Lights, Camera, Action

I invite you take a moment and check in with yourself. What’s it feel like to be you, right now…out of 10…how do you feel?

Now, take a deep breath and let yourself experience the sensation of breathing in and then breathing out. Simply breathing, nothing else. What’s that feel like?

How often to you pause to smell the roses, appreciate the small stuff or not so small stuff in your life, like your children, or someone else’s, achieving some milestone and enjoying the pride and pleasure they feel in their accomplishment with them and savouring the moment?

If this thought doesn’t inspire you, perhaps simply appreciating the colour of the sky, the changing cloud formations, the dawn, sunset, or maybe the smell of freshly baked bread or 1000 different things can – for it’s the practise of noticing what you notice that starts to wake you up to the life you are living now, not yesterday or tomorrow, but right now.

Mindfulness is defined as knowing what you are doing when you are doing it. What could be simpler? But it’s not easy.

We are patterned in our very essence, in so many ways. From the time we are born we make every effort to adapt to our surroundings and the people in them. As creatures of habit we become comfortable with our patterns of thinking and doing, no matter how ineffective they are, and settle into a standard, automatic way of being in the world, one that we’ve learned – a conditioned response.

It’s in this partially-aware comfort zone that we tend to operate in, instead of paying attention to what we notice and being present to ourselves and the world, we focus on trying to control it. This strategy may seem to work for a while, yet it never gets the results we are hoping for because there’s nothing we can really control other than ourselves.

We can create the conditions, set the terms, clarify our expectations and manage our relationships but forget about trying to control them. The attempt to control the world outside us tends to take us towards a litany of bad practises that include blaming, criticizing, judging self and others, doing everything ourselves, jumping in on conversations, interrupting others rather than listening, trusting and empowering others by sharing our lives and the actions to sustain our collective needs.

To be happy, we must wake up…wake up to ourselves, pay attention, recognize and honour what matters to us, notice what brings us joy, delights and engages us in the moment. Everything less is a compromise….It’s simply not good enough.

Be happy. Be clear about who you are, what you want and the terms you want, no – you need to have met, to live by. Life is not a rehearsal. It’s an act and you are the star, the hero of your own life story. Have fun playing the lead role. Make your life the event you want to remember it to be.