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.

The question remains, how much of life do we miss out on day-to-day as we spend so much attention in the past and future?

Jan Chozen Bays is a physician and Zen teacher and her latest book How to Train a Wild Elephant: & other adventures in mindfulness, she teaches us many practices to engage in week to week, but here’s a simple one to show us how much we usually miss.

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.

In the spirit of this blog I want share you with a song that was recently sent to me by Jim Angus, a Canadian songwriter. As you listen to this you are welcome to close your eyes and just hear the song or keep them open and allow the images to complement the experience.

Enjoy!

In the foreword to Steve Flowers’ and Bob Stahl’s book Living with Your Heart Wide Open, psychologist and mindfulness teacher Tara Brach says that “If we cannot embrace our own frightened and vulnerable hearts, we cannot love our world.”  I think this sentence pretty much sums up the ongoing struggle most of us have with life.

In a world often devoid of a true sense of community, we grow up searching for how to belong. Social isolation is our greatest fear and many of us grow up with the mantra “There’s something wrong with me” feeding a cycle of unworthiness and shame. How we relate to our “frightened and vulnerable hearts” makes all the difference.

Imagine if you grew up in a world where the expression of your vulnerabilities and fears was met with someone just listening to you non-judgmentally and with a sense of really caring. How would you feel? If I had to guess, I would say safe and secure.

In my life, as in many peoples’, my in-basket is never empty. A story is created in my mind that there is so much “to do” that “I don’t have time” for the less important tasks. I have clients that I see along with a number of projects that I engage with when I’m not seeing clients. This morning I found that same story about not having time invading my mind, creating tension in my shoulders and making me irritable.

My 2 year old son has an abundance of energy (as many of them do) and wanted to get outside with me for a little bit. In the face of the screaming voices inside my head telling me to “get to work” I decided to take him out. What happened?

Derrick was 13 years old when he stepped into my office complaining of “just not enjoying anything in life.” His parents told me they’d tried everything. They had him playing piano, going to soccer practice, involved in drama practice, along with a few more activities. “He just doesn’t seem to be interested in any of it,” the mom said.

One day, Derrick came into session and I asked him if he could tell me his happiest memory. Sitting slumped into the couch, his head perked up and he said: “I remember when I was six my parents bought something that came in a big box. When they emptied it out, I played in that box for hours, it was my favorite place. It made me happy.” It was clear that Derrick was missing out on his natural right to have more play in his life.

Play deprivation doesn’t just apply to kids, but to all of us. We can easily fall into a state of being overly strict with ourselves and taking life too seriously.

To bring mindfulness into our lives and cultivate a healthy, flexible and resilient mind, we need to loosen up on ourselves, allowing openings to arise, and then like cultivating a garden add in nutrients that facilitate the kind of change we’d like to see. You can think of play as a fundamental way of bringing mindfulness into your life creating spaces for your healthier mind to take root.