What is a Good Life? #113
Attentiveness: The Key To Living Fully with Minna Salami
On the 113th episode of the What is a Good Life? podcast, I am delighted to introduce our guest, Minna Salami. Minna is an author and social critic, and currently senior fellow and research chair at The New Institute. She is the author of Sensuous Knowledge and Can Feminism Be African?, and her work appears in the Guardian, Project Syndicate, Al Jazeera, and other outlets.
In this incredibly captivating conversation, Minna shares her sense of living an extraordinary life, emphasising the importance of attentiveness and curiosity. We explore childhood and mystical experiences and their impact on her understanding of life.
This conversation is an invitation to notice, to really pay attention to life, and to live your own full expression of life.
The weekly clip from the podcast (5 mins), my weekly reflection (2 mins), the full podcast (61 mins), and the weekly questions all follow below.
1. Weekly Clip from the Podcast
To explore this question for yourself
2. My weekly reflection
Minna shares a fascinating experience in the clip above regarding a past life experience—an incident she experienced as a child, unaware of concepts of meditation but playing a game of attempting to have no thoughts by herself. This left her reflecting:
"It's fascinating that that could happen without any sense of what meditation is when I was a child. It's almost as if that was my natural state, and maybe for humans at large—like there's something in our natural state that just wants to not have thoughts, that needs that almost in order to experience deeper explorations."
She went on to add how "attentiveness encapsulates so many dimensions of our lived experiences."
She mentions being an analytical person who, despite mystical experiences, remains grounded. Her attentiveness to life brings her back to everyday thoughts, feelings, and experiences.
For me, when I consider experiences my rationality cannot make sense of, it leaves me with this wonderful paradoxical sense that all things are both real and not real at the same time.
If some experiences inform me that we are all connected—wonderful—pay attention to that and honour it. If some experiences leave me in my head, feeling quite separate, pay attention and be present to that also.
In this conversation, we briefly touched on experiencing grace and anger in the face of situations we would not particularly wish to face.
I had a temper growing up; anger was an emotion I often experienced. It remained much the same in adulthood until I began to explore it. Initially, I wanted to ignore my anger and ascend to more graceful and loving states—almost an expansion into spirit. While this seemed to contain it at times, it also led to moments where it felt more unpredictable than before. I hadn’t yet embraced my anger as part of me, seeing it as something to avoid rather than integrate.
At times, we strive for idealised states, yet this can feel ungrounded. We focus too much on out there rather than in here, losing connection to our emotions and lived experience—chasing only aspirations.
On the other hand, if we completely ignore our capacity for change or growth, we become too closed off and separate—even from life itself, which constantly seems in flux and movement. This disconnection can also distance us from the mystical or divine aspects of life.
I sense that we need to remain open to both our ascending spirits and our descent into our souls—the possibilities and the blood and bones of this experience.
We need to acknowledge both the deeply connected moments of oneness and the very individual moments or pockets of separateness we also feel. It is all part of this wonderfully stretching and paradoxical experience of life—this awe-inspiring, frustrating, fearful, and loving journey.
What I find so interesting about Minna’s sense of attentiveness in this life, and my own experiences of simply sitting with and observing life, is that life takes us on this incredible ride across the full range of existence.
The more we oppose or fight what is—clinging to one state or insisting that life is one thing when we are experiencing another—the more we seem to suffer.
Whereas, when we can hold that attentiveness, we can move with life and its changing states, no longer in opposition to its paradoxes but aware of the incredible gift they present us in this life.
None of this is to say life is one way or another, more to be attuned to whatever it presently is for you.
When we remain attentive to all of it, we find a wholeness not defined by understanding or solving it, but by embracing it fully as it is.
To explore this question for yourself
3. Full Episode - Attentiveness: The Key To Living Fully with Minna Salami - What is a Good Life? #113
4. This week’s Questions
What are you presently struggling and striving to solve that you may need to just sit with or accept?
Is there a relationship or situation in life that you requires you to be more attentive?
About Me
I am a coach, podcast host, and writer, based in Berlin, via Dublin, Ireland. I started this project in 2021, for which I’ve now interviewed over 250 people. I’m not looking to prescribe universal answers, more that the guests’ lines of inquiry, musings, experiences, and curiosities spark your own inquiry into what the question means to you. I am also trying to share more genuine expressions of the human experience and more meaningful conversations.
If you’re interested in exploring your own self-inquiry through one-on-one coaching, joining my 5-week Silent Conversations group courses, or fostering greater trust, communication, and connection within your leadership teams, or simply reaching out, feel free to contact me via email or LinkedIn.