What do you look for habitually in your every day life? To know this, you must ‘watch’ yourself, in particular, your mind.
The unwatched or un-monitored mind runs on reaction. Something happens and the mind reacts, usually in the same way it has reacted for a long, long time. Let’s say you get to work and you are in a relatively good space. Then you open your email and start reading – in a very short time you start to feel a familiar stress building in your gut and/or your chest. There is so much to be done in so little time. Your mind is responding to what you are reading. The feeling wasn’t there before and now it is. This is an automatic response – what I call a brain track.
What happens if you stop, just stop, for the length of time it takes to breathe deeply and say to yourself “This is not who I am. I may not know who I am, but I know I am NOT stress and reaction and tension”. Then allow yourself that short space of time to be still; no thoughts, no judgments, no decisions, no worry, no fear. Just be. Breathe deeply again and go back to your inbox.
You have just stopped the flow of reactivity, even if for a short few seconds. Do this often during the day and you will begin to see a new world emerging.
- When you give yourself space, you allow something else to see through your eyes, hear through your ears, understand through your mind. In that space you allow for new and different ideas and experiences to occur.
- You also allow yourself to detach from the ever present mind talk that causes the stress and anxiety. Just a little at a time. As this occurs, you begin to be more aware of this mind talk, and that you are able to actually watch it in motion.
- As this awareness grows, you begin to see life through difference lenses. Somehow LIFE begins to flow more easily. You move on from what were previously perceived as problems. As challenges arise, and they still will arise, you look at them differently and you find that those old reactive modes just aren’t how you want to be anymore.
This is not an overnight process, it is an ongoing, maybe lifetime process. The wonderful thing is that the more you find yourself able to let go of the grip the mind has in the present moment, the more magic you will find in that moment.
Life, as she flows through your cells, your brain, your awareness, is most amazing and magical. Give it a try, you might like it.