“The world is won by those who let it go.” -Lao Tzu
Writing provides an excellent precedent for living when done with a certain degree of abandon. I woke up today and didn’t particularly feel like writing, but lately I’ve just sort-of pledged to write 1000 words a day for this particular blog and I don’t plan on letting up on that anytime soon. I had to just let go, sit down, and get to it.
Strengthening our daily habits requires a type of mindful mindlessness that I have never found any literature on. It’s a form of lucid intoxication that makes committing to something simultaneously unthinking and rational. I’ve written extensively on the benefits of mindfulness as a methodological approach to having a heightened attentiveness to the world. After tackling mindfulness it’s possible to experiment with a willful suspension of it. Mindless activity is often harmful and meaningless, but meta-mindlessness is spurred by, you guessed it, meta-mindfulness. Continue reading
When we moved to our acreage 14 years ago, one of the many surprises (right up there with the 1 a.m. howls of coyotes and the taste of well water) is that nature is in constant motion. This wasn’t total news to me—I just hadn’t witnessed it so completely before.
When you lose touch with inner stillness, you lose touch with yourself. When you lose touch with yourself, you lose yourself in the world. — Eckhart Tolle
Mindfulness meditation is a huge phenomenon – and a multibillion-dollar industry – in the United States.
There is such a thing as old emotional pain living inside you. It is an accumulation of painful life experience that was not fully faced and accepted in the moment it arose. It leaves behind an energy form of emotional pain. It comes together with other energy forms from other instances, and so after some years you have a “painbody,” an energy entity consisting of old emotion.
Whether you’re new or old to mindfulness, you’ve likely heard the definition that it is a “intentional non-judgmental awareness of the present moment.” There’s a lot of confusion around the term non-judgment. Years ago, before I began being more intentional with a mindfulness practice I had a friend practicing meditation and he told me that he was practicing being completely detached from everything in a non-judgmental way. That didn’t seem too fun to me. Today, many of us can still be confused by this term, so what does it really mean?
I was concerned at first about writing this column. Nothing was coming to mind. Speaking of nothing, you might recall from the Jerry Seinfeld show that there were several episodes where George and Jerry came up with an idea for a TV series. When the potential producer quizzed them as to what the series was about, George replied, “Nothing, the series would be about nothing.” At first the producer was puzzled until George and Jerry explained what they meant by nothing. The series would be about their daily life which in a way was about nothing.
“God does not look at your outer forms, but at the love within your love.” –Rumi