Meeting Life with Mindfulness

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Once you begin noticing the mind through the practice of watching it, something surprising happens.  You discover mindfulness is not about managing life, life can do just fine on its own thank you very much.  It is about meeting life where it blossoms.  Managing life can feel exhausting – filled with controlling, fixing, rushing, reacting – no wonder we are exhausted at the end of the day.  Meeting life has ease built into it as we become curious, feel what’s going on, continually arriving in a fresh moment and responding from insight rather than habit. 

Life doesn’t always blossom into warm and fuzzy experiences. It often blossoms into the thorny, prickly ones.  As you continue to practice observing, notice what flavor your experiences come in: pleasant, unpleasant or neutral.  Again, get curious about it.

Humans are wired to move away from thorny, prickly discomfort as quickly as possible.  Mindfulness gently interrupts that reflex. It invites us to stay present even when experience is uncomfortable or unpleasant, we learn to sit beside ourselves with curiosity instead of immediately trying to escape.  We want to be able to meet and get to know our experiences before changing them.  It’s analogous to meeting someone for the first time and then immediately turning our back on them. Ouch.

You can always begin by noticing the rise and fall of your breath, the sensation of your feet meeting the floor, or the subtle rhythm of your heartbeat; small anchors that remind the body that it is here, now, supported no matter what.

Is it possible to carve out those 2-3 minutes a day to sit with yourself and not do anything but simply notice; get to know your own mind by watching it?  Over time, this simple act becomes something deeper – a relationship with yourself built on patience, curiosity and care.  You might be surprised by what you discover.

In-joy meeting life,

Debbie