Eric Oliver

And one of the things that I'm burdened with that my cat doesn't have is this discursive mind.

The fact that I'm a creature of language and that language dominates my ordinary consciousness.

And so a lot of the times I'm there and I'm ruminating and my thoughts are twirling around on one subject or another.

And I had this mental dialogue going in my head.

And it's kind of the byproduct of being this linguistic being.

And so a lot of what I try to do to go throughout my day to live in a less encumbered way is to try to be deliberative, yet not so caught up in my own thoughts.

Like this morning, for example, I was getting really nervous about this interview and I was like, oh, I'm going on hidden brain.

This is gonna be a great thing, but oh, there's a lot of pressure.

And I was just thinking like, okay, is this thought helping anything?

Is my obsessing over about how well I'm going to perform in this conversation

Really making my life any better and the answer like with a lot of my thoughts was no And so what can we do in those moments?

Well, we can let go of the thought and

and to say, okay, that thought's not really working for us.

Let's let it go.

And maybe just focus on the breath because one of the wonderful things about our existence is that the breath is this one kind of neutral constant.

It's this remarkably peaceful place of refuge for us.

When our minds are in so much storm, the breath is a place that we can always come back to that has no judgment, that has no criticism, that is just the breath.

I like to sort of tell my students that there are really only two certain things in life, which are breath and taxes.

Yes.

So I've been practicing both yoga and meditation for about 30 years.