Our Mind Can Be Our Worst Enemy

“Mindfulness has never met a cognition it didn’t like”.

-Daniel J. Siegal

 

“Our minds are full of irritants, like fear and jealousy and greed.  Mindfulness is a way of clearing our minds of such irritants”.

-Unknown

 

Mindfulness is a kind of pure state where we are flowing and are one with where we are and what we are doing to the point of transcending time and space.  Admittedly it is difficult to maintain this level of consciousness all the time.  To use a meditation term of reference, we get pulled out of our center by distracting thoughts.  Many of our distracting thoughts are in our head and are fear based.  As I have told my wife on many occasions, most of your fears never happen.  I admit that one time in some previous daily thoughts I mentioned like five things you frequently hear about on the news but most people never experience in their life time.  A woman wrote to me and told me that every single one of my examples had happened to her!  Statistically, this was an anomaly.  In general, your mind is your worst enemy.  Sometimes it almost seems like we were given our minds just so they could taunt us.  Our minds, not our reality, generate most, if not all, the negative emotions that we feel.  By practicing mindfulness we focus on the reality of the moment and not the imaginary fears in our heads.  Less any of you think I am totally out of touch with reality, I accept that sometimes bad things really do happen to all of us.  Life is not perfect and there are difficult moments.  It has been my experience that most things in life are 80/20.  With that presupposition, I submit that 80% of life is mostly good.  Sometimes the remaining 20% can be very challenging but even that can be a perception and not true reality.  One must understand the difference between a crisis and an inconvenience.  Live in the moment and be grateful, not just for what you have, but also for what you don’t have.