Ep. 58: Dr. Brandon Nappi - Is Presence the Root of Your Healing & Freedom - Copper Beech Institute
Dr. Brandon Nappi is a spiritual teacher, speaker and writer who passionately believes in the capacity of the human spirit to awaken. Inspired by the common wisdom of the world's spiritual traditions. He has dedicated his life's work to sharing the transformative power of mindfulness practice. He founded Copper Beach Institute in 2014 and is the institute's executive director.
In this podcast you will learn about Dr. Nappi’s mission to bring more curiosity and meaning into the world. Curiosity was a special trait his earliest school teachers noticed about him. A turning point in his life was working as a janitor in a church in highschool. He found a world there in the quiet stillness, and began to come alive.
Today, he helps others find that world through mindfulness -- which can be done lying down, standing, walking, or sitting. He says this practice of staying present will in effect almost double your life. Recent study show that we spend more than 48% of our time distracted, unconsciously projecting into the past or present.
Dr. Nappi naturally felt compassion for others but grew to use mindfulness to cultivate his own self compassion. This double synergy is powerful and without it is like breathing with one lung or flying with one wing.
Mindfulness takes courage, but it transforms pain at the root, because pain that isn’t transformed is transferred. When we go through life we can be reactive but mindfulness helps us to look at our life with exceptional courage and compassion, allowing us to respond outside of our normal patterns.
It is not enough to want to be kinder and more loving, we must practice our way into whole heartedness. People who visit the Copper Beech Institute often say their hearts have grown ten times. Often when people are not wiling to feel emotions that come with mindfulness we can live in denial and we can begin to self medicate with addiction, self medication, lashing out at others. If we don't take care of our pain, profound depression and anxiety that may seem to have no exact explanation, a kind of vague sense of unease.
I'm fond of saying if you can feel everything and anything that a human being can feel, then you will be free. The purpose of our mindfulness practice is freedom, true freedom. And that freedom then makes joy and love and compassion really possible.
More From Dr. Brandon Nappi
Website www.copperbeechinstitute.org
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BOOKS MENTIONED IN THE PODCAST
Peace Is Every Step: The Path of Mindfulness in Everyday Life by Thich Nhat Hanh
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Show Notes
[01:47] I have had a lifelong interest in how people answer and ask the great questions of life. Why am I here? What gives my life purpose? How do I respond to the most difficult challenges that a human being can face? Loss and disappointment? How can I grow my heart to love more deeply? So really, the questions that I've been interested in for so long have been about how we as human beings reach our fullest potential, how we can be of service and how we can live a spiritual life, a life that's in service to others, deeply connected to others, to our communities, and to give back in a sustainable way.
[03:10] I think what I discovered over my childhood is that teachers saw in me a kind of curiosity. And of course, it's hard to see yourself when you're young. You have no perspective on what your unique brilliance is. And I think if I have one unique brilliance, it's just that I'm so curious both about the world, what provides meaning and how other people seek meaning.
[04:33] The quiet of sacred spaces always moved me as a high school student in the summertime. I worked as a janitor in the church and so I was able just to be in the quiet and I realized that there was something that came alive within me in silence and then quiet. And I didn't know in those adolescent years that this would be a pursuit of mine for the rest of my life. Pursuing the sacred and pursuing a kind of. Peace and serenity that I found in the quiet
[05:12] How can I experience that same peace in a busy, hectic world?
[05:41] We see a kind of addiction to busyness and we actually brag about it and we wear it as a badge of honor when we see our friends. We instantly confess and almost brag about the level of busyness and hyper activity that is a part of our lives. Most of us are not going to be hermits or monks and live in monasteries. And so we have to find a healthier balance because I think the pace that many of us are running at is unsustainable and what we learn in mindfulness practices that we can actually create a kind of sanctuary of stillness on the inside of this reservoir, which can then support us and carry us as we move through life that can get full and hectic.
[06:23] What are the top benefits of mindfulness?
[06:25] I think the benefit that feels most powerful to me is equanimity. This wonderful word which comes from two Latin words, which means the same or even and soul.
[06:37] So what we're practicing in mindfulness is a kind of groundedness within, to use a visual metaphor. It's kind of the calm at the center of the storm. I notice this the eye of the hurricane.
[06:57] Secondly, I would name compassion as a real discovery.
[07:05] Compassion for myself is something that I recently discovered in the last decade or so of my life. I thought that compassion was only motivated toward others, and for most of my life I tried to live in service of others. But what I really came to understand was that was like breathing with one long or flying with one wing. It was really limiting and unsustainable ultimately. So what we practice in mindfulness is both a kind of compassion for our own experience as we welcome whatever it is that's arising, which then allows us to radiantly shine for others.
[08:25] What we do find is this reservoir of strength, of courage, even a deep, deep contentment that's available in the midst of that suffering.
[08:48] I sense myself most coming alive when I get to talk about the connection between inner peace and peace in our world or healing within the heart and healing within the community. Often mindfulness and meditation in the popular media and in social media is described as an individual quest to enlightenment. And it certainly is that it's certainly an individual journey. It's one that no one else can take for you that requires a kind of responsibility for your own happiness and taking care of your own pain as if this is a really important piece of the puzzle. But it's not the entire puzzle. And what we really believe is that the healing that we can experience within us with some mindfulness practice then ripples out into our families. Ripples out into the workplace. It can support our work in the world in a really, really powerful way.
[10:05] Richard Rohr, who loves to say, “Pain that isn't transformed is transferred”. So the pain that we've experienced in our lives will just be shared with others unless we intentionally welcome some kind of practice that can bring healing to our lives.
[10:31] This practice is so simple and I think what's really important to remember is that all of us as children, we're naturally mindful. So this isn't in some way a foreign skill or something that needs to be added to the human person. What we're really doing in practices, we're just awakening what has children we knew how to do when we played, when we watched a sunset, when we played with our toes as babies in the crib. Really, what we're talking about in mindfulness is paying attention on purpose in the present moment.
[11:19] Some recent research suggests that 48 percent of the time we're distracted in our lives. It's staggering to think of. We're blessed enough to live a hundred years that 48 of them would have been essentially missed thinking, projecting into the future, projecting into the past, unconsciously distracted. So we believe that these very simple practices can actually, in a sense, add years to our life.
[11:42] At Copper Beech Institute, we're working with directing attention throughout various senses in the body. So we often just start with feet on the floor, meditation, taking a moment to feel the soles of the feet, actually feeling the experience of the earth rising up to support our bodies. So working with the body is a really grounding way to come back to the present moment because of course the body is incapable of existing in the past or the future. The body is naturally mindful. So bringing some attention to bodily sensation like the feet on the floor instantly leads us to the present moment and you can do it anywhere.
[12:53] We come to see in our mindfulness practice is the kind of unconscious patterns and habits that maybe at one point in life really served us quite well. But that we've outgrown. Mindfulness is really just bringing into consciousness what has been unconscious. And so we might discover that there's a pattern in our lives that's actually causing ourselves harm and others harm. And so what we do in mindfulness is we look with exceptional courage and compassion at how we're living. And sometimes it's really, really difficult to take a look at the patterns in relationship patterns and workaholism patterns with addiction or how we handle pain when we can look really honestly about how we're living and we can make healthier choices.
[13:41] Victor Frankl, said, “Between stimulus and response, there is a space.”
What mindfulness does is it acts in that spatial region and it actually creates a bigger and bigger space so that when we are triggered, we then realize that we have a choice in how we respond without some kind of practice. Most of us react rather than respond. In other words, we're not responding out of the deepest wisdom that's within us. And so as we spoke of before, we end up transferring our own pain, our own habit patterns to others.
[14:25] Often what happens is we shift into a kind of victim mentality, “I've been wronged and the whole world is to blame”. And then so we angrily project out at other people and we lash out and we make decisions that are hurtful or harmful. And so the very people whom we often love the most then begin absorbing the effects of all of these habit patterns that we've developed over a lifetime. So I think the first beneficiaries of mindfulness practice are the people we live with.
[15:21] The great insight in the last generation of contemplative neuroscience that Richard Davidson and many others have been on the forefront of is that our brains grow and develop and change.
[16:06] We practice our way into whole heartedness. It's not enough simply to want to be kinder, to want to be more generous and loving. Of course, that's a wonderful place to start, right? Because energy follows intention. So it's a wonderful beginning point. We start with this intention. I want to stretch my heart more open. I want to be more generous. I want to have more compassion for myself and for others. And the great insight of contemplative traditions is that we practice our way into wholeness. And mindfulness is one of those ways of nurturing this gradual and slow opening of the heart.
[18:02] The language of vulnerability, which is simply opening our hearts to the risk of this life. And anything worth doing requires risk.
[18:12] Any great heroic act, any blessing, any love requires some amount of risk and not being in control.
[18:52] We're going to change and we're going to grow, which requires letting go of how we were yesterday. And for some of us, that can be really scary.
[19:00] So when people aren't willing to feel the pain and the emotions that can come up with mindfulness, what happens?
[19:08] We can live in denial and we can begin to self medicate with addiction, self medication, lashing out at others. If we don't take care of our pain, profound depression and anxiety that may seem to have no exact explanation, a kind of vague sense of unease. The Buddhist word “dikkha” is really just a word that describes the dis-ease in life. Many of us come to mindfulness, particularly because we feel like there's this misalignment that something's off. That something is not satisfactory to us.
[21:36] I'm fond of saying if you can feel everything and anything that a human being can feel, then you will be free. The purpose of our mindfulness practice is freedom, true freedom. And that freedom then makes joy and love and compassion and service really possible.
[22:33] We are not our thoughts, that who I am is infinitely larger and so much more vast. Then the conceptual mind, it's important to make the distinction, though, that the mind isn't bad and meditation isn't a way of stopping or clearing the mind, but it's simply a way of noticing this inner monologue. So how incredibly freeing it is to remember that we are not our thoughts and in fact, much of our thought is just fiction. And so it's a wonderful practice to just observe thoughts and then reflect a little bit. How much of this is really true or how much of this is just a kind of creation and a projection? And what I've come to understand is a great percentage of the stories I make up. I don't need to believe and so many of those stories have to do with my own inadequacy, my own not being enough. So many of us really struggle with this wound of not being good enough, smart enough, pretty enough. This chasm of never enough that's within us. And one of the most freeing things that I've experienced is to understand that it's simply a fiction and that who I am is just infinitely more vast.
[24:26] It really caring for ourselves, really thinking about our own well-being and our own whole heartedness is a profound gift that we make to ourselves, to our families, to our communities and to the world so that we don't continue the cycles of violence that we're often inflicting first on ourselves. Right. This is why self compassion is so important. Few of us would ever speak to another human being the way we speak to ourselves.
[24:59] For me, I understand that everything is connected. And Albert Einstein said everything that exists is connected to everything else.
[25:16] So there's a kind of multiplier effect that when we extend kindness to another and they're touched and they're moved then to be of service to their network.
[26:20] To have a front row seat to people waking up to their own goodness, to people tasting self compassion for the first time that they don't have to live in loathing or that they can find some new way of dealing with pain.
[28:52] For me as a Christian, I understand that meditation is one way of surrendering to, as my friends in recovery would say, my higher power. The Christian insight or contribution to the great conversation that world religions have been having for millennia is that God is love and that God is relational.
[29:15] You come to encounter the divine in relationship to others, and that you grow in the image and likeness of God by sharing love with others. Meditation is one way of stretching my heart more open so that the divine light and love and grace can flow more through me.
[30:01] My practice is to meditate each day in the morning for about 25 minutes
Sometimes I will practice my meditation laying down. Some days I'll practice walking meditation. Some days I'll practice standing up meditation. So the practice is really flexible.
[31:03] Peace Is Every Step: The Path of Mindfulness in Everyday Life by Thich Nhat Hanh, I'll begin there because you can read five pages or even one page and it can begin to change your life. It's a book that I still keep by my bed. It continues to nourish me.
[31:26] I think what's beautiful about mindfulness is that we can start really with small practices moments. So for some folks, a practice of twenty five minutes is overwhelming. But Thich Nhat Hanh offers a practice of one breath. Practice a breath anywhere. He offers a practice of washing the dishes mindfully, sitting at a red light in traffic. So I think part of what I've really been touched by is just the exquisite simplicity of Thich Nhat Hanh writing.
[32:05] That the greatest gift that we can give in life is our presence. Healing itself begins with presence.
Thank you for joining us on HealthGig. We loved having you with us. We hope you'll tune in again next week. In the meantime, be sure to like and subscribe to this podcast, and follow us on healthgigpod.com.
“Compassion for myself is something that I recently discovered in the last decade or so of my life. I thought that compassion was only motivated toward others, and for most of my life I tried to live in service of others. But what I really came to understand was that was like breathing with one long or flying with one wing. It was really limiting and unsustainable ultimately. So what we practice in mindfulness is both a kind of compassion for our own experience as we welcome whatever it is that's arising, which then allows us to radiantly shine for others.” - Dr. Brandon Nappi
“Working with the body is a really grounding way to come back to the present moment because of course the body is incapable of existing in the past or the future. The body is naturally mindful.” - Dr. Brandon Nappi
“Mindfulness is really just bringing into consciousness what has been unconscious. We look with exceptional courage and compassion at how we're living.” - Dr. Brandon Nappi
“We're going to change and we're going to grow, which requires letting go of how we were yesterday. And for some of us, that can be really scary.” - Dr. Brandon Nappi
“I'm fond of saying if you can feel everything and anything that a human being can feel, then you will be free. The purpose of our mindfulness practice is freedom, true freedom. And that freedom then makes joy and love and compassion and service really possible.” - Dr. Brandon Nappi
“So many of us really struggle with this wound of not being good enough, smart enough, pretty enough. This chasm of never enough that's within us. And one of the most freeing things that I've experienced is to understand that it's simply a fiction and that who I am is just infinitely more vast.” - Dr. Brandon Nappi
“Few of us would ever speak to another human being the way we speak to ourselves.” - Dr. Brandon Nappi
“For me, I understand that everything is connected. And Albert Einstein said everything that exists is connected to everything else.” - Dr. Brandon Nappi
“That the greatest gift that we can give in life is our presence. Healing itself begins with presence.” - Dr. Brandon Nappi
Keywords
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