On Tuesday we talked about mindfulness in the simplest of terms,
Knowing the state of your mind at this moment without judging it,
Without evaluating it or trying to change it.
One of the elements of mindfulness is the observing power of the mind that knows that we're knowing.
We're not just lost in different experiences and this knowing that we're knowing,
It's called metacognition.
Metacognition is an awareness of our thought processes.
An example of metacognition is sometimes in social situations you may be aware of that you have difficulty remembering people's names or you remind yourself to try to remember the names of people you had just met.
There's this kind of stepping back in the moment and being aware that we're aware.
Another way of understanding this clearly is seeing the difference in your experience between being lost in thought and being aware that you're thinking.
In both cases thoughts are happening but in the first situation we're not aware that we're thinking.
We're just caught up in it and in the second thinking is there but there's this awareness we can say thinking thinking there's this noting we know that we're thinking so this is the added observing power of the mind and we talked about thinking a little bit on Tuesday starting to track our thinking a little bit maybe naming the top 10 tunes of thought but rarely do we ask what is a thought you know when we ask the question what is a thought if we look closely all we see is that it's an energy wisp in the mind.
That's it.
It comes and it goes and it's so insubstantial but when we're not aware that we're thinking thoughts have this tremendous power in our life.
They're like these little dictators really.
They're dictators in our mind.
Do this,
Do that,
Get married,
Get divorced,
Move,
Travel,
Buy this,
Buy that.
Thoughts are running us.
They're running our lives.
They have all this power when we're not aware and yet as soon as we drop in what is the nature of thought?
Not the content,
Not the story,
Then what we see is there's not much there and to see it repeatedly it begins to free us from being so dominated by this mental activity.
So I've encouraged you to get more familiar with your thoughts and a lot of them are quite seductive.
You know they pull us in but with this practice we begin to really see for ourselves this thought is completely insubstantial.
The teacher Joseph Goldstein sometimes says the thought of your mother is not your mother.
It's like that.
You know we forget this.
We get entangled in our perception of whoever that person is that we're thinking of.
Forgetting that the thought of that person is not that person.
It's just a thought and the thought itself is completely insubstantial and the reality is it's kind of a disservice to believe your thoughts about a person,
Who they are in your mind.
Lisa's like this.
When we carry the awareness that my thoughts are just thoughts,
They're not like the carriers of truth.
There may be some truth in them but they're not it's not this knowing it's a perception.
Then what becomes possible,
What opens up is all kinds of possibilities.
We get curious.
We enter into the don't know mind.
We investigate.
We're opening to this great space of freedom.
Relationally that is just such a gift to whoever is in your life.
When you suspend your judgment and your perception of who you think they are,
Your knowing of them and meet them where they are with curiosity.
What a gift.
As we become steadier with this practice of awareness,
We see that practice becomes kind of the means for answering one of the basic questions for all of us,
Which is how can I be happy?
That's what we all want really right?
Just to be happy in our lives.
I read this some years ago.
It's from John Lennon.
He wrote,
When I was five years old my mother always told me that happiness was the key to life.
When I went to school they asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up.
I wrote down happy.
They told me I didn't understand the assignment and I told them they didn't understand life.
This you know from a five-year-old.
Another way of expressing this question is what do we learn from being mindful?
Mindfulness is not the end.
We're practicing mindfulness in the service of wisdom and freedom and care and happiness.
Care for ourselves and care for others.
One of the things we learn from being mindful is that what we do matters.
Our actions have consequences largely determined by the motivation behind the action.
So if motivations are,
If the actions are motivated by ignorance or wanting or aversion,
That generally brings suffering to our life.
And if actions are motivated by generosity and love and connection and compassion,
This brings about well-being and happiness.
And in our world as it is right now often we just go through life doing what we're doing,
Moving at the speed of sound and acting through habit patterns and not looking at the consequences of our actions.
There's a very important teaching that Kurt brought to us on Tuesday which is what we frequently think about and what we practice knowingly or unknowingly.
What is repeated over and over again becomes the inclination of the mind.
Speak and act with a generous mind or generous actions.
Happiness follows.
Speak and act with self-centered actions,
Actions of greed,
Suffering follows.
Everything we do,
Every action that we take in a certain way reinforces neuropathways.
And when we really understand this,
It engenders a sense of care in what we're cultivating.
So every time we get caught in anger,
We're actually strengthening anger.
And when we get caught up in our wanting,
We're strengthening more wanting.
And when we get caught up in love,
We strengthen love.
So when we practice and we pay attention with mindfulness,
It really has the power to transform and create new pathways.
It gives us more choice.
So we're not simply just acting out of the habit pattern of our conditioning,
The well-worn path.
So this is the liberating potential of what we're doing.
It's like we are the artists of our life.
So when we practice and pay attention with mindfulness,
It has the power to transform.
And the invitation for this time ahead is to start to investigate in your direct experience.
And as a reminder,
Direct experience is in the felt senses of the body,
The feeling tones,
The raw,
Unprocessed experience,
Hearing,
Sensing,
Touching,
Feeling,
Tasting,
Direct experience,
Very different from thinking.
Thinking often follows,
Gets entangled.
But the direct experience,
What does it feel like?
Like the direct experience of being generous?
What does it feel like when we're self-centered?
What does it feel like when we're judging?
Or when we're connecting?
What does it feel like when we're focusing on the good of people?
Like the good in them,
Not their faults.
Not the thoughts we have about them.
Just the felt sense,
The direct experience.
These are things we can learn about when we're mindful.
And I encourage you to check it out for yourself.
You don't have to believe any of it.
It's all just an invitation to inquire and investigate yourself.
I'll close today with some words from the Native American writer,
Louise Erich.
She wrote,
Those powerful moments of true knowledge,
Which we paper over with daily life.
But every so often,
Something shatters like ice.
And we fall into the river of our own existence.
We are aware.
Thank you for your kind attention and your consideration.
