Hi everyone,
This is Dr.
Tia H.
Ho with Finding Mindful Now,
Guiding you out of your head and into your life with applied mindfulness.
Finding Mindful Now is about starting with a mindfulness practice and then seeing the capacity for us to tune in and be present with life more of the time,
Whatever we are up to.
And today's applied practice I'm going to call Making One Dish Wonders.
And for those of you who are subscribers to my newsletter,
Who requested recordings of the newsletter,
This is from September 3rd,
2019.
So I'm going to invite us first for a guided arrival practice and what I'm just going to invite you to do is take two of the longest inhalations and exhalations you have taken today and while you're doing that I'm also going to invite you,
If it feels cool or like it would feel like a release for you,
I'm just going to invite you to shake limbs,
Whether that's your hands or your arms or your legs or even twirling your body a little bit.
So I'm just going to inhale the longest inhalation for my day and as I exhale I'm just going to fling,
Fling my arms and release.
Oh the tension.
I'm going to do it one more time because it feels really good.
All right.
So I love making soup.
It's a way we can clearly see how a variety of individual,
Unique,
Wonderful ingredients come together to make something nourishing and delicious that wouldn't exist without the elements.
The same is true for one dish wonder.
Soup is kind of one of these subsets of the one dish wonders.
You might make mixed green ensembles or casseroles or different forms of pasta or rice dishes.
So too often we are conditioned to view one individual,
One group of people,
One race,
One gender,
One way of loving someone,
Maybe even one action or inaction as the best,
The only way or you know insert your hyperbolic oversimplification here.
And this is an example of how societal conditioning trains your brain to judge from the time your brain begins forming language.
And when you're caught up in judging style thinking,
This can take you out of your innate creativity.
And this limits not only you,
It limits all of us.
Because our complex societal challenges need your unique creativity,
The unique way you see connections that others don't,
The special solutions that come from your life experience,
Your perceptual ahas,
We need ways where that comes forward.
So mindfulness kind of in my mind sometimes I think of mindfulness as a synonym for just awareness or beingness.
It's a practice,
I realize it's a way of guiding attention to help discover that awareness and presence that we are.
It's also a process of recovering our attention and letting go of the judgment the mind has a habit of generating.
And you know I don't mean to bad mouth the mind or the brain,
It doesn't really mean any harm.
It's doing its absolute best,
It is doing what it's basically a survival mechanism to keep the body safe.
This is what a mind does,
It distracts itself and then judges the distraction.
So the applied invitation this week is for you to notice how many different circumstances you encounter that require a diversity of unique ingredients to come together and create something wonderful.
So this might be noticing the foods that you make as a starting point and really honoring each of the ingredients,
How the unique flavors,
The unique colors,
Textures,
Patterns and how they create something completely different and that different whole couldn't have existed without each of the individual ingredients in the exact same way.
That's kind of the most simple format and I invite you also to extend it to maybe classrooms or teams or even entire multiple collaborations of organizations.
So whether it's being simple at this food level or all the way to fancy,
I'm just inviting you to notice how many different circumstances you encounter that require a diversity of these unique ingredients,
Including you and your innate creativity to come together and create something wonderful.
You might be surprised at what shows up and I'd love to hear what you notice.
