Tonight's talk will be kind of an overview of the idea of mindfulness, what it is,

mindfulness slash inside what we're trying to accomplish here,

and building on hopefully some of the ideas that Melissa introduced in this morning's

talk. So in life when we're faced with any

kind of important decision or just have to make choices as it were, we tend to rely, especially heavily on circuits of the brain that we might refer to as analytical analytical conceptual narrative storytelling.

In other words, if somebody came up to you and said,

Wow, have I got a great job for you? You won't believe it.

This is what it is and started to describe a new possible employment, when it came time afterwards to make

a decision about whether to take that job or not, you would probably visualize in your mind

that sort of create images of what this job might look like, visualizing yourself going there to the job, seeing yourself in a place that you actually haven't been, you might visualize great things happening or if you're like me from the upper west side you might

and then from the lower side you might visualize how terrible it could possibly be.

You might go into catastrophizing.

We might tell a story about whether this job looks good for us on paper and whether the title would

be good and how much money we make as opposed to this amount of money we're making right now

and whether we'd be able to travel or how much more of the rent we could afford to pay

and whether we be able to move.

And so what we're doing is we're in essence what's called representing the world in our heads.

Representing, in other words, we're painting a visual and a set of ideas that represents the actual

lived world to try to make a decision.

You're not actually at the job when you're visualizing what

it'll be like. You're trying to figure out whether it's a good idea to take it or not. If somebody asks whether you want to leave your job,

or whether you're happy at it,

...