How Mindfulness Helps You Design a Great Life
The following is an edited excerpt from the Enough-ism Podcast.
Life is nothing more than a game. Built into the game are difficulty and tragedy. And an opportunity to design your life exactly how you want it to look.
But how do you recognize and seize this opportunity to redesign your status quo versus continuously feeling defeated and deflated?
Says character coach Emmanuel Noble Enime, combatting your personal opponents — whose main goal is to put thoughts into your head you eventually start believing as your own— means cleaning up your beliefs. This, he says, is the secret to having a great life. In short, it comes down to defending your sense of joy.
Emmanuel recently sat down with Rev. Yugen Bond, host of the Enough-ism Podcast, to discuss how to control your thoughts, skillfully navigate today’s media (social media addictions included), and manage confrontation to protect your peace. And to share how he’s helping people stay strong, stable, and hopeful through mindfulness and intentional character development — something everyone can learn how to practice in their own lives.
Listen to our full podcast here.
Live your Best Freaking Life
Rev. Yugen Bond: Tell us a little bit about why you decided to join the show about mindfulness today.
Emmanuel Noble Enime: Actually, can I ask you a quick question? Mindfulness. What does it mean to you?
Rev. Yugen Bond: That’s a wonderful question. For me, mindfulness means going inward and not being afraid to go inward. Not being afraid to sit with yourself and sit with your thoughts.
We are so distracted right now. It’s really hard to do anything without something pinging, beeping, making noise, or sending us news.
We’re often too obsessed with our phones and capturing the visual moment versus the lifelong memory.
In addition, the news now is always so negative. It’s meant to elicit a reaction in you that makes you feel sad. So mindfulness is about being able to separate yourself out from all of that and feel okay, feel empowered. To feel like you have the authority and the responsibility within yourself to act on what you want to act on. To shape your life, to create your life, to design your life, and make hard choices.
It’s also about being able to think, “Where am I now and where do I want to be? What do I need to get there?”
Then, “What can I trust the universe with to kind of help me fill in the gaps?” That’s a hard thing to do depending on where you are in your life. But I think everyone can get there and we can all work on ourselves together.
Emmanuel Noble Enime: So let me see if I can boil down the essence of what you said. It’s basically going into your mental space and finding out what’s in there, what you want to keep in there, and how to use those thoughts to move forward.
Rev. Yugen Bond: That’s it.
Emmanuel Noble Enime: That is my work. My work is to help people defend their joy.
Rev. Yugen Bond: What does it look like to defend, or lose, your joy?
Emmanuel Noble Enime: There are many things in this life that will act to overwhelm a person’s mind and steal their joy.
Maybe you’re watching something on the news and maybe the broadcast is coming off as fear, fear, fear, fear. Now those seeds of fear have entered a person’s mind and depending on their susceptibility to that, those thoughts of fear can now replicate and grow, and gain momentum to the point where a person can go crazy.
Rev. Yugen Bond: How do you help people deal with being overwhelmed by the media?
Emmanuel Noble Enime: One practical thing that I tell people is to turn off the news.
It’s a battlefield of the mind going through this life. If you’re not fully equipped for battle, then it’s wise to step back and say, “Okay, I can’t take all of this in right now.”
I was talking to this one young man on a podcast I did recently. He was talking about how when he goes on Twitter, things always turn into a heated debate. And my advice is: Don’t go on Twitter. It's far too easy to get sucked into one of those debates. They’re not necessarily productive because what you went into the debate for is not the thing that you should have gone into the debate for.
“Turn off the news. Don’t go on Twitter.”
Emmanuel Noble Enime: And so it comes down to a matter of, if you do need to have a disagreement with someone, you need to have the proper tools — the proper fundamentals — in place to be able to have a productive, reasonable disagreement.
One of those fundamentals is forgiveness. Sometimes, you’re going to enter into a debate and somebody is going to be throwing shots at you personally to get you fired up to the point where it turns into a conflict. If you are not ready to forgive when such a thing happens, the situation is just going to escalate.
“Sometimes, you’re going to enter into a debate and somebody is going to be throwing shots at you personally to get you fired up to the point where it turns into a conflict. If you are not ready to forgive when such a thing happens, the situation is just going to escalate.”
Rev. Yugen Bond: I find this interesting because what you’re essentially doing is helping people change their habits and their lifestyles.
Do you find people are resistant to your advice because they enjoy the comfort of that Twitter debate or the familiarity of having to defend themselves? Like, all of the sudden, it becomes all about you and it becomes difficult to turn away because people are attacking you essentially?
Emmanuel Noble Enime: I would say that now people are not resistant. When you provide people with the skills and knowledge to successfully handle a difficult situation, like a social media confrontation, they want to use those skills.
For example, I’m going on to Twitter and having some sort of exchange with someone who has opposing views to me, now I say, “Hey, practice forgiveness.”
Then if someone takes a shot at me, I’m going to forgive them.
The second part of that is learning patience when having these conversations so you can step back and think, “What is this person really saying?”
Rev. Yugen Bond: And where does it come from? What is the root of it?
Emmanuel Noble Enime: Exactly. That's another thing: understanding a person’s why. So maybe someone takes a shot at me in conversations, but I extend kindness to them or a well-placed, strategic joke to deescalate the situation.
Rev. Yugen Bond: You’re changing the energy. You’re transforming it from hostile to kind, because you’re recognizing where the hostility comes from. Again, it has nothing to do with you. It’s more of like an emotion that’s bubbling up inside of someone and they need to get it out somehow.
Emmanuel Noble Enime: Yes, and that’s the other thing. Who knows what kind of trauma this person is experiencing. That outburst, the shot taken, could easily be coming from a place of trauma. Be mindful in discussions. Practice being slow to speak and respond in these situations.
“Be mindful in discussions. Practice being slow to speak and respond.”
Rev. Yugen Bond: Right. And I like that you say practice because that’s really what it is. It’s about practicing.
Emmanuel Noble Enime: Yes, indeed. By practicing, I’m able to communicate to more and more people. And communicate that message of mindfulness.
The thoughts in your head can be causing you serious, real-life problems from being distracted in the workplace, to being distracted in your relationship, to your home life. You can have anxiety that won’t let you fall asleep at night because you’re worried about the future.
One thing I’ve battled with is being a perfectionist, trying to get things just right. I was able to examine that issue and realize one of the reasons why I was a perfectionist was because I’m trying to avoid messing things up because I tied my self-worth to the work I did.
Whether that be cleaning the home, sending an email, or cooking an apple strudel, because in my mind if I mess this up then somebody’s going to see and think that I’m messed up.
So, it’s taken some training for me to separate myself from the work I create.
Part of that involved me doing things to improve my overall self-worth — increasing courage, increasing patience, increasing gentleness, kindness, and increasing healing. Being able to connect with people more has also increased my overall self-worth in a sense.
Emmanuel Noble Enime: One of the goals in my work is that a person gets their self-worth improved so much that you can drop them in any environment and they’ll be stable and peaceful. The goal is achieved when a person can step back and say, “Hey, I have my self-worth. Maybe I messed that up. But I’ve developed persistence and tenacity. I have overcome self-guilt and condemnation, I’m not beating myself over the head whenever I mess up.”
The process also involves mindfulness. There’s a point when a person can start to feel more confident about their daily walk, or be able to take a nap without the constant anxiety about the future.
In the past, I have found myself unable to fall asleep. It takes constant work, and constant mindfulness to figure out what’s going on in my head, where those thoughts came from, and how to dismantle them. It also involved understanding what new beliefs I needed to replace those negative thoughts with. And then one thing that I will add is that I made mention of knowing where these thoughts come from.
“If you start to clean up your internal environment, you’re going to have a great life.”
Emmanuel Noble Enime: This life is a game and built into this game called life is difficulty and tragedy. And we have an opponent in this game called life. One of his goals is to trash talk so that he shakes people off of their game. Part of that is putting thoughts into people’s heads and making them believe that they’re their own thoughts. Those thoughts get you down into worry, fear, rage, and anger. Once that opponent has you down, he’ll continue to kick you and keep you down.
But what people need to know is, if you start to clean up your internal environment — if you start to clean up your thoughts — you’re going to have a great life.
Rev. Yugen Bond: There’s such a liberation thinking about what someone is saying and realizing where it comes from and why they’re saying that. It really forces you to be in the moment, especially during a really heated conversation where you feel like you should be angry by default. But you’re able to stay calm because you are able to really listen, take it for what it is and what it isn’t. There’s power in that.
Emmanuel Noble Enime: These fundamentals help you do just that, stay in the moment. One of the things that helps me stay in the moment is pausing when I speak because I think about what I actually need to respond with rather than a rash reaction.
Another practical thing that people can do is write down their thoughts after having an unpleasant or upsetting interaction with a loved one.
Write down your thoughts to find out why you feel tension right now. Why do you feel anger or bitterness towards them? What’s actually going on? Are you even on the same page?
Because sometimes you’re talking about apples, they’re talking about oranges, but you both think you’re talking about pomegranates.
“Sometimes you’re talking about apples, they’re talking about oranges, but you both think you’re talking about pomegranates.”
Rev. Yugen Bond: Absolutely. Thank you so much for your time and for sharing your thoughts. I really appreciate it.
Listen to our full podcast here.
About the author: Reverend Yugen Bond is a metaphysics writer, reiki master, and podcast host who once thought meditation was boring, had both too much and nothing to wear, and didn’t know how to slow down her thoughts. What a journey it’s been. Time to share it with the world, especially with you.
Article contributor: Ryann Anderson
Can’t get enough of Enough-ism? Visit IAmEnoughism.com to hear the Enough-ism Podcast and follow @IAmEnoughism on social media.
Check out Emmanuel’s website & social media @emmanuelenime
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