Practice Makes Present

Day 295

“Writing can be an incredible mindfulness practice.”

– Jon Kabat-Zinn

Mindfulness.

You see the term everywhere you look these days. You’ve read about it here many times. There’s a constant barrage of messages telling us to be mindful, mine included.

Easier said than done right?

It’s easy to lose your focus and get caught up in the hype around you to the point where it drowns out your own voice. When you are mindful, you zone the noise out, and then you’re able to hear your own voice.

So, how do you do it?

Practice.

I’ve written about listening to your inner voice many times throughout the year too. It’s often described as that voice in your head criticizing you, or telling you to do or not do something. Sometimes, and likely more often than “the voice”, it’s a faint, inaudible, subtle pull, like the feeling you get when you think you forgot something important.

I had that feeling last night. Hours after I’d published yesterday’s post, something didn’t feel right. I felt like I had to fix something I’d written. I re-read the post, and realized that I didn’t write at all what I originally intended to say. I had gotten side-tracked by social media sputterings about the U.S. presidential candidates, and tried to somehow tie in the very unrelated thoughts I had on that topic to the post.

It was a great lesson on how, like writing, if your intentions are muddled, the resulting product will be too. I ended up heavily editing re-writing much of the post, so if you read it yesterday, you might want to take another look. You can read it here.

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Quote Of The Day: Inspiring Words by Rumi

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If you want to manifest your desires, you must be clear with your intentions. In other words, you must know exactly what you want, and then feel like you already have it. That’s really all there is to it. Although I’ve shared the commonly agreed upon steps to manifesting your desires, there is no technique set in stone, or a “right way” to implement those steps.

There are millions of ways to capture the feeling that you have received your desire, which is the essence of manifestation – and mindfulness is the key to achieving that state of being.

“Mindfulness is simply being aware of what is happening right now without wishing it were different; enjoying the pleasant without holding on when it changes (which it will); being with the unpleasant without fearing it will always be this way (which it won’t).”

– James Baraz

Use the steps as a guide to get started. Play around with it, and see what feels good and works for you. It’s helpful to look back at times when you did manifest a desire, possibly without a deliberate attempt to do so – think about how you felt, what you did, what you believed and expected before your desire manifested, and use those findings to help you get into the state of having, being, or doing what you’d like to bring into your experience.

No matter how you do it, you must feel like you have received your desire in the present moment; it is the only creative moment. To help you focus, today’s Food For Thought Friday series exercise is to try this mindfulness practice:

Drink your tea slowly and reverently,
as if it is the axis on which the world earth revolves,
slowly, evenly, without rushing toward the future;
live the actual moment.
Only this moment is life.

– Thich Nhat Hanh

Thank you, thank you, thank you!