Interview
Meditation
Quote

The contemplative has helped me with my thoughts and feelings

From Holly Roach Knight

Video Interview Transcript

So the contemplative builds our capacity to be self aware and develops what we call and what Buddhism calls the inner witness. So when we're sitting in silence and we're watching our thoughts and our feelings go by we develop this sense that we're actually not our thoughts and our feelings which is very counter to what we're taught. Even our very language says I am happy. I am sad right. So we so closely identify with our thoughts and our feelings that we think we are our thoughts and our feelings. But when we're sitting in silence and we're watching this kind of feelings, sensations, thoughts coming and going, kind of like clouds in the sky we've become start to become aware of the thing that is watching right. What is the inner witness? And my teacher Richard Rohr would say the inner witness is in fact our true self who we really are. And so what's so lovely about engaging our inner witness and having an inner witness involved in our activism is that we can begin to see our motivations for things. And so often we're so unaware of our motivations that we're just kind of on automatic pilot and we're just reacting and behaving just based on our you know our training or acculturation, our neural pathways. And what the inner witness does is kind of gives us this choice of whether or not we want to react and live our lives from this automatic place or if we want to be more conscious and choose another way. So in activism so often we are facing very difficult conditions, front line situations, pain, a great deal of pain and not just personal pain but collective pain you know which is oppression. And it's really important in those circumstances to be able to interrupt our automatic responses to things and be able to really gauge and really discern what's the most strategic thing. What's the most strategic response that I can have in this situation. And without that inner witness we don't have the choice. We're just kind of enslaved to our automatic behavior. And so our inner witness is very key to having more freedom and actually having the choice to be more strategic and to show up in different ways, more positive ways and to be more self aware of you know what our motivations are.

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