Eric Oliver

Right, and I think it goes to a misconception I had when I was young, which I thought, oh, if I could just get a handle on this self, like that it was this thing and I could master it, then everything would be fine.

And the flip side of that was whenever I was feeling terrible about myself, I felt, well, if I'm this thing, I'm a flawed thing.

I'm a bad thing.

If I'm feeling discomfort, it must be because I'm somehow or another broken.

And when you let go of thinking of yourself as a thing and you begin to appreciate the far more subtle and difficult idea that you're a process, one of the great things about that is that you'll see these fixed conceptions of yourself begin to melt away.

And rather than being a broken thing, maybe you're just a slightly misaligned process.

And the good news with that is that processes we can fix.

If you engage in a contemplative practice, as you begin to sort of quiet your mind down and open your consciousness up, what you begin to appreciate about your own physicality is that it always has this effervescence, that we are beings of energy.

Now, most of the time, this experience of luminescence is so subtle, it just gets crowded out in our ordinary consciousness and we don't really experience it.

But the more that we can get in touch with those aspects of ourselves, where we can quiet our minds down, where we can kind of open up our sensory experience to kind of the more raw, unfiltered information coming through our perceptions...

the more glorious our experience of being becomes.

And I think this is what is at the heart of a lot of spiritual practices.

It's very much at the heart of the contemplative practice.

And so a lot of what I'm trying to do with this class and in some ways with this book is give people some tools so that they can decompress from a lot of the things that dominate their consciousness and begin to open up some space for this inner feeling of effervescence to make itself more available.

Well, one of the things I always notice is that my cat seems to live so much better than I do.

Like, she just seems perfectly content in herself.

She's happy to stay curled up in a cute little ball.

And I've always wondered, like, why is it that my cat, who's a far simpler creature than I am, is so much happier than I am?

And more importantly...

what is it that I could do to maybe live a little bit more like my cat?