Mindfulness-ish

I have a project this year.  I call it my "Mindfulness Project/Being Present/Being Open" (whatever I feel like calling it that day.  To that end, I always have four books in my bag:  one for fun reading, one that furthers my education for this project, and two notebooks; one for freewriting and one for for gratitude, etc.  (Yes,  my bag is heavy).  Over the course of this project so far, I have taken up meditation, am re-reading "A Course in Miracles", gone to Shaman Circles, participated in the Paradox Process, and have had the pleasure of familiarizing myself with remarkable thinkers like Hahn, Castaneda, Hancock, Chopra, Huston Smith, Ram Dass, and a few others.  I have experienced very powerful, healing things that I don't know I would have tried had I not been working on this project.

I like Jon Kabat-Zinn’s definition of mindfulness.

“Mindfulness means paying attention in a particular way;
On purpose,
in the present moment, and
nonjudgmentally.”

 Needless to say, I'm trying.  But when I woke up this morning (as my mother would say) "on the wrong side of the bed," I just didn't feel justified in being grumpy, sad, tired, exhausted, anxious, and a little depressed.  So I took great malicious joy in slamming down my coffee mug (well, setting down forcefully...don't want to break anything...), brushed my hair with lock-yanking glee, and brushed the gums right off my teeth.  It was like this creature was inside of me saying, "ooohhhh...yes...throw something, be mad, who do you want to piss off?"  That unhinged glee turned into roiling anxiety as I walked to the train, and then I started to feel sick.  Like angry sick.


What the hell? 


This is not thinking from the higher places.

Later, I sat down on the 8th floor of the Marriott Midtown and decided to try to figure out what was going in my body and brain.  I started to just write and then realized that it didn't matter what I wrote because I already knew. 

My ego was being a little bitch.  It was like she took up in the sandbox of my mind and knocked down all of the beautiful little sandcastles I had constructed sooooo carefully  (which, by the way, is also ego, though maybe with a smaller "e").  And I was observing her decimating them, saying "well, there goes that chapter about the assemblage point, oh!  Damn, I loved that part in "Be Here Now,"  heheheheh...she's on one...funny little ego."  Not once did I say to her, "Yo...ego...you're messing up my castles.  I built those.  How 'bout you step off?" 

If I'm learning right, the trick to being present in that imagined moment would have been to simply sit in the sand and not construct anything at all, to be there with the tantrum throwing brat and let her scream.  Thich Nhat Hahn says in his book "Be Here Now" (so good, beautifully written and touching) that (and I'm paraphrasing) when you feel a strong emotion, you should be with it and hold it like you would a small child.  Treat the powerful feelings gently.

A friend of mine asked me the other day if I had noticed any changes with my reading and practices, and I said "yes.  I can't control anything.  Not that I ever could, but doing this just helps me to be okay with the not having control part." 

I breathe, I think, I imagine, I become.  Ish.