July 10, 2025 • 59 mins
✨ Episode 3: See for Yourself — You Are Not Your Thoughts
In this meditative and heartfelt episode, Jacob invites you into a simple but powerful experiment: to stop, breathe, and watch. What begins as a guided self-awareness practice unfolds into a deep exploration of identity, suffering, and spiritual clarity.
You’ll discover why you are not your thoughts—or even your body—and how disidentifying from them can lead to the deepest kind of peace. Through reflections on prayer, mindfulness, Christian and Buddhist wisdom, and a raw story about financial hardship, Jacob explores the liberating truth that love and awareness are one and the same.
He speaks vulnerably about sitting in silence during a dark night of the soul—not to escape pain, but to embrace it—and how this honest presence opened the door to compassion, clarity, and even unexpected help.
Whether you’re a seeker, a skeptic, or simply burned out, this episode invites you to stand nowhere… and discover you were always home.
🕊️
“You are the sky. Your thoughts are just clouds.”
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
SPEAKER_01 (00:00):
Hello and welcome to the third episode of the
(00:20):
Standing Nowhere podcast.
I am your host, Jacob Buehler.
I wanted to try somethingdifferent with you today.
Instead of me giving you a wordsalad about reality or yourself,
I wanted to invite you toexperience it for yourself.
(00:44):
Experience yourself foryourself.
But in order to do this, you'vegot to go along with me, at
least for a little while.
I want you to try an experiment.
(01:06):
This experiment will show yousomething about yourself that
you've always known, but youreally haven't known or you
haven't experienced yet.
So let's pretend that you're,and we can just pretend.
Let's pretend that you'reinterested in what I'm about to
(01:27):
say, what I'm about to ask youto do.
At some point in your day, Iwant you to sit down.
It doesn't matter if it's on acushion on the floor with your
legs crossed or on a chair, butI want your body to be in a
sitting position with your backupright, a dignified position,
(01:53):
not slouching.
I like to say upright, but notuptight.
so that you don't fall asleep.
Now, while you are sitting, Iwant you to bring your attention
(02:15):
to your breath and your body.
It can be primarily with yourbreath, but if you feel other
sensations in the body as well,just simply be aware of them.
Don't try to influence yourbreath in any way Don't try to
(02:35):
slow it down and don't try tospeed it up.
In fact, if you feel anyresistance or weirdness about
your breath, as in you'restruggling with not controlling
it, let that be as well.
(02:55):
And just notice that.
Maybe your breath feels relaxed.
Maybe it feels a littlestrained.
I'm not asking you to doanything.
I'm asking you to do nothing butwatch.
Just watch.
(03:19):
Now during this process, whenyou watch your breath, you will
notice that thoughts willappear.
I don't want you to judge thethought.
the many thoughts, I want you todo nothing about them at all,
(03:42):
but simply be aware of them.
See if you can notice before thethought arises, when you're
completely with your breath oryour immediate surroundings, the
feelings in your body.
(04:03):
When you're with your breath,See if you can notice the
thought just before it arises.
Is there a feeling like I'mabout to think something?
Of course, it doesn't come outin words like that, but you know
the feeling, and we can't reallyput words to it.
(04:27):
Or did you catch the thought inthe middle of it?
Or perhaps you caught itafterwards?
Whatever the case, it doesn'tmatter.
I'm just asking you to noticewhen you notice.
Notice what it's like whenyou're carried away by a thought
(04:51):
or in the middle of it andconsumed by it.
And notice when you come out ofit and you remember to come back
to the breath.
That word remember isinteresting, isn't it?
It's almost like the opposite ofdismember.
(05:13):
Like your mind was dismemberedand then you remembered.
You came back together.
You came back to now.
And you're just with yourbreath.
Now you may be driving andthat's okay.
(05:33):
If you're driving, Watch yourbody as it drives.
Just notice it.
Notice how your body knows whatto do.
Just like if you're sitting, itknows how to keep the muscles
erect to keep you in a sittingposition from collapsing to the
(05:54):
floor.
You may notice little quirksabout your body.
This part hurts.
Oh, this part was moving and Ididn't notice it.
But now I do.
Just notice.
(06:16):
If a thought arises and carriesyou away, don't judge that.
Don't judge yourself.
Just come back to the breath.
If you're carried away in athought and then another thought
arises, darn, I got carried awayby that thought.
(06:37):
Just notice that thought aswell.
Notice that judgment.
What you'll notice over time,and this is something that you
must experience, because whatI'm about to tell you will make
sense, but you have toexperience it.
(07:00):
You will notice over time thatyour thoughts are simply
thinking themselves.
In other words, you are notdoing your thoughts.
Your thoughts are doingthemselves.
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And I don't just mean somethoughts.
I mean all thoughts.
are doing themselves.
All of them.
The good, the bad, the neutral.
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Your thoughts will be veryseductive.
They won't quite say literally,this thought is you, but you'll
feel seductive without words,that your thought is you.
That you're the one doing yourthoughts.
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If that happens, just noticethat as well.
Some of you may worry that thisis some form of disassociation.
or disidentifying.
And in a way it is, but not in away of avoidance.
(08:41):
No, no, no.
This is the deepest form ofgrounding that you can get
because you're simply watching.
And in the process of watching,you come to realize that your
thoughts are not yourself.
(09:09):
You'll start to notice that ifyour thoughts are not yourself
or me, you almost have aweightless feeling that you're
the sky and the thoughts areclouds that pass by Whereas
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before, you took your thoughtsvery seriously.
You identified with yourthoughts.
They made you feel a certainway.
They moved you throughout yourday.
Thoughts are not a bad thing.
Thoughts are not the enemy.
Identifying with your thoughts,that's where problems can arise.
(10:01):
I want to read something to you.
It's a quote by Kalu Rinpoche.
He says, we live in illusion andthe appearance of things.
There is a reality.
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We are that reality.
When you understand this, you'llsee that you are nothing.
and being nothing or no thing,you are everything.
That is all.
Now, why do I bring that up?
(10:48):
The reason I bring that up isbecause some of you, before
hearing this, assumed that youwere your thoughts and whatever
you were thinking.
But after you do this experimentwhere you sit and you watch and
you watch, you start to realizethat you, the real you, your
(11:14):
real self, is not the content ofthe thought itself.
But you are that which iswatching the thought arise.
The more you practice this, themore you understand accumulate
what i like to call and whatmany call self-realization
(11:38):
because you are doing nothingmore than realizing what
yourself actually is andyourself as you will realize is
not a thing it is not a thoughtit is not a body Well, that
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sounds weird.
Perhaps I wasn't going out ontoo much of a limb when I told
you that you are not yourthought.
You can see clearly that you arethat which watches the thought.
Okay.
But now I'm telling you thatyou're not your body.
(12:23):
That's a bit of a stretch.
Let me propose an idea to you.
If you have just as much controlover your thoughts as you do the
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beating of your heart, therotation of the earth around the
sun, or the very next thing thatsomeone you meet today will say,
then why do you identify withyour thoughts when you have just
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as much control over them asanything else in the whole
world?
Why do you say, that thought,that's me?
You have no control over thatthought.
None whatsoever.
In fact, if you're under theillusion that you think you have
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control over any thinkingwhatsoever, then let's put that
to the test.
Go ahead and say to yourself, Iwon't think a single thought for
the next 10 minutes.
And let me know how far you get.
This is a liberating thought.
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truth.
Perhaps you've heard that wordliberation before.
In the messianic traditions,Messiah means liberator, amongst
other meanings.
In the spiritual tradition ofBuddhism, they talk about
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liberation of the mind orenlightenment, self-realization,
and In Hinduism, they callliberation moksha, nirvana, the
blowing out, the exhale.
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You see, there's a phrase thatpeople use when this realization
starts to begin, and they callit sudden awakening.
with gradual realization.
For some people, this makes themlaugh hysterically for a while.
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It did for me for a little bit,not in a crazy manner.
But when you really just slowdown enough in this crazy busy
world and just breathe with yourbreath and just watch and rest
into that watchfulness, youstart to realize that you are
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not your thoughts.
And that is incredible, thatfeeling.
They still come, but they comeand go like clouds.
The only difference is you don'tidentify with the clouds
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anymore.
You realize that you are thesky.
Notice these words that we'reusing, breath, sky.
Isn't that interesting?
The word breath in Greek, theword is pneuma.
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And that word also means spirit.
Some of you may not have knownthat.
The word spirit means breath andpneuma.
It carries with it a nuance ofmeanings, the breath of life,
but also the simplicity of thebreath.
And being aware of thatbeautiful, wonderful simplicity
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helps you realize what you are,what you really are.
The other word I used was sky.
You are the sky holding theclouds, the background holding
the foreground, the backgroundholding the thoughts.
(17:02):
And notice that word sky wasalso used by the ancient Hebrews
and Jesus Christ.
The kingdom of the sky, or as weknow it, the kingdom of heaven.
The word heaven means sky.
Spaciousness.
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That awareness.
There's an interesting quotefrom the Christian mystic
Meister Eckhart who said, theeye through which I see God is
the same eye through which Godsees me.
(17:47):
So if all thoughts thinkthemselves Does that mean all
the things that I'm saying toyou right now are saying
themselves?
Is there no Jake behind thesewords that's saying them?
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Food for thought.
Does being aware of my thoughtsand my words change things?
There was something interestingspoken by Jesus Christ.
Well, many things he said wereinteresting.
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But one thing in particular Ifound that was very interesting,
very curious.
He said, the words that I'msaying to you right now are not
from myself, but from him whosent me.
Of course, the source or originof all life, they personified as
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a father figure.
Some people don't like that, andthat's okay.
But the point is, he said, thewords that I'm saying are not
for myself.
That's interesting.
I quote Jesus sometimes becauseI grew up in the Christian
(19:19):
tradition.
And I rather like a lot of thethings he said.
I try not to go over them tooquickly, but really stop and
sink into them.
I also happen to like a lot ofthe things that the Buddha said.
Siddhartha Gautama, who was 500years before Christ,
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approximately.
I also enjoy the words ofKrishna and Arjuna in the
Bhagavad Gita.
Does that make me a bad personfor branching out and seeing
what other various traditionshave said throughout the
millennia?
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By being fascinated in all oftheir similarities?
That they in fact have morethings in common than they
don't?
Now, some people listening mightfind that upsetting.
Let's say you were like me andyou were raised a Christian or
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you fell out of the faith andyou prefer atheism or nihilism,
whatever your beliefs are.
There is no judgment, but goingback to our experiment,
observing thoughts and realizingthey think themselves is your
(20:50):
view of Something that youdecided?
If you decided to believe whatyou believe, when did you decide
to decide to believe that?
Can we look at them as justbeliefs without you attached to
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them?
Jesus said something else thatwas interesting in this context.
He said to deny thyself and takeup the cross.
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Those who would follow me.
Deny thyself.
Deny yourself.
How do you deny yourself?
Well, I would imagine the firststep is to notice what you're
doing, what you're thinking,what you're feeling.
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On this concept of self, goingback to that Buddhist quote that
I gave you, we live in illusionand the appearance of things.
There is a reality.
We are that reality.
When you understand this, youwill see that you are nothing.
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And being no thing, you areeverything.
That is all.
To the Western ear, beingnothing sounds a little scary.
Nobody.
What does it mean to be nobody?
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That's a curious word, nobody.
UNKNOWN (22:47):
Nobody.
SPEAKER_01 (22:49):
Perhaps you are that which is watching this body.
Another curious thing that Jesussaid, he said, he who believes
in me, Jesus, does not believein me, Jesus, but in him who
(23:14):
sent me.
Let's look at that again.
He who believes in me does notbelieve in me, but in him who
sent me.
And yet, what do we see today?
You need Jesus.
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I'm not saying that it's a badthing to praise Jesus.
He did a lot of amazing things.
but I think we overlooksometimes what he was trying to
get at.
He seemed like a humble man.
He came from a town, what, 200,250 people, very poor, Nazareth.
The very people he lived withmocked him for claiming to be
(24:02):
more than he was or that we allwere more than we are.
As I mentioned in the lastepisode, He said, is it not
written that you are also of thenature of God, that you are
Elohim?
That word Elohim means God,divine, of the nature of God.
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From where I'm sitting, itsounds like Jesus had a
realization about himself, whathe really was, what we all are.
From what I can read, it did notseem like he wanted to be put on
a pedestal alone and worshipedalone.
(24:54):
Although I do believe he was apure reflection of the source
that sent us all.
You see, there are people inthis world that we refer to as
realized beings.
And some of you listening may befamiliar with that term.
(25:18):
And some of you, it may soundtotally foreign.
What is a realized being or afully realized being?
This language points to thosewho have walked this earth in a
state of inner stillness, innersilence.
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And through that, we're able torealize their true nature.
And these figures have come fromall different walks of life,
through all different eras.
As I mentioned, SiddharthaGautama, the original Buddha, he
came from the Hindu tradition.
(26:03):
He was raised in a rich familywhere he had everything given to
him.
And in fact, his parents wantedto keep him from suffering, not
allow him to experience it.
And the moment he saw someoneold and dying, his whole world
was shattered.
In a way, this kind of reflectsthe innocence we have as humans.
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When we're young, the world isjust such a wonderful, playful
place.
And then we are exposed tosuffering at various points in
our life.
Some of us, it comes earlier.
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than others.
Myself, I was exposed to somepretty intense realities in my
youth, particularly with myparents.
(27:06):
I won't go into it here, but I'msure you all can relate that The
age of innocence, as we call itin our youth, our youthful
innocence eventually meetsreality, as we say.
And the reality is that there issuffering in life.
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And you will notice in thetradition of Buddhism that this
is the first of the truths thatthe Buddha shared.
There is suffering.
in life.
There it is.
Look at it.
And to those unfamiliar withEastern tradition or the
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Buddhist tradition, it may soundvery foreign, very other.
You may have intense fears aboutwhat you believe, or perhaps
you've thrown the baby out withthe bathwater, as I mentioned in
the last episode, and allspiritual traditions are just
seem not worth the effort.
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But in Buddhism, the word Buddhameans one who is awake.
The root in Pali or Sanskritword meaning awake, I believe is
Bodhi.
And I may be wrong on that.
But the idea is wakefulness, tobe awake, to be aware.
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to be aware that you are aware.
Most people, they go throughlife thinking that they're
awake.
You wake up in the morning, I'mawake.
But are you really awake?
Are you watching yourself?
Are you really aware of whatyou're doing?
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Notice, going back to ourexperiment earlier, when we
watch our breath, It makes iteasier to see when thoughts
arise because we sort of make adeclarative statement to
ourselves when we sit down in adignified posture.
I will watch my breath.
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And it's not a grunting strugglewhere we're clenching our jaws.
I'm going to focus on my breath.
Not at all.
I describe it as a relaxedalertness.
We're focusing on what is, andwith watching what is, the
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background becomes more apparentbecause the foreground is also
more apparent.
We're taking a stance ofwatching.
We're sitting down, we're beingstill, and we're watching.
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We're not doing We're justwatching.
Notice another curious thingthat Jesus Christ said in the
gospel of Mark.
When he was praying the nightbefore he was to be executed and
he knew it was coming, hisdisciples kept falling asleep.
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And he said, this I say to you,I say to all.
stay awake stay alert and youwill notice in all spiritual
traditions the core emphasis isalways to stay awake to stay
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alert whether it's on the nosewith the title buddhism which is
another way of sayingwakeful-ism, or staying awake,
watching, or in Christianity, inthe tradition of Jesus Christ,
where he says to stay awake, butalso to love thy neighbor as
(31:18):
thyself.
Now, why do I bring up love whenthe emphasis is on wakefulness?
Well, well, well, you willdiscover that love is elusive as
that word is, and compassion,you know in the deepest fabric
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of your being is nothing morethan the same exact thing that
being awake is.
What do I mean by that?
Let's take children, forexample.
Do children enjoy when you areattentive to them, when you are
awake to them?
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Giving them your full attention?
Yes.
Human beings in general, notjust children, we crave to be
seen, to be in the awareness ofanother person.
How about, it's a curiousphrase, isn't it?
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When we say, my mother, shecooks with love.
What does that mean?
Well, obviously it means thatyou are cooking with attention,
with clarity.
What about when someone gardenswith love?
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Do you see where I'm getting at?
So love and awareness are twosides of the same coin.
You might say awareness clearsout the stuff that to allow the
love to flow both in and out.
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Wherever there is awareness,there is love.
There is gentleness.
There is calmness.
Notice how when you are calm,you are also more aware.
You are more in a state of flow.
There is a saying, slow issmooth.
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Smooth is fast.
There's a wonderful examplegiven by Alan Watts in this idea
of clarity and awareness.
And that is the idea of what wemean by clear.
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And this is a wonderfulmetaphor.
When I say the word clear, whatcomes to mind?
Well, the first thing is totaltransparency.
Like a lens wiped clean.
No blemishes, no smudges,nothing whatsoever to obstruct
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the vision of the lens.
Now the next thing you'll thinkof is, of clear, is perfect
form, focus.
Everything is clear, sharp,articulated in a very precise
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way.
Is the image clear?
You see, two sides of the samecoin.
When you are clear, when you arenobody, in other words, when
your mind is uncluttered,unfettered by various thoughts
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that weigh you down, whatremains?
Where do you go?
Well, you're fully there,completely in focus.
When you are listening to yourfour-year-old tell you about
Minecraft or his monster trucksor playing games with him, fully
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there, fully clear, then you arecompletely in focus for your
child or your spouse or yourmother.
You're there.
You're there.
And they feel it.
When you are listening to yourfriend with complete attention,
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not at all thinking about thenext thing that you're going to
say in response to the person,no matter who it is, they can
feel that connection.
They can feel that love, thatcompassion.
And that is where you want todwell, in that clear state.
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They have that analogy with theword mindfulness.
Is your mind full of things?
Or are you mindful, as in takingin your surroundings?
the person in front of you.
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This wisdom seeps into ourlanguage automatically, doesn't
it?
We say, watch yourself, watchwhere you're going, watch your
mouth.
When I was a child, I loved thatmovie, Pinocchio.
The cricket represented theconscience.
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And there's that line, alwayslet your conscience be your
guide.
I think I mentioned it inepisode two or one.
If you are fully with and awareof exactly what you're doing,
you'll always be okay.
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Always.
Because the first noble truth,as I mentioned from the
Buddha...
is that there is suffering inlife.
However, there's a phrase that Ireally like that really
encapsulates what the Buddhameant by dukkha or suffering as
(37:47):
we translate dukkha, which isthe Pali word, which means
suffering amongst othermeanings.
There is...
I forgot what I just said.
So...
Oh, yes, the reality is thatthere is suffering in the world,
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but there's a phrase that Ilove, and that is that suffering
is pain times resistance.
Pain times resistance.
How do you resist pain?
How do you resist things thatyou don't like?
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You avoid them.
That's the only way to resistthem.
You run from them.
You run to a bottle and youdrink.
Or you run to your pipe and youlet your mind get high.
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You run, run, run, run.
We all run.
I run.
That's resistance.
Fighting it.
Let's say on a smaller scale,you stub your toe.
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Sharp pain.
But do we have to call it evenpain?
After all, it's a sensation.
The same nerve endings in yourfeet that experience a foot
massage are the same nerveendings experiencing that
intense sensation.
And yes...
It is painful.
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Pain exists.
But is pain suffering?
If we get real quiet and we makepain our object of meditation or
focus, as opposed to our breath,or perhaps we do both at the
same time when we stub our foot,is there suffering there?
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What is pain?
What does it feel like when youlook closely at it?
intense sensation, but there'sno suffering.
Suffering arises when we are outof sync with whatever is arising
in our life.
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We hear the phrase like, getwith it, man.
Get out of your mind and come toyour senses.
Isn't that interesting?
Our language always points us tothe truths that we know deep
down.
Or when your spouse may say, itfeels like you never listened to
(40:38):
me.
You see?
So perhaps what we perceive aspain or the down moments in our
life are not really suffering,but a cry for us to pay
attention to it, to be with it.
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This is not to say that we donothing, become pacifists, as
many people misunderstandspiritual traditions to be,
passivity.
It's quite the opposite.
It's a full embracing of whatis.
What is.
It's interesting.
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Prayer and meditation are oftenmentioned together, but what is
prayer?
We've mentioned meditation andmindfulness and how that is
really the other side of thesame coin of love.
But what is prayer in the Hebrewtradition?
Prayer, the word in Aramaic, Ibelieve, is pronounced salotha.
(41:47):
I don't speak Aramaic and Inever have, so this is from my
half-baked research experience.
You guys can Google and correctme if I'm wrong.
But the word prayer in Aramaicis salotha, and that means not
asking for this or that, butpresenting whatever is giving
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you difficulty or challenge orstruggle in life and saying,
here it is, and opening up.
I'll give you a vulnerableexample of this.
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And of course, there's manyexamples in the Bible.
If you read the story of JesusChrist, he went off by himself
to pray quite often.
In fact, he spent 40 days byhimself in absolute stillness,
prayer and meditation.
Here I am.
Here I am.
(42:54):
This is what I have to do.
Here I am.
I had been struggling to pay myrent for years.
Still am.
More than you know.
Patreon.com slash standing overpodcast.
I always like to throw in thatjoke.
But seriously, if you'd like tosupport podcast, please do.
(43:16):
So I had been struggling to paymy rent for a long time.
And it got to the point where Imoved into an apartment that was
charging me almost$2,400 a monthin rent.
In my job, I was losing a lot ofincome at my place of
employment, or my gig work,doing deliveries.
(43:40):
Business was going down.
Long story short, they werecutting pay.
And I've been adjusting to paycuts over the last few years.
But it had reached a culminationpoint where I couldn't even
sleep.
My mind was so full of worry anddread about where this money was
(44:04):
going to come from for thisparticular month.
And I woke up at two or three inthe morning, sweating, thoughts
racing.
And this is a good year, yearand a half into my spiritual
practices that I had picked up,being with my thoughts,
meditating in the morning,trying to be actively aware of
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all the activities and thoughtsI did throughout my day, what
the Hindu tradition might callkarma yoga, releasing the fruits
of my actions to God or whateverword you have for God, and just
focusing on my action, what Ican do.
So here I was.
3 a.m.
(44:50):
A mind riddled with pain andsadness and worry and fear.
How am I going to pay the rentfor my wife and my three kids
and myself, supporting thisfamily?
And I got up out of bed and Iwent to go pray as the Aramaic
meaning of the word pray fromJesus' time, salotha.
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Presenting what is to God orhigher power or just being with
what I was experiencing.
So I put a meditation cushion onthe floor in the living room.
Everyone's still sleeping.
The whole world is still asleep.
And I sat on that cushion and Ifocused on the feeling of my
(45:41):
financial shit storm.
Not with words.
but just being with that feelingin your chest.
And anyone listening that knowsthe struggle of financial worry
knows that feeling and exactlywhat I'm talking about.
(46:03):
And even if you've neverstruggled financially, I'm sure
that you've had some struggle inyour life.
And if you reduce or eliminatethe words that go with that
struggle and just focus on thefeeling in your chest, That's
what I did.
I sat on that cushion and I satwith my breath and I held that
(46:27):
feeling, that incrediblystressful feeling.
I held it with open arms.
I said, here I am.
And I gave my stress a hug and Ijust held it and I cried out.
and tears streamed down my faceas I was sitting there on that
(46:51):
cushion.
And I just sat with it because Ididn't know what else to do.
I didn't know where the moneywas going to come from.
You see, that is prayer on thedeepest level, where you're not
crafting a well-worded petitionto God, fix this.
(47:15):
You're sitting there with yourfeelings, without words, and
you're just experiencing it.
And later that day, I felt alittle better.
After the session was over, Isat for probably a good 40
(47:36):
minutes with it.
I didn't push the feeling away.
I didn't drink it away.
I didn't smoke it away.
And no judgment to anyonelistening if you struggle with
addiction of any kind becausethe problems in life are very
real.
(47:59):
But it's like Dante's Inferno.
The only way out of hell isstraight through the middle of
it without trying to fix it,without knowing how you're going
to fix it.
That's what prayer is.
That's what meditation is.
The two are really very similar.
They just hail from differenttraditional backgrounds.
(48:22):
So later that day, when everyonewoke up, I texted my family and
I said, I don't know what I'mgoing to do.
This is my situation and I justwant to share it with you
because I'm lost.
I want other people just toshare my pain with me.
(48:48):
And you'll notice the wordcompassion, that's what that
word means.
Suffering together.
That is the definition ofcompassion.
Literally, that is thedefinition of compassion.
Suffering together.
(49:10):
I think passion means suffering,compassion, suffering together.
The evil twin of compassion ispity.
When you tell someone your woesand they say, that sucks, dude.
Hope it gets better, dude.
Oh, that sucks, man.
You know, or I feel bad for you.
(49:30):
You know what pity is.
Nobody wants to be pitied.
But compassion...
That's where you open upyourself to the pain and
suffering of others and youexperience it with them.
And perhaps you know a way offixing it and you help them fix
it or you don't and you just arewith them completely.
(49:54):
And I shared the way I felt withmy family and my sister and God
bless her.
She took immediate action.
I mean, all of my family wasthere for me and they always
have been.
My sister in particular, shetook immediate action and she
reached out to a church that wego to and they gave me$1,000 to
(50:17):
help me pay my rent.
And it was like within that dayor two.
You might call it a miracle orlucky, whatever.
And there's plenty of people whowill go through something like
that and there won't be$1,000 atthe end of it.
(50:38):
And that's okay too.
What else can we do?
But be with what is.
Moving towards the finish linehere.
But I wanted to point out to youguys in a still...
compassionate way what it meansto be alive, to be human.
(51:03):
There is suffering.
And in Buddhism, that word isdukkha.
And it also means sort of amisaligned wagon wheel axle.
Like you're going through lifeand it's a bumpy ride because
(51:24):
You're out of sync with life.
You're not with what is.
There's a wonderful saying thatI've heard.
You can't stop the waves, butyou can learn how to surf.
And that, my friends, is whatmeditation is.
That is what prayer is.
(51:46):
You can call it prayer.
You can call it meditation.
That is what love is.
When you stop...
and you really get withyourself, you are loving
yourself.
When you're really with theperson that's in front of you,
you're loving that person.
When you're cooking and you'rereally with what you're cooking,
(52:07):
you're cooking with love.
Love, love, love.
Love is all you need.
So whether it's Jesusemphasizing loving everyone and
everything, Notice he says, lovethy neighbor as thyself is the
greatest commandment thatfulfills all the others.
(52:29):
And of course, the second, lovethe Lord your God.
What does Lord mean?
Lord means I am, to be, toexist.
Love your existence with allyour heart, mind, and soul.
Love your neighbor.
The Buddha, he says less andemphasizes stillness and
(52:51):
watching.
Is that any different?
releasing the fruits of youractions, you know, with karma
yoga.
They have many traditions.
You know, I'm not trying tosimplify or reduce all the
traditions, but if we distillthem down, they all tell you to
stay awake and to havecompassion for everyone and
(53:11):
everything that you come across.
Jesus says, if someone strikesyou on your cheek, turn and
offer him the other one.
If he steals your cloak, offerhim your shirt.
Love people.
Don't be selfish.
(53:31):
Well, I hope that this foundwhoever it needed to find.
And my parting message is toslow down.
Look at your life.
Watch it.
This is your life.
Be there for it.
Don't be in your head abouttomorrow.
(53:53):
Be here now.
It's okay to plan for tomorrow,but do it mindfully in the now.
If something pops up in yourhead because thinking will
always happen, it just happens.
And thinking is not a bad thing,but if you are not aware that
(54:15):
you are thinking, that is whenthings can go awry.
Or if you identify with yourthoughts.
This is not some clinical badcase of disassociation.
It's simply a realization of thetruth.
You are that which watches.
(54:37):
So I think that's all I'll saytoday.
I want to thank everyonelistening.
I also want to encourage you toreach out because I would love
to hear your story, what you'regoing through, what you've been
through.
Your story can inspire manypeople.
There are many podcasts wherecelebrities are usually the
(54:59):
exclusive ones interviewed.
And perhaps I'll have celebrityinterviews on this podcast or
authors of books, but I'd liketo hear from you.
You're as real as anyone elseand no different than a
celebrity.
You have a story.
Your life matters.
I want to hear it.
So please...
(55:20):
Use the link in the descriptionand join us on Discord or email
me if you'd like me to read yourstory out.
I can keep you anonymous.
You can email me atstandingnowherepodcast at
gmail.com.
If you would like to support theshow, we'd greatly appreciate
it.
It would free up more time forus to...
(55:44):
Focus more on the content ofthese episodes and devote more
time to them.
You can support us atpatreon.com slash standing
nowhere podcast.
And I told myself I would writeout a call to action sheet at
the end so I wouldn't be lefttrying to remember all of these
(56:07):
things.
And here I am without one.
So join the discord or email meat Support the show if you are
able to.
If not, maybe you could at leastsubscribe to the show and share
it with someone who maybe needsto hear it.
But either way, I am grateful toyou, whoever you are, wherever
you are.
Thank you for listening.
(56:29):
Stand nowhere.
That word nowhere.
Now, here.
Stand in the here and now.
Let go of your concepts.
Let go of your thoughts.
If they arise, notice them andmove on.
I love you guys, and I will seeyou on the next episode.
SPEAKER_00 (56:49):
This voice might feel like dust on the dial But
I'm standing, oh is made just awhisper that won't be afraid
(57:23):
standing nowhere and it feelslike home no flags to wave no
need to roam the silence speakslouder than war ever could and
(57:47):
I've never felt so understoodthe static is kind it leaves me
alone no orders to follow noking on the throne the sky
(58:12):
Turning amber The clock's allreset And I haven't stopped
walking just yet Standingnowhere Air wide and free No
(58:36):
chains, no nails Still here,nothing
Hello and welcome to the third episode of the
(00:20):
Standing Nowhere podcast.
I am your host, Jacob Buehler.
I wanted to try somethingdifferent with you today.
Instead of me giving you a wordsalad about reality or yourself,
I wanted to invite you toexperience it for yourself.
(00:44):
Experience yourself foryourself.
But in order to do this, you'vegot to go along with me, at
least for a little while.
I want you to try an experiment.
(01:06):
This experiment will show yousomething about yourself that
you've always known, but youreally haven't known or you
haven't experienced yet.
So let's pretend that you're,and we can just pretend.
Let's pretend that you'reinterested in what I'm about to
(01:27):
say, what I'm about to ask youto do.
At some point in your day, Iwant you to sit down.
It doesn't matter if it's on acushion on the floor with your
legs crossed or on a chair, butI want your body to be in a
sitting position with your backupright, a dignified position,
(01:53):
not slouching.
I like to say upright, but notuptight.
so that you don't fall asleep.
Now, while you are sitting, Iwant you to bring your attention
(02:15):
to your breath and your body.
It can be primarily with yourbreath, but if you feel other
sensations in the body as well,just simply be aware of them.
Don't try to influence yourbreath in any way Don't try to
(02:35):
slow it down and don't try tospeed it up.
In fact, if you feel anyresistance or weirdness about
your breath, as in you'restruggling with not controlling
it, let that be as well.
(02:55):
And just notice that.
Maybe your breath feels relaxed.
Maybe it feels a littlestrained.
I'm not asking you to doanything.
I'm asking you to do nothing butwatch.
Just watch.
(03:19):
Now during this process, whenyou watch your breath, you will
notice that thoughts willappear.
I don't want you to judge thethought.
the many thoughts, I want you todo nothing about them at all,
(03:42):
but simply be aware of them.
See if you can notice before thethought arises, when you're
completely with your breath oryour immediate surroundings, the
feelings in your body.
(04:03):
When you're with your breath,See if you can notice the
thought just before it arises.
Is there a feeling like I'mabout to think something?
Of course, it doesn't come outin words like that, but you know
the feeling, and we can't reallyput words to it.
(04:27):
Or did you catch the thought inthe middle of it?
Or perhaps you caught itafterwards?
Whatever the case, it doesn'tmatter.
I'm just asking you to noticewhen you notice.
Notice what it's like whenyou're carried away by a thought
(04:51):
or in the middle of it andconsumed by it.
And notice when you come out ofit and you remember to come back
to the breath.
That word remember isinteresting, isn't it?
It's almost like the opposite ofdismember.
(05:13):
Like your mind was dismemberedand then you remembered.
You came back together.
You came back to now.
And you're just with yourbreath.
Now you may be driving andthat's okay.
(05:33):
If you're driving, Watch yourbody as it drives.
Just notice it.
Notice how your body knows whatto do.
Just like if you're sitting, itknows how to keep the muscles
erect to keep you in a sittingposition from collapsing to the
(05:54):
floor.
You may notice little quirksabout your body.
This part hurts.
Oh, this part was moving and Ididn't notice it.
But now I do.
Just notice.
(06:16):
If a thought arises and carriesyou away, don't judge that.
Don't judge yourself.
Just come back to the breath.
If you're carried away in athought and then another thought
arises, darn, I got carried awayby that thought.
(06:37):
Just notice that thought aswell.
Notice that judgment.
What you'll notice over time,and this is something that you
must experience, because whatI'm about to tell you will make
sense, but you have toexperience it.
(07:00):
You will notice over time thatyour thoughts are simply
thinking themselves.
In other words, you are notdoing your thoughts.
Your thoughts are doingthemselves.
(07:24):
And I don't just mean somethoughts.
I mean all thoughts.
are doing themselves.
All of them.
The good, the bad, the neutral.
(07:48):
Your thoughts will be veryseductive.
They won't quite say literally,this thought is you, but you'll
feel seductive without words,that your thought is you.
That you're the one doing yourthoughts.
(08:17):
If that happens, just noticethat as well.
Some of you may worry that thisis some form of disassociation.
or disidentifying.
And in a way it is, but not in away of avoidance.
(08:41):
No, no, no.
This is the deepest form ofgrounding that you can get
because you're simply watching.
And in the process of watching,you come to realize that your
thoughts are not yourself.
(09:09):
You'll start to notice that ifyour thoughts are not yourself
or me, you almost have aweightless feeling that you're
the sky and the thoughts areclouds that pass by Whereas
(09:30):
before, you took your thoughtsvery seriously.
You identified with yourthoughts.
They made you feel a certainway.
They moved you throughout yourday.
Thoughts are not a bad thing.
Thoughts are not the enemy.
Identifying with your thoughts,that's where problems can arise.
(10:01):
I want to read something to you.
It's a quote by Kalu Rinpoche.
He says, we live in illusion andthe appearance of things.
There is a reality.
(10:22):
We are that reality.
When you understand this, you'llsee that you are nothing.
and being nothing or no thing,you are everything.
That is all.
Now, why do I bring that up?
(10:48):
The reason I bring that up isbecause some of you, before
hearing this, assumed that youwere your thoughts and whatever
you were thinking.
But after you do this experimentwhere you sit and you watch and
you watch, you start to realizethat you, the real you, your
(11:14):
real self, is not the content ofthe thought itself.
But you are that which iswatching the thought arise.
The more you practice this, themore you understand accumulate
what i like to call and whatmany call self-realization
(11:38):
because you are doing nothingmore than realizing what
yourself actually is andyourself as you will realize is
not a thing it is not a thoughtit is not a body Well, that
(12:01):
sounds weird.
Perhaps I wasn't going out ontoo much of a limb when I told
you that you are not yourthought.
You can see clearly that you arethat which watches the thought.
Okay.
But now I'm telling you thatyou're not your body.
(12:23):
That's a bit of a stretch.
Let me propose an idea to you.
If you have just as much controlover your thoughts as you do the
(12:44):
beating of your heart, therotation of the earth around the
sun, or the very next thing thatsomeone you meet today will say,
then why do you identify withyour thoughts when you have just
(13:08):
as much control over them asanything else in the whole
world?
Why do you say, that thought,that's me?
You have no control over thatthought.
None whatsoever.
In fact, if you're under theillusion that you think you have
(13:31):
control over any thinkingwhatsoever, then let's put that
to the test.
Go ahead and say to yourself, Iwon't think a single thought for
the next 10 minutes.
And let me know how far you get.
This is a liberating thought.
(13:57):
truth.
Perhaps you've heard that wordliberation before.
In the messianic traditions,Messiah means liberator, amongst
other meanings.
In the spiritual tradition ofBuddhism, they talk about
(14:19):
liberation of the mind orenlightenment, self-realization,
and In Hinduism, they callliberation moksha, nirvana, the
blowing out, the exhale.
(14:43):
You see, there's a phrase thatpeople use when this realization
starts to begin, and they callit sudden awakening.
with gradual realization.
For some people, this makes themlaugh hysterically for a while.
(15:05):
It did for me for a little bit,not in a crazy manner.
But when you really just slowdown enough in this crazy busy
world and just breathe with yourbreath and just watch and rest
into that watchfulness, youstart to realize that you are
(15:29):
not your thoughts.
And that is incredible, thatfeeling.
They still come, but they comeand go like clouds.
The only difference is you don'tidentify with the clouds
(15:50):
anymore.
You realize that you are thesky.
Notice these words that we'reusing, breath, sky.
Isn't that interesting?
The word breath in Greek, theword is pneuma.
(16:15):
And that word also means spirit.
Some of you may not have knownthat.
The word spirit means breath andpneuma.
It carries with it a nuance ofmeanings, the breath of life,
but also the simplicity of thebreath.
And being aware of thatbeautiful, wonderful simplicity
(16:37):
helps you realize what you are,what you really are.
The other word I used was sky.
You are the sky holding theclouds, the background holding
the foreground, the backgroundholding the thoughts.
(17:02):
And notice that word sky wasalso used by the ancient Hebrews
and Jesus Christ.
The kingdom of the sky, or as weknow it, the kingdom of heaven.
The word heaven means sky.
Spaciousness.
(17:22):
That awareness.
There's an interesting quotefrom the Christian mystic
Meister Eckhart who said, theeye through which I see God is
the same eye through which Godsees me.
(17:47):
So if all thoughts thinkthemselves Does that mean all
the things that I'm saying toyou right now are saying
themselves?
Is there no Jake behind thesewords that's saying them?
(18:10):
Food for thought.
Does being aware of my thoughtsand my words change things?
There was something interestingspoken by Jesus Christ.
Well, many things he said wereinteresting.
(18:31):
But one thing in particular Ifound that was very interesting,
very curious.
He said, the words that I'msaying to you right now are not
from myself, but from him whosent me.
Of course, the source or originof all life, they personified as
(18:57):
a father figure.
Some people don't like that, andthat's okay.
But the point is, he said, thewords that I'm saying are not
for myself.
That's interesting.
I quote Jesus sometimes becauseI grew up in the Christian
(19:19):
tradition.
And I rather like a lot of thethings he said.
I try not to go over them tooquickly, but really stop and
sink into them.
I also happen to like a lot ofthe things that the Buddha said.
Siddhartha Gautama, who was 500years before Christ,
(19:42):
approximately.
I also enjoy the words ofKrishna and Arjuna in the
Bhagavad Gita.
Does that make me a bad personfor branching out and seeing
what other various traditionshave said throughout the
millennia?
(20:07):
By being fascinated in all oftheir similarities?
That they in fact have morethings in common than they
don't?
Now, some people listening mightfind that upsetting.
Let's say you were like me andyou were raised a Christian or
(20:29):
you fell out of the faith andyou prefer atheism or nihilism,
whatever your beliefs are.
There is no judgment, but goingback to our experiment,
observing thoughts and realizingthey think themselves is your
(20:50):
view of Something that youdecided?
If you decided to believe whatyou believe, when did you decide
to decide to believe that?
Can we look at them as justbeliefs without you attached to
(21:10):
them?
Jesus said something else thatwas interesting in this context.
He said to deny thyself and takeup the cross.
(21:34):
Those who would follow me.
Deny thyself.
Deny yourself.
How do you deny yourself?
Well, I would imagine the firststep is to notice what you're
doing, what you're thinking,what you're feeling.
(21:59):
On this concept of self, goingback to that Buddhist quote that
I gave you, we live in illusionand the appearance of things.
There is a reality.
We are that reality.
When you understand this, youwill see that you are nothing.
(22:22):
And being no thing, you areeverything.
That is all.
To the Western ear, beingnothing sounds a little scary.
Nobody.
What does it mean to be nobody?
(22:43):
That's a curious word, nobody.
UNKNOWN (22:47):
Nobody.
SPEAKER_01 (22:49):
Perhaps you are that which is watching this body.
Another curious thing that Jesussaid, he said, he who believes
in me, Jesus, does not believein me, Jesus, but in him who
(23:14):
sent me.
Let's look at that again.
He who believes in me does notbelieve in me, but in him who
sent me.
And yet, what do we see today?
You need Jesus.
(23:37):
I'm not saying that it's a badthing to praise Jesus.
He did a lot of amazing things.
but I think we overlooksometimes what he was trying to
get at.
He seemed like a humble man.
He came from a town, what, 200,250 people, very poor, Nazareth.
The very people he lived withmocked him for claiming to be
(24:02):
more than he was or that we allwere more than we are.
As I mentioned in the lastepisode, He said, is it not
written that you are also of thenature of God, that you are
Elohim?
That word Elohim means God,divine, of the nature of God.
(24:33):
From where I'm sitting, itsounds like Jesus had a
realization about himself, whathe really was, what we all are.
From what I can read, it did notseem like he wanted to be put on
a pedestal alone and worshipedalone.
(24:54):
Although I do believe he was apure reflection of the source
that sent us all.
You see, there are people inthis world that we refer to as
realized beings.
And some of you listening may befamiliar with that term.
(25:18):
And some of you, it may soundtotally foreign.
What is a realized being or afully realized being?
This language points to thosewho have walked this earth in a
state of inner stillness, innersilence.
(25:39):
And through that, we're able torealize their true nature.
And these figures have come fromall different walks of life,
through all different eras.
As I mentioned, SiddharthaGautama, the original Buddha, he
came from the Hindu tradition.
(26:03):
He was raised in a rich familywhere he had everything given to
him.
And in fact, his parents wantedto keep him from suffering, not
allow him to experience it.
And the moment he saw someoneold and dying, his whole world
was shattered.
In a way, this kind of reflectsthe innocence we have as humans.
(26:24):
When we're young, the world isjust such a wonderful, playful
place.
And then we are exposed tosuffering at various points in
our life.
Some of us, it comes earlier.
(26:45):
than others.
Myself, I was exposed to somepretty intense realities in my
youth, particularly with myparents.
(27:06):
I won't go into it here, but I'msure you all can relate that The
age of innocence, as we call itin our youth, our youthful
innocence eventually meetsreality, as we say.
And the reality is that there issuffering in life.
(27:28):
And you will notice in thetradition of Buddhism that this
is the first of the truths thatthe Buddha shared.
There is suffering.
in life.
There it is.
Look at it.
And to those unfamiliar withEastern tradition or the
(27:51):
Buddhist tradition, it may soundvery foreign, very other.
You may have intense fears aboutwhat you believe, or perhaps
you've thrown the baby out withthe bathwater, as I mentioned in
the last episode, and allspiritual traditions are just
seem not worth the effort.
(28:13):
But in Buddhism, the word Buddhameans one who is awake.
The root in Pali or Sanskritword meaning awake, I believe is
Bodhi.
And I may be wrong on that.
But the idea is wakefulness, tobe awake, to be aware.
(28:40):
to be aware that you are aware.
Most people, they go throughlife thinking that they're
awake.
You wake up in the morning, I'mawake.
But are you really awake?
Are you watching yourself?
Are you really aware of whatyou're doing?
(29:02):
Notice, going back to ourexperiment earlier, when we
watch our breath, It makes iteasier to see when thoughts
arise because we sort of make adeclarative statement to
ourselves when we sit down in adignified posture.
I will watch my breath.
(29:24):
And it's not a grunting strugglewhere we're clenching our jaws.
I'm going to focus on my breath.
Not at all.
I describe it as a relaxedalertness.
We're focusing on what is, andwith watching what is, the
(29:46):
background becomes more apparentbecause the foreground is also
more apparent.
We're taking a stance ofwatching.
We're sitting down, we're beingstill, and we're watching.
(30:06):
We're not doing We're justwatching.
Notice another curious thingthat Jesus Christ said in the
gospel of Mark.
When he was praying the nightbefore he was to be executed and
he knew it was coming, hisdisciples kept falling asleep.
(30:32):
And he said, this I say to you,I say to all.
stay awake stay alert and youwill notice in all spiritual
traditions the core emphasis isalways to stay awake to stay
(30:58):
alert whether it's on the nosewith the title buddhism which is
another way of sayingwakeful-ism, or staying awake,
watching, or in Christianity, inthe tradition of Jesus Christ,
where he says to stay awake, butalso to love thy neighbor as
(31:18):
thyself.
Now, why do I bring up love whenthe emphasis is on wakefulness?
Well, well, well, you willdiscover that love is elusive as
that word is, and compassion,you know in the deepest fabric
(31:42):
of your being is nothing morethan the same exact thing that
being awake is.
What do I mean by that?
Let's take children, forexample.
Do children enjoy when you areattentive to them, when you are
awake to them?
(32:04):
Giving them your full attention?
Yes.
Human beings in general, notjust children, we crave to be
seen, to be in the awareness ofanother person.
How about, it's a curiousphrase, isn't it?
(32:26):
When we say, my mother, shecooks with love.
What does that mean?
Well, obviously it means thatyou are cooking with attention,
with clarity.
What about when someone gardenswith love?
(32:50):
Do you see where I'm getting at?
So love and awareness are twosides of the same coin.
You might say awareness clearsout the stuff that to allow the
love to flow both in and out.
(33:11):
Wherever there is awareness,there is love.
There is gentleness.
There is calmness.
Notice how when you are calm,you are also more aware.
You are more in a state of flow.
There is a saying, slow issmooth.
(33:33):
Smooth is fast.
There's a wonderful examplegiven by Alan Watts in this idea
of clarity and awareness.
And that is the idea of what wemean by clear.
(33:55):
And this is a wonderfulmetaphor.
When I say the word clear, whatcomes to mind?
Well, the first thing is totaltransparency.
Like a lens wiped clean.
No blemishes, no smudges,nothing whatsoever to obstruct
(34:16):
the vision of the lens.
Now the next thing you'll thinkof is, of clear, is perfect
form, focus.
Everything is clear, sharp,articulated in a very precise
(34:37):
way.
Is the image clear?
You see, two sides of the samecoin.
When you are clear, when you arenobody, in other words, when
your mind is uncluttered,unfettered by various thoughts
(35:03):
that weigh you down, whatremains?
Where do you go?
Well, you're fully there,completely in focus.
When you are listening to yourfour-year-old tell you about
Minecraft or his monster trucksor playing games with him, fully
(35:35):
there, fully clear, then you arecompletely in focus for your
child or your spouse or yourmother.
You're there.
You're there.
And they feel it.
When you are listening to yourfriend with complete attention,
(35:55):
not at all thinking about thenext thing that you're going to
say in response to the person,no matter who it is, they can
feel that connection.
They can feel that love, thatcompassion.
And that is where you want todwell, in that clear state.
(36:23):
They have that analogy with theword mindfulness.
Is your mind full of things?
Or are you mindful, as in takingin your surroundings?
the person in front of you.
(36:44):
This wisdom seeps into ourlanguage automatically, doesn't
it?
We say, watch yourself, watchwhere you're going, watch your
mouth.
When I was a child, I loved thatmovie, Pinocchio.
The cricket represented theconscience.
(37:06):
And there's that line, alwayslet your conscience be your
guide.
I think I mentioned it inepisode two or one.
If you are fully with and awareof exactly what you're doing,
you'll always be okay.
(37:26):
Always.
Because the first noble truth,as I mentioned from the
Buddha...
is that there is suffering inlife.
However, there's a phrase that Ireally like that really
encapsulates what the Buddhameant by dukkha or suffering as
(37:47):
we translate dukkha, which isthe Pali word, which means
suffering amongst othermeanings.
There is...
I forgot what I just said.
So...
Oh, yes, the reality is thatthere is suffering in the world,
(38:08):
but there's a phrase that Ilove, and that is that suffering
is pain times resistance.
Pain times resistance.
How do you resist pain?
How do you resist things thatyou don't like?
(38:30):
You avoid them.
That's the only way to resistthem.
You run from them.
You run to a bottle and youdrink.
Or you run to your pipe and youlet your mind get high.
(38:50):
You run, run, run, run.
We all run.
I run.
That's resistance.
Fighting it.
Let's say on a smaller scale,you stub your toe.
(39:12):
Sharp pain.
But do we have to call it evenpain?
After all, it's a sensation.
The same nerve endings in yourfeet that experience a foot
massage are the same nerveendings experiencing that
intense sensation.
And yes...
It is painful.
(39:33):
Pain exists.
But is pain suffering?
If we get real quiet and we makepain our object of meditation or
focus, as opposed to our breath,or perhaps we do both at the
same time when we stub our foot,is there suffering there?
(39:55):
What is pain?
What does it feel like when youlook closely at it?
intense sensation, but there'sno suffering.
Suffering arises when we are outof sync with whatever is arising
in our life.
(40:18):
We hear the phrase like, getwith it, man.
Get out of your mind and come toyour senses.
Isn't that interesting?
Our language always points us tothe truths that we know deep
down.
Or when your spouse may say, itfeels like you never listened to
(40:38):
me.
You see?
So perhaps what we perceive aspain or the down moments in our
life are not really suffering,but a cry for us to pay
attention to it, to be with it.
(40:59):
This is not to say that we donothing, become pacifists, as
many people misunderstandspiritual traditions to be,
passivity.
It's quite the opposite.
It's a full embracing of whatis.
What is.
It's interesting.
(41:20):
Prayer and meditation are oftenmentioned together, but what is
prayer?
We've mentioned meditation andmindfulness and how that is
really the other side of thesame coin of love.
But what is prayer in the Hebrewtradition?
Prayer, the word in Aramaic, Ibelieve, is pronounced salotha.
(41:47):
I don't speak Aramaic and Inever have, so this is from my
half-baked research experience.
You guys can Google and correctme if I'm wrong.
But the word prayer in Aramaicis salotha, and that means not
asking for this or that, butpresenting whatever is giving
(42:11):
you difficulty or challenge orstruggle in life and saying,
here it is, and opening up.
I'll give you a vulnerableexample of this.
(42:33):
And of course, there's manyexamples in the Bible.
If you read the story of JesusChrist, he went off by himself
to pray quite often.
In fact, he spent 40 days byhimself in absolute stillness,
prayer and meditation.
Here I am.
Here I am.
(42:54):
This is what I have to do.
Here I am.
I had been struggling to pay myrent for years.
Still am.
More than you know.
Patreon.com slash standing overpodcast.
I always like to throw in thatjoke.
But seriously, if you'd like tosupport podcast, please do.
(43:16):
So I had been struggling to paymy rent for a long time.
And it got to the point where Imoved into an apartment that was
charging me almost$2,400 a monthin rent.
In my job, I was losing a lot ofincome at my place of
employment, or my gig work,doing deliveries.
(43:40):
Business was going down.
Long story short, they werecutting pay.
And I've been adjusting to paycuts over the last few years.
But it had reached a culminationpoint where I couldn't even
sleep.
My mind was so full of worry anddread about where this money was
(44:04):
going to come from for thisparticular month.
And I woke up at two or three inthe morning, sweating, thoughts
racing.
And this is a good year, yearand a half into my spiritual
practices that I had picked up,being with my thoughts,
meditating in the morning,trying to be actively aware of
(44:29):
all the activities and thoughtsI did throughout my day, what
the Hindu tradition might callkarma yoga, releasing the fruits
of my actions to God or whateverword you have for God, and just
focusing on my action, what Ican do.
So here I was.
3 a.m.
(44:50):
A mind riddled with pain andsadness and worry and fear.
How am I going to pay the rentfor my wife and my three kids
and myself, supporting thisfamily?
And I got up out of bed and Iwent to go pray as the Aramaic
meaning of the word pray fromJesus' time, salotha.
(45:15):
Presenting what is to God orhigher power or just being with
what I was experiencing.
So I put a meditation cushion onthe floor in the living room.
Everyone's still sleeping.
The whole world is still asleep.
And I sat on that cushion and Ifocused on the feeling of my
(45:41):
financial shit storm.
Not with words.
but just being with that feelingin your chest.
And anyone listening that knowsthe struggle of financial worry
knows that feeling and exactlywhat I'm talking about.
(46:03):
And even if you've neverstruggled financially, I'm sure
that you've had some struggle inyour life.
And if you reduce or eliminatethe words that go with that
struggle and just focus on thefeeling in your chest, That's
what I did.
I sat on that cushion and I satwith my breath and I held that
(46:27):
feeling, that incrediblystressful feeling.
I held it with open arms.
I said, here I am.
And I gave my stress a hug and Ijust held it and I cried out.
and tears streamed down my faceas I was sitting there on that
(46:51):
cushion.
And I just sat with it because Ididn't know what else to do.
I didn't know where the moneywas going to come from.
You see, that is prayer on thedeepest level, where you're not
crafting a well-worded petitionto God, fix this.
(47:15):
You're sitting there with yourfeelings, without words, and
you're just experiencing it.
And later that day, I felt alittle better.
After the session was over, Isat for probably a good 40
(47:36):
minutes with it.
I didn't push the feeling away.
I didn't drink it away.
I didn't smoke it away.
And no judgment to anyonelistening if you struggle with
addiction of any kind becausethe problems in life are very
real.
(47:59):
But it's like Dante's Inferno.
The only way out of hell isstraight through the middle of
it without trying to fix it,without knowing how you're going
to fix it.
That's what prayer is.
That's what meditation is.
The two are really very similar.
They just hail from differenttraditional backgrounds.
(48:22):
So later that day, when everyonewoke up, I texted my family and
I said, I don't know what I'mgoing to do.
This is my situation and I justwant to share it with you
because I'm lost.
I want other people just toshare my pain with me.
(48:48):
And you'll notice the wordcompassion, that's what that
word means.
Suffering together.
That is the definition ofcompassion.
Literally, that is thedefinition of compassion.
Suffering together.
(49:10):
I think passion means suffering,compassion, suffering together.
The evil twin of compassion ispity.
When you tell someone your woesand they say, that sucks, dude.
Hope it gets better, dude.
Oh, that sucks, man.
You know, or I feel bad for you.
(49:30):
You know what pity is.
Nobody wants to be pitied.
But compassion...
That's where you open upyourself to the pain and
suffering of others and youexperience it with them.
And perhaps you know a way offixing it and you help them fix
it or you don't and you just arewith them completely.
(49:54):
And I shared the way I felt withmy family and my sister and God
bless her.
She took immediate action.
I mean, all of my family wasthere for me and they always
have been.
My sister in particular, shetook immediate action and she
reached out to a church that wego to and they gave me$1,000 to
(50:17):
help me pay my rent.
And it was like within that dayor two.
You might call it a miracle orlucky, whatever.
And there's plenty of people whowill go through something like
that and there won't be$1,000 atthe end of it.
(50:38):
And that's okay too.
What else can we do?
But be with what is.
Moving towards the finish linehere.
But I wanted to point out to youguys in a still...
compassionate way what it meansto be alive, to be human.
(51:03):
There is suffering.
And in Buddhism, that word isdukkha.
And it also means sort of amisaligned wagon wheel axle.
Like you're going through lifeand it's a bumpy ride because
(51:24):
You're out of sync with life.
You're not with what is.
There's a wonderful saying thatI've heard.
You can't stop the waves, butyou can learn how to surf.
And that, my friends, is whatmeditation is.
That is what prayer is.
(51:46):
You can call it prayer.
You can call it meditation.
That is what love is.
When you stop...
and you really get withyourself, you are loving
yourself.
When you're really with theperson that's in front of you,
you're loving that person.
When you're cooking and you'rereally with what you're cooking,
(52:07):
you're cooking with love.
Love, love, love.
Love is all you need.
So whether it's Jesusemphasizing loving everyone and
everything, Notice he says, lovethy neighbor as thyself is the
greatest commandment thatfulfills all the others.
(52:29):
And of course, the second, lovethe Lord your God.
What does Lord mean?
Lord means I am, to be, toexist.
Love your existence with allyour heart, mind, and soul.
Love your neighbor.
The Buddha, he says less andemphasizes stillness and
(52:51):
watching.
Is that any different?
releasing the fruits of youractions, you know, with karma
yoga.
They have many traditions.
You know, I'm not trying tosimplify or reduce all the
traditions, but if we distillthem down, they all tell you to
stay awake and to havecompassion for everyone and
(53:11):
everything that you come across.
Jesus says, if someone strikesyou on your cheek, turn and
offer him the other one.
If he steals your cloak, offerhim your shirt.
Love people.
Don't be selfish.
(53:31):
Well, I hope that this foundwhoever it needed to find.
And my parting message is toslow down.
Look at your life.
Watch it.
This is your life.
Be there for it.
Don't be in your head abouttomorrow.
(53:53):
Be here now.
It's okay to plan for tomorrow,but do it mindfully in the now.
If something pops up in yourhead because thinking will
always happen, it just happens.
And thinking is not a bad thing,but if you are not aware that
(54:15):
you are thinking, that is whenthings can go awry.
Or if you identify with yourthoughts.
This is not some clinical badcase of disassociation.
It's simply a realization of thetruth.
You are that which watches.
(54:37):
So I think that's all I'll saytoday.
I want to thank everyonelistening.
I also want to encourage you toreach out because I would love
to hear your story, what you'regoing through, what you've been
through.
Your story can inspire manypeople.
There are many podcasts wherecelebrities are usually the
(54:59):
exclusive ones interviewed.
And perhaps I'll have celebrityinterviews on this podcast or
authors of books, but I'd liketo hear from you.
You're as real as anyone elseand no different than a
celebrity.
You have a story.
Your life matters.
I want to hear it.
So please...
(55:20):
Use the link in the descriptionand join us on Discord or email
me if you'd like me to read yourstory out.
I can keep you anonymous.
You can email me atstandingnowherepodcast at
gmail.com.
If you would like to support theshow, we'd greatly appreciate
it.
It would free up more time forus to...
(55:44):
Focus more on the content ofthese episodes and devote more
time to them.
You can support us atpatreon.com slash standing
nowhere podcast.
And I told myself I would writeout a call to action sheet at
the end so I wouldn't be lefttrying to remember all of these
(56:07):
things.
And here I am without one.
So join the discord or email meat Support the show if you are
able to.
If not, maybe you could at leastsubscribe to the show and share
it with someone who maybe needsto hear it.
But either way, I am grateful toyou, whoever you are, wherever
you are.
Thank you for listening.
(56:29):
Stand nowhere.
That word nowhere.
Now, here.
Stand in the here and now.
Let go of your concepts.
Let go of your thoughts.
If they arise, notice them andmove on.
I love you guys, and I will seeyou on the next episode.
SPEAKER_00 (56:49):
This voice might feel like dust on the dial But
I'm standing, oh is made just awhisper that won't be afraid
(57:23):
standing nowhere and it feelslike home no flags to wave no
need to roam the silence speakslouder than war ever could and
(57:47):
I've never felt so understoodthe static is kind it leaves me
alone no orders to follow noking on the throne the sky
(58:12):
Turning amber The clock's allreset And I haven't stopped
walking just yet Standingnowhere Air wide and free No
(58:36):
chains, no nails Still here,nothing
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