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Iyanla Fix My Life has returned to own. I am my mother's child.

She still aggressive just like me, just like me being willing to hear the truth. That is not the truth. That is that all three of your children have issues with you. Why can't you give to them? I want them to deal with this baby.

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I'm Oprah Winfrey. Welcome to Super Social Conversations, the podcast. I believe that one of the most valuable gifts you can give yourself is time taking time to be more fully present. Your journey to become more inspired and connected to the deeper world around us starts right now.

There are so many simple pleasures that allow me to delight in the present moment a long walk in solitude or a spirited hike with friends brings a renewed sense of gratitude and connection. I consider reading a book a sacred indulgence, and I also happen to love a cup of piping hot masala tea. The daily ritual of being at the sink, boiling the water, steaming the milk and then steaming the tea helps bring me to a place of stillness. Whether it's watching a sunset or really feeling the stream of water hit your face in the shower, everyone needs to take time to find a way to quiet themselves.

Allowing these moments of awareness and recognizing that it is a magnificent thing to be alive, regardless of what might be pressing on me, has brought a level of calm that words cannot adequately explain. Many of the spiritual teachers who have talked with me on Super Bowl Sunday described the highest state of mindfulness as a constant state of prayer. This means acknowledging only what you are experiencing in that moment, the true power of staying in the now means that you resist projecting what might happen in the future or lamenting past mistakes.

There will always be times of stress or sadness. But when you feel the earth moving, that's the time to bring yourself back to center whatever shake up or disturbance that might come. You will handle that when it actually happens. But in this moment, you're still breathing. In this moment, you've survived. In this moment, you're finding a way to step on to higher ground. Today and every day I continue to do the consciousness work, focusing on prayer and just being still.

I awaken and my first thought is thank you and my next thought is I'm still here in this body. I feel the all with a capital A. That is God so deeply that it lifts and carries me. Sometimes I actually feel weightless in the love that I call God because I sense it in all things. The entry point for living consciously is mindfulness, let these words and examples be your guide to becoming more relaxed, responding to the inevitable swirl around you with compassion.

Staying present is the reason. After talking to thousands of people over the years, I still have an aha moment.

Meaningful things happen when you release the anxious thoughts and negative chatter that's in your head and tune in to what the person in front of you is saying. Slowing down, showing up and listening to your child, your spouse. Parent or friend shows them that they have been seen and heard by you.

Not only are you providing validation when they need it most, you are consciously creating your own spiritual practice. We start with John catbird's in. So is mindfulness science? Is it art or is it spiritual? It's a gateway into the full dimensionality of being human, being alive.

I love that it's a gateway into the full dimensionality of being human. And without it, you're just missing out. Well, you're missing a lot. If you miss the look in your child's eye one day, you've missed it. If you've missed the look in your lover's eyes the next day, you've missed that. If you miss the beauty of sitting under trees, well, you've missed that. If you sum that over many moments, many years, you may wind up missing the most beautiful aspects of your own life.

Who are you going to blame for that? I was too busy. Well, who was too busy? Who tells oneself I don't have any time when all you've got is time. All you've got is this moment and we might as well take it while we're alive because sooner or later we're going to be dead. So this is the perfect moment. Is this one? Let's take that in a moment. And now hear from Shonda Rhimes, my daughter Harper is 13, she's very different from me and very different like she is an extroverted, tall, thin, beautiful wannabe actress kind of child.

And I am if you put me in a corner of the book for the rest of my life, I'm happy. We are polar opposites. And I have really sort of thought, how do I embrace her personality and make her shine for who she is? And that has been really wonderful for her and for me, as opposed to me thinking like, how do I help her fit into the box of what I think a kid is supposed to be.

Wow. And so I said yes to my kids in a way that I had never done before. I decided to myself that every single time they asked me, my daughter says to me all the time, I want to play, want to play. And there's so many times that I've said, well, I can't right now, honey, I'm doing this. I can't right now. I decided that every single time she said to me, Want to play?

I would say yes. Wow. So it doesn't matter if I'm wearing an evening gown and heading out to the DGA awards or I have my bags on my shoulder and I'm heading out to work. I drop everything I'm doing. I get down on my hands and knees and we play and, you know, she's three it's ten minutes and she loves it. And it changed my sense of being a mother and my sense of pride in being a mother.

And it's changed our relationship, I think.

So powerful and profound. And now Arianna Huffington, because and this obsessive type personality, I had to really get a bad wake up call. I mean, thank God, not bad enough to be life threatening, but I actually collapsed from exhaustion on April six, 2007, two years after I had founded the Huffington Post. I hit my head on my desk, broke my cheekbone, got four stages on my right. I was very lucky. I didn't lose my eye.

Didn't you sort of went unconscious and then woke up and you're in your own blood? Yes.

And then in a way, what is worse is that I had to go from doctor to doctor, from MRI to echocardiogram to find out what was wrong with me. You know, did I have a brain tumor? They didn't know what was wrong. And they discovered there was nothing medically wrong with me, but just about everything wrong with their way. I was leading my life and what I was prioritizing. And doctors waiting rooms are great places to ask life's big questions.

Yet sometimes they're Super Sunday questions and big questions. You know, I was asking myself, is this success by conventional definitions of success so successful? Right. By any sane definition of success, if you are lying in your own pool of blood on your office floor, you are not successful because there are really simpler things that you can do to slow it down.

And actually, the most important thing I want people to get is that there is no tradeoff.

Now it Deepak Chopra, all of you wisdom teachers speak a lot about being in present moment. Is being in present moment a form of its own meditation? That's a form of mindfulness. And the body has the same effect as. Yes, absolutely. If you live mindfully, then you'll make conscious choices and that'll change your life. So the best way to be in the present moment is to be aware that you're not in the moment as soon as you're aware that you're not in the moment.

In the moment. Father Richard Roy, I try to preserve good chunks of silence, if I can do that and learn how to rest there, it is a rest, then I have to use that as a touchstone all day. Can I get back to that place of who I am and God, apart from my role, my success, my title, my authorship, or all of those things, those are going to pass. And silence is the one spiritual discipline that is found in all of the world religions at the higher levels, some degree of silence.

And that would be my practice, finding inner silence and then honoring the silence that's really around everything. Rainn Wilson, I definitely knew I wanted to be an actor and had that dream, I had that longing to be an artist. Yes. And that was my deepest drive.

My family, that is the heart of our souls calling is that longing thing that you're talking about. Yes, yes. Yes. And I knew that I basically had to be an actor or I would die. I had. Such as? Yes. Such a deep drive to become an actor. And at the same time, I grew up as a member of the Baha'i faith and my parents are Bahais. It's always difficult to sum up a kind of a world religion in a nutshell, but essentially the Baha'i faith is a religion of unity.

So you grew up with this sense of openness toward all religions and a belief that we were all the same. We're all connected.

Yeah. What a miracle it was to grow up that way. Yeah. One of the fundamental tenets of the Baha'i faith is the elimination of racial prejudice. Wow.

So to grow up feeling that we're all one human family, just to know that from age four, as soon as you could think or walk or talk was a gift, whether people of other colors, races in your church, all the Bahasa every race, age, creed, background that you can possibly imagine.

And so I'm sure that infuses not only certainly your personality, but also distinctly infuses your art.

One of the teachings of the Baha'i faith is that in this day and age, Bollocked tells us that the making of art is no different than prayer. There's not any difference between lifting up a paintbrush and touching it to a canvas and bowing your head in a church.

You know, I just got a little. Yeah, yeah.

The hairs on my head rose a little bit when you said that all you want to do is sit in a cafe and quietly enjoy this podcast when you can. I have a total Hemi Demi semi half. Kind of cute. McClarty Oh. And can you served in a macchiato class. Oh, give me strength.

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Norman Lear. You write that when we laugh together we are one.

How does laughter elevate the human experience?

I believe my longevity has depended a great deal on the amount of laughter I've had in my life. I love thinking about this. I could cry thinking about this. You stand behind an audience, as I did time and again when Archie Bunker was at his funniest. Let's say when an audience laughs together side by side, they tend to come up and out of their chairs a little and down and then back up again.

Really. And if there's anything more spiritual in our life and an audience moving on a belly laugh, I mean, that's praying. That's gratitude. That's enjoyment. It's yeah. I never thought of it until you said that, that it is like it's your offering to the universe. It's it's your praise.

Iyanla Vanzant, here's the lesson when you find yourself in a new situation, a new circumstance, a new life experience, everything that requires healing is going to rush to the surface.

And if you don't take a minute to breathe, to gather yourself, to pray, you will do what you've always done. So you've got to be clear enough, grounded, enough centered enough to say, how am I going to handle it this time? That's right. So the lesson is. Pause, OK? We go from being 20 to 30 without a pause, 30 to 40 without a pause. We go from one job to the next, from one bed to the next from one pause to take a breath, pause.

And that's particularly women particularly make this mistake over and over and over again with relationships and men, too. You get out of one and you go into the next and you are now into the next one because it looks different or looks bigger or the grass is greener. You think that it's different and you bring all your old stuff to it. It took me 40 years to realize.

That I was trying to get my father's approval and acceptance. One man, 40 years. And I kept reliving my issues with my father over and over and over. One day my soul just opened up and the Holy Spirit said, you can't get your daddy to love you like that. What do you mean, you know, so that's when I had to take a pass and look at it and it's the truth, Oprah, it's facing the truth is hard.

It is painful as hell. Excuse me, Sunday. Excuse us. Super. So truth will set you free, but you have to endure the labor pains of birthing it. Michael Singer speaking for myself, I want to be able to be connected to that seat of the self that is ultimately where God flows through the power of God flows through. How do we begin to make that happen for ourselves?

All you have to do is get to the point on your everyday life. Every moment of life is a spiritual experience. I know you know that. Yes. And so I will here until Sunday. And the reason it becomes a spiritual experience is because you realized you are causing the vast majority of your own problems due to your mental reactions. So as life unfolds on a daily basis, you have the right to choose not to do that. You can still go to work.

You still take care of the kids. You just lean away from this this mess that the mind is doing to amplify and overemphasize over, exaggerate whatever is going on.

And then what do we do? Lean into what that that awareness is saying.

What will happen is when you let go of the noisy mind, you will end up in a seat of quiet, which I know you'll have to talk about.

You'll have a seat of quiet because that's what it is back there is a star in the sky. My experience is that now you can look at reality and you will know what to do.

Ultimately, I think what we're all seeking, even when we don't know it, what do you want? Everybody would say they want happiness, but aren't we all ultimately seeking freedom? Yes, we're seeking a state of absolute well-being.

And that's what freedom means. That's what that's what it means. Yeah. It was beautiful when you say because I know you know, it is the true freedom is freedom from yourself, not freedom for yourself. And Lamont, it's very easy for me to see God in my backyard with the dogs and with a very bitter cat that I call my own, but when someone's sick, when you get to bad phone call, when someone's heard from the doctor, when the appearance of life is very, very shaky and seeming, it throws me completely off my game.

It throws me for a loop. I think this can't be right. And I know now you believe that we can pray any time, anywhere, anytime, and you can say anything. And I say to God, sometimes you have got to be kidding. So it would be so much skin off your nose to cut this person a little slack. And I think you can say anything. You can say I'm mad at you and I'm not going to be a good sport about it.

How about that? And that's prayer. Silence can be prayer. Rage can be prayer. It's truth. So prayer when we are talking to something that the rest of the world may not be seeing right now, I mean, we were talking from the deepest part of our heart. We're trying to tell the truth. This prayer, that's prayer.

Jill Bolte Taylor, so what can brain science teach us about ourselves to help us cope when there's all this brain chatter going on?

Where do you focus your attention and pay attention to how things feel in your body? Because you know what you feel like in your body when you get angry and you have a choice when you get angry of either being angry or of paying attention to what it feels like in your body when you are angry and when you have that kind of physiological response, when you get angry, it only takes 90 seconds. It takes 90 seconds.

From the moment that you feel that trigger happen and you feel yourself starting to get angry for the chemicals to flush through your body and then flush completely out of you, 90 seconds is all.

So next time, Oprah, next time you start feeling yourself getting angry, I want you to look at your watch and start timing and start timing it.

Within 90 seconds, it will be gone and you'll go, OK, I just dodged that one. Really? Yeah. So 90 seconds. So then why do people harbor the same feeling for years?

They keep rethinking the same thought that restimulate that emotional circuitry and they rerun the loop.

Got it.

And I hook right back into that hostility and I'm going to run it again and I can stay angry. People can stay angry for days and weeks and years. It's phenomenal just because they're choosing either consciously or unconsciously, they're choosing to rerun the loops, the circuitry.

Zainab Salbi.

It is through working with women survivors of wars that I learn to how to appreciate beauty and to incorporate beauty in my own life. And look at me now.

I would like to still go where exactly. But I appreciate beauty right now. And beauty becomes one way of resisting, one way of building peace.

But you had to learn yourself. I mean, I look at you, I see a beautiful woman. It took you a while before you could look at yourself into a beautiful woman. You taught yourself to see your own beauty. How did you do that?

Well, I actually always thought, first of all, that I am not a beautiful woman. I would look at myself in the mirror. And no matter how many people, my former husband, everyone I like you are beautiful. It's like, no, I would look and I say, not a beautiful woman. I can say ugly woman, but not a beautiful woman, you know. And one day a Tibetan woman actually told me, she said, you need to start meditating on your eyes.

So I go to the mirror. Same mirror, by the way. Same mirror. And I'm meditating. And you still much to look at your whole face. And I said, looking into the people of my eyes and in the pupil, I just kept on meditating on it and I saw my soul. I don't know. And it was beautiful. What I saw was a beautiful person, but it was just the pupil. It's just one. And I was like, wow, that's a beautiful person inside.

And little by little, I mean through that better, little by little. I started seeing my own beauty.

It's the same food judging yourself. Tik Nhat Hanh. With that practice, you can always remain alive in the present moment, according to the teaching and the practice. It is possible to live happily right in the here and now. And in our tradition, the practice of mindful breathing and practice of mindful walking always help us to go home to the present moment in order to live deeply every moment of our daily life. So it's about being aware and grateful for what we have in our lives.

Yes, and not just the material, but for the fact that we do have our breath.

If you are fully present in the here and now, you need only to make a step to take a breath in order to enter the Kingdom of God. Happiness is possible in the here and now. And once you have done the kingdom, you don't need any more to run after objects of your craving like power, fame, sensual pleasure and so on.

OK, so what if in this moment of mindfulness you are being challenged, do you go to your back then or do you just not resist this challenging situation?

The first mindful breathing and recognize the feeling, recognize the situation and help us not to be myself to to be overwhelmed by the negative feeling like fear, anxiety. And you are still yourself. It's like a mother and the baby crying. Yes, she pick up the baby as she holds the baby tenderly in her arms, your pain, your anxiety is your baby. You have to take care of it. You have to go back to yourself and recognize the suffering and you embrace the suffering and you get the relief.

And if you continue with your practice of mindfulness and concentration, you understand the roots, the nature of that elby and you know the way to transform it.

I'm Oprah Winfrey and you've been listening to Super Soul Conversations, the podcast. You can follow Super Soul on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook. If you haven't yet, go to Apple podcast and subscribe. Wait and review this podcast. Join me next week for another super soul conversation. Thank you for listening.