Breathing to bring a quietness & stillness to the mind. Seeing Grafton Street for the first time
Patrick McKeown: "How do you conduct yourself in your normal, day-to-day activities? We have a choice as human beings: we are either stuck in our head or we are not. And I'm not talking about being in our mind and thinking about practical purposes. There is a time to think, to make decisions, to plan, to question. There's a time to think, and that's very practical, and that's very important for human beings, because we do have to think things through.
"But there's a time to stop thinking. The problem is that we have develop the thinking mind into such an instrument involved with thinking, we just cannot stop thinking. Our education system has trained us how to think for 12 or 14 years. It has trained us how to think, but it hasn't gave us the tools to be able to bring a quietness and a stillness to the mind. Because if we are living our life stuck in our head, it's not a nice place to be. The human mind is not a nice place to be. […] We all have a tendency to overthink. […]
"If you were to break it down it's actually so simple. Stop thinking. Yeah, so stop thinking. OK, and you say, 'Well that's not so simple.' Well, but actual fact it's not that hard, if you compare the alternative. What the alternative? Living stuck in your head, totally isolated from life. You can't live life. Like, I was that individual.
[…]
"When I came across breathing I was lucky enough to. . . I went to a two-hour talk in Dublin in a hotel and it was obviously gave by people, two individuals, who were in a state that they were immersed in presence. And there's one thing about human beings that when we talk about bringing a stillness and a quietness to the mind, it's not necessarily the words that we are transmitting. But there's something else that goes beyond the words and I don't want to sound too woo woo here because it's difficult to kind of objectively break it down scientifically.
"I left that two-hour talk and I walked down Grafton Street, which is a street in Dublin, it was the first time that I actually saw the street. Now I had walked that street numerous times and I can still remember. I can remember the colors, I can remember the sounds, I can remember the feeling, and I can remember the silence of my head. And it wasn't, you know, it was just different. I didn't really know what was going on but I got a taste. […] It was almost as if the critical mind had just been put aside for that brief period of time because whatever I'd listened to these two individuals.
"It wasn't that I was in a state of hypnosis or anything like that going down the street. But it planted a seed in me that even though I woke up the next morning I was still back to that racing mind, because of the societal pressures for young kids. […] I was in my early 20s at the time. You know, that drive to succeed, and the pressures that we put upon ourselves."
Patrick McKeown with Mads Tömörkènyi & Jakob @ 22:25–24:36 & 26:15–27:53 (posted 2024-07-21) https://youtu.be/-nCm8c_hVJA&t=1345