Embracing Mindfulness: How to Transform Your Life with Derek Lakin
Are you ready to break free from stress, overwhelm, and emotional disconnection? In this powerful episode of the You World Order Showcase Podcast, host Jill Hart, The Coach’s Alchemist, sits down with Derek Lakin, a mindfulness expert dedicated to helping people reconnect with themselves and live authentically.
Derek shares profound insights on how self-awareness, emotional healing, and mindfulness can help you release old patterns, reduce anxiety, and cultivate inner peace. Discover how your emotions manifest in your body, why mindfulness isn’t just about meditation, and how small, intentional shifts can transform your relationships, health, and overall well-being.
Tune in to learn practical techniques, including Derek’s Mindful Moment Method, to start a mindfulness practice today. Plus, get access to his free mindfulness worksheet to deepen your journey.
🌟 Resources & Links Mentioned:
✅ Download Derek’s Mindfulness Worksheet: mindfulnesschangeslives.com
✅ Connect with Jill & Explore Podcasting Opportunities: jill@gnostictv.com
If you’re a coach, entrepreneur, or spiritual leader looking to amplify your voice and monetize your mission, reach out to Jill to explore how the Gnostic TV Network can help you get visible!
Resources
👉Alchemist's Guide to Podcast Audiences & Best Be a Guest Directory - discover where your ideal clients are tuning in and how to get featured on those podcasts.
👉Podcasting on Substack - the Ultimate Guide for Coaches & Creators to Leverage Substack for Getting Visible
▶ Workshops for leveraging podcasts to attract clients & build authority
🚀Monetize Your Mission Mastermind
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Transcript
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: If you're interested in maximizing your mental wellness, learning what your emotions can teach you, and living your best life, however, you define it, you're going to want to stick around and hear what our guest has to share today. Hi and welcome to the uworld, order, showcase podcast where we feature life, health, transformational coaches, and spiritual entrepreneurs stepping up to be the change they seek in the world. I'm your host, Jill Hart, the coach's alchemist.
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: here to help coaches and entrepreneurs amplify their voice, monetize their mission and get visible leveraging podcasts and the huge audience on the Gnostic TV network. Today we are chatting with Derek Lakin, and his mission is to help others mindfully realize the preciousness of their own everyday miracles, and live from a place of authenticity, empathy, and compassion. Not tomorrow, but now
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: welcome to the show, Derek. It's really great to have you here.
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::Derek Lakin: Thanks so much for having me, Jill. I appreciate it.
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: So on to the big question, are you ready.
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::Derek Lakin: Ready!
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: What's the most significant thing in your opinion, as individuals, we can do to make an impact on how the world is going.
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::Derek Lakin: We can know ourselves.
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::Derek Lakin: I think that's hands down. The biggest thing.
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::Derek Lakin: I think that our entire most of our lives are built around a massive web of distractions
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::Derek Lakin: that we build intentionally to, not face ourselves, to
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::Derek Lakin: run from discomfort, run from pain and trauma that we haven't healed run from emotions, negative emotions that we don't like.
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::Derek Lakin: and we wonder why we're always exhausted and confused and not in flow
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::Derek Lakin: with the universe and with our world.
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::Derek Lakin: We are just so out of touch with ourselves
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::Derek Lakin: that there's no way we can be in touch with others.
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::Derek Lakin: So in order to be in touch with others. And to make any kind of significant impact in the world, we 1st must know ourselves. Yeah.
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: I like that. And and I think it's so true that it's
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: we're we're trained from a very young age to disregard our emotions, you know. Don't cry, men don't cry.
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: Little girls are whiny if they cry so we're we're taught to ignore our emotions, and
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: and it it just gets larger the older that we get until we get to a point where we
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: we come face to face with all of these big emotions that we've just ignored over the years, and I think you have some experience with that.
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::Derek Lakin: Absolutely yeah with with looking at ourselves. Is that what you're talking about?
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: Looking at ourselves, and then reaching a point where you're just overwhelmed with all of the emotions that you haven't looked at.
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::Derek Lakin: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So I you know, I'm I'm somebody that has experienced depression most of my life. And
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::Derek Lakin: I mine is from chemical imbalance, so there are certainly necessarily necessary things like medication and therapy.
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::Derek Lakin: But the biggest gift I ever gave myself was stopping running from myself and really looking at
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::Derek Lakin: my emotional triggers that were leading to depressive spirals and learning how to.
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::Derek Lakin: instead of running from those emotions, sitting with them facing them.
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::Derek Lakin: I'm a big fan of of actually personifying emotions in meditation or in mindfulness. I do. I do. You know if it's if let's say I'm I'm facing fear. I'll actually picture myself embracing fear and hugging it, and, you know, feeling it, relax underneath my my embrace, and then
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::Derek Lakin: asking it what it wants to show me. You know, because the the uncomfortable emotions that we run from
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::Derek Lakin: are only trying to protect us. You know, when we experience fear that fear is there just because it's trying to say no, you don't want to do that because XY and Z is gonna happen, even though we obviously don't know any of that's gonna happen.
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::Derek Lakin: So we can. When we face our emotions, we can mindfully thank it.
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::Derek Lakin: Thank that emotion for its protection and for wanting to protect us. But we can also say enough.
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::Derek Lakin: You know, I've learned what I've I can learn from you for now. So I'm gonna let you go. I'm gonna release you.
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::Derek Lakin: I know you'll come back to me. It might be, you know, 2 h from now it might be 2 weeks. Whatever it is, we'll we'll address it at that point. But for now thank you for your protection, and I'm going to go ahead and release you.
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::Derek Lakin: And I think in my experience. That's that was a a transformational
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::Derek Lakin: moment or transformational series of moments for me
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::Derek Lakin: is that when we see that these emotions that we spent oftentimes decades running from are really just these
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::Derek Lakin: tiny little nuggets that these tiny little seeds of hurt or pain that we've
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::Derek Lakin: never. We've never wanted to address. So we've built this layer on top of layer on top of layer until you know what was once the size of a seed is now the size of a house, you know, and it just becomes completely unwieldy. And we're carrying all of this weight.
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::Derek Lakin: And the second we
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::Derek Lakin: decide to stop and look at them. We see them for the seeds that they are, and I always like to say, you know, they turn from lions to mice, you know we see them
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::Derek Lakin: as as they are, and and and it's at that point we can release them and move forward in whatever direction
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::Derek Lakin: that serves us at that time.
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: Do you find that emotions sometimes show up in your body before they show up in your head? I mean, we. We have this practice of
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: pushing thoughts down that that we don't want to address, and so
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: well, the the fear is real, and it it expresses itself in our bodies. But sometimes we don't even realize that it's expressing itself in our body, because we're so much in our head.
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::Derek Lakin: Yes, yeah, absolutely. There's a huge emotion, body connection. There really isn't an emotion that we don't also feel in our body. You know, emotions are not just mental states, they are physical states as well.
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::Derek Lakin: and
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::Derek Lakin: by building these giant webs of distraction over the course of decades we become dissociated, but from that emotional body connection we
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::Derek Lakin: from from the mental perspective, we run from it. So we cover it up. We don't even look at it. But then, when you know, let's say it's grief, and grief keeps appearing in your body over and over and over again, and you but you don't recognize it as grief because you're not mentally prepared to address it.
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::Derek Lakin: So
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::Derek Lakin: in mindfulness. And one of the biggest things that we want to do is reconnect with ourselves, and a big part of that is reconnecting with
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::Derek Lakin: the how our emotions trigger our body.
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::Derek Lakin: and consequently how our body, how bodily sensations, can trigger our emotions. It's a 2 way street. And
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::Derek Lakin: you know, part of the the peace Pathway. The 12 week program that I offer is the 1st month is really all about, I call it. I don't actually think that I teach mindfulness. I just help people remember mindfulness. I think mindfulness is our innate state. That's that's where we naturally want to be. We just have to remember how to be back in that state. And really, literally, the 1st month of the program is remembrance. Remembering
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::Derek Lakin: that we can sit with our emotions, and that those emotions do show up in our body, and that we can use those bodily sensations
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::Derek Lakin: as awareness that we're feeling a certain feeling.
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::Derek Lakin: We can kind of reverse engineer it.
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::Derek Lakin: So yeah, absolutely. You know, there's a we. We all are very disconnected from from the brain, body connection.
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: Do you find with your clients? Do you have experiences where they may come to you and say, You know, I've got like a chronic stomach ache, or a chronic back pain or chronic headaches. And and then through the process of mindfulness, I'm not talking about. This is not medical advice. Okay, so don't anybody do.
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: It's drew it that way. But do you have anecdotal evidence of people saying, You know, once I went through your course, these things that I was experiencing in my body that were causing me discomfort, have kind of melted away.
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::Derek Lakin: Absolutely. Yeah, exactly. You're talking about. Certainly I'm no no kind of medical professional. And that's that's not the intent of the program in any way. But yeah, absolutely. When, when we are dissociated between the connection between our emotions and our body, we don't. It's confusing. We don't. Why do I have a stomach all the time. Why do I have a headache all the time? Or in my case it was. It was
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::Derek Lakin: just absolute bone, melting fatigue. I was tired all the time, and
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::Derek Lakin: when we're disconnected from ourselves we're always confused again. Why am I feeling this way? Why is this sensation arising, why can't I get rid of it? So then we get frustrated, and then we get angry, and then we get you know, why am I not as good as I mean, it's a it's a whole
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::Derek Lakin: funnel that we fall down. I mean it, and and that that's ultimately what spirals and puts us in negative head spaces.
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::Derek Lakin: but yeah, as soon as we can reconnect our brain and our body or our mind and our body
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::Derek Lakin: and we can make those recognitions on the fly. Oh, I'm feeling my stomach is a little upset because I'm nervous about this meeting later today, or I have a headache because I didn't drink my water this morning. Whatever it is, we we start making connections, or we start seeing the connections that were there the entire time. We just didn't have the tools to see them.
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: And so that that kind of brings us around to meditation. What what is meditation and what isn't meditation in your worldview.
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::Derek Lakin: I actually wrote a 3 part series on substack about called Mindfulness. 101 and one of the main questions is asking. The series is, what's the difference between mindfulness and meditation?
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::Derek Lakin: Really? Nothing.
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::Derek Lakin: you know, formally, mindfulness is just paying attention to your thoughts or being curious of your thoughts, and how those thoughts trigger emotions, how those emotions trigger bodily sensations on down the line.
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::Derek Lakin: and meditation is simply formally practicing mindfulness.
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::Derek Lakin: So we can practice meditation anywhere we want, and we can also practice mindfulness anywhere we want.
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::Derek Lakin: And you can also be mindful without meditation. So that's really one of the biggest things that I have found in my experience. And the reason that I created the the peace pathway. The way that I did is because I want people to get out
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::Derek Lakin: and start practicing mindfulness immediately. I want them to stop focusing on
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::Derek Lakin: some kind of formal practice that only takes place in very controlled circumstances on a cushion sitting in front of a an altar or something.
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::Derek Lakin: Certainly the that's a huge part of the program. And those those moments of met of formal meditation are required in order for us to build the mindfulness skills that we can then take out into the real world.
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::Derek Lakin: But ultimately that's what
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::Derek Lakin: I want to help clients do is take mindfulness from a controlled circumstance to an absolutely uncontrolled circumstance in the real world.
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::Derek Lakin: And then that's where the real power in my experience of mindfulness comes in. Is that when we can practice microseconds of mindfulness, somebody reacts to us in a negative way. They cut us off on the freeway, we can immediately practice mindfulness and catch ourselves.
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::Derek Lakin: and not follow that path of getting angry and turning a a kind of negative situation into a very negative situation. If we can. Just it's all about creating that microsecond of pause. So if we can just pause for one moment
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::Derek Lakin: we can change our lives. And and
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::Derek Lakin: That's really what mindfulness is to me for me and for the clients that I help is that that real world application.
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: I I like to chop vegetables.
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::Derek Lakin: There you go!
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: In meditation. It it cooking can be a kind of meditation in that.
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::Derek Lakin: Washing dishes. Yeah.
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: Washing dishes, cleaning your house. I mean all of the things that you do every day, if you do them with intention, and you're paying attention as you're doing it, and not just like
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: listening to something, or often letting your mind run wild, which you know. That's
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: the normal state, I think for people which is really sad is that they're they're having all of these thoughts, but they're never thinking about what they're thinking about and looking at the thoughts as they're happening. I wonder how that's. I wonder how that's helping me
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: to have that thought.
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::Derek Lakin: It's like watching a TV is is what what we're doing most of the time just watching our own internal movies.
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: Yeah, yeah. And but we have control over the channel. And I think that's what you're you're really about is like you can switch a channel. You don't have to just keep listening to the same
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: show over and over and over again. My sister used to call it. It's not my monkey, not my circus.
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::Derek Lakin: Exactly.
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: You can. You can put in the VCR. But you don't have to bring the popcorn and tune in.
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::Derek Lakin: That's right, that's right, or you don't even have to change the channel. You can just mindfully lean into the channel that you're already watching. What can I learn from this channel, or what is this channel telling me about myself, or.
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: Yeah.
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::Derek Lakin: Just just looking at our thoughts with curiosity.
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: Yeah, I it. It opens up a whole new world. I
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: it really changes not only your own personal life, because your inner dialogue really affects your whole being, but it also affects how other people react to you. And so your relationships with other people change. You know, some people will fall away, but you'll you'll find that the people that are really close to you will start mirroring back to you some of the things that
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: are are changing within, you
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: will come back to you as well. So it has a ripple effect when you start taking care of yourself, and I'm all about selfishness. I think selfishness should be like a good word, not not the way it's been used in the past, because if you're selfish about your boundaries and the things that you want to put out into the world. Then it's just going to make the world a much better place if we'd all just.
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::Derek Lakin: Absolutely take care of ourselves first.st
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: 1st we change ourselves, then we change the world, right?
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: Yeah, for sure, for sure.
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: And so
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: that that is kind of my thoughts on how mindfulness can actually change lives. It's not even just your life, but it's everyone's lives.
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::Derek Lakin: Absolutely. Yeah.
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::Derek Lakin: I'm not sure if you oh, go ahead.
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: I was just going to ask you, how how do people get started down this path?
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::Derek Lakin: Down the actual peace pathway, or just in mindfulness in general.
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: Well mindfulness in general, and if they wanted to work with you or learn more about you, how how would that look for them?
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::Derek Lakin: Yeah, absolutely.
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::Derek Lakin: Mindfulness is simple, but not easy, you know.
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::Derek Lakin: it's simply pausing and looking at your thoughts with curiosity.
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::Derek Lakin: So
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::Derek Lakin: pausing and saying, Oh, well, what am I feeling right now? Maybe I'm feeling a little bit of frustration. Well, what is that frustration coming from? Well, you know, maybe I you know, didn't do as well on my meeting that I wanted, or my presentation as I wanted to do.
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::Derek Lakin: Well, you know what are things that maybe I could do next, you know. So it's a it's just opening up. That dialogue with yourself is all mindfulness, is and that's you know one of the biggest things that I wanted to do with the peace pathways. Take that stigma out of mindfulness, that it has to be this like
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::Derek Lakin: formal process, and it has to be complicated. And it doesn't it? It's it's literally the most simple thing that we can do. Pause, breathe, and listen. That's all we have to do.
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::Derek Lakin: Now that's where
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::Derek Lakin: the difficulty comes in right, because the second that we pause and breathe, we're gonna find out how crazy our minds are if we've never, especially if we've never looked at our thoughts before, it's gonna be jarring.
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::Derek Lakin: recognizing just how absolutely wild your internal movie is. And then, you know, trying to to sit with that and move through it and learn the lessons from it. And that's kind of where
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::Derek Lakin: a lot of people fall by the wayside.
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::Derek Lakin: Because it's it's again simple, but not easy.
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::Derek Lakin: because it's making us uncomfortable, and a lot of us to spend our entire lives running from discomfort. So literally. The last thing that we want to do is sit and lean into our discomfort in a quiet room by ourselves. You know, it's it's it's literally like the last thing. It's like putting ourselves in a room with a line. Why in the world would we want to do that. And that's where I
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::Derek Lakin: I have found that programs like the Peace Pathway, can help us
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::Derek Lakin: maintain those habits. Really, you know, the the 1st month of of the peace pathway is is habit, formation, and
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::Derek Lakin: learning how to create good habits
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::Derek Lakin: is what creates our identity, and then our identity is what
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::Derek Lakin: determines our life right? So if we're going to create an identity around mindfulness, if we want to say I am a mindfulness practitioner, then we 1st need to start with the habits that get us there. So that's really what the peace pathway is all about.
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::Derek Lakin: And anybody interested yet just go to mindfulnesschangeslives.com. And you'll see the the 12 week program there at the top. And you can click on more information and enter your email address. If you'd like to to learn more.
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: And you have a mindfulness worksheet, that people can
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: access over there. Also, you want to talk a little bit about that.
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::Derek Lakin: Yeah, absolutely. I created this. So I sat and asked myself, what is the absolute, fastest way that somebody can start a mindfulness practice if they have never, if they had never even heard of mindfulness until today. So that's what I wanted to do with the mindful moment method worksheet. Really, it's something that somebody can sit down and get started meditating in seconds. And then, as soon as they're done meditating, they write down their thoughts so that they can sit back and reflect on it, and then take that information out into the real world.
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::Derek Lakin: So yeah, it's a quick and easy download. I offer it free to anybody. Just enter your email address and you'll get the download immediately, and
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::Derek Lakin: you can start implementing it today.
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: Awesome, and people can find you at
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: mindfulness. Changes, lives.com, and we'll make sure
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: that link in the show notes below.
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: Thanks so much for joining us today, Derek, this has been a lightning conversation.
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::Derek Lakin: Thank you for having me. It's been a pleasure.
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: So to learn more about Derek and get access to his mindfulness. Worksheet, please visit
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: mindfulnesschangeslives.com, and we'll be sure to put that link in the show notes and thank you for tuning in with us today. If you have a podcast or are interested in starting one to get your message in front of our huge and active audience. Be sure to reach out to us at jill@gnostictv.com.
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: We love to help spiritual entrepreneurs and coaches amplify their voice and monetize their mission and offer a variety of ways to do this on the Gnostic TV network platform, join us for our next episode as we share what others are doing to raise the global frequency. And remember, change begins with you. You have all the power to change the world, start today and get visible.
