What is Your Mindfulness "Ah-Ha" Moment?

Great idea, you guys.

Each presentation has at least one ah-hah! moment for me, so while I can't remember a particular one, what I am getting is a much better sense of how mindfulness integrates with the deep emotional work that we are all doing here. For me, this is one giant Ah-Hah!

The other day, responding to a post, I suddenly found myself writing about how TMS is all about our thoughts, but at two different levels.

The first level is the deeply repressed negative emotions, often from childhood, which our brains cover up by giving us distracting symptoms. We are always talking about this level, and that's what the writing exercises are designed to expose.

The second level of thoughts is the constant negative self-talk that is running around in our heads all day long, much of it related to the fact that our primitive brains are constantly scanning the horizon for danger, and then reacting to all kinds of everyday situations as if we were facing a sabre-tooth tiger. We are only now really starting to talk about this, especially thanks to the Summit! Because Mindfulness is the exercise that will help us expose these thoughts, and help us to recognize what's really going on (not a tiger) and to respond more appropriately.

The two are totally related, because the reason our brains have to suppress the deep emotions in the first place is that we might not notice the tiger in the shadows if we're obsessed by emotional stuff. Supposedly we're more alert if we've got a physical symptom to worry about. I guess. It's not a very good mechanism, and it's certainly extremely flawed in today's modern world.