When I fancy I am in control of my life, it is a delusion. What do I really have control over? My body breathes for me, my mind creates thoughts, my heart pumps blood to all my body parts. I can control the breath, with practice, and I can control how I respond to the thoughts my mind creates, again, with practice. And, although it takes a good deal of practice to control how I respond to challenging situations and people, it is possible.
Ideations of control come about through having particular expectations or preferences; we set ourselves up for suffering because we are doomed to be unhappy when things don’t go the way we want them to. Newsflash! Things rarely, if ever, go the way we want or believe they should go.
Much suffering occurs when we have certain expectations of others and, in our eyes, they fall short of those expectations. We have our truth of what we believe to be right and wrong and it is bewildering at best, maddening at worst, when others don’t have those same beliefs.
But honestly, right and wrong are mere labels. Just because I label something as right, decent, or moral doesn’t mean that this is the same truth for someone else. The struggle, and the practice, is seeing people as people, and not boxing them up and classifying them as good or bad based on their actions or what they believe. My work is to practice acceptance and non-judgement, trusting there is a higher reason for what happens in this life. This reason goes way beyond my limited understanding.
Verily, I do not have control over how other people behave, what they think, what values are important to them, and their perspectives concerning the way they believe things “should be”. Yet, I cause myself suffering when I get angry about others’ words and actions, and then catch myself justifying my anger with righteousness. What value does this serve? These people are living rent-free in my head, as they say, and I am most likely not even a blip on their radar. They have power over me without even knowing it. Moreover, I am putting out bad energy, negative juju, destructive karmic power, or what have you, through wasteful rumination.
According to the Oxford Dictionary, the verb “ruminate” comes from the Latin root word “ruminat”, which means “to chew over”. So, when I ruminate, I am like a cow or goat, chewing cud-thoughts over, and over, and over again. But rumination, the thinking about the thoughts and letting the stories take me down dark paths, is controllable when I become aware I’m ruminating, and I can do this through the practice of Mindfulness.
It doesn’t matter how long I have been ruminating - once I am aware I am doing it, I can imagine spitting the cud-thought out of my mouth, or, for something less gross, lifting the needle out of the broken record in my head, or turning off automatic pilot and coming back to the present moment. Finding the breath, taking some deep inhalations and exhalations, and grounding myself into my body helps to bring myself back. Mindfulness is the practice of awareness, noticing when we are not aware of the present moment, and purposefully coming back. Although the brain’s function is to have thoughts, I have control over how much thinking I do about my thoughts, and that’s about it.
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