Wednesday, February 01, 2006
Thank you to the commenter on the “Angels Fly Lightly!” post.
Let’s reflect a bit on her comment that the terms “inner peace” and “busy women” are in conflict, but don’t have to be. A central point that the author of the book, Inner Peace for Busy Women, Joan Borysenko makes is that we can learn to stay in the “eye of the” cyclone of busyness that often characterizes our lives.
How do we stay in the eye? Joan suggests that we can take a big step in that direction by learning “mindfulness” practices. What is mindfulness? A commonly-accepted definition is that it involves awareness of present experience with acceptance. So, when you are mindful you are present to whatever is happening (outer circumstances as well as inner experiences—thoughts, feelings, sensations) in the moment. And, you observe such experiences without evaluating or judging them.
ONE of the endpoints of mindfulness is that it changes your RELATIONSHIP to your thoughts, feelings and sensations. Instead of BEING them, you HAVE them. That, proponents of the technique hold, ideally, leads to greater equanimity and respons-ability for what you do about them.
Mindfulness is generally taught through meditation and other meditative techniques (yoga, mindful walking, conscious breathing, for example.) Teachers of mindfulness suggest that moments of ordinary mindfulness can be relatively easy to come by, but that continual, sustained mindfulness takes hard work and lots of practice.
I like the idea of mindfulness and I practice it. It can make even the most mundane tasks enjoyable.
I remember once getting mindful while washing a bathroom floor...just watching my mind...seeing my angst at the question of why I was the ONLY ONE in the family who washed bathroom floors....
...noticing my knees screaming at me...noticing the frustration about hairs that just won’t be captured by wet rags...seeing the sunshine dance across the beautiful tiles...noticing the way the colors of the tiles and wall paint I had chosen complemented each other so beautifully...feeling grateful for the abundance I enjoyed.
Somehow, when I found the nice feeling, I just stayed there. I actually found myself moved to tears with the level of my appreciation.
Mindfulness seems to do that for me...leading me, inevitably, to a nicer feeling state.
I will say, however, that I do think being in a more and more continual state of mindfulness actually can require much less “hard work and practice” than many proponents would have us believe! Children know how to do it naturally; we adults just forget how. More about THAT in coming days....
Posted by Linda Sandel Pettit on 02/01 at 11:43 AM in Tranquility |
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