Waking Up Together: a mindfulness blog

How will you engage this moment?  Will you flip the switch into autopilot? Or will you accept the invitation to step fully into the here-now?

Within every moment, we have an opportunity. We can continue to reinforce the habitual, the tried and true, the known. And in doing so, we will continue to arrive at the same outcome of all the past moments.

Or we can accept the invitation to step fully into this moment. To completely inhabit body.  What might we discover in this exploration of the here-now?  Who knows? And this is exactly the point. For it is in this moment that Life is unfolding. It is only in this moment that the answers dwell. It is only in this moment that we experience all that Life offers.

Leaving the familiarity of auto-pilot can be scary. Even though auto-pilot leaves us at the whim of our thoughts, at least the territory is known. At least the demons that dwell there carry no surprises as we have done battle time and time again. But what would it be like to drop the sword, expose those demons for the illusionary wisps of thought that they are? What would it be like to shift our energy not to the known battle but back into this unfolding moment. We just may discover that those demons cannot dwell in the fresh light of day. They run and scatter as we empower them no more. We just may find a Bigger Me that has no need for those battles of old.  A Bigger Me that breaths in the cool clear air of here and breaths out into the expansiveness of now.  A Bigger Me, free from shackles, free to run and play!

“Beyond our ideas of right-doing and wrong-doing,
there is a field. I’ll meet you there.
When the soul lies down in that grass,
the world is too full to talk about.
Ideas, language, even the phrase ‘each other’
doesn’t make sense anymore.”

   ~ Rumi

Tags: freedom, mindfulness, thoughts

In the Sufi tale of Looking for the Key, we find the wise sage Mulla Nasrudin searching for his lost key outside his home.  A passer-by, curious about Mulla’s searching in the dust, offers to help.  As time passes, the crowd grows assisting in the search, as promises grow of riches to be shared once the key is found.  After many hours, a young boy asks Mulla, “Are you certain you dropped the key right here?”  “No,” replies Mulla, “…I lost the key somewhere inside my house.” The crowd stops and asks, “Why are we looking out here?”  “Your insight is clear…,” responds Mulla, “… it is far too dark to look for the key in my house. There is far more light out here!”

As we approach another turning of the year, making resolutions to do more of this or less of that, where are you looking for this change to occur?  Far too often, while we honestly seek change, we look where the “light is brightest,” only at the action.  But from both neuroscience and Buddhism, we learn that all action is preceded by intention.  Athletes use the power of mental imagery to perform a specific movement to improve their abilities.  In this mental rehearsal, nearly all the same neurons are fired just as though their body is moving.  What if we put this power of intention to work in our daily lives?

As we seek to change, either prompted by New Year’s Eve or later in 2023, consider a new approach: learning how to shine the light into those dark areas where intention dwells.  Mindfulness practices invite us to access this innate capacity to witness the unfolding thoughts that drive emotions and behavior.  This simple act of observation creates a gap between trigger and reaction.  And within this gap, dwells choice: the choice to continue to reinforce the habitual reactions or experiment with a new response.  Remembering that neurons that fire together, wire together, we invite true long-term behavior change with each choice made a new.  And a true “out with old, and in the new” arises.

 Wisdom Tales: Looking for Lost Keys

Tags: change, mindfulness, sufi

I recently came across a quote by Dr. Hans Selye, "...it is important to keep in mind that stress is an abstraction; it has no independent existence." Selye was the researcher who coined the term stress in the 1950s, so this quote is worth exploring. When it comes to stress, commonly we focus on the events in our lives that result in struggling and suffering. Selye proposed just the opposite: stress is not outside, but driven from the inside. Stress is the relationship we create with these external events. This does not mean our experience of stress is not real. All the symptoms - across mind, body and emotions - are real as the outcome of this relationship with external stressors.

When speaking about relationships, we may or may not be able to affect the outside half of this equation. We always have the capacity to affect our contribution to this relationship. Mindfulness offers a two-fold approach to managing our contribution. First, I can observe my habitual reaction to the external event. What shows up when the stressor is present - in thoughts, sensations and emotions? A key quality of mindfulness is to be kind and gentle in how we observe ourselves and these reactions. Judging and criticizing are likely just to compound the experience of stress. Suspending judgment, as best as we can, creates space between ourselves, our perception of the stressor and the reaction. This observational stance with the stressors and our reaction already put us on the path to a shift in relationship with the external event.

Secondly, I can choose to comply with the old reaction or experiment with a new response. The beauty of experimentation: there is no way to fail! No matter the outcome, I become just that much better informed on how different behaviors produce different outcomes. With time and practice, we build out a better stress response toolkit. The more extensive our toolkit, the more diverse range of stressors I become prepared to manage. Remembering that "neurons that fire together wire together," these new responses become my new normal for how I relate to external events.

Stress - "it's all in your head" and the way out is found there as well!

Tags: mindfulness, selye, stress

Greetings! Please watch this fascinating TED talk on studying happiness. More stuff does not make us happier (OK, no surprise there!). Does wandering mind make us happy? Apparently not. Even during a current unpleasant experience, taking a trip in our minds does not provide a break or escape, just more unhappiness. This dovetails well with the mindfulness approach: to be in full contact with whatever is unfolding, whether I like it or not, I am more likely to experience the transient nature of reality. This increased experience of non-permeance leads to acceptance, patience and freedom from habitual mind states that drive our emotions and behaviors. Want to be happier? Stay in the moment

Peace!

Paul

Tags: happiness, mindfulness, ted