Monday Mindfulness Minute: Appreciating The extra Ordinary Is Extraordinary

"The great lessons from the true mystics, from the Zen monks, is that the sacred is in the ordinary, that it is to be found in one's daily life, in one's neighbors, friends, and family, in one's back yard... To be looking everywhere for miracles is a sure sign of ignorance that everything is miraculous." Abraham Maslow (as cited in Pronoia p. 207)

Breathing

Having enough food to eat

Getting clean water from the fountain or the refrigerator

Having a roof over our heads at home and work

Hanging out with friends

Walking the dog

Reading a book

I don't think any of us would necessarily define these items as extraordinary. How often do we see pictures or videos of these posted on social media? Hardly ever. (Unless of course we are hanging out with friends on a tropical island, eating a fancy meal at the hot new restaurant in town, or showing off our fancy new fridge that keeps water at a glacier level of coldness)

It seems that in our panic for greatness and growth, we are steadily overlooking the ordinary happenings which may be the only true calories that leave us fulfilled, alive, and ok.

I fall into this trap all the time - believing the mind that tells me what I'm doing is not enough and too ordinary. Feeling this existential crisis of not good-enough-ness and ordinariness seems to correlate to when I overlook and forget all of the seemingly ordinary things I have to be grateful for right now.

We are taught repeatedly to be extraordinary, to do extra, get extra, be extra, and that if we accomplish these we will receive the ultimate gift: aliveness. But what if the extraordinary feeling of being alive on earth right now can only be accessed by focusing on the extra ordinary life that surrounds us daily?

The Boy, The Mole, The Fox, and The Horse

Let's commit this week to being extraordinary by focusing on the extra ordinary around us.

Monday Mindfulness Minute: Can you hear the static thoughts?

"There's a radio playing in our head, Radio Station NST: Non-Stop Thinking." Silence (Thich Nhat Hanh) p. 3

As an avid Spotify user, I rarely listen to the radio in my car and have never preset any radio stations. This means there is usually a cacophony of static for a few minutes before the Bluetooth connects. I used to hate the noise and would turn the volume down as quickly as possible, but I've started to enjoy the little bit of irritation that starts to build in the mind and seeing that I don't have to immediately make it go away. The static has come to serve as a wonderful reminder of what is usually going on inside my mind most hours of the day.

Have you heard the static of the mind? You know, the inside voice that is constantly comparing, criticizing, and complaining (labeled as the "3 Cancers of the Soul" in Think Like a Monk) and never seems to stop. In his book The Untethered Soul, Michael Singer describes this voice as an inner roommate. The static voice can make what should be a perfect moment not so much. The static voice tells us we’re not there and will never be there. The static voice is unable to fully live in the present. 

But just as we can change the station in our cars, we can learn to tune our inside voice to different frequencies. But what are the different stations of the mind? In his book, Map of Consciousness, Richard Hawkins does an expert job of describing what stations our minds can be tuned to.

So what radio station of mind are you tuned to? Do you enjoy the music? If not, have you ever tried to change the station?

As we enter this week, let's remember that our minds don't have to play the same static over and over and that it is completely within our power to not buy into the repeated narratives of the mind as we evolve how we see and hear life.

Monday Mindfulness Minute: Can you see the sunflower in the sunflower seed?

"...charity is a way of perceiving the perfection of another even if you cannot perceive it in yourself... it's a way of looking at another as if they had already gone far beyond their actual accomplishments in time." A Course in Mircales p. 27

It blows my mind to contemplate how vessels as tiny and seemingly dull as seeds contain the potential to grow into beautiful flowers and mighty trees. Consider a sunflower seed for instance. Could you imagine the surprise on the Native Americans' faces when they compared the sunflower seed with what it could become?

Examples abound in nature of seemingly tiny things containing mighty potential or things that appear to be dull turning into beautiful stories. So, why do we seem to forget that the same holds for us and those around us?

Of course, it's much easier to judge somebody for where they are, what we deem to be the truth from our limited vantage point, and then lock them into that position. But this would be the same as throwing out the sunflower seed because it wasn't "beautiful." It might not be beautiful yet, but it contains beauty. We/they might not have it figured out yet, but the answer is somewhere inside of us/them.

Let us consider this week how we may limit ourselves and those around us (family, friends, neighbors, etc) because we are limiting them to what we see in front of us instead of the potential that is within them. Let's extend some grace and trust the natural flow of life that magically got us to this point from a cell smaller than a seed.