1. Introduction (00:19):

- Title: "Understanding Mindfulness and Conscious Living through Buddhism"

- Introduction: Matthew Hawk Mahoney, host of "The Imperfect Buddhist," delves into the significance of patterns in mindful living.

2. Mindful Living and Recognizing Patterns (01:07 - 02:34):

- Understanding the role of mindfulness in recognizing and altering life patterns, fostering conscious decision-making and personal growth.

3. Understanding Life's Cycles and Patterns (03:17 - 04:18):

- Highlighting the concept of interconnectedness and life cycles, emphasizing the significance of patterns in mindful and Buddhist philosophies.

4. Cultivating Present Moment Awareness and Mindfulness Practice (04:18 - 06:32):

- Emphasizing the importance of mindfulness and present moment awareness as fundamental practices in conscious living and Buddhist teachings.

5. Mindful Relationships and Conscious Communication (06:32 - 09:45):

- Applying mindfulness to foster healthy relationships, emphasizing the importance of conscious communication and understanding patterns in interpersonal dynamics.

6. Transforming Patterns through Mindfulness and Gratitude (09:45 - 11:56):

- Exploring methods for transforming deep-rooted patterns through mindfulness and expressing gratitude, aligning with Buddhist principles and conscious living practices.

7. Conclusion: Embracing Mindful Living for Joy and Fulfillment (11:56):

- Encouraging readers to embrace mindful living and conscious awareness, fostering joy, love, and well-being in alignment with Buddhist teachings and principles.

Transcript

00:19

Welcome to the Imperfect Buddhist. My name is Matthew Hawk Mahoney, and today's episode is titled Buddhism and Patterns.

01:07

Patterns have been a key theme in my life lately. Particularly patterns that I would like to cease or change or augment. Maybe I'm halfway there. Maybe half the battle is knowing that I have patterns. Patterns have been playing an important part in my life right now, in my marriage and my personal life. Decisions I make with my health, how I spend my time, how I show up in my relationship.

01:35

Do I show up with a approach of love and growth and wanting to learn about myself and my partner? Or do I show up with feelings of jealousy, of control, of needing things to be a certain way? How does my partner show up? Is my partner showing up with patterns she created in her past? Certain family dynamics that shaped her at a young age? Is she showing up to me with those patterns?

02:04

or she's showing up with a mindset of love, growth, honesty. And let's not forget fun. My dad, of all people, because he has some serious habits and patterns in his life, he told my sister, I don't know if he told me, I think he told my sister, but it's a thing that we bring up every now and then in the family where he said, you know, Amanda, everything's a pattern, everything's a circle. When it comes to our habits, seems to be the case, seems to be true.

02:34

When we're unconscious, as can happen with anybody, even the most serious meditators in the world, we find ourselves at the end or the beginning or the middle of a habit. We ask, how the hell did I get here again? Some of us might believe we have no control, that this is just how it is, this is just my life, and it's your fault. It's her fault, it's his fault, it's their fault that I'm acting this way.

03:17

Patterns are a part of life. And to try to say that we should be devoid of patterns, goes against human nature, goes against nature itself. Look at the sun, look at the moon. They rise and they fall, usually around the same spot in the sky depending on the time of year. It rains, it's sunny, trees grow leaves and the leaves fall down to the ground and nourish the soil and the soil nourishes the tree. The tree makes new leaves.

03:47

The leaves fall down and nourish the soil. Our bodies, we inhale. Our lungs fill with air and pulls oxygen into our bloodstream. And we exhale that carbon dioxide. We inhale again. Our digestion, we get hungry. We eat food. Food goes in, it's digested, and it comes out as poop. It's all cycles. Everything is patterns. Experts will tell you it's good to have a healthy routine, a healthy pattern.

04:18

So how does Buddhism or mindfulness, present moment awareness, play a part in any of this? A friend and I were talking, and this is one of my best friends in the whole world, and my friend had been at the bar, just taking a little bit of me time, doing some journaling, reading some self-help books, trying to just figure out how they were feeling, what was going on with them. And I met up with them after they'd done this soul-searching session.

04:47

They were talking about how they wanted to start doing like these self check ins with themselves. They asked themselves like, how am I feeling? What am I doing right now? And we started talking about it and they asked me, how do you start with these patterns, either making new patterns or changing old patterns? The truest answer I could say was present moment awareness. And does it matter if you're Christian, Buddhist, Hindu, Jewish, Catholic, Satanist? The present moment is a real thing. It's right here in front of us. And

05:15

Being in the moment, being present is not a religious belief, it's just an act. It's a habit to focus. If we want to work on our patterns in life, we have to start where we're at. We have to start where the patterns start and start paying attention. Present moment awareness is the key to having some authorship to get our hand on the wheel of our life a little bit and to steer a little bit consciously. Like we're in a Tesla

05:45

car and it's autopiloting towards the ultimate destination of our life and we're like watching YouTube on the screen or playing one of those Tesla video games that comes with the car and then we like look up and we start looking around and we're like wait a minute do I want to go here? Do I want to go to Chuck E Cheese for the 50th time this month? I'm kind of sick of Chuck E Cheese. I haven't liked Chuck E Cheese since I was five years old. I am a 55 year old man.

06:14

Why do I keep going to Chuck E. Cheese? Do I like Chuck E. Cheese? I think I'm gonna turn off autopilot and maybe go to Olive Garden. What's more mature than Olive Garden?

06:32

So the core teaching in most meditative traditions is mindfulness and present moment awareness. And there's a reason for that. It is the key to deeper states of awareness, to augmenting habits, changing habits, engaging in new habits that hopefully benefit our well-being, feeling a freedom in life, joy, relationships.

06:57

Relationships and patterns seems to be one of the areas where patterns become most prevalent, most hurtful, most painful. Whether that's our own patterns and the way we are in relationships or the way other people are with us based on their patterns. And I'm guilty of it. I can admit that I have my patterns that are not so helpful. In this particular situation with this person I was with, she got home after work. I had made a nice meal.

07:27

I noticed a tightness in their face, like a little crease in between the eyebrows, usually a sign that something's going on. My partner had signed up for a book reading group and I said, oh, that's cool. I'd like to go. And they said, no, I don't really want you to go. I want to do this on my own. Sometimes you have a habit of talking over me or I feel like I can't express myself fully when you're around. And that was hard to hear, but I understood where they were coming from.

07:57

was much more quiet and there had been talks about how sometimes I could overpower them or talk over them. So yes, I totally got where they were coming from. I said, okay, I understand. As we sat on the couch, I said, hey, let's talk. Let's just connect and do a little check in. And it started pretty positive. But as we talked, that tightness on my partner's face came back and they had this crease between their eyebrows and I could sense.

08:23

It was getting heavy again. We eventually got to the bottom of it, and my partner expressed to me that she felt embarrassed by jokes I would make. And that was really hard to hear. And I felt sad that we had to dig so much to get to the bottom of what was going on. My partner expressed to me that, oh my God, this was a pattern. That she, in some ways, was projecting some of my responsibility on how she should feel or not feel when it comes to being.

08:53

embarrassed or not. The bigger pattern here was maintaining the status quo. So instead of telling me and really sitting down and expressing to me how serious this feeling of embarrassment and my part in bringing that up in them was, she decided to avoid that, maintain the status quo, and then begin to exclude me from certain social events. For her it was a moment of revelation of this is

09:23

points of contention out of fear of upsetting the person in my life. It was something that they learned early on with their family, their parents, and it was a pattern that was brought into our relationship.

09:45

I used to do these quick tip things and who knows, I may bring it back, but really there's only one tip and that is to be present. To do the practices that bring your attention and focus your mind on what's happening right now in your body, in your mind, in the environment around you. And that's really the only tip I can really give is that we can cultivate our present moment awareness through practices like mindfulness, meditation, and we can use the...

10:14

present moment energy that we cultivate through this to work with the patterns in our life. Sometimes noticing a pattern is all it will take to change it. Noticing a pattern though, sometimes it stays the same. It may even increase for a time. But usually through the simple noticing of a pattern, when we see it in the totality that is available to us as much as we can, we see what does it create? What is it creating in our lives and our relationships? Is it...

10:41

Is it bringing us closer to people? Is it pushing people away? Is it bringing us closer to a feeling of wholeness, of health, of love? Is it pushing those things away? We see the result and sometimes that's enough to completely change the pattern. With other things that are deeply ingrained, like my partner's habit of maintaining a status quo, or my patterns of jealousy or worry, it takes more time, it takes more work.

11:10

We've learned these habits to survive and we can honor them. We can get real self-help you with it. Say to these unhelpful habit patterns during meditation, thank you. Thank you, worry. You've helped me survive probably some situations, whatever reason, you're probably going to stay around or stick with me, but let's try to switch things up a little bit because it's not as helpful anymore. You can think the patterns and let them go and maybe they'll come back expressed in a new healthier way.

11:56

Wonderful week ahead and whatever patterns you experience. I hope that they bring you more joy, love, health, and just an awesome fricking life. I look forward to talking with you next time. Thanks, bye.

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