfolding now, one has to have cultivated some amount of focus or concentration in order to stay with the unfolding experience without allowing the mind to get distracted. Um, and if it does get distracted, can we notice the distraction quicker and quicker and be with that? Um with concentration practice, um, you know, there's some element of mindfulness baked into concentration, to know what we're focusing on, to be aware that we're aware. And so it's difficult to tease out concentration and mindfulness in the actual experience sometimes. Sometimes we may uh sense into our belly as we breathe and be generally concentrated on the rise and fall of the belly as we inhale and exhale. We might be slightly, you know, noticing other sensations in the belly, um the changing rhythm of our breath, um, noticing whether we're hungry, we're full. Um there's elements of mindfulness and concentration, um, and there's elements of concentration in mindfulness. Um my first year as a monk, I I didn't really know what I was getting myself into, and I went to a monastery where they really specialized in concentration practice, and I I had um uh I didn't really know that that's what I was getting myself into, and so for the first year um we would sit in silence, you know, for the vast majority of the day, and oftentimes, you know, throughout the night, uh, sensing into the belly as we breathe. And um one of our main practices was one of the practices that we did today, which was um one of the more unique practices of um sensing in the belly and visualizing a hollow, dark belly, like space in the belly, and visualizing an object like a candle flame or a Buddha statue, a Buddha rupa, or a piece of like clear crystal in the belly, and we'd focus our awareness into smaller and smaller points at the center of the visual object. And um we would first prepare for that by sensing into safety, gratitude, you know, develop a sense of ease. Um, and um I really enjoyed that practice and felt like it was something that um felt good to me in my experience. It just felt like I was a little bit more embodied in general by bringing my awareness into the belt, to the belly, into the body. Even though I was visualizing to some degree, there was also this sense of groundedness by bringing awareness into the center of my belly as I breathed. And I had just come from a background where I was kind of a busy business man traveling around um China and um Tibet and Vietnam and Thailand. Um and I found that the concentration practice was very peaceful in the sense that it offered me a sense of a refuge that I didn't have to think about anything, I didn't have to like notice all sorts of things, um, I didn't have to analyze anything or figure anything out. It was a very simple invitation to visualize something in the belly and focused on more narrow and narrow points in it. And that simplicity felt like a breath of fresh air, and that simplicity is found in all of the concentration practices we did today. Um, we you know would focus on a visual cue outside ourselves and focus on something maybe on the wall, on a surface, um, something in front of us, but we would focus on one thing outside ourselves visually. Very, very simple practice. Uh counting exhales. Um I'm curious what number some of you got to. I know when I first started counting exhales as a concentration practice, I was lucky if I got to eight. Um, and on some days I might get to four if it was a really busy day or there's a lot going on. Um the good thing is that um this is a practice that we cultivate and that the more we practice, generally speaking, um, you know, the higher number we can get to, the longer we can stay with the visual object, the longer we can stay with the breath, uh, the felt sense of breathing at the nostrils, um, the sensations of the heart, etc. Um can repeat you know a mantra or a phrase or a word over and over and over. And that this is a cultivated practice and it becomes um something that tends to feel easier over time, especially with consistent practice. I can really develop a sense of or a ability to concentrate uh the felt sense in the body, ears, eyes, can even do nose of uh visualizing. Um it's easier to cultivate this on retreats or on longer practices. Today was a relatively short practice of half hour. Um with concentration practice, um, it usually behooves us to try to lengthen the duration of our meditations and to string together as many meditations back to back or really close to each other in the same day, the same weekend, same week. Um, and we find that the more we're able to practice, the longer we're able to practice, um, we start entering into different states of mind, where a sense of stillness um enters the mind, sense of ease, and oftentimes joy is felt in the body. A sense of perspective tends to come in our lives because we haven't been trying to process a lot of information or data. We've been stilling the mind so that our lives clarify, like shaking up a snow globe. We can allow all of the energies of our lives to settle, and there tends to be a perspective in our lives that occurs, which for those of you interested in the Eightfold Path, can lead to our um understanding a right of right view and can fuel right effort as well, because we're clear about our priorities and our values and what's really important. Um, it's this practice of concentration that um I found super helpful for adopting a life of simplicity, because when we have the stillness of mind, we tend to sense into a greater sense of peace. And we realize that all the things we're kind of chasing or the things that we think we needed, um aren't actually the things that necessarily create happiness. That a lot of that happiness and well-being and peace comes from um simplicity. Sense of ease and just finding a sense of peace with life as it happens. We don't always need the things that we think we do. Whether it's possessions approval. Other monks would um put something in front of them to concentrate on visually, and some of the monks would get a rock and stare at the rock and stare and concentrate on the earth element and focus on smaller and smaller points of the rock. Um, others would have fire to concentrate on, and some people find fire as a really powerful concentration object. Um there's a sense of change that happens with fire and heat and destruction, but also light, and there's a lot of things that uh uh can come up as we focus on a flame, but others put water in front of them or an empty cup to focus on the space inside something. So sometimes the space will become the object. Um the more I practice concentration, um I notice my sense of happiness increase. And in fact, it's like I'd say three out of the top five happiest moments of my life have been while concentrating. Um some of you may be familiar with the jhanas. Uh J A sorry, J-H A N A S, jhanas. And depending on who you talk to, like some people say there's four jhanas, some people say there's eight, but um most people um describe the journey of going through the jhanas as basically being the same, um where there's a stillness of mind, there's a sense of joy and rapture that can come from experiencing that simplicity and stillness, and then a sense of ease uh washes over us. Um sense of equanimity comes, and then uh in really concentrated uh states, there's neither pleasure nor pain. Um, there's no like objects, there's a dissolution of separateness. Um, for me, in my experience, there's often a sense of uh profound interconnection that's felt in a almost subatomic way, where it feels like I'm really at one with everything. And I don't know all the chemical changes that happen in the brain, but I know that um you don't have to be Buddhist to do this. This is not belief-based, this is just a byproduct of a very still, concentrated mind. And in some cases, people, including myself, feel like even the breath disappears where uh the need to inhale uh ceases for very long periods of time. Um with cell phones, you know, like it's we're always surrounded by screens, it seems, like in our culture. TVs, computers, cell phones, watches, etc. And our ability to concentrate and stay present for longer and longer periods of time is diminishing largely. And I feel like we need more say mindfulness teachers to teach concentration practices. Um concentration practices tend to be overlooked by a lot of uh meditation teachers. And so my invitation really is to sense into which of those kinds of concentration practices resonate. Um to experiment with trying one concentration practice for um say longer than you would normally meditate, and to carve out time even for a mini retreat at home in which you come back to that practice over and over and over and over. And notice what happens. Um, I think you'll find that you've find that stillness and perspective and clarity, and you'll be able to sustain integrated mindfulness or informal mindfulness in your daily life for much longer periods of time, to the point where you pick up more nuance of rising emotions and the falling away of emotions in real time, the arising of certain thoughts and passing away of certain thoughts in real time, the arising of physical sensations like hunger or pain or discomfort or tiredness in real time, and we stay with that and we notice those change too. We're able to stay with it, not just noticing and logging it and then deciding, well, what do I do now? But rather actually staying with the arising of sensations and thought patterns as they happen, and noticing how they change as they change, and noticing what arises after that and what passes, and staying with those waves. It's not just like one wave and then you fall off the surfboard, it's like you're riding a wave across the Pacific, it's like you're catching it in New York, and you know, by the end of the day, you're in Portugal. Um it's um it's really the fuel for mindfulness. Concentration is what sustains our ability to stay present. Um, and without concentration, without having cultivated concentration by focusing on one thing and one thing only, and locking in for as long as you can and keep coming back. Um, without that, our mindfulness is distracted at best. Um, we might notice the superficial aspect of an experience, but not really sense into the deeper layers of what's actually happening or staying with the unfolding of it for more than a couple seconds. Um it's important to note that you know, this is not about suppressing anything or bypassing anything. We still need to bring the gentle awareness and mindfulness to our shadows, deep emotions that surface in our days. We do need to tend to those things too. But in the actual practice of concentration, it's okay to exclude those things for the time being to cultivate this fuel of awareness, sustained awareness. And for those of you uh who are familiar with the five hindrances, um you know, we can work with the five hindrances before concentration practice, working with sensual desire, um, ill will, sloth and torpor, restlessness and worry and doubt through a lot of the classic practices that we do to um overcome the hindrances, uh, the hindrances to mindfulness, the hindrances to um concentration practice. So we can adopt the um antidotes to the five hindrances before we practice or during the practice too, if if they come up. Just some things to have on our radars. Um I'm seeing that there's 25, 26 new messages in the chat section. Um yeah. Um just for the sake of time, maybe I'll I'll kind of run through these briefly if that's okay. Does that sound like a good idea, George? Okay. Um what is your own practice these days? Um like I'm right now, I'm resonating with that practice of sensing into the actual heart, the organ of the heart, um during sort of a loving-kindness practice. Like I'll do a loving kindness practice and then sense into the feeling of care in the heart and use that sensation of care as an object of concentration. Um, it's relatively new to me, and um I find it very helpful for um uh feeling love, quite frankly. Um da da da. Seeing some comments. Beautiful. Do you also use different breathing patterns during your meditation teachings? Um generally speaking, no, but uh when I work with certain clients, um, sometimes I'll uh invite box breathing. And I'm actually doing uh uh a breath work facilitator training program as a student where I learn how to facilitate certain breath work. It's in the tradition of um Asha, A-S-H-A. I was in uh Tuscany a couple months ago uh with the founder of the breathwork retreat center, and I'm signing, I signed up for the year-long training, um, but I've experienced very deep, profound um transformation through this style of breathing. And um the founder of it is on my podcast. Uh his name is Anthony Abignano. Um, highly recommend it. So I'll be doing more of that as a facilitator in the coming years. Um, what was the title of Locke Kelly's book? Um Effortless Mindfulness. Uh, could you please post your podcast info? Yeah, I've done it a few. I'm I'm weary of promoting anything. I'm really just here to you know support. Um, but um I just posted it in the chat section. Uh it's called the Mindfulness Exercises Podcast with Sean Fargo. Um, Sean, if you could expand please on the concepts you described or outlined about how these types of practices can make priorities or ideas appear clearer in your mind or being. Um yeah, it's it's kind of like how you if you go on a vacation and then you come back and you're just like, oh, wow, like this is the routine I used to have. This is these are the thoughts I used to have, these are the stories and the you know challenges that I had. It's like, oh, okay, I can relate to these a little bit differently now. It's kind of like vacation in a way. Um like a really restful rejuvenating vacation where the nervous system is settled, the mind is clear, you can process things more clearly. It's it's kind of like that. But also like in the concentration practice, when we when the mind becomes very concentrated, um, insights often arise in real time. So insights of um the nature of interconnectedness, um, how a lot of the suffering that we experience um is sort of self created oftentimes. Um so a lot of insights arise. Um, and this is actually a great practice for creators. Which I would argue is all of us. We're all creators in some ways. And so having this spaciousness and stillness of mind can be very helpful for allowing um uh creative thoughts and ideas to come. Um I often today I got to ten exhales. Yeah, that's great. Yeah, and you know, just as a challenge, like can you work your way up to fifty? Can you get to a hundred? You know, not to not as a competition or um as a way to feel good about ourselves, but rather just kind of cultivate our concentration um and have those as sort of um milestones. 14 exhales. Um I wonder how to practice choiceless awareness without falling into daydreaming with minimal awareness. So um so choiceless awareness is sort of this um open mindfulness of kind of any aspect of our experience that arises. Um, anything that's predominant. You don't have a preference for where you bring mindfulness, you're just kind of staying attuned to um things as they happen. Um so choiceless awareness, in my opinion, um requires uh uh prior work with concentration in order to stay with the unfolding now. So I think concentration is uh underpinning to the ability to practice choiceless awareness for for very long. Um and so you could do um uh a concentration practice and then segue into choiceless awareness. And if you find like that you're uh daydreaming, come back to concentration, fuel up and then go back to choiceless. Just an idea. Fifteen exhales, good job. Um, a couple questions around um the antidotes to the five hindrances. Um it's funny because I wanted to attach a book here that really goes into a deep dive on a lot of this. But I'm not seeing the ability to attach a book. Like a PDF. Um, I know. I'm gonna send a link to a book that really goes into the best detail I've ever seen on this. So I just posted the link. Um it's a book on the foundations of mindfulness, and in it it goes into great detail on uh the five hundred says and the antidotes. Um so, but just as a bullet, you know, like some of the antidotes as a monk are not exactly recommended for lay people. Um, some of the monk antidotes are quite intense, and I've actually had to do years of therapy to unwind some of those patterns, especially around sensual desire. Um having a wife, uh, I cannot do some of those the monk antidotes. Um that's probably TMI, but um so you know, classically speaking, for sensual desire, um you can uh contemplate uh impermanence, uh the human body's unattractive aspects. Um certain things like breathing can be helpful. Um the ill will, um usually we uh the antidote for that is loving kindness practice. Um but also just um yeah, like empathy, compassion, curiosity for why um we have ill will, and oftentimes that ill will is a reflection of um how we feel about ourselves or a um projection of a shadow that we're carrying. Um sloth and torpor, I have a lot of experience with because one of my reactive patterns is to um kind of zone out and get tired. Um and you know, if something's uncomfortable, I'll start yawning. Or if I feel um like I don't want to be there anymore, I'll like start falling asleep. And I realized after I practiced um mindfulness of sloth and torpor, of the sleepy, tiredness, checked out feeling. I would sense into my head and sense into my brain and sense into what I thought was tiredness and realize I'm actually not tired. There's actually a lot of energy here. This is just a reactive pattern that I would have in order to check out. But when I would check in with mindfulness, I would realize, oh, there's a lot of energy. Oftentimes. Sometimes I was actually tired, but um, but I was surprised by how often I wasn't. Uh restless and restlessness and worry, um concentration practice is a great antidote. Um mindfulness of breathing. And then with doubt, um, I to me that's the trickiest of the five hundreds. Um and so with doubt, we can just bring curiosity to the teaching, um, journal about whatever the teaching is that we're doubtful of, um, about um our own experiential understanding, um, and to um talk to teachers about it and see like, am I missing something? Am I assuming something? What's happening with this that um I'm not resonating with? So I hope that's helpful. Um Dr. Love says love is the antidote to fear. Yeah. Beautiful. Love it. Um Sloth and torpor often seems to rest on some level of depression. Accordingly, self-compassion seems to help right the ship, and I'll also sometimes help with a nap. Yeah. Um, I had a strange visual distortion occur during a concentrating on a ceiling pot light. Suddenly the ceiling around it started to swirl, making the light look as if it was moving. It actually frightened me, so I closed my eyes again. So oftentimes when we're highly concentrated in the genas themselves, this usually happens on retreat or in a mini self-retreat, where um very surreal, unusual experiences happen that um just happen that we've never experienced before. And oftentimes there's uh lights, uh visuals. I'm not talking about psychedelics. Uh I'm talking about um things that happen uh visually with our eyes closed when we're highly concentrated. And um, and so the practice is to stay with whatever's arising and not hold on to it or push it away, but rather just stay with it with sort of an equanimous um perspective, like allowing things to arise, allowing um experience to happen and staying with it, and just allowing it to fade, allowing it to increase, change into something else, dissolve, um, and to stay present with the unfolding now. Um, so oftentimes lights are a part of that. Um, yeah, if anything feels overwhelming or unsafe, please back out, seek support, go for a walk, take care of yourself. Um uh we're not here to push ourselves like into intense discomfort. Um, so please, you know, um consider that as well. When I meditate on loving kindness, I often feel strong emotions arise and end up crying. It feels like a combination of deep love and some grief underneath it. Is this an experience that is usual during loving kindness? Absolutely. It's more and more common, I'd say, because a lot of us need to grieve. And so that may be an indication that we're holding on to some sadness, some grief, some form of loss, which is normal. And so the invitation would be to create some time and safe space for grieving. Um and I know Rick has a course right now that he's been offering on uh grief and loss. I know he has a free worksheet on his website around grief and loss. Um, with loving kindness, it's not about forcing a sense of love, it's really about inviting a sense of love and then noticing what happens. Sometimes grief comes instead, sometimes um hatred, resentment, annoyance comes up instead. So, can we tend to that with gentleness? Um, we don't know what's gonna actually come up with loving kindness practice. We just kind of invite a sense of care and then tend to whatever arises. Uh, Donald Rothberg, in my opinion, is one of the great teachers of loving kindness. Uh, he was on our podcast. You can go to our podcast and go to Donald Rothburg. But he is an amazing loving-kindness teacher, and he actually talks about this um this type of experience and what we can do with that. Rick Kruger, thank you for bringing up those hindrances. Looks great. Yeah, box breathing was tested on veterans suffering from PTSD. Yeah. Um, I support various um uh departments of veterans' affairs around the country and um found yeah, a lot of these breathing exercises to be very uh very helpful for uh PTSD. Um what is the difference between grasping and concentrating on an object? Um that's a really good question. So um with I guess I would frame it depending on what the concentration object or what the concentration object in practice is. Um like with visuals, it's easy to grasp by going outside our eyes and like locking in on something outside ourselves versus receiving sights. Um with a felt sensation of breathing, I think um it may um it's it's really about like surrendering thoughts about it and just feeling it, like like sensing the breath right here, sensing the nostrils and kind of relaxing everything else around you and just allowing the sensations of breathing um to be felt at the nostrils, um, with a sense of um yeah, that gentleness um and that sense of safety that I talked about earlier. I think with counting breaths, it can be much easier to grasp per se. It's like, ooh, I gotta get to 10, I gotta get to 20. Um so with grasping, it could come in the form of accomplishment, of uh self-worth. There's there's a different kind of grasping that I think is um that we're more prone to. And so if we notice ourselves grasping for a number, maybe that's not the concentration practice for us at that time. Maybe we do a different one. Um for me, actually, uh one thing to help um with the grasping of it of counting is actually going from one to ten and then ten to one and then one to ten and then ten to one, so that I'm not trying to go for a high number. I'm simply kind of oscillating between one to ten to one to ten to one to ten, so that it's more of a process-driven practice rather than an outcome-based practice. So those are a few thoughts on how we might differentiate grasping and concentrating on a few of those practices. I'm seeing uh is it helpful to note resistance when it arises in response to a hindrance during meditation, since resistance is just another form of a hindrance. Um absolutely. Yeah, if there's any form of resistance, then it's a wonderful note. Um, I think that's very um insightful, Linda. Um oftentimes with hindrances, uh there's often a judgment. Um but yeah, noticing resistance to a hindrance is a wonderful note. Um just because you're noting resistance doesn't mean you're identified with it. So I think noting can help us to just be aware of what's happening, and that awareness allows us more freedom to choose. So we're not we're not the resistance, we're aware of the resistance. So the noting can be helpful for kind of unlocking from identifying with it. Um so if we're able to note it, um we have much more agency than if we're identified with that. Uh Jeffrey, thank you. I don't know where you are, but uh thank you. Um Lori, hi, you want to share something?

SPEAKER_01 48:23

The resistance on an unhealthy attraction. Like I I tend to be attracted to unavailable partners. I just can't help myself, you know. I feel helpless in that area. Is there anything you could suggest or help in? You know, it can have something to do with sexual or more romantic or the attention, something like that. Um it's embarrassing, but you know, still I I need some suggestions.

SPEAKER_00 49:02

Yeah. Um yeah, I I feel like um there may be a lot of follow-up questions I would want to ask to really get to the heart of it for you. Um uh but um, you know, and there's a lot of nuance here. Like, do we know that they're unavailable? Um maybe I think there's a lot of um nuance here, a lot of factors that could be involved. Um yeah, um I don't really have a great stock response for for you right now. I'm sorry. Um yeah, but I wish you well. I hope that you find someone who who treats you well.

SPEAKER_01 50:02

Um thank thank you. Um I appreciate that. And um the reason I know that um they're unavailable is my therapist and I have um like recognized a pattern.

unknown 50:16

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 50:16

And so that's the key, I guess, is to um in this instance uh notice the pattern and show some resistance.

SPEAKER_00 50:28

Yeah, yeah. I mean, I think some for some people it's a matter of almost self-protection. Like if we know that they're not available, then it's safe for us to like them because we know that it won't get sticky. Um again, I I don't want to assume anything or you know, but there there may be um yeah. Um I'm glad you're working with someone. Um I in terms of patterns, I will say that I really recommend this book called The Five Personality Patterns, um written by uh someone who lives here in the Bay Area named Stephen Kessler. Um but um I'm that sounds great. Yeah. I'm really a big fan of uh the patterns that are laid out, also fan of the Enneagram. Um, but sometimes when we get to the core underpinnings of our pattern, we get a sense for why uh we're attracted to certain energies that um complement or supplement our pattern um or um satisfy something that we're longing for.

SPEAKER_01 51:46

So um yes, yes, that that sounds it sounds it resonates, and I'm I'm gonna get that book. So I'm sorry, I didn't mean to interrupt.

SPEAKER_00 51:58

Oh, it's okay. Um like one of my favorite teachings um was uh like the Buddha had an attendant named Ananda, like his main attendant was Ananda. And there was uh uh a woman who loved Ananda, like she she wanted to marry Ananda. Like he's a monk, but this woman like was just so infatuated with him, uh, and um you know made a lot of advances to him. And um basically, I think it was Ananda himself who said, you know, um uh, you know, thank you for your compliments, thank you for your kindness. But a lot of the things that you see in me that you like that you've fallen in love with are actually aspects of yourselves that you would love to um sort of awaken to or appreciate inside yourself. Um can take that with a grain of salt, but you know, when we're really attracted to someone and they may not be available, you know, maybe we can say, okay, well, what is it about them that I love or that I'm infatuated with? And can I find those same qualities in myself and appreciate those qualities internally? And oftentimes when we really take that to heart, our um say clingingness to the other person will dissolve, and appreciation for ourself uh increases.

SPEAKER_01 53:53

That is beautiful, just beautiful. Wow.

SPEAKER_00 54:00

So I'm guessing you have a lot of those qualities right now, Laurie.

SPEAKER_01 54:05

Oh, thank you so much. That was beautiful.