Mind FULL



shrine2015In the practice we learn how to watch our thoughts. We begin to cultivate curiosity for where they come from or who is doing the thinking. And just as we think we are being clever about all of it, we execute detachment in hopes to not be so caught up even in our own seeking. I was chatting with someone yesterday and asked how the 3D cartoon life was treating her (you realize this was not a metaphor as we were having a conversation in IMVU — but of course it IS all an allegory … is it not?) She replied that she was working hard to not care so much about other people’s opinions. To which I echoed that I tried hard not to care so much about my own opinion.

Truth is I have a very FULL mind. I am a story teller not only in prose but pretty incessantly in the hollows of my own imagination. And I can go from innocuous to catastrophic in 9 seconds flat. As the red neck guru reminds me “Babe, you think too much.” And its true … very little of what I ruminate over is useful, practical or even rational to someone at the top bump of the bell curve. And yet though I may be more than a few standard deviations outside of the norm … I also recognize that we are all the same and that the root of our suffering is more common than peculiar.

The only thorn in our side is the thorn INSIDE our own mental story. Sure our teen is rebellious, our boss unreasonable, the clerk at the discount store simply wrong to not take back our misguided notions that we were ever going to fit into those jeans so of course we don’t have the sales receipt. But in truth none of that on the outside creates the sensation of suffering … of how the world, the economy, the ex-mother-in-law did us wrong … like the belief in our own opinion. As if what we think matters.

I have a lot of useless information in the backlog of my frontal cortex. Working in high tech for 99 years comes in handy less than .009% of the time (like when my daughter calls to ask a question at midnight about her programming class and I stumble around like an old rat in a python maze looking for a morsel of brie that was once around the corner … who moved my cheese?) There are quips about forgetting more than we ever learned, or learning all we needed in kindergarten. As you might imagine, my most useful class in high school was Typing 101. But yet I’ve lived most of my life believing that all of the knowledge amassing mattered. Kids stay in school … I’m not saying that physics is irrelevant (though I rarely swing my cat above my head by her tail to reaffirm she spins off in a straight line.) And its not to say that everything we learned or felt passionate about or took a stand for was meaningless.

There is inherent joy and bliss in anything we do when we are awake in the moment that it unfolds before our eye (*I*). There is doing … and then there is the commentary, the play by play that we DO that either precedes, accompanies or follows the doing that does us in. This is when the mindfulness practice gets cluttered by the mind FULL meaning making machine that likes to multitask to the detriment of our happiness.

Its not about him not noticing our new dress (or our new eyes if we are in IMVU) or the colon we forgot to end our phrase that caused a recursive endless loop of errors. Or maybe it is … perhaps it is just that period … that pause … inserted in just the right line of code (NOW) that allows us to experience the joy of a well written program. We need only step back … back from the FULL mind for a moment and instantly we have compiled mindfulness.

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