Twenty years ago I was living my life the same as most people. I was waking up to a boring routine of fear and necessity most people live their entire lives in.
There I was going to work and participating in family dinners and endless casual conversations about nothing I cared about and the pursuit of all things material and I found myself wondering what was the purpose of it all.
It turns out mindfulness is not meditation, it’s not Yoga classes or Tai chi, it’s not mentoring lessons or finding yourself your own personal guru. It turns out our mind is a very powerful tool that is responsible for every aspect of our lives and all we need to do is accept that and learn to invest in that.
You see, up until then, I thought I knew the true power of our mind but slowly understood that nothing could be further from the truth, from my freedom.
What got me curious was the fact that I saw that people weren’t happy because they achieved something special or because they knew something that others didn’t, the happy people around me just managed to convince themselves they were happy.
And believe me, it takes a lot of practice to sell yourself this simple fact, everything in our lives begins in the pictures our brains paint for us. We just have to learn to paint these pictures ourselves.
Bold words like courage, freedom, daring, peace, are not born from action but rather from the picture you paint in your head.
You could meet a guy living his life without a care in the world, who feels like he is in prison and then you could easily meet a guy in prison who feels he has all the freedom he needs. The physical world is not what makes us live a feeling of loneliness, fear, not belonging, drowning, it is our mind that plays tricks on us that gets us there.
So after a while of contemplating about that, of working on the images in your mind, you start seeing your life in a very different light, you start making different choices that are not based in fear or necessity, you begin to understand that traveling the world with a backpack on your back is not freedom, it is choice, that freedom itself is something you convince yourself in, not what the physical you is busy living.
Now, after you’ve realized all of this and practiced a little (or a lot), you begin to invest in the really important things in life because you now see why those are important. You may choose to focus on your eating, on your breathing, on your walking, on your self consciousness. Things we think we were born knowing now receive a very special meaning in your life. You begin to grasp the meaning of the power of here and now that many ancient philosophies talked about, your living your life with full control and eyes wide open for the very first time.
Go ahead, give it a try 🙂
