The Wisdom of a Leaf: Thich Nhat Hanh
I was sitting with a friend recently who told me that he was resting in his backyard bringing mindfulness to the sounds and sights around him when he had an insight. The trees and leaves around him in some way were just like him. No, he wasn’t on any psychedelics or intoxicants, he just had this awareness that he was not really that separate from the nature around him.
In that moment he said he felt incredibly connected and the worries that had surrounded him before seemed to drift away as a feeling of belonging arose. Belonging is the essence of well-being.
In his latest book, Your True Home
The mind is a mysterious thing, it’s true, but some things about it are not that mysterious and can be observed through a simple practice giving us a brief insight into everything.
A short while ago 
What’s the first thing that comes to your mind when you think of the term “Mindful Recovery?”
A couple weeks ago I highlighted a therapist in Los Angeles named Stan Friedman who had a story of how he broke free from the auto-pilot of negative thinking and into a space of choice and possibility. I want to open this up as an opportunity for people to send me stories of mindfulness that can show the rest of us how it has had a practical impact on a particular event or their lives.
We spend a lot of our attention day in and day out, knowingly and unknowingly trying to be somewhere else than where we are. You may have had this thought before, but still the same process continues. It’s as if our mind is in the business of constantly trying to evade life as it is.
Every day we walk outside our door to go to work, the post office, the grocery store or wherever, our mind is already ahead of itself. In many of the mindfulness-based classes I teach we start with Jon Kabat-Zinn’s raisin exercise where we pretend we’ve never seen this raisin before and proceed to bring all our five senses to it. Inevitably people come out saying they noticed so much more about the raisin than they ever knew. Many say they enjoyed it so much more and found it satisfying.
There’s no denying it, inherent in our human make-up is the need to judge and criticize. Some of us are more naturally talented at this than others. It’s worth getting curious about how the act of criticizing or judging others affects us. The truth is it rarely – if ever – has any lasting effects of helping us feel better. In fact, it usually has the opposite, like a slow leaking toxin in our minds and bodies. So here’s a practice for today.
Part of the process of healing from our various mental and physical afflictions is learning how to do a 180 degree shift from self-avoidance to self-inquiry. Self-inquiry is a simple process, but at times not easy.
We’ve all heard the adage that “It is what it is,” telling us that whatever is happening is simply the reality of the current experience. But I like to add on another piece saying, “It is what it is, while it is.” 
