“Don’t believe everything you think!”

Excellent advice, if you ask me.  Advice that meditation practice, including mindfulness meditation practice, will help you see the value of.

Not long after the car with that bumper sticker drove off, another car with this bumper sticker drove by:

This is the lab calling.  Your brain is ready to be picked up.

Ouch!

Then again, in the context of meditation and mindfulness and peace of mind, perhaps having the brain/mind reconditioned/reprogrammed in a ‘lab’ might not be such a bad thing :)

But the purpose of this post is really to remind us of the neurotic thinking habits of our conditioned mind and to encourage us to take time to disengage from it by some form of meditation practice.  I know that in my last post, I talked about mindfulness meditation.  I have also provided you with some simple instructions on 3 types of mindfulness practice.

This lovely little Zen spiritual story, told  by Maritza Parra, illustrates this point beautifully:

I know the value of mindfulness practice and I do some form of it everyday.  In fact, I make it a point to maintain a constant degree of awareness at all times.  I don’t always succeed but I am quick to catch myself when I am not being present.

So, how is mindfulness practice valuable?  As I said, it breaks the conditioned pattern of thinking, the kind of thinking that is anchored in unexamined beliefs, fears, doubts, worries etc. It gives you a chance to step out of this whirling pool of conditioned thinking and step into the crystal-clear waters of the unconditioned mind.  “Ground zero‘ if you like.

What a relief!  What a marvelous reality check!  What a magnificent way of reconnecting with your true nature!  And what an amazingly healing experience – mentally, emotionally and physically!  Yes, of course your body heals as your mind is cleared of all its toxic thought patterns and their neurochemical and biochemical products!

Love always!

Lucy

Awakening to Happiness, Prosperity and Freedom!

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As people get into the habit of observing their breath during meditation practice, it is easy for them to lose sight of the purpose of breath awareness.  In fact, it is easy to fall into the trap of thinking that observing the breath is the purpose of meditation!  It is not.  It is merely a means to an end…

As I’ve explained in my previous posts on meditation, the practice of meditation has many and far-reaching benefits.  Ultimately, however, its purpose is to help us achieve greater states of happiness and peace, something that we all want.

So why is breath observation given so much attention and importance?  Let’s look at some of the reasons:

• It gives us a readily available point of focus.  No matter where you are or what you are doing, you can always tune into your breath
• No other materials or preparation are required for us to practice observing our breath
• It provides us with a readily available object of focus that traverses the entire landscape of gross to subtle phenomena.  For instance, when you first begin, you may focus on the in-breath and the out-breath.  Then you might extend your observation to notice through which nostril the breath enters and through which it leaves.  Next, you might notice the speed of entry and exist of air and the force of entry and exit.  As you continue, you will begin to notice even more subtle qualities of the breath by observing the length of the in-breath and that of the out-breath and the ‘gap’ or pause between each out-breath and the next in-breath.  You may also notice the sensations you experience at the rims of your nostrils as air enters and leaves.  In this way, the breath provides you with a range of observable qualities, from ‘gross’ to ’subtle’ .

So how is all this beneficial?

Well, for one thing, the sharper and finer your observation, the clearer and brighter is the quality of mindspace that you occupy as more and more of your conditioned thoughts, feelings and other preoccupations  ’settle’ like mud in a glass of muddy water.

This quality of mind approximates the quality of your natural, unconditioned mind of unsurpassable power, clarity, creativity, freedom, peace and joy!  Wouldn’t you want to be living from such a mind rather than one that is clouded and disturbed by innumerable, habitual, enslaving thoughts, feelings, beliefs etc?

But there is more!

As you practise observing your breath in a gentle, compassionate and non-judgmental way, you are setting your mind free from its ingrained habits of judging, responding harshly to undesirable situations or avoiding them altogether!  Can you imagine the freedom and joy that this kind of non-judging, compassionnate attitude affords us?

And there is still more!

Your experience in observing your breath is a microcosm of your experience of the world at large!  Everything that happens during your practice reflects what happens outside your practice.

If you find yourself getting tense or agitated and wanting to stop the practice or if you keep judging your breath, wanting to change it instead of simply observing and accepting it, or if you become impatient with the practice, resisting it or resenting it, you can be certain that you are also displaying similar attitudes, responses and ways of thinking and feeling in life more generally.

In an indirect way, observing your breathing is the perfect way of observing your mind at work!  Such observation provides you with hard data about yourself, your conditioned self, and armed with such data, you are in a position to make new and different choices, freely from your clear mind state!  What a truly powerful thing that is!

So, don’t mistake the finger pointing at the moon (observing the breath) for the moon (self-awareness, freedom from conditioned existence).  It is a means to an end – a simple, easy-to-use means to a profound and liberating end!

Blessings

Lucy Lopez

Awakening to Happiness!

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Image from Cosmos Magazine

Einstein is supposed to have said that the solution to any problem can never be found at the level of the problem itself. Instead, it is only ever found at a level above it.

The metaphysical version of this truth is the truth about our happiness, our source of power and our nature of freedom. What do I mean? Let me explain by using an analogy.

Let’s say you decide to take your car to a mechanic for a routine service. A few hours later, you receive a call from him saying that your gear box is in trouble and will need immediate attention, possibly replacement. You are surprised and disconcerted. There had been no indication of a problem when you drove your car even up to the point of leaving it at the garage. But now that you have been told there is one, you are concerned that if you don’t fix it immediately, you may find yourself in an awkward if not dangerous situation should you continue driving your car.

You consider getting a second opinion but when you think of the time and effort it will take to find another mechanic, your motivation starts to wane. Besides, how can you be sure that this mechanic is going to be any more trustworthy? So, somewhat reluctantly and mostly out of fear, you decide to let this mechanic go ahead and do the repairs and replacements that he has recommended. What you don’t know (although you may have suspected it) is that there never was a problem with the gearbox to start with and that it was this untrustworthy mechanic that had deliberately created a problem and then opportunistically and urgently offered to fix it.

This is more or less what happens with our conditioned mind, our mind that has learned how to see the world in the way it does and one of the most persistent ways in which it does this is to see/construe problems. The conditioned mind is forever perceiving situations as problems. This is how it has been conditioned. This is the very nature of its conditioning. It has learned to create problems from events that our senses pick up.

We see things but we don’t just see them as they are, we see them as we have learned to see them through our judgments, our fears, our history, our projections, our likes and dislikes. Needless to say, once we have perceived something to be a problem, we must find a solution. But, as you might have experienced,  the solution is only temporary, lasting only until the next problem is perceived/construed. Even more insidious than this is the fact that the conditioned mind, like the mechanic, is actually creating problems from ‘events’! (Think: The glass is half empty or half full)

In Buddhist and Hindu teachings, the example is given of a coiled rope that a man sees in a dimly lit room. The man thinks the rope is a snake and is filled with fear. He spends the entire night running various scenarios in his mind about what is likely to happen, scenarios of struggle with the animal, of being poisoned, of death even and so on. As the first light of dawn filters into the room, he realizes much to his relief, that the snake is in fact just a coiled rope!

I am sure you can relate to both these examples. So, tying this in with Einstein’s observation, we cannot expect to find the solution to a ‘problem’ using the same level of thinking or consciousness that created the problem in the first place! We must go to a higher level of thinking or consciousness. We must in fact, enter into the level of sheer Awareness i.e. the Unconditioned mind!

Here, the illusions and distortions of the conditioned mind are penetrated and we can see clearly. Here, the investments of our personality, our history, our prejudices, our likes and dislikes, our needs, cravings, attachments, fears and aversions are all dropped. Here is where we find our true nature of happiness, power and freedom for we are no longer shackled by the conditioned mind and its habits of fear and self-protection.

Wouldn’t you like to be able to look at your ‘problems’ without the usual distortions and biases that have become so ‘natural’ to you?  I assure you, there is nothing ‘natural’ about them!  Just because they are familiar and widespread among all human beings does not make them ‘natural’!  They are learned habits and unfortunately, they are disempowering habits that keep you trapped in fear instead of being creatively free or fearlessly creative (even and especially in ‘problem solving’)!

The fact is, you are naturally happy, powerful, peaceful and free!  That is your true nature!  Refuse, therefore, to take the advice of the ‘untrustworthy mechanic’, your conditioned mind :-).

Would you like to know how to enter into your natural, unconditioned state where you will experience true happiness, power and freedom? Email me for my free meditation course!

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A mystical story about performance anxiety with hidden messages!

Lucy Lopez

Awakening to our Natural Happiness!

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