Opening to Our Lives

How I pay attention to “my” world colors my experience and creates my reality.

When I am mindful–intentionally remaining open to life–things flow better for me. Mindfulness doesn’t have much to do with thought, but rather interpreting events through the awareness of the heart. (I have heard that in most Asian languages the word for heart and mind is the same–would like to explore that further in another future post.)

In our education system, we don’t receive training about “how” to pay attention–typically children receive negative feedback when they fail to pay attention. The emphasis is all on thinking.

Where do thoughts come from to begin with? I believe they are waves of energy that radiate all around us within our field of awareness. Unseen, like radio waves, they ricochet past us, mostly unnoticed, all day, every day. It’s our choice which signals we choose to tune in and listen to. The people and situations we surround ourselves with have a strong influence on the quality of thought messages we are likely to be exposed to. Choose your friends wisely.

Thoughts are associated with belief. I need my brain to construct a hypothesis to explain what I see happening around me. This explanation is necessarily based on projections of my interpretations of events in my past. If I have faulty interpretations lingering from the past, my present and future models are likely to be of the same ilk.

Belief implies doubt. Why do I need to believe something if it is inherently true? True for whom?

Mindfulness implies knowing, rather than believing–opening to ones own truth. When I try out ideas in my life and they continue to work for me in a way that I expect, my relationship with these ideas becomes one of knowing rather than believing. That which I know as my truth cannot be argued away or dis-believed.

Awareness and inner knowing help to balance creativity and imagination. These gifts take us to a different dimension than thinking.

Today I will rest in an awareness that is very stable and refuses to be thrown off by the events of the day, whatever they may be. Like the water lily, I will remind myself to remain grounded, with my roots deep below the surface of what is shared and seen in the world. I remind myself that I am in this world, but not of it.