Mindfulness Series, It's Not Personal

We can choose where we focus our attention. 

The diagram above shows us there are two separate things at work; our attention and the object of our attention.  We are really not our thoughts.  We are not our senses.  We are not even our emotions.  We are essentially our awareness.  These other experiences are a result of our mind activity and they are constantly changing.  The one constant over our whole lives has been our awareness of these objects.

Mindfulness is about creating distance between “you” and whatever is around or in “you”.  

Our experiences don't have to be personal.  We can experience our world through our senses, thoughts, and emotions without it swallowing us up.  Taking this perspective helps us to let go a little bit.  It helps us to see thoughts as thoughts and something we can work with, rather than our identity.  It empowers us to develop our awareness and relate to these experiences in new ways.  It becomes easier (notice I said easier and not easy!) to stay unattached to these experiences.

Need a real life example?  Today I was frustrated by some software I was using and I "got lost" in the frustration.  The software was not working.  I was hooked.  I felt so irritated that it was taking so much time and not user friendly.  I thought, "Who designed this?", as if it mattered.  The idea, of course, was that I could do a better job!  Yeah I don't think so...but then I caught it.  I could see the situation for what it was.  It wasn't really the software.  There was something I didn't know about how to work the software.  I let go.  I accepted that what I wanted to do on the computer wasn't going to happen the way I wanted and, from that position, I could see choices.

May you benefit in some way from these ideas.