There are many remarkable things about mindfulness practice.
And one of the things I find most remarkable is that when we pay attention to our experience in a mindful way,
We change not only our relationship to that experience,
But often the experience itself begins to change.
And this is a process that I call the alchemy of awareness.
As you might know,
Alchemy was a philosophical tradition,
One of whose goals was to take base metals and transmute them into gold.
If you look at alchemy psychologically,
You might say that it's about transforming the dark and the painful emotions that we have inside us and turning them into something noble,
Something that helps us transform ourselves,
Something that brings understanding and healing.
And I think this type of inner alchemy is really what mindfulness does when we practice.
You can see this in a lot of different ways.
Most of the time in our default state of mind,
We're not really being mindful.
We're more focused on what we want,
On getting our to-do lists done,
Or maybe we're focused on what we don't want,
Maybe focused on getting rid of something.
In this default state of mind,
We essentially get lost in our experience.
We become identified with the details and minutia of our daily traumas.
You know how it goes.
You get into your car and you're going somewhere that you've never been to before.
So you get out your GPS on your phone and you get your route.
And you're halfway to your destination when you get a message that a faster route is available.
And so you tap the phone and take the faster route.
And within a few minutes,
You realize that you made a huge mistake because now you're stuck in traffic for half an hour.
And you just get really infuriated and you say out loud in the car,
This can't be happening.
And you sit in your car for a half an hour catastrophizing about being late or about all the things you could be doing if you weren't stuck in traffic.
Or maybe you're at work.
And someone at work you don't like says something that triggers you.
And you fly off the handle and say something that maybe escalates the tension.
Or maybe something happens which is a setback in your business.
Something that's really a challenge that you weren't expecting.
Maybe you made a mistake about something and now you're suffering the consequences in your business.
And then without even realizing it,
You start thinking that you're a failure.
And before you know it,
You begin to feel depressed.
And maybe you go out for a few drinks to kind of forget about it.
And the next morning you wake up and you don't end up going to the gym because you're too hungover to do so.
You know,
This is the way our minds work.
We're constantly reacting to experience.
Grasping at it or pushing it away.
Trying to change it or fix it or numb it so that we don't feel it.
We get caught or lost in the experience all the time.
You know,
It's like a movie and we're the star of it.
And the script is already preordained.
But if we sit down for 30 minutes and meditate,
Something entirely different begins to happen.
If we just sit in a chair and just stay there,
The storms of the heart and mind will come.
Absolutely.
Just as they do when we get caught in a traffic jam or get into an argument with a co-worker or start thinking we're a failure.
But because we're meditating,
We're not actually getting into that argument or going out to that bar to drink away the blues.
When we meditate,
We have nowhere to go but be right here.
With our own experience exactly as it is.
The good,
The bad,
And the ugly.
We can't act on the experience because we're sitting.
But we can't avoid the experience either because thoughts and emotions come and go as they always do.
So when we meditate,
We are forced to simply be with ourselves.
No matter what comes.
And that being with ourselves forces us to see the patterns of our minds.
The stories that we tell over and over again.
The emotional triggers that get pushed again and again.
We see these mind states come and go.
And if we watch them long enough,
We'll also see that they're not solid.
They're not fixed at all.
They're completely evanescent,
Like soap bubbles,
Swelling into existence and disappearing.
And this begins to create a new perspective for us.
By watching these states of heart and mind come and go.
By not being lost in them but seeing their impermanence.
We begin to understand that there's something else in our experience that knows what's happening but isn't the content of what's happening.
We begin to see that there's a knowing aspect of our mind that is never caught in our suffering.
We see that awareness is this part of the mind that knows experience but isn't identified with it.
Awareness is the part of the mind which is always available to us when we just open to the present moment.
When we let ourselves be as we are.
We see anger and fear and sadness and obsession.
But we also know that this awareness is bigger than those things.
We realize that we are not the anger and fear and sadness and obsession.
That there's something bigger about us.
Bigger than those mental states.
And when we begin to align ourselves with this non-judgmental awareness which is always available to us,
Something in us begins to relax.
Our self-identity begins to soften.
We see our limiting narratives as just stories that we don't have to believe anymore.
We see our habits of liking and disliking as ruts in the mind that don't have to rule us.
We start living more in the body.
In the actuality of this aliveness,
This embodied consciousness and intelligence that is our human life.
We start valuing the power of pausing before reacting.
We start reflecting on what's important to us.
We become much more intentional and much more awake.
And this process begins by simply being willing to be with ourselves exactly as we are.
Right here.
Right now.
