Celebrate the Return

On any particular day, if you looked at the minutes of my mind on a bar chart, you would be startled.

Much of the day, my mind is absorbed with meandering thoughts about tasks, details, to-do lists, whether to check email (again), and other minutia. When I stop to look, I see that a lot of my thoughts are a list of worries, real and imagined. My worry list creates a background radiation of low-grade anxiety that colors my day.

I don’t spend much time in the present.

I have moments of recognition when I pull my attention out of the chattering thought-stream and remember the larger context – remember that I started the day with an intention to remain conscious and open, or that my list of tasks is not as important as my state of being, or simply that I am connected to Spirit.

My attention oscillates back and forth throughout the day between attending to details and expanding into the larger context. We could call these two states worry mind and big mind. When I look at the daily bar chart of time spent in both, I can easily become aghast, but judging it as wrong is a mistake (it would just give my worry mind something new to worry about). My worry mind is only doing what it has been trained to do. I can train it to do something different, but not by scolding.

But the number of minutes on the bar chart are not the important measure. The essential part is what I do in the moment of recognition, because that first instant is far more powerful than the hours I spend in worry mind.

Here is the strange paradox of spiritual growth – we want to make progress, we want something to change, we want to be different than we are; but the journey is not really about arriving at a future, fantasized enlightened state, it is about bringing conscious awareness to each moment along the way. We are becoming something different in each step, more than taking steps to get somewhere that is not already here. The emphasis is on walking, not arriving; constantly becoming, more than statically being.

I have a way of anchoring my steps and embracing the moments I switch from worry mind to big mind. It’s a small thing I do that works for me, I call it Celebrating the Return.

When I realize my attention has switched to big mind, I try to imbue the moment with a positive feeling of lightness and joy. Not only do I not scold myself for being asleep all day, I thank myself for waking up! I celebrate the awakening as a beautiful moment, no matter how brief or rare.

This practice opens me and allows me to relax a bit. I can rest in a feeling of acceptance and gratitude that my spiritual walking is bearing fruit. I am better able to meet whatever needs to be addressed, including unpleasant feelings like grief or fear.

Try it and see if it works for you. Linger in that first flash of recognition and allow yourself to be joyous and grateful that you are walking this path, advancing the work one step at a time. Treat each moment of awareness as a little piece of enlightenment and trust that these moments add up.

Photo by Amore Seymour from Pixabay