This week’s challenge is to notice as you go through your day, where your thoughts take you. Are you watching t.v. and thinking about what happened to you twenty years ago when that person said something to you that hurt your feelings? Are you on Facebook thinking about the future, posting what you will be doing for the new year, weeks away?
“When you are present in this moment, you break the continuity of your story,
of past and future.
Then true intelligence arises, and also love.”
Eckhart Tolle
This week pay attention to your thinking mind, are you vacillating from past to future and back and forth. Ask yourself are you in the present moment. Are you totally focused on what you are doing right here and now? Doing this will help bring awareness to your thoughts. Awareness lies beyond thinking and is much more powerful. Awareness is like a big container that not only holds our thinking, helps us to see and know our thoughts but it also helps us to not get caught up in our thinking mind.
Our thinking mind is most of the times fragmented, it goes everywhere. It is the nature of thought. When we bring awareness to our thoughts we can see this fragmentation and we can also see that we are more than just these thoughts, that there is a wholeness that also exists within us.
Meditation is not about changing our thinking, it is about watching thought itself with awareness. By watching our thoughts and not getting caught up in what may seem real, we are able to separate and not feel like a prisoner of our thoughts. Our thoughts patterns are often strong in us, but they can also be inaccurate, narrow, self-involved or just plain wrong, unfortunately, most of us believe our thoughts.
As you do this exercise during the week and find yourself in the past or future instead of picking up a magazine, watch t.v. or going on your phone, sit for a few minutes, breathe and allow yourself to just be aware of your thoughts. Observe and notice, no need to change anything. Sit with the thoughts, do not fight with them, do not push them away, don’t agree or disagree only notice the thoughts and notice how you feel in your body.
"Why should the lord of the country flit about like a fool?
If you let yourself be blown to and fro, you lose touch with your root.
If you let restlessness move you, you lose touch with who you are.”
Lao-Tzu, Tao-te-Ching
Deeper Meaning: When we bring awareness and stillness to our thoughts even for a few minutes a day, we touch what is most real and reliable in ourselves, the parts of us that is mostly overlooked and underdeveloped. Our happiness, understanding and satisfaction is no deeper than our capacity to know ourselves inwardly. As we practice this inward awareness, we strengthen our capacity to understand our own mind and body which then can help us better meet any challenge the outside world throws at us.
