Living with our senses wide open
Hello ….how are you today?
In many of the countries where my subscribers live, next Sunday is Easter so, you’re probably enjoying a few days off like me. Walking outdoors and inhabiting my body so much inspired me to write about Mindfulness.
There’s an idea that Mindfulness is only accessed through meditation and while this is a very effective tool to live mindfully, living with the senses wide open is a way to honor life every day.
Mindfulness helps us to live gratefully, to stay connected to the present moment, to feel awe by what surrounds us, and to have a spirit of acceptance and curiosity in the face of the not-so-easy emotions of our day-to-day life.
You can listen to the podcast with this player, or if you prefer reading you have a written version below. Enjoy it!
As always, I’m going to start by asking you some questions (be super honest, please). Do you live fast and on automatic pilot? Do you jump from one obligation to another? Are you stressed, angry, scared, or easily overwhelmed? Do you feel irritable? Do you have moments for yourself that connect you with the here and now on a daily basis? Do you have routines to disengage from stress and external conflicts? Do you find yourself savoring a meal, a good talk, an enriching book, a podcast, or music for the soul? Can you feel one with nature? Do you feel a connection to something bigger than yourself? Can you adopt an eagle's eye view and observe what is happening to you with perspective?
Jack Kornfield, the great Mindfulness teacher, tells us:
“The present moment is the door to true calm. It is the only place you can love or awaken—the eternal present. You cannot know the future. But here and now you can create a life of dignity and compassion, a day at a time”.
Key to the path of Mindfulness is to develop a presence that observes what happens inside you with kindness and love to attend your needs. Mindfulness is our way of creating space between what we’re experiencing and our response. Therein lies our liberation.
Viktor Frankl put it like this:
“Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom”.
When we live with our senses wide open in the present moment, we stop reacting automatically to what is happening, we stop giving in to our default option, and we can choose what to do instead.
An example
A client told me that she was walking and started noticing that she was filled with complete gratitude for her life. She felt grateful for her family, her work, the walk she went for, and the weather at that moment. In short, her mind and heart were in total alignment. At that moment, her full energy was in the here and now; her soul was open and in sync with that which is greater than oneself. She was in such connection with the present that she managed to stop feeling overwhelmed by the future or whipping herself by the past, her senses were wide open and her attention was sharp.
“The most ordinary activities are invitations to be the architect of your own life.”
This state that my client shared with me is a state that you can cultivate one day at a time, and believe it or not, you’ll be rewiring your brain to adopt this new way of life. You simply have to start by choosing to live your days with intention. Ask yourself, what do I want? Going through life distracted by my obligations or doing them mindfully? The most ordinary activities such as listening to the person who’s speaking to you, eating, doing the house chores, walking, and enjoying some moments by yourself are invitations to be the architect of your own life. The idea is to train yourself to observe what happens to you, so that your most awake part makes itself present to reduce your reactivity, and to gain autonomy and power over what you really want and need. Living with your senses wide open in the here and now is a way of life. Meditating is, as I mentioned before, one way of achieving this (among others).
The TOUGH days: an oportunity
Living mindfully doesn’t mean that our days will be peaceful and that we won’t have any challenges or pain because that’s part of being alive. On the contrary, instead of covering up or running away from what happens to us, we’ll get in touch with the full range of our emotional experience: the good, the bad and the ugly. No human being escapes from that, we are all in this together. We all have moments of absolute bliss and we all go through the dark night of the soul repeatedly. What mindfulness does is empowering us to manage our emotions.
what about stressful times? … Also.
In my personal experience, living mindfully is related to disengaging from the stress or anxiety generated by my long to do lists. When I realize that I’m like a hamster running on its wheel, I pause and talk to myself “I'm worried, ok, this belongs to me right now, why am I feeling this? What am I afraid of?” When I wake up from the trance of the daily hustle and bustle, I take a deep breath, and talk to myself as the wisest person in the world would: “calm down, relax, I know it hurts, I know it isn’t always easy, cut yourself some slack, you’re doing your best, you can surrender now"
I’d like to round off with a few words by Mindfulness teacher Tara Brach analyzing Thomas Merton, who defines rush and pressure of modern life like a form of contemporary violence.
“To allow oneself to be carried away by a multitude of conflicting concerns, to surrender to too many demands, is to succumb to violence.”
When we’re speeding along, we violate our own natural rhythms in a way that prevents us from listening to our inner life and being in a resonant field with others. We get tight. We get small. We override our capacity to appreciate beauty, to celebrate, to serve from the heart.
Would you like to start living with your senses wide open? Let me know, I’ll read you.
A big hug ❤