Dear Friends,
Spirit Rock has an on-line video course with esteemed teacher Sylvia Boorstein called Everyday Life as Mindfulness Practice.
In the videos, Sylvia takes us through her home and her daily activities and describes all the different ways she brings mindfulness into these “ordinary” things. She says “there isn’t any activity that isn’t a venue of training attention.”
In the second video, in which she talks about how she starts her day with a cup of coffee, she describes how she hears the coffee maker gurgling and how she smells the coffee brewing. She comments, “it’s so interesting to me how sensual cues trigger different kinds of impulses and desires in me and in all human beings.”
The practice of mindfulness, she says, allows us to know when an impulse arises to do something (X), and allows the mind enough time to decide whether that action X is good for me; is action X a valuable thing to do.
She gives an example of what might happen without such mindfulness:
“You’re on your way on a mission to go someplace and all of a sudden you find yourself in [a donut shop] buying yourself a cruller and a coffee and you think to yourself, “How did that happen?” And what happens is the mind, consciously or unconsciously, makes the decision to veer off its course and follow its impulse and get the [donuts] and the coffee.”
So today, perhaps you can notice when an impulse arises, and then notice the space that’s there to decide what to do about that impulse.
Hmm… I’m noticing that I want a cookie… 🙂
With best wishes,
Andrea G