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Transcript Episode 1: The Practice

0:00:06.9 Juan Alvarez: Wouldn’t you like to be a better parent or a partner? Are you ready to break free from unwanted habits and get over the burden of the past? Maybe you would like to develop a healthier relationship with money or with food, or be able to lead with compassion. In all those matters, mindfulness can be a catalyst of change and a resource that you can always tap into.

0:00:31.4 JA: My name is Juan Alvarez, and I’m an executive coach and a mindfulness teacher, a teacher and a guide or a companion for people looking for attainable ways of being more present, peaceful and conscious in their lives. I have dedicated my life to exploring how mindfulness and meditation improve our relationship with the world and with the people around us. So tune in if you want to build a solid meditation routine and learn different techniques that will also enhance the only practice that truly matters when it comes to being purposeful: Life itself.

0:01:12.4 JA: Welcome, friends, to Life Is The Practice. This is our first episode, and today we will talk about what I came to call the practice, a system that integrates all the teachings that I use with my one-on-one coaching clients and everything I’ve learned in 25 years of personal research with mindfulness and meditation.

0:01:30.6 JA: In the next minutes, we will see in detail what the practice is about with a focus on reviewing how mindfulness helps us live better. We will also break down the elements that make this system up. And at the end of this podcast, I will share with you my vision of how it helps us create a better world for everyone. But to start, I would like to play you a brief set of testimonies of some of the clients I’ve coached over the last few years. I believe their words loosely illustrate their state from which most of us came into meditation. Let’s listen.

0:02:00.9 Speaker 2: When I first started, I had this heaviness that I was holding onto as just part of my being.

0:02:08.4 Speaker 3: And I was really just on all the time, but what I found was, it wasn’t a good on.

0:02:16.1 Speaker 4: There was a part of me that didn’t like to be with myself.

0:02:20.7 Speaker 5: I had spent most of my life focused just on achievement and kind of always looking for what’s that next thing I’m going to do, that next risk I’m gonna take, that next person I’m gonna meet, that next business achievement, and once I get there, you know that, I’m gonna be happy.

0:02:38.9 Speaker 6: I had come to a time in my life where I had been running my agency for 10 years, and I was running it out of fear and tons of anxiety. I just felt anxiety all the time.

0:02:55.1 JA: You see, life brings difficulties and challenges to everybody. None of us are free from these experiences. However, it is also true that how we have learned to live and how we have been taught can make things even more complicated, can create additional and unnecessary suffering. To put it simply, our main existential problem has to do with a sort of internal paradigm that colors and distorts the way we humans relate to the world and to others. I call this internal mode of operating the egoic state, which is a concept I describe as a state of identification with the mind. We get a sense of self derived from the mind. I will talk more about it in further episodes as well.

0:03:41.2 JA: Anyway, when we conduct our lives from that particular and illusional place, the egoic state, we experience once and again the same emotions and feelings. We experience a scarcity, fear, insecurity, dissatisfaction, anxiety. We experience a lack of love for ourselves, a lack of trust. We experience various forms of suffering, in short. Fortunately, as this podcast series will try to humbly prove, there is another way to face life that instead brings more peace and joy. There is a way to engage with the world that implies simplicity and less suffering.

0:04:23.8 Joe: The practice and time spent with Juan really helped create a new operating system for myself.

0:04:31.2 JA: In opposition to the egoic state there is the state of alignment, as I like to call it. Going from the egoic state to the state of alignment is a shift in our way of positioning ourselves internally. That rearrangement serves to restore the natural balance of our awareness of being, favoring thus a more complete and realistic understanding of who we are, favoring an intimate and direct experience of life itself.

0:05:00.7 Michael: And if you shift to define your relationship to life as your relationship with life, the big… Life with a big L, you start to understand that you are never alone and that there’s this limitless well bank of help that you have from life, from the universe.

0:05:19.8 JA: Shifting to the state of alignment opens our lives up to an array of experiences that is the opposite of what I mentioned. Here, we experience luminous things such as the abundance of life and a spontaneous gratitude, or forgiveness and innocence, or security and trust in life. When we contemplate life from this state of alignment, what we encounter is a sense of fullness, joyful presence, unconditional love and inner peace, and that shift gives us a higher quality experience and helps us live well.

0:05:56.6 S2: Life is just so much more at peace, and there’s so much more beauty that I see around me.

0:06:03.2 S3: There’s peace and safety in that moment, that you can’t find anywhere else.

0:06:07.4 S4: I have this presence and calmness and less anxious and less chatter in my head.

0:06:16.2 S5: It’s completely changed my business around, it’s changed my relationship with my family around.

0:06:21.2 S6: I can just live and be and feel present and connected and love for other people and love for myself in a way that I just didn’t think I’d be able to.

0:06:30.5 JA: This, which might seem like the promised land or an experience only attainable to a few people, is in fact our default state, from which we have been separating little by little. When we arrived in the world, we all were in a state of alignment, and from there we learned something different that separates us from it, we learned the egoic state. So while the practice shows us the way back to it, back to that original state, the shift from the egoic state into the state of alignment is something that happens in an instant, and the practice helps us develop the skills and the abilities necessary to take charge of our experience and do it.

0:07:11.9 JA: So we’re not talking about a permanent shift that, “Okay, I made it to the state of alignment and I’m here and I don’t have to worry about it anymore. ” It’s not like a final destination. We have to practice continuously and it comes and goes in a existential swing, sometimes I get it, sometimes I lose it. Like most things, inhale and exhale, night and day, high tide, low tide, the swing of life. So it’s not that the egoic state is something bad that we need to eliminate since it’s limited and incomplete. On the contrary, everything has its place in our experience, so we have to expand our awareness and see it pass to restore the balance of our consciousness of being.

0:07:57.1 JA: Some people using a more poetic language that I use sometimes describe such an outcome as healing. So let’s get to the heart of the question. What is the practice all about? 

0:08:09.7 Christopher: This practice has allowed me to be more the person I want to be than just the reactive person sometimes you are to understand what those invisible motivations are.

0:08:20.9 JA: This is my friend Christopher. He has been a student and a client of mine for quite some time. Over the years, we’ve worked together on some projects, and one day I asked him to give me a testimonial about our work together that I wanted to post on my website. I always joke about how life speaks to me through him because, well, it does. And this example was one of those times.

0:08:45.7 Christopher: Combining traditional mindfulness practices with his own hands-on professional and personal experience, Juan brings an approachable yet deeply impactful style of instruction to his work. I consider myself blessed to be learning from him as a client and collaborator, and I attribute his presence and guidance in my life as instrumental to my own ability to be present, peaceful and purposeful.

0:09:13.8 JA: When I heard Christopher’s words, something clicked immediately. That’s why I’ve been using his insight as a sort of a motto or rubric to explain the main benefits of embodying the practice. Present, peaceful, purposeful. Thank you, Christopher. And thank you, life.

0:09:34.7 JA: So let’s break down the meaning of those three words. Present points to an increased awareness of the present moment, to our ability to observe our experience as it is unfolding, to be here and to know it. Peaceful refers to the return to our natural state of inner peace, which happens when we stop fighting or resisting our experience in the present moment and choose instead to surrender, when we choose to trust and align ourselves with life. Purposeful points to the discovery of the meaning in life that occurs when we relate to others from an internal position of love and unity, instead of fear and separation, honoring what we share with others, as well as what makes us unique. Otherness and oneness here now.

0:10:27.0 JA: To understand how we arrive to these consequences of benefits, let’s call them, we need to explore the three elements of the practice, namely what we actually do, the action, the wisdom in motion. The practice, the way I understand it, the way I teach it, consists of three elements: Meditation, active practice, and the processing of the negative emotional charge. Through the use of meditation techniques such as presence, inner presence, reconnecting with the body or alignment with the help of these techniques, we develop valuable skills, we develop awareness of the present moment, concentration. We also develop awareness of our mental and emotional states, which helps us manage emotions and disidentify from egoic states.

0:11:22.2 JA: In addition, we learn how to feel life from the body instead of thinking about it, and we learn to combine the development of attention with the intention of deep acceptance.

0:11:36.3 Christopher: I’d never been exposed to meditation or anything remotely similar to it. I was trying to understand things intellectually. I was trying to understand the world through my mind, and what the world taught me and has continued to teach me is to experience the world through my body.

0:11:54.9 JA: The practice of active meditation invites us to bring all these abilities to life. My dear friend and student Ari reflected on his own journey by saying the following.

0:12:07.2 Artie: I used to meditate and or not be meditating, this curriculum schmurgles the two of those together, where I am meditating. And when I’m not meditating, I am also meditating. It’s merged into my life, which is great.

0:12:22.6 JA: This is key. The practice of active meditation is key for our transformation. It brings the skills we develop in seated meditation to life, to the present moment. It allows us to create an inner space of observation, to respond consciously to life events, taking responsibility for the quality of our experience instead of reacting with our learned egoic patterns. Overall, it contributes to restoring inner peace and reconnecting with our essential identity.

0:12:55.9 JA: And by means of the emotional processing tool, the third aspect of the practice, we free ourselves from negative emotions trapped throughout our lives, learning to process them, freeing ourselves from the heavy burden of the past in our body which is by the way responsible for many of our unhealthy habits and addictions and diseases, even. At the end, all of this creates the space for the conscious reunion with life.

0:13:25.8 JA: And that’s what I call the practice, my friends, a continuous exercising of something that, for a lack of a better word, I can only call practices, in plural: Meditation. Active practice and emotional processing. I look at it as a practical and modern method for personal and spiritual development for today’s people. In future episodes, I will discuss these techniques and how to integrate the practice into our everyday lives. But for some of you learning more about this might be something that cannot wait, and if that is your case, I have a comprehensive online course that is available for you to start today. You can find the details in the show notes or in the website, lifeisthepracticepodcast.com.

0:14:15.1 JA: Alright, so we’re coming to the end of this episode, and I would like to say goodbye by sharing with you my personal vision of this remarkable and fruitful practice. What matters here in the end is to face life with inner peace and joy, to live in a simpler way without so many complications and suffering and without harming ourselves and others, basically to live in touch with our essential nature, to be able to embody that. So by doing this work as good old Gandhi said, we become the change we want to see in the world. The more we strive to eliminate the suffering within ourselves, the less suffering we will see reflected in the world, inner peace, outer peace.

0:15:05.8 JA: And that would also be our contribution to improving living conditions on the planet. By improving the quality of our experience, we improve the quality of the experience for everyone else, helping to create a cleaner and more conscious society. Therefore, improving the conditions of the world is something that is in our hands, and it does not depend on anyone else. The practice shows you the way, but you put in the effort. A better world begins with your decision to move from the egoic state to the state of alignment. Doing it here now. It only starts when you take responsibility for your experience.

0:15:52.1 JA: This gives you back your personal power, you are no longer a victim of the circumstances, nor you depend on others to change, improve their behavior, become more loving, less harmful. You no longer blame others for your suffering or discomfort. Instead, you get down to work, improving the quality of your experience moment by moment. Doing so, it’s a heroic job. No doubt. Like I see that first hand every week in the coaching sessions I do with leaders worldwide. Look around at your peers and look upon yourself, you see the easiest thing is to get carried away by negativity and blame others for our suffering and discomfort.

0:16:36.3 JA: Although it is a heroic job, as I’ve said, this is also a humble job that happens mostly in everyday life, in the most ordinary and mundane, now, in the immediate, at the wheel, when I’m driving, in the supermarket at work, in my own head, neutralizing the mirage of the egoic separation and the negativity and fear that I live with daily and that dominate my experience and actions, to make way for the love that unites us, healing our experience. And for the intelligence of life, which guides us.

0:17:15.6 JA: Alright, my friends, so with this feeling of potential and optimism, I leave you until our next episode. Keep practicing, friends. A new world is in your hands.

0:17:30.3 JA: Thank you for listening to this episode of Life Is The Practice podcast. If you found it valuable, please subscribe, leave us a review, you might help others live better. And if you want to learn more about the practice, please explore the online course that is available to you at lifeisthepracticepodcast.com. Thank you and be well, friends.