Charlotte Center For Mindfulness // Podcasts
Oct 2, 2026 · 22 min · 6 segments
Cognitive Science is identifying different ways we relate to “self” that are very useful for untangling a challenging moment. This relates beautifully to Phillip Moffit’s quote: *A crucial skill from…
It opened with this quote, "A crucial skill for minimizing emotional chaos and sustaining clarity in your life is the ability to distinguish betwe- between your experience in..." [laughs] Wait, I'm so sorry.
I realized this last night and I didn't fix it.
I messed up when I put the quote on here, so I have to translate what I wrote.
"A crucial skill from minimizing emotional chaos and sustaining clarity in your life is the ability to distinguish between your experience and your interpretation of your experience." Crucial skill in minimizing emotional chaos and grounding ourselves back in some sort of sustaining clarity is to distinguish between what am I experiencing and how am I interpreting it.
Your experience is simply whatever is happening in the moment.
A sound, a taste, bodily sensation, emotion, any kind of interaction, et cetera.
Your interpretation is your mind's reaction to that experience.
I love that.
I mean, like, it's so succinct and puts it right on what we are doing in this practice.
We are learning to tease apart the tangle so that we can start to see through the tight knot that we're caught by and understand the vast spaciousness that actually exists through, within, and beyond any knot we can be living with.
So Alex went on to describe a new understanding in cognitive science around how we relate in any given moment to this idea of I am, me, a self.
Um, one of the big, uh, teachings of Buddhist psychology that's very different from the Western way of thinking, I certainly, uh, was, uh, embedded in, [laughs] uh, is all around this idea of what is the self.
That there is not some permanent thing that is me, that is different from everything else that there is, that can be separated out.
I am this, and everything else is something outside of this.
There is nothing that we can ever tease apart that stands separately alone from all that is.
So it's not no self.
It's the, the best translation that I'm hearing is not self.
It opened with this quote, "A crucial skill for minimizing emotional chaos and sustaining clarity in your life is the ability to distinguish betwe- between your experience in..." [laughs] Wait, I'm so sorry.
I realized this last night and I didn't fix it.
I messed up when I put the quote on here, so I have to translate what I wrote.
"A crucial skill from minimizing emotional chaos and sustaining clarity in your life is the ability to distinguish between your experience and your interpretation of your experience." Crucial skill in minimizing emotional chaos and grounding ourselves back in some sort of sustaining clarity is to distinguish between what am I experiencing and how am I interpreting it.
Your experience is simply whatever is happening in the moment.
A sound, a taste, bodily sensation, emotion, any kind of interaction, et cetera.
Your interpretation is your mind's reaction to that experience.
I love that.
I mean, like, it's so succinct and puts it right on what we are doing in this practice.
We are learning to tease apart the tangle so that we can start to see through the tight knot that we're caught by and understand the vast spaciousness that actually exists through, within, and beyond any knot we can be living with.
So Alex went on to describe a new understanding in cognitive science around how we relate in any given moment to this idea of I am, me, a self.
Um, one of the big, uh, teachings of Buddhist psychology that's very different from the Western way of thinking, I certainly, uh, was, uh, embedded in, [laughs] uh, is all around this idea of what is the self.
That there is not some permanent thing that is me, that is different from everything else that there is, that can be separated out.
I am this, and everything else is something outside of this.
There is nothing that we can ever tease apart that stands separately alone from all that is.
So it's not no self.
It's the, the best translation that I'm hearing is not self.
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