Check out the following video. What this young man did is truly amazing, but don't miss his mom's attitude about his "disability." My guess is that without his mother's attitude he would never have achieved what he achieved.
Can you imagine how difficult it would be to sort out everything you hear in terms of space and shape? None of us would be able to do it with the distraction of sight and no good reason to focus of that aspect of your senses. It goes to show that there is a lot more information all around us most of which we don't pay any attention. His mom obviously played a big part in his success in overcoming his "disability." The attitude she gave to her son by the way she looked at things made it possible for him to to overcome his lack of sight. You may not be able to do what he did but ask yourself what is your attitude toward your life and what you can do in it?
Let's look at some of the qualities of attitude that can help you be more successful in achieving your goals and overcoming stress.
Hopefully this blog will give you some things to do that will help you deal with stress. But one of the key tenets in this blog is that you should not take anything I say or anyone else says as absolute truth. Question all things but be open to new ideas. If it seems like a good idea to you, try it and see if it works for you. As you will see later, our needs are changing every day, every minute, so some things may work one day as they are tending to our current needs and not work on another day because our needs have changed or because we are expecting something that occurred at another time. Hopefully you will see, as we go along, life is complex, reality is complex and truth is not always what it might seem. The ultimate truth may be hidden among other lesser truths. What might be true for us one day may not be true the next day. This makes tending to our needs a challenge and creates the need for us to be mindful as much as we can.
Having an open mind is also a necessity if you are to be as happy as you can be. As you will soon see, even when we are mindful we can miss an awful lot of stuff. Being open to new experiences and appreciating old experiences is important for our happiness as well as being open to at least understanding other peoples ideas even if they are opposite your own.
We make our own suffering. Bad things happen to everyone and many of them are not under our control or caused by us. Our attitude toward those bad things will determine how much we suffer above and beyond what has happened or is happening to us. Do we really need or want to suffer more than what life deals out to us? I think not. But that is up to us and takes some work on your part.
It is inevitable that life will throw us some bad stuff and how we deal with it will make a big difference in how we enjoy our lives. Meet the bad stuff with (courage) the warrior spirit. Sometimes it takes courage and effort, to make an effort for everyday things, especially if we don't feel like it. The Warrior Spirit is not centered around war but around the never give up spirit. If you get knocked down you want the have the courage to get back up and put out the effort to achieve your goals.
As we will see, things are not always what they seem. There is so much to learn all around us. One of the themes of this blog is that things and people are constantly changing and if you don't pay attention you'll miss important things. Even things we think we know a lot about are changing, some quickly some over a longer time period. Take a look at a young child and see how they approach life with curiosity and excitement. This is how they learn about life. We all have much to learn about life. Have the curiosity of a child.
We need to show compassion for ourselves and others. In order to do that you much have empathy and love. We will talk about empathy at great length later. Compassion is an important component for happiness and in terms of helping ourselves in achieving our goals.
Repetition is a key quality to have if you want to be more mindful or if you just want to learn something. As brain studies have shown, repetition is the way we learn. Why do some people not learn new things? Not because they can't but because they find repetition boring and give up on it. Unless you already can do something you need repetition to learn it. Look at basketball players. They get better by doing the same shot over and over until their muscles learn the moves. Don't let your mind tag repetition as boring and entice you away from learning . Repetition is the way we learn.
Like repetition, failure is the way we learn something. It is a sign that you need to make some effort to achieve you goals. Approach failure as a guide to what you should and should not do so you do not fail the next time. If you are afraid to fail you will never know what you can do, what fun you could have, what life has to offer.
Change is one of the fundamental laws of the universe. It's something we don't often talk about because it reminds us of the fact that we are not in total control of what happens to us. Which can be an anxiety producing thought. However it does point out the fact that we can control our attitudes towards life and the things that happen to us in life. This is a blessing. If we can't control the things that happen to us, we at least can control how we react to things. The other side of that coin is we don't have to control how we react to things and just go with our knee jerk reactions to things no matter how appropriate or inappropriate they might be.
Because Change is always with us it behooves us to learn to Mindfully pay attention moment to moment to see what is going on right in front of us and in our minds. In doing this we can choose to react in the most appropriate way to every situation.
Change is interrelated to all of the attitudes. Each plays a part in how our experience of this life goes and it behooves us to review often what are the attitudes we choose to have in relationship to life.
Here is an old Tao story that exhibits the fact that life can be so unpredictable. We would do well not to cling to good or bad if we want to live in peace.
There was once a farmer in ancient China who owned a horse. “You are so lucky!” his neighbors told him, “to have a horse to pull the cart for you.” “Maybe,” the farmer replied.
One day he didn’t latch the gate properly and the horse ran away. “Oh no! That is terrible news!” his neighbors cried. “Such bad luck!” “Maybe,” the farmer replied.
A few days later the horse returned, bringing with it six wild horses. “How fantastic! You are so lucky,” his neighbors told him. “Maybe,” the farmer replied.
The following week the farmer’s son was breaking-in one of the wild horses when it threw him to the ground, breaking his leg. “Oh no!” the neighbors cried. “Such bad luck, all over again!” “Maybe,” the farmer replied.
The next day soldiers came and took away all the young men to fight in the army. The farmer’s son was left behind. “You are so lucky!” his neighbors cried. “Maybe,” the farmer replied.
.We can never know what twists and turns life might take. Being in the flow of life will produce a much happier life than riding the roller coaster of good and bad.
Life is complex and it is easy to focus on some things and give little or no attention to other things that might be just as important but have not come into our consciousness. It's easy to get caught up in a narrow group of things and ignore all the rest.
Your attitudes make a big difference in how much stress and everything else effect you and your happiness, so it behooves us to occasionally review our attitudes. think about how these attitudes fit into your life.
Judging is an important part of life. It can prevent us from doing dumb or detrimental things. However, when we run on mindlessness we do not see things as they are but see everything in terms of our likes and dislikes, things that give us pleasure and things that give us pain. When we do this everything has some shade of good or bad. This is not great on a lot of different levels. When we judge everything, we raise everything to a whole different level. We begin to judge ourselves and everything that happens to us, which tends to add another level to our experience of things, the level of good or bad. If it's good, we will have the mindless tendency to cling to it, making us anxious about when it will end or we want it to happen again. If it's judged a bad thing, the pain naturally intensifies in our minds because be have added fear or another negative label to the experience. Mindfulness suggests you should face your pain for just what it is and nothing more. Paying attention to just how much you judge things instead of just experiencing what is, can be a very liberating experience.
Non-judging is an essential part of Mindfulness. Being judgmental leads you and your focus of attention away from the senses and into your ideas that are, at best, partial truths.
This is something worth your attention.
Here's a good article relating to judgment and non-judgment.
Patience is connected with the idea that we must accept that we can not control everything in our lives, and even some things that we can control must unfold in their own way. That's true with events in our live as well as people in our lives. Accepting this as one of our attitudes is a choice that will make a positive impact in our lives.
Being Patient also includes accepting what is in this moment without wishing is would be something else or like something else used to be. This is sometimes a large challenge in your meditation practice. If you come to your meditation practice wanting to be more relaxed, less stressed you are putting roadblocks to getting where you want. Focus your attention on your body just as it is this moment and experience you breath, noticing when your mind wonders off and bring it back to your body sensations and your breath.
Accept all that is as it is in the moment. That doesn't mean you can't do things to change what is if there is something you can DO, change is one of the principles of life. Thinking about how things used to be or how you want them to be in the future when you should be in this moment is a very stressful choice.
To see what Jon Kabat-Zinn has to say regarding Patience click below:
The Beginner's mind is one of the seven interdependent fundamental attitudes of Mindfulness according to Jon Kabat-Zinn in his book Full Catastrophe Living.
The Beginner's mind can be a challenge. We have seen how quickly our mind can use our past experiences to create "understanding." of what we see by reacting to something that seems similar to something we remember and understand in a narrow way. If we don't overcome this tendency, we will be stuck with our past memories and not open to other possibilities. Shunryu Suzuki in Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind says "In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, in the expert’s mind there are few."
We need to come to each new experience with an open mind seeing what is in the moment and not jumping at the first thing we see that will make sense to things we have experienced in the past. There is always time to do that once we have seen what is without jumping to judgment.
If you would like to read more about the Beginner's Mind click on the link below:
Trust is trusting in yourself, in your intuition, in your own ability to do the best thing for yourself and others. We all make mistakes and if we learn from them we will be better people. If we are afraid of making mistakes we will never learn. Don't be looking for other people to tell you what is the way things are. You know deep down inside what's right and wrong. Everything you need to know is either right in front of you or inside you. There is nothing else. Be open to new ideas but rely on yourself to know if they work for you. Remember things change and idea that may work today may not work tomorrow. That's the way life is. That's why we have to be mindful day by day and moment by moment.
There is a wisdom in the body that knows what to do to keep us going. We don't have to remember to breath, all our organs work without our conscious help. Learning to trust our body to keep us going is an important attitude.
“In practicing mindfulness, you are practicing taking responsibility for being yourself and learning to listen to and trust your own being.”
Source- Full Catastrophe Living, by Jon Kabat-Zinn, Ph.D., pages 33-40
In Mindfulness meditation there is no goal, no striving to be something. Mindfulness meditation is practicing to be whatever you are at the moment as best you can, no striving and no goals to reach. You have already reached the " goal." The trick is to be aware of it and experience it non-judgmentally. Accepting and experiencing what is at this moment, as best you can, is what Mindfulness meditation is all about. It is also what everyday Mindfulness is all about.
See what your experience is at this moment and in each moment. If you feel you need to move towards a goal, than do that in this moment, whole heartedly.
Acceptance is one of the important parts of Mindfulness. Acceptance refers to your experience from moment to moment. Life is change. Accepting what is at the moment does not mean we have to stay in that moment forever. We can move each moment from where we are to where we want to be. We can work for change but only from where we are at the moment. It's kind of like
You Have to keep moving to get anywhere. Just because you accept what is in the moment does not mean it has to be there in the next moment or moments way in the future, but if you don't accept where you are at this point your are hindering yourself from getting anywhere.
Not accepting that thoughts will come into your mind while you meditate is putting a big road block to accepting what is because it is part of meditation to have thoughts diverting your attention away form experiencing the moment. One way of dealing with this is to watch yourself freaking out about having thoughts during meditation and saying to yourself freaking out, freaking out.
The process of Mindfulness is observing when your mind wanders into the thinking mode you notice what it is that you are thinking about and let it go. This is the flow of life, this is change in action. Because of the way our mind works and because of the law of change we will always have ideas popping into our heads, Mindfulness allows us to notice them and let them go. It might be negative thinking, it might be looking to the future or the past but it will happen and as with everything it's your habit of dealing with it that will determine the quality of your life.
Letting go of an idea is sometimes the hardest of things. We would like to think our ideas are all true, meaningful and explain life. We tend to close ourselves off to any idea that conflicts with what we think. Ideas can't hurt us as long as we approach them mindfully.
Change is inevitable and if you do not develop the ability to let things go you will be stuck in the past forever.
There are many ways of trying to get your head around Mindfulness. One reason is that Mindfulness can not be fully understood with words. The best thing we can do it let it all go and just be in the moment. Trying to define just what that means leads to many ways of organizing our thoughts. The Four Foundations of Mindfulness is one of them. However because life and Mindfulness is complex there is more than one group of four foundations of mindfulness. We can go over some of these, as they all have their value but are not necessarly THE best one. Since life is so individual each person must seek out the elements that work best for them and then ultimately let it all go and just be.
One of the most liberating aspects of Mindfulness is becoming mindful of the body on a daily basis and not just during formal practice. Often when we have occasion to focus our attention on our body we use the concept of the body that we have developed over the years and forget to be Mindful of the body by experiencing how the body feels and not get into how we think it should feel. We need to do this with the Beginners Mind and Non-Judgementally.
Being Mindful of our feelings can help us not to have knee-jerk reactions to things that produce strong feelings in us. Observing and allowing our feelings, non-judgmentally can help us work through strong feelings and help us to let them go. Remember we tend to add to the meaning of our feelings and that adds to our stress level. Experiencing our feelings as they are tends to alleviate some of the stress.
What you think is your life. Paying attention should be a priority. Pay attention to your thoughts without judgment, commentary, or decision-making. Try to identify what your thinking about or what your feelings are without engaging in them.
The goal of mindfulness is to just be in the moment, doing what is appropriate, and experiencing what is in a non-judgmental way. We can do that anytime any place if we choose, if we pay attention to the what is important in life. Keeping these things in our consciousness is the trick. We always have the choice, but how often do we choose to choose?
Not only do we want to experience the moment, but also be aware of how we are reacting to it, which is based upon our past experiences. At this point we have the opportunity to reflect upon if our reactions are appropriate to what we are experiencing in this moment and go from there.
It seems in an attempt to make things perfect we have given too much validation to words. We all want to be right, we all want to be accepted, we would like everyone to get along and be nice to one another, but we can't let that desire to cloud our view that we are inherently good people that can make mistakes. We are all individuals and may have differing views from our own. This does not invalidate our view or make their view any more true than ours, just different. There are infinite ways of seeing the world and again, we all see things a little differently than everyone else, we must allow others to have their opinions. That does not mean we shouldn't speak up when others show values that degrade people, but we can't make everyone see things our way. If they can't see what you see, let it go and move on. Speak up for values that value all people but know that those values will always exists as long as the opposite values exists. If there wasn't an opposite value, that value wouldn't exist, we wouldn't care, and we might not even know it exists at all. It's the same old thing. If everything was the same temperature, we wouldn't even have a word for temperature. Just keep in mind words are words, they can't hurt you. What hurts you is your attitude towards the words. If the words are bad, they are not you and you needn't choose to allow them to hurt your feelings. It's all a choice. People that come from a tough environment often learn how to deal with tough things and still be productive and positive about themselves. Having tough moments can make you stronger or you can allow it to beat you down. It's your choice. It's just like working out in a gym. Lifting weights is tough, it can hurt and burn, but in the long run your body builds itself and becomes stronger. This is the way of life.
This is a little tricky. Usually we connect effort with doing. Mindfulness is not doing, it's being. Yet there is a need for us to put out some effort when we don't really feel like meditating. We might even may need some sleep and not want to be in the moment but just zone out. There will be those times and we need to be compassionate with ourselves at these times. Because we are so programmed not to be in the moment some discipline on our part is necessary.
Jon Kabat-Zinn has said about this:
“Mindfulness requires effort and discipline for the simple reason that the forces that work against our being mindful are exceedingly tenacious.”
As with life, Mindfulness is always changing in that something that we respond to today, we may not respond to it tomorrow. Sometimes this is caused by cling to the past and not being in the moment. Be open to what is in this moment, the only one we have and explore with the Beginners Mind new ideas that come to you, especially ones that are not what you think.
It is not a bad idea to daily explore the relevance to you all the Attitudes of Mindfulness with the Beginners Mind. You can not do this too much.
Our Attitudes come from our Values. Although it is important to look at our Attitudes it's equally important to look at our core Values. When we are making decisions and actions based upon our core Values we are happier and life seems good. When we are making choices and acting against our Values or having other peoples expectations of us over ride our values we are not in a happy place.
Knowing what our core Values are can help us to make better decisions for ourselves and make us happier with our lives. Our Values are guidelines as to which direction to go and also allow us to great goals around our Values.
Without Values and goals we are like a boat without a rudder.
"'Cheshire Puss,' Asked Alice. 'Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?' 'That depends a good deal on where you want to go,' said the Cat. 'I don't much care where.' Said Alice. 'Then it doesn't matter where you go.' Said the Cat." ------ Lewis Carroll
Words Can't Totally Capture Mindfulness
Words cannot totally capture the nature of mindfulness. It can be expressed in many many ways and yet no way is perfect. When you point your finger at the moon, the finger is not the moon. If we confuse the finger with the moon what do we have? And yet the finger can point the way for us to find the moon in the sky. Words can provide the same kind of help, pointing us to the experience of life but not being the experience of life. Even though words are not the experience, we can still find direction by reading what different people say about the key components of Mindfulness.
The reading for the day is a gives yet another group of values and attitudes relating to Mindfulness.
Life is about attitudes. Attitudes are not static. They are flexible. They change and adjust to the needs of the moment. Some attitudes make for a happy life and some don’t.
One attitude that is created by the left side of the brain is the “My Way or the Highway” attitude. Sometimes it’s necessary to stick to your guns, but it is never a good idea to be so rigid as to not to be able to see and understand the other side of things.
The left side of your brain loves to divide up things and make relationship between the things it sees. It serves a purpose. Helps us to understand and get things done. It has created the modern world we now live in.
In order to make these relationships it is necessary to leave stuff out that doesn’t directly add to the logical order inherent in the idea we are pursuing. So as we get more and more into a particular way of thinking, we leave more and more out until our thinking becomes very narrow and in some cases very unrealistic.
Thus our logical thinking can create paradoxes. A famous paradox by a Greek named Zeno goes like this. If you want to travel from point A to point B you must go half way. When you get to the midpoint you again must get to the midpoint between where you are and point B. This way of thinking though very logical is so narrow that the inevitable conclusion is that we can never get to point B. That of course doesn’t match up with our experience of reality. This is very obvious, but there are countless examples that are not so obvious. We need to make the effort to explore the things that are left out in any given way of thinking. If we don’t do this it can lead to big problems.
The left side of our brains tries to ignore things that don’t fit into its’ sometimes very narrow way of thinking. A person with damage to the right side of their brains and thinking that their paralyzed arm is fine, will do whatever they have to in order to maintain the idea that their arm is okay. When asked to move their arm they say, “See I moved it.” when actually it did not move at all. When asked whose arm is this paralyzed arm, pointing to their arm, they will say, it is someone else’s arm.
Without the wise right side of the brain, we do not see the whole, more complex, picture. We will do anything to fool ourselves into thinking that our narrow way of thinking is the way things are.
Coming back to our senses is one way to come back to the right side of the brains view of the world. Experiencing the world moment by moment is very grounding.
Don’t get too locked into one way of thinking, it rarely totally realistic.
If you find yourself thinking that you and your group are right and everyone else is wrong, step back and take a breadth. Try arguing the other side. See if you can find the human truth behind the opposing argument. In doing that you can better see and understand the reality of the situation. Very rarely is one way the only way in every situation.
There is a comfort and pleasure in involving ourselves in a logical progression of thought. This contributes to our lack of wanting to give up a set of ideas. On the other side of the coin, there can be great discomfort facing the unknown, facing ideas outside our own way of thinking. This can add to our lack of interest in seeing the whole. It is no wonder we want to cling to our narrow more comfortable ways of thinking.
It seems the more narrow the thinking the happier we are thinking those thoughts but the more problems we create when we have to live in the real world.
Life Changes, It's All New Everyday
Our lives are works of Art. Some are Masterpieces and most are not, but they all are reflections of our values and our choices.
Learn about life and explore the possibilities.
Approach everything with the beginners mind.
See life as an adventure. Everyday is new and different if you pay attention. How can we be board?
Since birth we have gotten all the information about our life via our senses. So when Jon Kabat-Zinn says come to your senses, he is not saying come to your logical mind but come to all of the senses we use to take in the world around us.
The beginners mind allows us to approach life without preconceptions. How does a beginner approach life you might ask? A beginner does not have knowledge or preconceptions and so must rely on his or her senses to take in the information, and not quickly react to any one stimulus based upon past experience. This opens up a world of possibilities and a world of choices in terms of reactions and actions. The beginner’s Mind is an especially good way to gather information for people that are experienced in an area, such as a doctor. The worse thing a doctor can do is to see a symptom and jump to conclusions before taking in all of the available information. This can lead to misdiagnoses.
The only true wisdom is in knowing you know nothing. Socrates
Whatever you know eliminates more than you know.
True wisdom comes to each of us when we realize how little we understand about life, ourselves, and the world around us. Socrates
A fool thinks himself to be wise, but a wise man knows himself to be a fool. William Shakespeare
