awakening to mindfulness
It all begins with an idea. What is mindfulness?
I remember hearing about meditation, and there was no way in hell I was going to be able to turn off my mind, much less drop into states of nirvana that must require decades and decades of practice reserved for monks and ‘lucky’ folks like Marianne Williamson, Malcolm Gladwell, Eckhart Tolle, David Deida, and John of God.
That is certainly not me.
And then something happened. After a cleanse, a dietary shift, and a months-long mindful abstinence from the gym (previously 7 days a week 2 hours a day), and an Ayahuasca awakening.. something surely happened.
I was walking on the ground feeling the moist dirt below cradling my feet and my feet were absorbing the water, and some of the minerals. It was a crazy thought, but that was actually what I was FEELING, not thinking. This was weird. My mind was filled with noise, so many layers of the puzzle available in an instant… SO NOISY!
When I wanted to calm down, I was immediately sure that I should put my attention on my heart (it feels like heart space), and breath in like there were lungs on either side of my heart, watching them expanding instead of my actual lungs. This evoked a feeling unlike any I have felt before.
I was drawn to meditation because I needed it to silence the sheer volume of information that can come it at any given moment. My breath, drawing me to feeling my body, and the space I can inhabit silently and energetically. Meditation felt like home. It felt like a way to return home, deep into my body, where I can connect to the infinite potential of feeling and experiencing everything.
This can sound grandiose, but the simple fact is that mindfulness is just a means of bringing absolute presence to the moment. For a deeper experience of mindfulness, you can ask to experience absolute reverence for EVERYTHING that is alive in this moment for you.
For example, if I am eating, am I really eating? or am I talking? or watching TV? or feeling? or masking? There are so many processes going on at all times, and sometimes a withdrawal into the pure richness of the moment is exactly what is needed for you to truly enjoy that bite of food. My mindfulness experiment began by putting a bite of vegetable stew into my mouth and thinking about each vegetable I tasted, and the ground it grew in, and the hands that brought it to me and a silent moment of gratitude for each of those things. By the end of the bite, the food was liquid and most easily digestible and my heart felt nourished by all of the things that happened to make that bite possible. So much love and gratitude was possible in a single bite of food!
The question that infused this exercise was how grateful can I be that all of these things were done FOR me to experience THAT things SO FULLY!
While my answer to the question ‘what is mindfulness?’ is bringing reverent presence of awe to the moment… your answer may be a bit different. I would love to hear you share your mindfulness insight and/or experience.
