Jon Kabat-Zinn, the person reputed for making Mindfulness Meditation accessible to conventional Medicine, talks about the certifiable insanity of human beings. It is characterized by our compulsive need to be doing, doing, doing, the flip side of which is our inability or unwillingness to be present to who and what we truly are. Or to put in another way, to be present in Awareness.
There is nothing wrong with doing, with having goals and with acting toward their accomplishment. But it is important to recognize what drives our need to keep doing.
When we honestly stop to examine this drive, oftentimes we will find that we are motivated by a sense of inadequacy, a not-enough-ness. We believe that only by doing and accomplishing will we be worthy of anything including the right to live, the right to enjoy ourselves and the right to have the partnership of another human being. All of this is reinforced by the norms and values of the society we live in.
What we fail to realize, however, is that we are naturally whole, complete, adequate and ‘enough’. Such realization happens in the seat or field of Awareness, which is the state of being present. But we must be prepared to allow ourselves into this Awareness.
In this state, we become aware of a natural, infinite and enduring wholeness. Here, there are no conflicts, no defects and no deficiencies. At the same time, there is within this ‘hidden wholeness’, as Thomas Merton described it, a spontaneous impulse toward creativity. After all, that is how all of life arises.
Imagine then, being guided and moved into action, into doing, by this spontaneous impulse, something that is not powered by any effort on our part but that carries within it an energy of unique responsiveness to each moment. Such is the nature of what we might call inspired action. It is the action that arises from the energy or the spirit within. IN-SPIRATION.
Much of our socialized, conditioned existence is premised on the belief that we need to be, do and have more because we are inherently not enough. This push, this pressure drives us on a relentless cycle of doing and achieving. It is one which may reward us momentarily but punishes us ultimately with a gnawing lack of fulfillment.
Whether we are driven by the failures of our past or the deceptive allure of a fulfilling future, we will find that our accomplishments are only momentarily satisfying. Sooner or later, we will find ourselves back on that manic treadmill driven by our sense of inadequacy or dissatisfaction with ‘what is’.
And yet, in our occasional moments of sanity, when we pause for even a few moments, we might be both alarmed and liberated by the realization that the present moment is all we truly have. The past exists only as a memory, the future as imagination. But the only true currency we have is this moment.
We regain our sanity when we allow ourselves to get in touch with this moment, to open into Awareness of this moment. When we do, we are blessed with the gift of fullness, wholeness, completeness, ‘enough-ness’. And in that gift is borne the energy of INSPIRATION.
This is the energy that all true artists know is greater and grander than any effort they strive to make. This is the energy that is uniquely and effortlessly available to all of us when we allow ourselves to be present, to be Aware, to fall into the infinite field of Awareness or Love or God or the Universe, whatever you wish to call it.
How much more efficient, effortless, joyous, powerful and loving would all our doing be when we allow it to arise from this Awareness!
But let’s be clear. As Jon Kabat-Zinn teaches, the practice of being in Awareness is not something we schedule into our day for thirty minutes or an hour. No. It is the practice that every ‘doing’, every action of ours, invites us into. It is literally being present in the here and now.MENTORING
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