A digest for conscious living
The practice continues…
In spite of a good yoga session and a long meditation this morning, I had a relatively difficult time maintaining a clear perspective throughout the day. I had some particularly monotonous and tiring work to do at my office and it slowly but surely drained me of energy and along with it, my patience and my balance. By the time I came home this evening, I was feeling relatively negative and my thoughts were turning almost irrationally toward desperation.
Its quite easy in our world to find reasons to feel bad: I’m unhappy with my job, taxes are too high, the whole system makes me ill, I feel powerless to do anything about the true problems in my life, let alone the world… and so on ad nauseum. Interestingly enough, throughout the day I was quite aware of what was going on- I knew I was allowing Small Mind to direct my attention, but I was not able to do anything besides watch it happen.
Luckily, I did not get completely lost in the psychological maze that I was building for myself. At first, coming home to a whining demanding and hungry toddler seemed like it might make push me adrift on a lake of self pity and frustration. While giving my daughter a bath however, after having vented a bit of emotional frustration at dinner by talking about my feelings with my wife, I somehow found my way back to myself. The joy of watching my daughter’s endless facination as she poured water from one cup into another over ad over brought me back home. Its almost funny now to think that I was on the verge of allowing myself to temporarily be shackled to my illusory negativity, and waste the oportunity to spend a few precious hours of life in happiness.
The one thing that once again became obvious to me after observing myself suffer through the afternoon, was that my suffering stemmed not from my thoughts or even my circumstances, but rather from within me. I was able to discern quite clearly that I was experiencing some sort of inexplicable emotional pain that had it’s source deep within recesses of my mind that I have no conscious conection to. Especially in retrospect, it is clear that the perceived resons for my blues were in reality only attempts by my mind to validate and explain my feelings by creating a justifiable reason for my feelings. My mind was desperately trying to make sense of emotions- trying to find a scapegoat for my emotional pain.
For me, today’s episode marks a definite step forward in my development of a stable and Awakened state. I was able to recognize the subterfuge that my mind was engineering for me and was able to avoid it. I made a decision not to go back down that path again- life is too short and precious to waste any opportunity to feel the love.
Goodnight,
Kikta