Tuesday, December 28, 2021
Discomfort arises when the mind zips around, randomly usurping your attention, and fragmenting your ability to focus for more than a nanosecond. Your attentiveness might be fragmented, and the shards are sharp, edgy, and thorny. Fragmented attention is uncomfortable and bothersome, and meddling thought patterns can interfere with peacefulness, ease, and the comfort of being attentive to one thing at a time.
Juggling the thoughts of a chaotic mind creates an unease (a dis-ease) within you. When one cannot focus, the inner depth gets silenced. When you cannot focus, you cannot notice what’s deeply inside of you, the multidimensional, inner universe that “speaks” only in silence and stillness. Pay attention to your level of comfort, at this moment. If you are sitting, are you really comfortable, or are you you’re slightly on edge, nervous, or antsy?
The mind wants to take flight, but the soul wants to be more anchored in the present moment. Relax into each of the simple activities of you day – walking from one place to the next; driving to and from your destinations; sitting in a meeting. Notice how simple those activities actually are. Your tasks are not making you uncomfortable, your thoughts about them are. Sit with yourself for a while. Let the anxiety simmer down. If you leave an agitated bowl of water alone, the ripples will eventually settle, naturally. Allow yourself to become a natural, inner stillness today – let the mental agitations calm. Mental agitation and edginess don’t make you important, or “busy.” They make you uneasy. Allow the turmoil to settle by focusing on one thing at a time, in a non-fussy, simple way. You can do it – prolonged, uninterrupted focus can be your daily practice. You might be surprised at how comfortable you’ll be today, if you would focus on something more worthy than your random, fragmented, and troublesome thought patterns.