Monday Mindfulness Minute: "I am never upset for the reason I think."

“One of the most amazing things you will ever realize is that the moment in front of you is not bothering you—you are bothering yourself about the moment in front of you.” Living Untethered: Beyond the Human Predicament

Life outside moves at such an incredible pace that it can be hard to pinpoint the source of our frustration, and we end up almost exclusively blaming our upset feelings on some external happening. What if the source of our frustration was something that lived inside of us?

In The Boy, The Mole, The Fox, and The Horse, the little boy remarks, "Isn't it odd. We can only see our outsides, but nearly everything happens on the inside." As it turns out, what happens on the outside can stay with us on the inside. The Sanskrit word for this is a Samskara. Samskara translates as an impression or imprint that remains with us after an outside event is over (I remember it because -skar reminds me of scar, and it's like an inner scar we take on).

These internal scars are like internal wounds that we spend our lives protecting. Ever wonder why we get so defensive when we get called out in a meeting or a driver cuts us off in traffic, it's because we are protecting some open wound from the past that hasn't had a chance to heal. The insidious nature of these open wounds is that because they are on the inside, and we never look inside, we blame the effects of them getting hit on what is happening outside. This misdirection leads to a lack of healing and leads to us having the same negative feelings over and over.

It might sound like we're arguing semantics, but this shift in our perspective can be the difference between living as a victim our entire lives, thrown here and there by what's happening outside, and living from an elevated perspective where our automatic reactions aren't one of upset at what's happening outside but one of gratitude because it is showing us an internal wound that needs to be healed.

Monday Mindfulness Minute: Appreciating The extra Ordinary Is Extraordinary

"The great lessons from the true mystics, from the Zen monks, is that the sacred is in the ordinary, that it is to be found in one's daily life, in one's neighbors, friends, and family, in one's back yard... To be looking everywhere for miracles is a sure sign of ignorance that everything is miraculous." Abraham Maslow (as cited in Pronoia p. 207)

Breathing

Having enough food to eat

Getting clean water from the fountain or the refrigerator

Having a roof over our heads at home and work

Hanging out with friends

Walking the dog

Reading a book

I don't think any of us would necessarily define these items as extraordinary. How often do we see pictures or videos of these posted on social media? Hardly ever. (Unless of course we are hanging out with friends on a tropical island, eating a fancy meal at the hot new restaurant in town, or showing off our fancy new fridge that keeps water at a glacier level of coldness)

It seems that in our panic for greatness and growth, we are steadily overlooking the ordinary happenings which may be the only true calories that leave us fulfilled, alive, and ok.

I fall into this trap all the time - believing the mind that tells me what I'm doing is not enough and too ordinary. Feeling this existential crisis of not good-enough-ness and ordinariness seems to correlate to when I overlook and forget all of the seemingly ordinary things I have to be grateful for right now.

We are taught repeatedly to be extraordinary, to do extra, get extra, be extra, and that if we accomplish these we will receive the ultimate gift: aliveness. But what if the extraordinary feeling of being alive on earth right now can only be accessed by focusing on the extra ordinary life that surrounds us daily?

The Boy, The Mole, The Fox, and The Horse

Let's commit this week to being extraordinary by focusing on the extra ordinary around us.

Monday Mindfulness Minute: Can you hear the static thoughts?

"There's a radio playing in our head, Radio Station NST: Non-Stop Thinking." Silence (Thich Nhat Hanh) p. 3

As an avid Spotify user, I rarely listen to the radio in my car and have never preset any radio stations. This means there is usually a cacophony of static for a few minutes before the Bluetooth connects. I used to hate the noise and would turn the volume down as quickly as possible, but I've started to enjoy the little bit of irritation that starts to build in the mind and seeing that I don't have to immediately make it go away. The static has come to serve as a wonderful reminder of what is usually going on inside my mind most hours of the day.

Have you heard the static of the mind? You know, the inside voice that is constantly comparing, criticizing, and complaining (labeled as the "3 Cancers of the Soul" in Think Like a Monk) and never seems to stop. In his book The Untethered Soul, Michael Singer describes this voice as an inner roommate. The static voice can make what should be a perfect moment not so much. The static voice tells us we’re not there and will never be there. The static voice is unable to fully live in the present. 

But just as we can change the station in our cars, we can learn to tune our inside voice to different frequencies. But what are the different stations of the mind? In his book, Map of Consciousness, Richard Hawkins does an expert job of describing what stations our minds can be tuned to.

So what radio station of mind are you tuned to? Do you enjoy the music? If not, have you ever tried to change the station?

As we enter this week, let's remember that our minds don't have to play the same static over and over and that it is completely within our power to not buy into the repeated narratives of the mind as we evolve how we see and hear life.