Welcome to Just Breathe....You Are Enough™ - The Podcast

Hello, everyone. Welcome to Just Breathe…..You Are Enough™, the Podcast.

I'm Adela, and this is Just Breathe…..You Are Enough™. Together we will deepen our relation with ourselves, strengthen our relation with others, and re-think together how we connect with our world.

Thank you for joining us for our first episode Just Breathe…..You Are Enough™. We will begin the journey together.

Own confidence. Build your strength.

We give and receive with an open hand.

Press pause. Apply kindness.

You are enough.

So many people are benefiting from mindfulness practices. Mindfulness practice grows out of an ancient world that had a shape of its own. It is intimately connected with the shape of our natural world.

What is a person? What is a thought? What is a feeling? What is the nature of time or mind?

How do we bring our best selves with us wherever we go? These things were understood differently in the ancient Indian world from which our mindfulness practices arise.

I am Adela, and, for about 25 years, I've been bathing in the waters of this ancient Indian worldview. I hold a doctorate degree from the École Pratique des Hautes Études of the Sorbonne in Paris, where I studied ancient Indian or Vedic cosmology and, in particular, a goddess named Sarasvatī. I studied Sarasvatī in a text that is dated to 1500 BCE.  It is the first Sanskrit text of the Indian sub-continent. Sarasvatī and I, in a sense, have looked together at the shape of that old world.

The Vedic period of Indian history dates from 1500 to 500 BC.  500 BC is called the Axial Age of human philosophy. It’s the lifetime of Socrates or Plato of the old Greek philosophers. It is the lifetime of Lao Tse who founded Taoism, of Confucius founder of  Confucianism, of the early Hindu philosophers whose work is recorded in the Upanishads, and it is the lifetime of Gautama Buddha.

Contemporary mindfulness practices are closely connected with Steps 7 and 8 of the Eightfold Path, part of the first teachings of the Buddha. They would grow with Buddhist psychology as it developed through the generations. They are rooted inside the shape of that ancient Indian world where:

we are enough.

We have everything we need.

We can access our deep strength, own our voice, and be present with ourselves wherever we go,

and it is the space in-between in which we all live.

I've been teaching mindfulness, ancient Indian tradition - and classical and contemporary expressions of Hinduism and Buddhism - for about 15 years at St. Francis Xavier University, in Nova Scotia on the eastern coast of Canada.

I've held leadership roles in mindfulness practice communities for over a decade. I've spent a two-year period living and practicing in the Buddhist monastery in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia founded by Pema Chodron.

So my path as a person has given me space to contemplate and reflect on the way that this ancient world view would continue inside Buddhist psychology and today’s mindfulness practices. There is so much that mindfulness – and yoga, which grows out of the same ancient world view - has to offer us when these ideas are seen within their own context and given the depth of this ancient view where people dreamed the world differently.

This podcast – and the books and other materials available to our on-line Just Breathe ….You Are Enough™ community – invite a global conversation for us to think about these things together.

What is the nature of power?

What is true strength?

How can we have a good relationship with others – in intimate personal relationships or as part of the team - that is life giving and brings us joy?

How can we care well for ourselves so that we can care well for others?

It's a global conversation because our current global and international conversations are telling us that we're ready for change. The structures and ideas that have defined the shape of our world aren’t working.

We're ready to be present with ourselves, present with each other, and present with our environment in our leadership roles in our families - and in our communities - in a different way that will meet the needs of our present time.

The shape of our inside world, and the shape of our outside world, is carved by the stories that we tell ourselves and the stories that we are told by others. This podcast aspires to give us space to pause and reflect as we re-think together the shape of that space in-between in which we all live.

As we consider how we will re-write the story of our humanity -as persons and as a global community- those who would be change makers are looking inside of themselves and looking outside of themselves and asking the question, “What does it look like?”.

What is it to be a healthy, strong, vital, dynamic, energized, fulfilled human person?

What is it like inside of relationships which are life giving and mutually supportive, vitalizing and invigorating? How can we be mutually supportive and work together for the benefit of a broader community - which is strengthened as a result of its engaged individuals working for ways to express ourselves as we care for the wellbeing of our planet as a whole?

We will not find solutions that we are looking for using the same styles of thinking that we were using when we created them: it’s a famous observation made by Einstein. So our time together aspires to be a support in this journey.

There is interest in mindfulness practices. People find it leads to an increased sense of peace and well-being, rest and relaxation, focus, confidence and strength, that it improves the quality of the relationship with self  and, therefore, by extension, improves the quality of the relationship with others.

Those practices grow from a worldview where power and gender, body and sexuality, strength and the team, Self and Other, planet and relationship and thought, emotion, time and space were dreamed differently.

It is not to say that one is good and the other is bad. It is to say that holding up for reflection how one world, among other worlds, dreamed the world differently, is supportive of our process as change makers coming together in a global conversation.

We are working are it out. How will we dream our lives and our communities and our world differently? Now.

We'll begin our time together with a set of seven in a series called “7 Ways to Take a Deep Breath”.  We will offer these daily for a week as part of a settling in and beginning to get to know each other. After that once a week – on Friday mornings - we'll have time together to pause and reflect, connect and consider.

We are enough.

The courage and wisdom, insight, intelligence, resourcefulness and strength, confidence and voice that we need to find to work with what we have in our lives at this moment we already have. We’ll discover, engage, reflect and meet our challenges - finding good solutions together - as we continue a journey on a path of discovery walked by humans for countless generations past.

May the journey bring us joy.

I am Adela, and you've been listening to Just Breathe…..You Are Enough™. You can find us at justbreatheyouareenough.com.  You can follow us on Instagram, Facebook and Twitter. If you haven't yet, please subscribe, rate and review this podcast. Join us next time, and thank you for listening.