Hello and welcome to another episode of the Secular Buddhism Podcast. This is episode number 71. I am your host Noah Rasheda and today I'm talking about breaking the chain of reactivity.

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Before I jump into the topic of the podcast episode, I want to remind you of the Dalai Lama's advice. Do not use what you learn from Buddhism to be a Buddhist. Use it to be a better whatever you already are.

This has always been one of the key messages that I try to reinforce throughout the podcast and in general with my approach to teaching Buddhist concepts.

All of this is about helping you to become a better whatever you already are. It's not about changing you from something to something else.

Keep that in mind. The topic I've prepared for today is called Breaking the Chain of Reactivity.

I think this is a really important topic. If you've ever been in London and you've traveled on their underground, the subway system,

you will recognize the phrase or the expression mind the gap. It's on the yellow line down by your feet when you're about to board the train.

It's a warning to mind the gap between the platform and the train. You hear it over the intercom, over and over and over. You always hear them saying, mind the gap.

It's a fun expression that's used even as a tourist promotion. You can buy shirts that say mind the gap or mugs or little street signs that have the underground logo and this message of mind the gap.

It's also a reminder to mind the gap between stimulus and response. I have a friend who is telling me that in their family, they've kind of adopted this as a motto.

Rather than mind the gap, they say gap the mind as a reminder to put the gap in their mind between stimulus and response.

In that conversation and learning a little bit more about how they use this expression, something came up that actually prompted me to clarify this in a podcast episode was the idea of how this gap actually works.

I think it's a common misunderstanding to think that the gap between stimulus and response is found in an external circumstance and then how I feel or react to that.

For example, you call me a name and here I am feeling angry. Well, I wasn't capable of putting the gap between that stimulus and this response.

That's the misconception I want to address today. That's why I'm calling this breaking the chain of reactivity because first I want to bring attention to the fact that it's a chain.

It's not that there's a stimulus and a response, although there is, it's more like there's a stimulus and a response and that response is the stimulus of the next response and that chain goes on and on and on.

At any given moment, everything that's happening now is happening because of what happened before and this is the overall teaching of interdependence.

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