Every morning I sit with Bubba and have breakfast. I used to cover her in a kind of backward shirt so she wouldn’t get food stains all over her, now I cover myself. Proximity to someone who is learning how to throw is a dangerous business.
<---- This one IS trouble, I can tell you.
But to get to my point. One day I found myself - in a moment of awareness - repeating parental mantras. These have little to do with meditation and everything to do with desperation … “But you LIKE avocado!!”
I have realised Bubs will not eat what she does not want to. Being a female, and related very closely to Sumati, she knows her own mind. One day egg is the flavour of the day, the next I’m dodging as it’s being flung at me.
There is no routine is what I’m trying to say. And I may be giving lofty spiritual attributes to something that has none - but it would seem she eats according to an inner wisdom - what she needs not what she wants. Some days she eats nothing at all, some days she eats like a rugby team.
It’s not about “its breakfast time, I SHOULD eat” but more like “what do I really need right now?”
We all have this inner wisdom, down deep beneath all the accumulated layers of belief and cultural instruction and past experience. It’s whispering to us all the time, it just gets swamped by everything else. Your ideal life comes from listening to and living from your innate wisdom. Trouble and strife only comes when you start listening to those second and third thoughts that doubt. “But what will everyone else think?” …
That is why I don’t put much stock in moral codes of behaviour. As soon as someone starts telling you to live this way and not that way, you’re getting quite divisive. How about this moment and that moment? How about these people? There’s always an exception, always an "us and them" is created and then what? What does your moral code say then?
I was told I should always eat breakfast. How’s that for a moral imperative? Turns out my body often functions better without it. Especially when I’m coming down with a flu or whatever - a quick fast can heal things quite nicely before it gets worse.
Bubba shows me that all the time.
So meditate - one of the greatest things it will give you is the awareness and the clarity of your own course of wisdom that is precisely matched to the moment you find yourself in. You become super familiar with it - and it’s always there, meditation gives you the space and the silence to tune into it.
What is possible for you - yes, you - is an ideal life, lived in perfect response to now, in perfect flow with - and never against - this moment. And you have to do so little to gain so much.
Alrighty? Go well! Arjuna
PS. I’m chuckling to myself because the book I'm finishing off is a kind of instructional manual to end overwhelm and negativity, be the best version of yourself, and have a darn tooting great life.
It could be seen as a set of moral guidelines - and yet! I start with Buddha who talks about being a scientist about everything. Listen to advice, test it out if it seems like something you agree with, but don’t agree simply because of authority. Fully try it and see if it works for you. And in all the best moral guidelines and practices will always point the finger back at your own heart: What do YOU really know?
You'd like to know how to meditate? How to be more aware and tune into your own inner source of wisdom, avoiding struggle and overwhelm and negativity?
Here you go: