Mitra Manesh, the founder of Innermap App  Innermap,  is a mindfulness educator with over 3 decades of experience and practice. She blends Western methods and Eastern traditions in a synthesis that cultivates intelligence and wisdom. A student of Rumi’s philosophy, a former Human Rights Commissioner, Mitra has a private practice in Beverly Hills, CA and teaches at UCLA’s Mindful Awareness Research Center in the School of Neuroscience/Semel Institute. 

A very rough transcription of my interview.

I’m here with Mitra Manesh and it’s meditation teacher mindfulness-based coach. The first question I have is. Why meditate?

Why meditate, because meditation is the study of South and eventually we can no longer skip over ourselves and we need to meet date except and hopefully greet ourselves and also meditation is a great sampler of how. A mindful life can look like so hopefully and eventually we would like to copy and paste what we do in our meditation in our daily life. I haven’t that nobody’s approached it from that place yet.

The next question is what is your definition of mindfulness? And what does it look like to live a mindful life?

Okay, so as you know, I teach mindfulness and have taught many many decades. So I’ve created my own definition nothing unusual. Just something that goes home for me and the way I Define mindfulness. As being awake and present with curiosity and compassion so I used for keywords. And the first one is a week. You may say what do you mean me to try I’m sitting here obviously up a week I drove for hours, right? But I’m not talking about physical weakness. I’m talking about with our sense of being aware and awake and knowing the here it’s opposite of being on autopilot. The second word I use was present and that is basically the opposite of being either in the past or in the future and you’ve heard me say that past is wonderful and we do want to go there but with a visitor’s visa. Because we want to learn or even maybe remember our grades experiences and learn from them even and also the future we would like to go there too. Lightly. The key word here is like the plan and come. After the present moment, so whenever we stay there too long either in the past or present or future and then that’s where all our troubles reside the extreme of being in the past brings a sense of sadness and even depression and extreme of being in the future brings a sense of anxiousness. So every sadness and depression needs a past and every anxiousness and anxiety needs a future. So it’s looking at but if we are looking into the past we’re looking at it in a light way. We’re observing it as opposed to living it exactly and grew up. There is a need for a purpose. That’s why I called the visitor Visa. I’m going to The Limited period of stay and I’m going to see some things of interest learn something. Hopefully, expand my Horizon of understanding life. So it’s very purposeful. I don’t go there to lament I go there to learn it’s a different and same thing with planning I go there to plan because of course if you and I didn’t plan we wouldn’t be able to meet today. Sure. However when anything. Even good and I have another relationship with good and bad. But let’s call it good whenever we do something over a certain line. It turns into something not useful. I’m in a very difficult sewn and why can’t we really plan and determine the future because at best I plan the day our the week with the knowledge of that present moment and as you know the knowledge or the facts are always changing, so I planned you plan to be here half an hour earlier, right?