Image by Bianca Mentil from Pixabay
I invite us to consider that the practice of mindfulness can ease, and even dissolve, memories we’d be happy to lose; memories we carry in our mind that are heavy and keep us from feeling Joy in Life and Being the Love we are. Lebanese–Canadian author and poet, Najwa Zebian, wrote: “These mountains that you are carrying, you were only supposed to climb.”
Mindfulness is the intention to maintain a moment-to-moment awareness of our thoughts, emotions, bodily sensations, and surrounding environment with the lightness of an open mind that is aware that anything is possible, and with a curiosity that allows the moment to reveal its newness and expand our awareness of the joyous Life within us and around us. Mindfulness is noticing this Life, and feeling this Life, as Its happening in this moment because this moment is the only place Life is happening and new possibilities for experiencing It are available to us.
In The Way of the Heart we read, “Are you willing to truly be right where you are? The mind will say ‘Well of course, I’m on a spiritual path.’ But rest assured, if you look well into your feelings and find any trace of resistance, you have not yet made the necessary commitment that gives you the power to open the door to Heaven.” If we haven’t yet, how can we make the necessary commitment to awaken to Heaven on Earth? Practicing mindfulness is a commitment that allows us to notice what we’re thinking, and how we’re feeling about what we’re thinking, in the very moment we’re thinking and feeling whatever it is. In this way can release any trace of resistance in us that is keeping us from experiencing peace of mind, financial abundance, a sense of well being, and happy relationships with others.
Being aware of how we’re feeling, whether we feel open and curious or closed and resistant, is not only good to notice, it’s essential if we want to our experience our Power to open the door to Heaven and to Life as It’s meant to be experienced. We all want to live fully before we die, but unless we release hellish thoughts that weigh us down and keep us from feeling free, we might “go” before we’ve had a chance to be the One we came here to be. We read in A Course in Miracles, “In this world Heaven is a choice, because here we believe there are alternatives to choose between. We think that all things have an opposite, and what we want we choose.” We all want to feel free to experience a life we enjoy, but sometimes we choose thoughts that are in opposition to the happiness we want.
It’s only at the level of feeling that we know what we’re choosing, and it’s only through choosing Love we discover our Power to open the door to Heaven, which is the door to Joy. We all have dips in our Joy from time to time, and it’s good to notice when it happens. If we’re not paying attention to that feeling indication, we might not notice we’re focused on thoughts that don’t feel good and won’t bring us the manifestations in life we want. And, we’re likely to react to others and situations in ways we regret.
But if we’re paying attention to how we feel, if we’re not feeling emotionally good, we have an opportunity to pause and take time to connect the dots that will lead right to the dippy thought we were thinking just a moment before we felt the dip in our happiness, energy or enthusiasm. If we’re unable to connect the dots, but we want to feel good anyway, we can always find something to focus on that allows our Spirit to rise up in us and lets our happiness, energy and enthusiasm to return. No worries if we don’t connect the dots because that dippy thought will come again if it still needs to be released by us. Until we resolve issues in our mind, we’ll still be carrying them around and making mountains out of mole hills.
No matter what choices we made in the past that brought about a certain mountain in our mind, once we look at it, feel it, and embrace it, we’ve owned it. Then we’re free to climb to the top of it or let it crumble into the sea of Love. But, we can only release thoughts we don’t want if we’re aware they’re there, and that’s where mindfulness is key because we can only interact with Life in the present moment.
In the Book of 2 Corinthians we read, “Behold, now is the acceptable time; now is the day of salvation.” Now is the acceptable time because nothing else, no other Life, is going on on either side of Now. Now is the day of salvation because salvation is freedom, emancipation, liberation, release, and deliverance from the weight of unhappy, unhelpful thoughts. Thoughts about anything that happened before right now have no power right now except the power we give them by bringing them with us, like accessories, into the present moment.
When we focus in any moment on thoughts in a way that causes a dip in our Joy long enough, that dip will turn into a deep valley before we know it. The Law of Attraction is this: “That which is like unto itself is drawn.” Therefore, whatever we’re thinking about attracts other thoughts that are like it. Did you ever have a disturbing thought, and then another one and another one came to mind, not necessarily about the same subject but equal to the same disturbing feeling, until you felt overwhelmed and you just wanted to go back to bed before the day had even begun? Mindfulness will cause us to be aware of that first thought, notice how it feels, and change it before it gets out of hand.
Mark Twain humorously wrote, “Love your enemies. It will scare the hell out of them.” But when we love our enemies, which are thoughts that aren’t true about our self, others and life, we scare the hell out of our self. Love flows where It is free to go, and just by being what It is, It removes anything unlike Itself. Heaven and hell can’t exist in the same place, at the same time. Since Heaven is a choice, if we choose It, It will be our experience. John Milton wrote, “The mind is its own place and in itself can make a heaven of hell or a hell of heaven.”
It has been scientifically proven that we can’t have two opposing thoughts at the same time, believe both are real, and feel good. In psychology the mental stress and discomfort experienced by someone who holds two or more contradictory beliefs, ideas or values at the same time is called cognitive dissonance. Cognitive relates to the mental processes of perception, memory, judgment, and reasoning. Dissonance in the mind is the same as in music: discord, disharmony, a simultaneous combination of tones in a state of unrest and needing completion.
Someone was telling me the other day about a noisy situation that had been going on around him that was causing a state of unrest in his mind, emotions, and body. He told me that he sat there “visualizing peace,” and I wondered what peace looked like in such a state of unrest. When I asked him whether he was feeling peace while he was visualizing it, he said, “I was trying to!” That’s when Gandhi’s words came to mind: “We must be the change we want to see.” We must Be peace if we want to experience it, and we must Be Love in order to love the hell out of our experiences. We must complete the task at hand, which is to bring harmony to our mind where the unrest originates.
We can choose to see anything that occurs around us, and within us, as the doorway to Heaven on Earth. We open the door with the Key of Being. A good question to ask our self is, “Am I willing to accept that I came this far in my life by climbing the stepping stones of my experiences, and that I didn’t come this far not to go farther?” We can choose a better view only from the vantage point of now. Then we can move on.
When we’re Being the Love we are, in the moment we are, we’re truly awake. We don’t have to love everything that’s going on around us or in the world. But if we want to scare the hell out of this world, we can only do it by Being the Love in this world that brings harmony to discord and peace to unrest. Nothing is going to change without a change in us wherever we are. Heaven and hell are states of consciousness. What are we choosing to be conscious of? When we feel peaceful, content, trusting, happy, or just plain good, we know in that moment we’re remembering the Presence of God that lives within us, around us, and through all things always.
When we’re willing to climb every mountain as it comes into view by seeing it as part of Love’s expansion plan through us, we’ll feel a deep sense of gratitude for everything this physical world has brought to us in the past and what it brings to us now. There won’t be a molecule of beingness within us that feels any resentment, any longing, any anger, or any remorse for anything. Matt Kahn wrote, “In a world of endless questions, love is the only answer.” Life is good, and we can prove it by loving the hell out of it!
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