Mindful Boston

I looked up from this screen to see snowflakes the size of small birds falling from the sky.  No one of a mindful ilk could resist.  I jumped up and ran out the door. There are movies these days with cheesy CGI versions of locusts or other swarms.  I looked up into a sky filled in real-life with a kazillion 3-inch diameter snowballs.  The entire sky.  Filled.  Surreal, and real. I tried catching the snowballs.  They were very thin and lightly constructed.  Caught with my coat-sleeve, they burst into snow powder.  Caught with my hand, they delicately melted away.  I went inside to pull on my snowsuit and boots, then went out the back to my hammock, dumped the bed of snow off the hammock, and laid down looking up into the sky.  Immediately ice drops stung my eyes and choked me making me shift position. Once I shifted to a semi-upright pose for the sake of my breathing, I stayed still in the cold and watched the snow balls shif...

I’ve run across some folks who have gotten the impression from magazine articles that   Mindfulness practice is a cure for suffering.   They have an impression that there is a choice we can make between living a life like Disneyland and living a life of despair.   But that choice is not available to us.   Jon Kabat-Zinn named his book on Mindfulness Full Catastrophe Living.   To me, that succinctly describes life as a combination of both Disneyland and despair mixed up like scrambled eggs.   There is no way to separate them.   You either eat the scrabbled eggs with all the ingredients, or you don’t.   Human life is a full catastrophe.   It includes ecstasy, victories, and fun games.   It also includes despair, defeat, and boredom.   We can’t pick and choose one set of ingredients over the others.   We either live it all, or we shut down and don’t experience any of it.   Most of us separate from living the full exper...

Mindfulness is not a technique to help you stop feeling bad feelings. I will say it again. Mindfulness is not a technique to help you stop feeling bad feelings. Mindfulness is a technique to help you accept the truth of what you do feel.  What you feel right now is valid.  Sometimes what you feel is despair. Sometimes what you feel is panic.  It is valid to feel that.  Sometimes what you feel is pleasure.  Sometimes what you feel is joy.  It is valid to feel that. Is your sadness unacceptable to you? If yes, you do have the option of distracting yourself, or taking a pill, or any one of a number of ways to change things. But if you are practicing mindfulness, you will start by accepting that you judge sadness (or joy) as unacceptable.  And then, taking your time, perhaps over the course of years, you will come to understand the conditioning that led you to judge sadness (or joy) in that way.  And then, taking your time, perhaps over the ...