Covering My Ears

When my grandson was younger and didn’t want to listen, he would put his hands over his ears and chant “covering my ears, not listening to you”. It’s a strategy with some merit.

Learning to work skilfully with the mind through meditation and mindfulness has gone mainstream. We’re taught to “accept the present moment”. Notice resistance to “being with what is”. To drop judgment and “shoulds”. There are studies proving the benefits in stress reduction, working with addiction and improving auto-immune disorders. Veterans with PTSD are taking yoga and healing the body mind. It’s in schools and hospitals, retreat centers and our homes.

In our personal experience, there might be a gap between our actual lives and how we think we should be, do or act. It is painful when this becomes one more way we fall short, when we fail to live up to ideas we have about what a spiritual or mindful life looks like.

Suppression is the opposite of mindfulness. Scott Kiloby’s practice of “Thank you for arising, I love you, you are welcome to stay” reveals the mechanics of resistance. We see how a certain thought comes with particular images and triggers linked sensation or energies in the body. We can do ‘on-the-spot’ inquiry or go back to it later when there is more time and space to be with what arises. Understanding it as a process feels workable. This event happens, this response…