Words of Wisdom...

From a ME First Newsletter I received today-talk about great timing!


Trust
L.D., ME FIRST Lead Facilitator
     In our ongoing series on Jon Kabat-Zinn’s Foundations of Mindfulness
Practice from his book Full Catastrophe Living, we have covered Non-Judging,
Patience, and Beginner’s Mind. The latter we defined as the act of asking
honest questions, with a true desire to learn something new about ourselves,
others and/or the situation we find ourselves in. Admittedly, this is a very
difficult way of being much of the time. Most of us resort to the survival skill
of ‘muddling’ through because it is easier in the moment. The cost long-term,
however, is feeling and being stuck, stagnated, fat and unhappy more than
we would like to because we are listening to the negative mental chatter we
learned a long time ago.
     By engaging regularly in beginner’s mind, we are practicing the thriving
skill of flexibility. This allows us the opportunity to listen to our authentic
voice, the voice that lives deep within each of us. It is the voice that knows
exactly what we want and how to get more of it.
     Too often we listen to the voice of what we think we should want. This is
the should of well meaning family members, co-workers, friends, neighbors,
and the ever present bombardment of the modern day charlatans of Madison
Avenue and accompanying media hype that promises to sell us happiness in a
bottle, or a new piece of expensive equipment, or the right clothes or the
newest miracle diet that will ‘fix’ us.
      Some of us get so tired of trying to do it on our own that we pay big
money to ‘experts’ who we hope will have the answer for us. There is only
one problem with this scenario: The ‘expert’ isn’t ‘out there’; it is inside
each of us.
     Ursula K. Le Guin says that “It is good to have an end to journey toward,
but it is the journey that matters, in the end.” This journey is about learning
from our mistakes. We do this by not thinking of our mistakes as failures, but
as opportunities to learn something essential about ourselves that we have
not yet learned. After all, as adults, they are our mistakes; we are fully
responsible for them. We are unlikely to learn anything new if we listen to
the negative mental chatter from the voices of our past. It is important to
savor the journey by listening to our own distinctive voice. It is the voice of
patience, understanding, searching and cherishing. This voice is sometimes
buried deep, but never so deep that it doesn’t find a way to be heard. Our
mindfulness in the moment, of caring to listen to our own voice takes time
and energy. How much time and energy are you worth? How much time and
energy are you willing to invest in learning about you?