Today is going to be a good day. It is. There is no question. We all know that firmly.
Whether the day is filled with joyful reward or even if awful events transpire within it, we can still silently and wordlessly inform ourselves that the day will absolutely be faced by the strong and capable person that is always alive within us all. But…
We must actively conjure this version of our Self. We must feel our posture rise, and our breathing deepen. We must feel a sense of energy flowing through us. As physicists confirm, we are literally made of energy. Let us get it all pointed in one direction. Toward whatever life demands or offers.
Thoughts about limitations are irrelevant when 100% is involved. Today we are sure that, with whatever resources we have available to us, and in whatever balance is required, we will meet the day with the clarity that goes with giving the universe 100%. That is a small price for to pay for a sense of living with powerful direction and purpose.
Even if we experience events like frustration or anger, we must accept that sometimes we are the student and sometimes we are the teacher. If the universe needs us to be the villain for a scene or two, then we must accept that these events happen in all lives and move on with our strength intact.
Our job is not to use our little thoughts to question the wisdom of an infinite universe. Conscious, word-based, me-centered egotistical thinking reduces our sense of flow, which we experience as something having gone wrong for us. But…
Healthy rivers include both eddies and rapids. A flowing river moves past those in their own time, without complaint.
Breathe deeply. Let us live today with our souls open. Today, we make enjoying the experience of life a priority over liking the specifics of the day. That through-line is what allows our power to engage with our lives. And today, life itself is an active pursuit.
Deep breath. Let it out slowly. Focus. Breathe deep again and power up. Let us begin.
Following a serious childhood brain injury Scott McPherson unwittingly spent his entire life meditating on the concepts of thought, consciousness, reality and the self. This made him as strange to others as they were to him. Seeing the self-harm people created with their own overthinking, Scott dedicated part of his life to helping others live with greater awareness. He is currently a writer, speaker and mindfulness instructor based in Edmonton, AB, where he finds it strange to write about himself in the third person.
It can be a good thing to build a random number generator into our day. Then we can use it as a trigger to signal us to check-in with where our internal narrative is at random times.
These are easily built by just choosing something random, like the number 15, or the colours yellow and blue appearing together. It just has to be something that we do not control, yet something our awareness remains very consciousness of, so that it can signal us when we do see our talisman.
How it works is simple: when we see the number 15 within bus route 2150, or the number 15 in a phone number for a plumbing company, or a 15 within a licence plate or billboard, that’s the random signal for us to check-in with where our thinking is at, at that exact moment.
Likewise, if we see a car with a Ukrainian flag on its bumper its blue and yellow colours can signal us to check in with our thinking. A blue and yellow blouse on a woman? Check in. A blue house with a yellow fence, check in.
This practice has a double benefit. First, it takes our mind off our personal thoughts and makes us more aware of our moment to moment surroundings. And secondly, it subconsciously starts to trigger us to check-in with where our idle mind has wandered to in the event that we are lost in thought.
And speaking of that wandering thought, it’s also useful to look at life to see if we’re developing habits as to where our emotional ‘low ground’ really is. If our thoughts are allowed to wander, do we tend to head towards excited, creative or curious thoughts? Or fearful, insecure or sad thoughts? These are our indicators of when and when not to take action to change our psychology.
Let’s each develop our own unique triggers. We can put a post-it note in our work-space to remind us of our talisman if that’s what we need. And yes, we’re all allowed to forget what our triggers are and we can restart with new ones. Because the point isn’t to avoid failure, it’s to practice being aware. This way, even failed practice is practice that moves us forward.
Let’s all find our own signs and let’s use them to expand our moment to moment awareness of the world around us. In doing so, may our days be deeper and more profound.
Following a serious childhood brain injury Scott McPherson unwittingly spent his entire life meditating on the concepts of thought, consciousness, reality and the self. This made him as strange to others as they were to him. Seeing the self-harm people created with their own overthinking, Scott dedicated part of his life to helping others live with greater awareness. He is currently a writer, speaker and mindfulness instructor based in Edmonton, AB, where he finds it strange to write about himself in the third person.
It gets mentioned often in my work because it really is important. It should be seen as a deeply spiritual act.
When did we each last laugh? Even when things are heavy, eventually we will need to lighten our emotions or we’ll be crushed. And laughter shouldn’t be something we leave to chance. We should have it as a part of our daily agenda in life.
We should all look at our weekly calendars and in them we should do our best to include some time with a funny friend, or to see a funny movie, or watch a funny show, or play, or to play some game that makes us laugh. We can even just watch comedians on YouTube.
Maybe we should even colour code times in our calendars where there is a high likelihood of laughing. Too little colour? That’s a week lacking in soul.
How and why we laugh doesn’t matter. It’s the laughing itself that we should see as being very real spiritual development. If that feels like a cheat it isn’t. Getting healthy not only can be enjoyable, to me it’s always been very weird that anyone ever thought that getting healthy needed to be painful. Why would that be? Catharsis maybe yes, but liberation feels great.
Let’s all make sure to keep our portals to joy open. Let’s laugh deeply and often and intentionally. We cannot lose touch with that part of ourselves. That version of us should be familiar.
Many times when working with someone new, I will see them react to hearing their own laugh for the first time in –sometimes years. So that ability might feel innate –and it is– but the more we do of it the better we get at finding reasons to do it. And it’s those moment by moment wins that add up to a great life.
We should considering making a category in our calendars for laughing. We need to ensure we get at least one good shot at some belly laughs every week at minimum and, if we can pull it off, we should go for one a day minimum. Everything over that is like icing on the cake. It just keeps getting better.
What a brutal spiritual guide I make, huh? Laugh more, I say. It’s because it’s a form of joyful prayer. When it is done so fully that we become the laugh –and cease for a time to be our ego-selves– that is where a state of enlightenment is discovered; a place where there is no time, and where we perceive no self to be judged or be wrong.
In that place we are always complete.
Laughing melts our egos into the energy of joy, expressed in a present moment. It’s like being in a church with walls made of light. Let’s all make sure we spend some time there on a regular basis.
Following a serious childhood brain injury Scott McPherson unwittingly spent his entire life meditating on the concepts of thought, consciousness, reality and the self. This made him as strange to others as they were to him. Seeing the self-harm people created with their own overthinking, Scott dedicated part of his life to helping others live with greater awareness. He is currently a writer, speaker and mindfulness instructor based in Edmonton, AB, where he finds it strange to write about himself in the third person.
Today, many people have turned their concept of ‘sleep’ into some sort of terrible terrain that they are afraid to traverse each night. If we choose to think of sleep that way then it only makes sense that it will feel that way when we get there. We’ve pre-demonized it.
Half the joy of dinner at a great cook’s house is built by our anticipation of how good the meal will be. Half of the joy of a horror film is that something might jump out of a closet. Anticipation and fear are both projections of the future that are known to consistently exceed reality’s ability to deliver. Thoughts do a lot.
Without our thoughts about it, Disneyland is just another paved lot filled with fake storefronts, common rides and cute characters. Take our thoughts about sleep away and a bed is not dangerous territory, it’s just a rectangular piece of soft furniture for laying down on. There is no reason to fear it. It’s our thinking about the act of falling asleep that we’re afraid of. But now the bed and bedtimes trigger those courses of thought.
It is time to reinvent bedrooms into meditation salons. We don’t go there to sleep, we go there to commune with spirit –to break the bonds of our earthly selves. Dreaming is a very spiritual thing.
Part of the problem is that so many people today use sleep aids. Those impact memory, so people don’t remember their dreams. Even if they are having fun at night too many of us can’t recall what happened.
Even more than just regular old exciting dreams, lucid dreaming can be an extremely enjoyable and rewarding experience. But again, to do it most of us will likely need to have a drug-free mind. If we can work our way through that however, we do get a reward…
Rather than turning the idea of sleep into something scary, let’s make it into something exciting and desirable. Let’s make it into a meditative opportunity. Instead of seeing our beds as hostile territory, we can see it more like a shaman’s platform, or some kind of test area in a science lab.
Bed is the surface that we lay on when we want to explore inner space –where we transport into our lucid dreams –as Astralnauts.
It might seem over-the-top and unattainable, but all it really requires is for us to take the task seriously. I learned it in about 2-3 months as a kid. But I tried every single night. No practice, no skill.
The easiest way is just to repetitively tell ourselves we will wake up in our sleep every night, and then stop to remember our dreams in the morning. Repeat then wait.
I did it by accident, by trying to ‘be awake’ for the moment that I fell asleep. However we do it, it’s important that we understand what we’re doing. We’re simply layering our waking consciousness over top of our sleeping mind much like our ego controls our biological mind while we’re technically ‘awake.’
When I succeeded and woke up in a dream, I’m not sure that was because I caught the moment of falling asleep or not. But after a few weeks of trying I suddenly found myself in a weird state of mind. I was in a dream, but part of me was awake. It was like achieving superhero status. In the dream I could do anything.
Many people have learned to do this. It’s better than labelling ourselves as insomniacs and just surrendering into that victim state. There’s no reason to do that when we can just as easily turn the Torture Chamber of Insomnia into the Horizontal Temple of Dreams. But again, it takes practice before the payoff.
We can all start by just remembering the unguided dreams we do have. If we don’t remember them now, no problem. If we start taking a few minutes each morning to try to, I have yet to meet the person who couldn’t over time.
Even within the first week of trying most people notice they are grabbing more snippets, and eventually the snippets get longer and within a few months people can often remember them quite easily, and in fair detail.
Over time we just get better at it like any other thing our brains do. And, if we remember them we can also think about how fascinating many of them are. They are also good clues as to how our mind is processing the world at any given time.
If we can come to see dreams as a kind of temporary freedom, then bed time isn’t scary. Instead, it becomes more like an opportunity, or a trip to the holodeck, or some fantastic theatre where we even feel what’s on the ‘screen.’ They can be great learning experiences.
Bottom line, sleep will never come easy if we see our beds as hostile territory. But that conception is made entirely of our own thoughts, so to change those we must first accept responsibility for them. From there we can use our minds to turn our time in bed into the very activity of falling sleep, all so we may have the lucid experiences that can not only make bed time quite fun, but they also make for a wonderful and useful form of meditation.
Following a serious childhood brain injury Scott McPherson unwittingly spent his entire life meditating on the concepts of thought, consciousness, reality and the self. This made him as strange to others as they were to him. Seeing the self-harm people created with their own overthinking, Scott dedicated part of his life to helping others live with greater awareness. He is currently a writer, speaker and mindfulness instructor based in Edmonton, AB, where he finds it strange to write about himself in the third person.
It’s a holiday here in Canada so here’s a reminder for today:
Ideally we are quiet-minded and there are no voices in our head. But okay, if we can’t quiet ourselves enough to point ourselves toward that silence, we can at least direct ourselves toward thinking charitable, compassionate and loving thoughts about ourselves.
That’s not ego. That’s the real us. We are decent people, we do care and we do want to love and to be loved. And of course like everyone else we have some struggles and peccadilloes, but that doesn’t change our worthiness in the slightest.
We are as integral to the universe as anyone else. So keep in mind (no pun intended) that every single voice inside our head is just us talking to ourselves. It’s absurd that we would pay attention to that voice as though it has some profound meaning.
Silence. Silence has profound meaning. Talk is all ego by nature. Maybe it lines up with reality, maybe not. Self-talk presents us with a divided world where comparison leads to suffering. Ego divides and describes. Our spirit doesn’t.
We should all do our best to try to use our minds as an awareness and absorption input device and not as an opinions and language output device. And we always always always always need to remember that any voice in our head is meaningless and it holds zero power to make us do anything unless we inexplicably choose to act on hollow thoughts.
If we’re going to think anything, think positive thoughts. But as much as we can, we should just try to be really, really quiet. After all, ff we’re quiet enough, wisdom is all that’s left. Take care.
Following a serious childhood brain injury Scott McPherson unwittingly spent his entire life meditating on the concepts of thought, consciousness, reality and the self. This made him as strange to others as they were to him. Seeing the self-harm people created with their own overthinking, Scott dedicated part of his life to helping others live with greater awareness. He is currently a writer, speaker and mindfulness instructor based in Edmonton, AB, where he finds it strange to write about himself in the third person.
An enlightened view of life is challenging because it requires a curious shift rather than the acquisition of new knowledge from outside of us. It’s why I’m a guide and not teacher. People need to experiment with their own experiences, not their intellectual understanding. I just prompt the experiences in a way tailored to them.
In an attempt to help point to this shift in perspective, imagine that you already sincerely have a way to love everyone without condition. You may not want to spend time with many, and you may disapprove of some of their actions, but below all of that there is a basis of love –of believing in that healthy part of the other person even when it’s not clearly evident. It is a belief in the human spirit.
Assuming that were true, can we then see that we don’t need to build bridges of love to others, we only need to remove the barriers in our thinking that are preventing us from accessing the love that is the basis of everyone’s shared existence.
Rather than finding out how to forgive or put up with someone, we need to ask ourselves what judgmental thoughts do we have that lead us to create feelings that we then attach to that other person –just as others do likewise to us?
Let’s take the example of someone that we don’t like, but someone that is liked by the people we do like. Imagine this person earnestly. We should imagine the qualities they have that cause the people we like, to like this other person. Then we can ask ourselves, what sort of sources a person’s history might provide explanations for the way they act?
We should ask ourselves if we truly believe the other person is being the way they are to irritate us, versus the idea that we struggle to stay mentally calm around certain types of entirely legitimate people who express nothing more than a normal human foible or even a quality we dislike.
Maybe we’re a woman who can’t stand another lady at work because she’s always sticking her nose into things and we don’t like it. She’s so nosy we can’t imagine how she has any of the friends she mentions. But those friends don’t have that barrier-thinking between her and their love like we do.
They were the for –or learned about– her history. Maybe she was a fatherless 16 year old caring for her mother while she died of cancer and what tortured her most was that no one even offered any help. Her friends know that she thinks the greatest tragedy in the world is people suffering all alone. So they understand that she comes across as a busy-body, but they just see a loving person caring for others.
Meanwhile, imagine that we were raised to see privacy as very important and so those taught thoughts clash with her taught thoughts, so while others can make friends with her, we do not. But the barrier was and is only thoughts based on histories we had little control over.
Or in another example, maybe a guy comes across as overly macho and we’re another guy who finds that irritating. But what if he’s only that way because his Dad left when he was a kid? And he felt –and people told him– he had to man-up, and it’s a performance he started at 13 and now it’s his personality because that’s all a personality is –a repetition of certain words or behaviours.
If we’re detached from our natural love for a person we’ll focus on our selfish thoughts about how we want the person to be, so his friends will love him because they do not share our thought barrier. They were there and watched him defend his wounded mother from countless abusive suitors and he did it by acting more like a man than he deserved to for his age. They’re proud of him.
His friends get that he came by the personality honestly, due to being a good person under difficult circumstances. And he loves them for that. The entire series The Big Bang Theory is based on the idea of friends putting up with each other’s social mistakes because they recognize no one is doing anything on purpose to anyone else. They can feel the love underneath it all because they ultimately accept each other unconditionally.
We don’t need to reach out to love people. We need to relax our judgments about them, just as we wish them to be relaxed against us. Because in the end, the world works best if we all just relax into being ourselves, letting others be themselves. Only then can we all flow.
Following a serious childhood brain injury Scott McPherson unwittingly spent his entire life meditating on the concepts of thought, consciousness, reality and the self. This made him as strange to others as they were to him. Seeing the self-harm people created with their own overthinking, Scott dedicated part of his life to helping others live with greater awareness. He is currently a writer, speaker and mindfulness instructor based in Edmonton, AB, where he finds it strange to write about himself in the third person.
Churches in England often look as though they’ve sunken into the landscape. That’s because the buried bodies around them have, for centuries now, biodegraded to create far more earth. So the churches didn’t sink, but rather their parishioners melted back into the nature. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust as they say.
The atoms and molecules that comprise ‘us’ and that carry our consciousness are only ‘us’ temporarily. If we think about that in a certain way we realize that this means we are free. Even the worst of our mistakes will merely melt into obscurity, as they did for the people who surround those churches. This is the grand perspective.
Far from avoiding thoughts of death, troubles are less troubling if we put them in the context of a natural death. Regardless of how much we choose to think about our ‘mistakes,’ they too will fade into larger and larger historical pile, where billions of people’s mistakes are added every single day.
Suicide is unnecessary because clearly we are not alone, and since that’s the case –a natural death generally leaves barely enough time for some really cool experiences so we have to keep having them. If we pay enough attention we’ll notice, when we feel worst is when we’re experiencing the least. So we can be bold about having experiences.
Our egos and ‘lives’ are just bits of ice temporarily floating in a sea of universal water. One day we will all melt back into all that surrounds us. Just like those people in those cemeteries. Who today thinks about those people’s mistakes? Even if they’ve only been gone for hours, most people just want the dead person back because they loved them, ‘mistakes’ and all. That shows us how much mistakes truly count for.
Each of us is preciously unique. Our identities get created when bits of the universe are frozen together by our independent thoughts. That’s why people can change; we can change our thoughts. But when there’s no one to think our problems into existence they cease to exist as our problems and they too melt into some new reality.
The clicking of our ice with other ice is what we call ‘life.’ People can see that as dismissive if they view it the way I don’t mean it. But the way I mean it, the ice is like a wonderful shadow theatre putting on shows for our entertainment and we too are characters. In seeing this for what it is, we gain a stunning reverence for the generousness of the water in allowing the whole thing to happen.
Religious readers may be familiar with that feeling of the water; something huge and powerful and trustworthy at the heart of everything. That’s what allows ‘life’ to happen and it’s everywhere, which is why we can find beauty in everyone and everything. We’re all bits of nature flowing together in the most amazing ways.
The freezing action everyone knows personally as well, because what we freeze is an ego –a collection of perspectives. Our ego is where we tell ourselves the story of our lives. It plays a role in life with others so we don’t want to be rid of it entirely; we have to be someone. We just don’t want to take who we are too seriously and think that we are our thinking.
Remember; our consciousness does the freezing, but it is not the shape that we are left with. Those are only our personal, changeable thoughts. The real us is who thinks them. If we meditate on this enough we’ll fall into a way of being able to actually see life as a less personal dance of water and ice; like beautiful entertainment for our soul.
But imagine if your TV gave you the same level of feeling you get from being in real life? Conscious life is like the ultimate sensovision TV. But unlike TV, living in reality gives us the opportunities to have profound and joyful and awe-filled personal experiences, including painful ones.
Do we sometimes get caught up in our character just like we do in movies with the hero? For sure. But the lights eventually come up and we come to our senses. Those lapses don’t change the fact that pain or joy, it’s all an inconsequential dance that just happens to be profoundly beautiful.
We have to be in a certain place to feel motivated to truly slow down to genuinely contemplate these ideas. But if we do, what we find is that we can live with courage. We can live as ourselves, with the conscious awareness that our successes and failures will both only melt into the past regardless. Our job is to merely be.
If we truly grasp that, it really takes a lot of pressure off of life, and that allows us to be ourselves. We need to surrender into our reality instead of trying to always make it better. We need to slow down and exhale. We need to let go. We need to simply let the universe be, and through our resulting and profound appreciation, we can become one with it.
peace. s
PS This is a two part answer, but it makes the case above quite nicely. It also demonstrates that we can contemplate ourselves into a lifetime filled with life.
Following a serious childhood brain injury Scott McPherson unwittingly spent his entire life meditating on the concepts of thought, consciousness, reality and the self. This made him as strange to others as they were to him. Seeing the self-harm people created with their own overthinking, Scott dedicated part of his life to helping others live with greater awareness. He is currently a writer, speaker and mindfulness instructor based in Edmonton, AB, where he finds it strange to write about himself in the third person.
I recently did a post on the facebook page that read, “We should be in our bodies, not our minds. We should profoundly feel reality around us. We should note how our thoughts can make our bodies appear lighter or heavier. We should note how much less we spill or drop when we focus on the present rather than thinking a layer of before or later over top of a semi-automated present. Our consciousness needs to be filled with something. Fill it with the present rather than with thought.”
Following that post, a long time reader responded that she found staying conscious a “constant struggle,” which in turn has lead to this post, as I also know many of you who go through the classes experience this stage so it makes sense that others reading the blog will as well.
Your consciousness can do two things. It can be focused on the present, or it can think a reality into being for your ego to experience. Each action in the present or thought-triggered reality from the ego will incite various biological reactions that we experience as the chemistry of the brain and the feeling of our emotions.
When we notice our ego most is when it generates pain, but the pain itself often causes us to delve into the past and wonder why we allowed the negative feels to be conjured rather than staying focused on own role in the present regarding how we feel. That means we then add to the problem by chastising ourselves for having gone the route of ego, which just creates more thought-based suffering when what we needed was less.
We don’t need a solution, we need understanding.
The path we seek is defined by where the path is not. What defines the path is its not-path borders. So the ‘struggle’ we feel in bouncing into the underbrush isn’t us failing, it is simply us allowing our consciousness to drift through a lack of active awareness. In turn, our painful emotional reactions to events in turn signal us to return to the awareness and that leads us back onto the path. Without that there would be no path at all.
That “struggle” is not a failure, it is really just the normal oscillation of a soul from spirit to ego and back again. But again; without not-path there is no path, so that is why spirituality is a practice and not a degree. That’s the point behind yin and yang. We can’t have just one. They work together to create reality. That’s why the Buddha said that the end of suffering is the acceptance of suffering, and it’s also why Rumi said, the road home is home.
Following a serious childhood brain injury Scott McPherson unwittingly spent his entire life meditating on the concepts of thought, consciousness, reality and the self. This made him as strange to others as they were to him. Seeing the self-harm people created with their own overthinking, Scott dedicated part of his life to helping others live with greater awareness. He is currently a writer, speaker and mindfulness instructor based in Edmonton, AB, where he finds it strange to write about himself in the third person.
Moods feel like they randomly happen but the truth is we create them. The question is, are we going to do that intentionally? Or only unconsciously, out of habit?
Unconsciously we’ll all just follow whatever patterns were established early in life, often by simple childhood experiences or big or traumatic life experiences then or in adulthood. It is these subconscious thoughts that lead to chemistry that we experience as a mood.
By remaining conscious we can lead ourselves to a much more rewarding life through better choices. As an experiment to prove the principle to yourself, take some time where you feel crappy, but not super awful. Let’s start small and work up.
First, think of some songs that make you feel powerful and strong and confident and then make a playlist or just remind yourself of how those songs go.
As soon as we notice we’re in a grumpy mood that’s where we direct ourselves to find one of the songs on our phone or in our memory –the ones that help us feel strong and capable– and we commit to hum or sing that song for five minutes to ourselves in our head or out loud. Five actual minutes if we’re doing this for real.
It won’t take that long though, because if you do the exercise earnestly, you’ll feel your chemistry shift quite quickly and you’ll feel that as an easing of the frustrated feelings that are tensing your stomach or shoulders or back or chest or….
A song that is stored in your mind as being powerful will run interference with thoughts that leave you feeling negative and incapable. It’ll shift your mood because you experience your brain via the chemistry created by choice and action and your life is engaging with that powerful song.
If we alter our choices regarding how we fill our now, our minds will generate the chemistry associated with our new thought or action. That is how the conscious song’s chemistry can happily conquer the sad regions of our habitual and detrimental subconscious thoughts.
Following a serious childhood brain injury Scott McPherson unwittingly spent his entire life meditating on the concepts of thought, consciousness, reality and the self. This made him as strange to others as they were to him. Seeing the self-harm people created with their own overthinking, Scott dedicated part of his life to helping others live with greater awareness. He is currently a writer, speaker and mindfulness instructor based in Edmonton, AB, where he finds it strange to write about himself in the third person.
I eat and sleep very well given the chance, but due to various responsibilities and circumstances I am often unable to get as much sleep as I would prefer, and I often am forced to skip meals because there are many cases like this recent one that legitimately prevent that from happening.
Dad recently has had several visits to Emergency where I am his guardian. If you go in before a meal, you can’t just leave your dementia dad in a hospital waiting room while you run across a parking lot of pure ice to get to the nearest source of food, (which isn’t even healthy), because he could wander away. And it’s not like I can take him with me; at his pace it’d take an hour in – 25C weather just to get there and we’d miss our call after two hours of waiting to get into see the doctor while they rightfully attend to much worse situations.
I did contribute to a panel for that hospital that recommended healthier food be available since it was a health facility, but they just added Rice Krispie Squares to a vending machine of chips. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
The lack of sleep and food can biochemically throw anyone off balance. Once I notice those bad feelings my awareness kicks in and if there’s no negative thinking attached then I know it’s biochemical. If I can’t eat right then, I am left to manage it actively like most of you are learning to. Note: that that won’t mean that I am somehow above being abrupt, unfair or even mean. Even the Dalai Lama has a temper. We’re all human.
Just last night my mother was watching the old film Outbreak and it features numerous scenes of people being very reasonably unreasonable –it’s too bad YouTube doesn’t have the part where Hoffman and Rene Russo scream at each other in sleep-deprived states. Those are realistic events in people’s lives. Any parents of toddlers know that frustration is essentially guaranteed as a part of the process.
This is why tolerance is valuable. Expecting others to always be at their best is simply crazy as a belief. And that’s also why I leave those unfortunate experiences in the past. I do my best to apologize, but I won’t feel guilt because I have no expectation of being superhuman. The whole reason I feel bad is because I’m a decent person who didn’t meet my own standards, so my standards are fine.
Reactions make sense given their context. But dragging them out of that context for inspection is a huge waste of time. By then all the people involved are in totally different states of mind that makes entirely different things possible.
I’m human. I just accept it. It’s just as crazy to think that you can can control your emotions under adverse conditions as it is to think you can walk on a broken leg. You can, but will hurt like hell and not do you much good unless you’re walking to a hospital.
So here I am, after two weeks of racing around catching plates just before they hit the ground. I’m exhausted, distracted, and I have a huge amount to do. I need to marshal my internal resources. I need to take action to change my state of mind and I thought you might learn something from me describing what I’ll do as I shift from survival mode to my usual enthusiastic zeal. This is a great exercise for anyone at any time, so consider joining me in trying this for the rest of your day:
The idea is to get out of thoughts about ourselves, because those are the ones that are debilitating us. To do this, we need to focus on other things or people. That being the case, when we leave the presence of anyone for the next couple days –even on the phone or via text or via social media etc.– we should just take a moment to earnestly meditate on what happened from their perspective (as much as that is reasonably possible).
Note whether the other people were likely to see our interactions as being positive or negative. But don’t just count arguments or meetings or parenting –also count shorter relations like holding doors for strangers, not yelling at your kid when tempted, or even saying thank you. Those are all volunteered positives. Every interaction with another person should be taken into consideration.
If you do feel a response was negative, you can apologize, but don’t make things worse with even more negative and guilty thoughts about the past. We don’t really need to worry about what happens either way anyway, because, of course, over time, negatives can become positives and positives can become negatives.
Reactions make sense given their context. But dragging them out of that context for inspection is a huge waste of time. By then all the people involved are in totally different states of mind that makes entirely different things possible.
We can feel it was bad to be fired, but if our next job introduces us to a beloved career and maybe even our spouse, then, looking back, getting fired seems like one of the best things that ever happened to us. Likewise, we can feel great about learning we got a promotion only to find out our personality and our new job description do not fit well together, and later we view the promotion as the beginning of the end.
Nothing is good or bad, only thinking makes it so. That’s why we let the past go and focus on the present moment. It’s practical. And if others do likewise, tolerance absorbs the balance.
Remember: how many people do we leave better off, versus how many we leave worse off, is not what’s important. This isn’t a comparative numbers game in the end, because it’s highly likely that we’re all far nicer than any of us will give ourselves credit for. So this isn’t about us being guilted into being nicer. It’s about us understanding the practicalities of how to get back on track as quickly as possible. That’s actually the fastest way to expand that capacity in us, not guilt or tortured regret.
So let’s pay attention to the thinking we do today. Let’s see our interactions with others less as what we did, and more about how everyone –including us– felt doing it. Awareness of that dimension of being makes more things understandable, and an appreciation of how bad things innocently happen is what gives us the wisdom to also know how to make a shift as soon as we’re able. It’s something we get better at the more we practice the act of letting go.
After a screw up, we should just apologize and forget it as soon as possible and get focused on the present moment so we don’t screw up again. The fact that you feel badly about it is all the proof you need that you’re truly a good person.
Here’s to all of us staying conscious enough to create ourselves a wonderful day.
Following a serious childhood brain injury Scott McPherson unwittingly spent his entire life meditating on the concepts of thought, consciousness, reality and the self. This made him as strange to others as they were to him. Seeing the self-harm people created with their own overthinking, Scott dedicated part of his life to helping others live with greater awareness. He is currently a writer, speaker and mindfulness instructor based in Edmonton, AB, where he finds it strange to write about himself in the third person.
Churches in England often look as though they’ve sunken into the landscape. That’s because the buried bodies around them have, for centuries now, biodegraded to create far more earth. So the churches didn’t sink, but rather their parishioners melted back into the nature. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust as they say.
