What is Mindfulness?

Mindfulness means paying attention in a particular way; on purpose, in the present moment, and nonjudgmentally. ~ Jon Kabat-Zinn

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The word Mindful or Mindfulness has a specific cluster of meanings, but it is not all that far from the way mama uses the word when she said “mind your manners.” To be mindful is to pay attention. To be mindful is to pay attention in order to cope with life and live in the NOW. But being mindful is more than just paying attention. For example, I can be aware that I’m acting like an irritable jerk, but still not be mindful of my irritable jerk-dumb-ness. To be mindfully irritable I would have to be deliberately conscious of where the sensations I’m labeling as irritations are located. If I were just aware that that I was irritated, my mind might also wonder around jumping from thought to thought. I might be rerunning the incident that sparked this irritation in me, and imagining me saying or doing something different this time and crushing my opponent, or I might also be watching TV, or answering my wife when she asks a question, and I have the ability to do several of these things at once.

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There are benefits of being mindful that come only from mindfulness. You see, when you practice mindfulness you can study yourself, what you are feeling at the very moment you are feeling it, and you can explore that feeling without getting all mired by the guilty past or entangled in your worrisome future. Just thinking is not good enough. If you just think, then the mind will wander, and unleash all sorts of negative thinking and raw emotions including anger, yearnings, jealousy, self-hatred, depression, and every shade and shape of fear that resides within the folds of your brains. If you practice mindfulness you harness and manage your thoughts, which in turn promote insightfulness and inner calm.

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Unless you are practicing mindfulness there is no purposefulness to your awareness. There is no conscious effort to bring your attention back to the irritation, or the joy, or the walking, or the eating, or whatever it is that you are doing in the NOW. Being purposeful is an essential aspect of mindfulness. Having the purpose of staying with our experience of NOW keeps us in the present moment. Being in the present moment is a cure to all the negative emotions we feel. Mindfulness keeps us from chewing on the past or the future, regurgitating our guilt [the past] and worry [the future] and then chewing on them some more.

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If I am irritated and become mindful of how I am feeling in the present, in my NOW, the irritation eventually dissolves because irritation sprouts from the past and mindfulness is always in the present. If irritations are in the past and if the past no longer exists, then by being mindful you become aware that the irritation in your NOW is based upon nothing, and it is easy to let go of nothing. Mindfulness is a good way to live.

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If this were my only life, I would also want to live with mindfulness, so as not to miss anything. And I would want to live with generosity and compassion because they bring happiness here and now, and because I will not be able to keep anything in the end. ~Kornfield
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My ole shrink Dr. Frank Shultz use to tell me when I got upset, to: take two or three deep breaths, relax my belly, and then asking myself, “Am I safe?”

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Almost always the answer is going to be, “Yes.” If the answer is “No,” then it’s time to call 911 or run like hell. Almost always, in the present, in your NOW, you are safe. Mindfulness is where our calm, contented self lives.

Losers?

If at first you don't succeed, find out if the loser gets anything. ~Bill Lyon

Losers? I haven't watched the Olympics, because we've been in a car accident, my wife is still very disabled from it, and she prefers TVland reruns of Andy Griffith show, Cosby, and I Love Lucy. I do watch some news and so I see clips of what is going on in China. It makes me think about winners and losers.

It seems that it is a need within most beings (perhaps all beings) that we have winners and losers. Whatever is done, we want to know who does it the best. It may be running, or eating hot dogs but we want to stage a competition and find out who is better at it. Is it any wonder that so many of us walk around feeling like losers?

This need for competition is also connected to our faith and love of capitalism.

Business is a good game-- lots of competition and a minimum of rules. You keep score with money. ~Nolan Bushnell

When I check my bank account I hear a voice whisper, "Looooooozer."

But using business and money to determine success has its draw backs, for most of us.

In accordance with our principles of free enterprise and healthy competition, I'm going to ask you two to fight to the death for it. ~Monty Python

Do we really want to sacrifice our life for success on a job?

My problem is that I have been programed to be a loser. As a child I was told that I was "stupid, a knot head, a dummy," that I "can't do anything right." As I grew I tended to confirm those negatives by feeling so much the dim bulb that I never had a bright idea, ever.

When you think about it, we are given negative assessments of ourselves every day of our life. I may have been 'dis-ed" 300,000 times before I was 18 years old, and maybe you were lucky enough to be put down only 100,000 times before you were 18 years old, but most of us get negative messages most of the time.

When you think about winners and losers it is clear that there is and can only be ONE winner, which makes everyone else losers.

But wait, that can't be right. Back to the Olympics. Most of the people there are not winners OR losers. Most of the TV audience is not made up of winners or losers. We are mostly observers. We don't compete. We didn't train. We are not trying to be winners or losers. You can't be a loser if you are not trying to be a winner, can you? Of course Michael Phelps swims faster than me. I don't swim. I don't even exercise. I use my body to move my head from room to room. I am not in competition with Michael Phelps.

It doesn't matter if you win or lose in the big, scary jungle of the real world. Winners and losers. . .Enemies and allies . . . We don't live in a comic book! This is the real deal. ~ Takayuki Ikkaku, Arisa Hosaka and Toshihiro Kawabata

By my focusing on winning and losing I actually do lose something, I lose my focus on the joy of life. Life is short, and in my opinion, I get only this one chance to live. Life is a spark separating two vast and eternal darkness-es. Why not enjoy it while I have it?



Every moment of your life is worth living. Every moment is filled with the extraordinary, if only you will allow yourself to be present for it. ~ Ihnen and Flynn



Winning (or being a loser) tells me something important: When I am concerned with being a loser, or with my failure to be the winner, what I am doing is placing the opinion of others above my opinions about myself.



By not taking responsibility for our own thoughts, we leave our minds open to the whims of others. ~Helmstetter

Stop the war inside

"We will never succeed outwardly until we also learn to stop the war inside. That is our work here." Ajahn Chah




When I consider my life it all looks, in my memory, like a long, endless war. It wasn't. In many ways my difficult life would appear to be a cake walk to others. I feel like I've stepped into puppy poo and to others it looks like I've stepped into cake icing and whipped cream. What felt like a fall into a pile of thorns may look (to others) like I fell into a truck load of nickels. All my advantages are nothing, if I continue the war that has been going on inside me for 57 years.

One of the biggest obstacles to happiness, for me, has been FAIRNESS.

I want stuff to be fair. When something is not fair, I feel like I must do something to change what is unfair into something that is fair, or I must find someone else who can hear my complaints regarding unfairness, and this other power will take action to make what is unfair FAIR.

The idea that anything must be FAIR gives me an excuse to be depressed, and to be self-destructive as I surrender to my own RIGHTEOUS INDIGNATION. I have been known to "cut off my own nose to spite my face." It is common. People who feel wronged on a business deal will sue, and end up spending more to proove they were right than they lost on the business deal that sparked the law suit. Why would someone spend $500,000 to prove that their opponent cheated them out of $50,000? It is this sense that FAIRness exists and that the principal of being prooven RIGHT is worth more than the money. But once you win -- once you have established that you were treated unfairly, has anything really changed? The main change tends to be that I am poorer and suffering more than I was before I went on this quest to be proven that I was right when I said I'd been treated unfairly.



"Suffering confers neither privileges nor rights; it all depends on how one uses it."Elie Wiesel

Suffering not only can be used -- suffering is used. Suffering is always used. Suffering is used to increase suffering. Misery loves company so much that it infects others like an Ebola-like mood virus, and it replicates itself to ensure that suffering and misery will continue to exist.

But with by shifting the way one thinks suffering can become pain, and pain is not at all the same thing as suffering. Suffering always contains the concept of fairness/unfairness. If you have pain and recognize it as the body telling the brain that there is a problem that must be addressed to ensure the survival of the SELF then pain is just a natural process of communicating life and death information to the SELF. Suffering is pain that dwells on how unfair it is that the pain exists. "In a fair world," one thinks, "I would not feel this pain."

Suffering stops with the idea that the pain is somehow wrong to exist. Pain is a problem to be addressed. Suffering is a crime and the sufferER is the victim and someone (the cops, the courts, or God) must step in and redress this wrong.

No matter how you slice it, it's still balogna.

"There is no such thing as a problem without a gift for you in it's hand. You seek problems because you need their gifts."

~Illusions