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WHAT DO CHOCOLATE, SEX AND ALCOHOL HAVE IN COMMON?

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WHAT DO CHOCOLATE, SEX AND ALCOHOL HAVE IN COMMON?

I am sure they have lots of things in common…we could go all day speculating about it!

But to me the main thing they have in common is that chocolate, sex and alcohol are best when experienced separately and in moderation.

We all may crave some chocolate sometimes, but while eating one square can bring you joy, eating 10 squares may not necessarily make the experience 10 times more enjoyable.

The line between pleasure and pain can be a very thin one, which often can be crossed if our awareness has not been sharpened.

We are this sensing machine going around smelling, tasting, hearing, touching, seeing, and imagining. So much input, especially if you walk into a shopping centre! And it is from these inputs that craving is born: I like this, I want that, I am hungry. And whenever craving is present its opposite is also bound to appear: aversion.

Then we are thrown from side to side with likes and dislikes: running towards what appeals to us, pushing away what we don’t like. And that is happening not only with our eating, our drinking or our shopping list, but also in our relationships with other people, in our health, in our work. Truly it is happening constantly. And it is causing us a lot of stress and dissatisfaction.

How to we free ourselves from such madness?

Sometimes I love to go away on meditation retreats. There, often after a couple of days, I start feeling less stressed and more at peace with myself.

While I could technically do retreats at home by turning all the phones and computers off, I feel that I am still too close to all that I perceive needs fixing, changing or improving to be able to have real ‘time off’. I am still too caught up in the ‘wants’ and the ‘don’t wants’ of my day-to-day life.

But the nicest thing I notice after coming back from one week of meditation, like I did last week, is that I am more grounded and less caught up in the madness of worldly life. It gives me a better perspective about what matters the most and also a better perspective about who I am and where I fit in the bigger picture.

Sometimes that’s all that one needs to become happier: to learn how to see life from a more detached perspective.

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Do I have to be grateful Today?

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DO I HAVE TO BE GRATEFUL TODAY?

Gratitude is something we need to practice every day towards every small thing, until we are able to become grateful for everything that comes our way (via Twitter this morning).

Last week the homework I gave at meditation class was to extend appreciation to all things around us, and to take that to our inter-personal encounters too.

Then, this week one of my students was brave enough to say she had to deal with a few difficult people and had trouble practicing gratitude along the week. I mentioned to her that we need to be kind to ourselves first and foremost, and accept that we all have days when we can be more tolerant than others. Accept and let go. Accept and let go. Again and again. That’s the beauty of the meditation practice.

It is common that some of us may set days to practice gratitude, or loving-kindness, or mindfulness, every once in a while. However to know how to be truly grateful only comes from daily practice. Day in, be grateful. Day out, be grateful. Sun comes, be grateful. Rain comes, be grateful. Bird eats the spiders on your plants be grateful. Bird leaves droppings on your balcony afterwards be grateful!

However to practice gratitude you need first to understand what it is that you are practicing, and the benefits of it. Then second you have to FEEL it. Is it coming from a genuine place inside you? Does it feel true to you? This is because if you set up to be grateful because you ‘should be grateful’ it will not work so well. It will only be working on a surface level, and you may end up feeling a bit like a great-fool instead.

Extending appreciation or developing gratitude is connecting with life itself. We can’t live in isolation. We depend on so many things and people around us, that being thankful is just an acknowledgement of what is already there. It is a remembering. We are just remembering our interconnectedness with all things, and that often bring us a sense of peace. And we slowly learn that good things and ‘bad’ things are equally part of life, equally important to our growth and happiness.

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“Your thoughts matter because they create matter”

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What are you thinking right now?

Did you know that you have in average 60,000 thoughts each day and that 95% of those thoughts are the same thoughts you had yesterday?

So if you are looking at improving your personal or professional life, wouldn’t be important to become more aware of the types of thoughts you are having at a deeper level?

Mindfulness meditation can help you in observing your the day to day thinking – such as planning, worrying about the past, worrying about the future, criticizing, more planning- and moving beyond that.

Mindfulness meditation will support you in observing your thinking underlying the day-to-day ‘noise’ or your common thoughts.

Because it’s only when you realise that underneath a thought of I’m going to be late! lies another thought such as I’m not good enough or  Who cares about me anyway? that you will start applying real change to your life.

with love from Ana

Classical Feng Shui and Mindfulness Meditation