Today is All that Matters – Part 3: Your Mind

Your entire life in an inside job; an inside felt experience. Your experiences of your life only happen inside of You, based on two things; the way – the language you use – to describe what you are experiencing or perceiving, and the feeling you embody as a result of your descriptions of life or of the experience of the sensations you feel. All of this only happens inside You.

For example, imagine you are a mother running behind with the morning lunchbox routine. You opt for efficiency and reach for the peanut butter only to discover there’s just a smidge left. In that moment a voice within might say ‘dammit, John always does this! He’s so inconsiderate!” There may even be more of a narrative to follow; “Well, this is the last time I go out of my way to pick him up at 4. He can just bus home. He never thinks about how his actions affect others. He’s so selfish”.

The nature of the untrained mind will run on and on and on describing internally what isn’t right, what’s wrong, who is to blame, and what others should and shouldn’t do. What follows narratives that describe the ‘problems we perceive’ is that we then feel agitation. When we believe the critical narratives to be true, they create an internal, and steadfast agitation that then increases our reactivity to others, and decreases our ability to connect as our kindest self.

Our Kindest self is who we are an an expression of the Open Mind; the mind that is flexible, soft, fluid, and able to remain in harmony with what Is, with a cheery lightness. The Open Mind, which is the mind that becomes trained to experience the jar of Peanut Butter as simply an almost empty jar, and the negative descriptions of John simply and ultimate do not arise. The jar, exactly as it Is, shows you simply that it’s not a PB&J day, and to Listen within for the next steps. Maybe it’s school lunch day? Maybe it’s cereal for lunch? Ask… you’ll Hear your own Wisdom rise up, yet only in the cessation of the mind that criticizes in contraction.

We have approximately 60-80,000 thoughts per day, and the quality of your thoughts will determine the quality of your experience of Your life. In Part 4, we’ll explore how the Open Mind is the Key to the Open Heart. It is only from the Open Heart can we respond to John later when we see him from a place of Kindness and Clarity, and sustain our own inner equilibrium of Patience, Lightheartedness, and Power.

Written by Daniela Hess, YogaFarm Director, Counselor, and Radiance Course Educator. For more information about self care practices, visit www.YogaFarm.us.