MINDFULNESS CREATES HAPPINESS - INTRO
Life is really about “managing” two aspects of our lives: our “outer-environment” and considerably more important, our "inner-environment." Keeping all the plates spinning can be a daunting task, to say the least. Living in a fast-paced, schedule-oriented society like ours creates a very fixed and predictable structure to our lives, but this very structure to our lives leaves little flexibility and can create copious amounts of stress that can rob us of our sense of happiness and inner well-being. Fulfilling so many obligations to work and family means a large percentage of our lives is lived out merely at the level of ‘functionality,’ with very little time to devote to ourselves. This can have detrimental effects on our level of self-awareness and the degree to which we consciously navigate through life. Not engaged with the dynamic process of life, we tend to merely go through the motions of securing our most basic needs.
The key to having a sense of balance and any resemblance of peace of mind is by cultivating our ability to be "PRESENT." To be present is to live 'mindfully-engaged' in the 'now-ness' of each moment, in order to prioritize things, evaluate their relevance, and thus effectively manage our inner well-being.
Mindfulness and presence are elusive concepts for most because society keeps us living at such a hurried pace, we're always focused on what needs to be attended to next. As a result, we bring very little awareness to our state of being.
Awareness is the ONLY catalyst to bring about changes in ourselves and in our life. Without awareness our emotional state of mind remains entirely ‘reactive,’ instead of ‘responsive,’ and entirely circumstantial. Few discover that their state of mind is NOT a product of circumstance.
How often do we devote way too much time to certain aspects of our lives only to have other aspects suffer? There are many who work themselves to death, only to have their health and relationships deteriorate. This imbalance and inability to manage the various aspects of our lives can create so much unnecessary stress for us.
Our human intelligence, a recently acquired product of evolution, is such that if we do not organize it properly, it only causes confusion and misery. Instead of being robust with tremendous potential and possibility, it is a very sophisticated tool that has become a big problem for most of humanity.
With clever minds we've given our suffering all kinds of different names, calling it concern, stress, anxiety, pragmatism, security, depression, loneliness, sadness, or misery, but essentially it simply means our mind has gone rogue and is now perceived as being beyond our control.
“All negativity is caused by an accumulation of psychological time and denial of the present. Unease, anxiety, tension, stress, worry—all forms of fear—are caused by too much future, and not enough presence. Guilt, regret, resentment, grievances, sadness, bitterness, and all forms of non-forgiveness are caused by too much past, and not enough presence.”
Eckert Tolle
How often I hear people say, "I just can't seem to stop thinking about it! My mind won't shut off!"
No longer able to see that our thoughts and feelings are ours but not us, the complexion of our emotions is seen as almost entirely circumstantial - meaning, we believe our feelings are just a natural response to what is happening to us in any given moment. Therefore, we just surrender to them, feeling powerless to do anything but wait for them to pass. This is a very debilitating and disempowering premise to approach life from. Our feelings emerge from one thing and one thing only: Our perceptions!!!
We essentially narrate the world as we are experiencing it to bring it into a frame of reference. In this way, we give every moment context in a way that is consistent with our underlying beliefs, derived from past experiences, as to how the world “should be.” When the outside world is inconsistent with our beliefs of how things “should be” this creates suffering. This creates discordance in our energy - frequency - vibration (we are all a vibratory field of energy) and we feel the disconnect from our core self, the immaterial, infinite, consciousness animating the body we reside in.
So moving beyond suffering involves becoming mindful of it. But, oh how much energy we exhaust in trying to ignore it!
Pain in life is inevitable, but emotional suffering truly arises from within us and our inability to remain present. Tortured by our thoughts we find ourselves effortlessly floating back into the past, where we ruminate on memories and things we cannot change; or we project ourselves into the future with fear and anxiety of the unknown. Both are "non-realities" that are devitalizing projections of an overactive mind.
In other words, we lose our grip on reality as our mind writes a script over every experience, we're having instead of seeing and experiencing each moment for what it is. Our focus becomes very myopic in nature as we incessantly replay events and/or conversations from the past over and over, that we believe are the source of our pain. All the while, we mentally drift back and forth between these two non-realities: the past and/or the future and are anything but immersed in the present moment.
If we are suffering all by ourselves, it is our mind, along with its never-ending stream of thoughts, that is now working against us; no one else. As a result, we become victims of its seemingly intentional and incessant provocation. This is all fear masquerading as logical thinking as our mind tries connecting the dots in trying to make sense of what is causing us so much pain, but it's very pathological, compulsive, and misguided energy. Rather than soothing us, it devours us. Sadly, this is the default state of mind for most of society and this constant stress has profoundly detrimental effects on our health. Learning how to deal with stress in a healthy way is paramount to our well-being.
So, let's give this context:
Most of us have never paid attention to, nor have we explored the most important dimension of who and what we are. We are trapped with a constant outbound focus, believing LIFE is "out there" and we're "in here." Looking out from behind these eyes of ours, we see life as something to be pursued, never realizing it's only going on within us.
We cannot know life any other way than the way it happens within us. You, and you alone, ARE THE ONLY DOORWAY TO EXISTENCE for yourself and the experiences you’re having. LIFE is only experienced through the mechanisms of our body, which again, is OURS, but is not US. This distinction is crucial to one's understanding on their path to enlightenment.
And therein lies the problem. Our whole perception of life is determined, not by the events themselves, but rather by our interpretation of all the information we take in through our five senses. Everything we know or ever could know, has entered our understanding by seeing, hearing, tasting, touching, or smelling. This is the only way we can know life and perceive the world around ourselves. Without your senses you'd have no perception of the world or yourself at all. We experience this deprivation every night when we sleep.
And this is the distinction that must be made. Most people's level of awareness is such that they believe they are a human having experiences. But experience doesn't occur in the body. The body has no experiences. All experiences take place in the mind. Remove consciousness from the body and the body has no experiences whatsoever. The body is only a technology that processes sensory input that our mind in turn, interprets as an experience. We believe it's real, but is it?
What is real?
As we enter into sleep, the whole of existence disappears because our five senses have shut down. Obviously, we don't cease to exist, it's just that the mechanisms of the body are not being employed to create an experience for us. When we awaken, an obvious sign we still exist despite the absence of any "experiences," our awareness returns . . . at least of the outside world. We see ourselves as trapped in this avatar interacting with the world "out-there."
So, what I'm alluding to, is that our sense organs are all outbound. What we've internalized as ‘the world’ pressing in on us, are only impressions; indelible perceptions we've developed about ourselves, others, and the world around us, based on what has been taught to us and what has happened to us along our journey over the course of our life. The repetitious patterns that play out have given a predictability to aspects of our life, and that predictability predisposes us to seeing what we want to see. What we see depends largely upon what we look for.
The cumulative sum of all the impressions made upon us governing our hopes, fears, aspirations, biases, beliefs, prejudices, perspectives, and opinions –fashions and creates the lens we see reality through. This lens is our karma, and it creates every experience we have. When we understand our karma, we are empowered to better navigate our emotional responses to the experiences we’re having.
I would love to hear from you and hear your own personal thoughts on how you practice mindfulness or would like to in the comment section below. Let me know if the content of this article resonates with you, provides perspective, or helps you see things in a different way that empowers you to make different choices or see life and relationships through a different lens. I value your thoughts and feedback and look forward to hearing from you.
Love & Light to You in your continued Journey of Self-Discovery!
David
