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
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Multiple studies have demonstrated minorities and women score lower on standardized tests. A researcher, Claude Steele, sought to understand this gap. He first administered a standardized test to women under typical test conditions: white lab-coated test proctors presented an "intelligence test" with minimal further interaction. The previously identified lower scores were repeated. Then, he had the test proctor present the test with the following statement, "You may have heard that women perform more poorly on standardized tests, but that is not true for this particular test, never has been, never will be." The performance gap completely vanished. He repeated the study, with various opening statements, changing the expectation of what the test was measuring. Words like "test" and "intelligence" were removed. That is all it took to remove the performance gaps for minorities and women.
One factor is crucial to elicit this performance gap. The test had to be challenging. Only then does the performance gap rear its ugly head. Why would the difficulty of the test matter? For easy test questions, the performance was the same. It is only when the questions became more challenging that doubt would creep into the test-takers thoughts, "maybe it's true, maybe I am really not that smart, maybe what they say about me is true." The added challenge opened the door for self-defeating thoughts to enter, resulting in the performance gap.
These self-defeating thoughts can only impair our abilities when they can acquire a foothold. Frequently, these thought patterns are laid down very early in life. Over time, we may reinforce these thoughts when evidence appears to support our limitations and not our strengths. We fall into a self-confirming bias that filters out evidence to the contrary of these thought distortions. Mindfulness offers an opportunity to observe our unfolding thoughts and reality test their validity, rather than blindly accept them. In essence, a self-defeating thought is no different than any other thought, until we allow ourselves to believe it.
The Obama Effect, Perhaps.
Tags:
performance, thoughts
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