“Cultivating a Responsive Mind” with Benjamin this Sunday at Minneapolis Insight

Dear Community,

Sunday 10am Community Practice & Discussion

This Sunday Benjamin will lead a practice and exploration in “Cultivating a Responsive Mind.” The reference point for the exploration is Phillip Moffitt’s 7-minute video teaching on “Discovering the Clarity of a Responsive Mind.” Below is an excerpt transcript of the video:

Let's turn our attention now to the single distinction that I find most helpful for most people, and that is learning to move from a reactive mind state to responsive mind state. I cannot emphasize sufficiently what a difference this can make in your life. A reactive mind state comes from the mind responding from an experience in our lives being pleasant or unpleasant… The mind gets really reactive to this because it's seeing everything from the lens of pleasant and unpleasant…

Now, what's the choice? Instead of being in a reactive mind state based on pleasant or unpleasant, we move to a responsive mind state. A responsive mind state does not base its relationship in a moment's experience of any kind as to whether it's pleasant or unpleasant. It's aware of whether it's pleasant or unpleasant and how that's affecting the nervous system and the thoughts that are occurring in the mind and what's being felt in the body. But its reference is our values. What you really care about, what really matters to you in this situation. Who do you want to be in this situation?

So a responsive mind state has wisdom in it and it has compassion in it. We are being the kind of person we want to be. We have to train having a responsive mind. We have to train it. It is not easy, it's not automatic, but the mind really will allow itself to be trained in this. We use mindfulness to see over and over again what's reactive and what's responsive...

The difference is night and day. One and is disempowering, this reactive mind state. The empowering mind state is the responsive mind. Who would not choose that?

All are welcome to join this exploration on Sunday! Registration and Zoom information available here.

With mettā,

Minneapolis Insight