Greene: Zen meditation creates spectator-like distance, reducing your immediate emotional reactivity.
Robert Greene · #35 Robert Greene: Alive Time vs. Dead Time · Jun 27, 2018 · at 58:41
Author Robert Greene explains how his personal Zen meditation practice helps him manage emotional impulses and avoid reactive behavior.
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“The meditation has helped me an awful lot in controlling my emotional responses. 90% of the meditating, I do a practice, a form of Zen meditation, and what you're doing is, it's hard to concept to relate, but the idea is, You're thinking of your thinking as if you're a spectator of yourself. You're looking at yourself, and you're going, you know, this is my mind, and how it's, has these anxieties and these obsessional thoughts, and you're looking at it as if you're another person. Can't explain it any other way, but it's really an interesting thing to go through, and so you end up having distance from yourself, and you end up seeing that you're kind of a programmed person to respond to certain ways, and with that distance, You find it easier to not react.”
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