On a recent Friday afternoon, I was having a conversation with this person and she casually mentioned another symptom that she experiences. She had never brought this to my attention because she just assumed everybody felt the same thing.

In that moment, I was slightly alarmed by the symptom she mentioned as it was definitely not a sensation most people have and certainly not one that people get on a regular basis.  It was also, I knew, a symptom associated with some pretty terrible things.  I said nothing about my concern but calmly inquired more into her experience, When does she get this sensation and what if anything brings it on and other questions.  On the outside, I probably appeared quite nonchalant, but on the inside, a small tsunami was forming in my chest.

Immediately following our conversation, I made a beeline to hell, otherwise known as Google.  I feverishly punched in her symptoms.  What I found was, not surprisingly, both horrifying and terrifying.  Her symptoms happened to be the first two on every list for one particularly dreadful and life-destroying condition.  And, as luck would have it, the third most common symptom listed as evidence of this particular disease turned out to be another symptom that my loved one had in fact mentioned experiencing over the last couple years, but which I had also dismissed and assumed would disappear on its own.

Within three hours of our initial conversation, I was disabled with enough information to be utterly consumed with fear.  I had three symptoms to work with now, and three symptoms which were the first three on every list describing the early signs of one particular horrifying fate.  Fear had not only arrived at my front door but had broken the door down and taken me hostage.

The more afraid I became, the more frantically I researched the internet, reading everything available on the condition I had diagnosed, looking for anything that would give me a different list of symptoms or at least a list where her symptoms were further down from the top.  I read about treatments, now and future, trial studies, ways that people self-care once diagnosed, the psychological effects of the disease, how early one should start taking the medication, and what the final stages look like. I read testimonials from people living with the disease, everything I could get my hands on.  By Sunday night I had five Ph.D.’s in this condition.

I was in a state of panic, heartbroken, and truly unable to get okay.  If a moment of serenity appeared, I would remember the shock of what I knew, that this person I love beyond anything, beyond everything, had no future.  I would remember that I could never be happy again.  Each moment I spent with my family member that weekend felt like the last, weighted with melancholy and finality.

I was living a narrative of fear and despair, a narrative I had written in less than 48 hours.  I was sure that the worst thing I could ever imagine happening was happening. I wondered, how was it possible that I had spent my whole life working on getting comfortable with the uncomfortable, okay with the not okay of life, accepting reality as it is, and yet here I was screaming, No, this reality is the one reality that’s not okay!  This reality I cannot bear.  I was in a thought-constructed hell, which felt real, inarguable, and true.

I was the only one who knew that she had all three symptoms.  Other family members knew of one or another, but I was the keeper of the full truth, the only one who knew the whole of it.  When I did finally break and tell another family member, he dismissed my fears as ridiculous, irritating, a case of bad hypochondria. I was to blame for my fear.  His impatience felt like an abandonment of sorts. I felt not only terrified but also deeply alone in my fear.  I couldn’t share my fears with the person whom they were about because I did want to frighten her; I couldn’t speak with anyone else in the family because they were angered by my fear; I couldn’t speak with her doctor about it because I didn’t want to set off further testing and thus speed the road to the eventual diagnosis. I was totally isolated; my thoughts had built a bubble of terror in which I was trapped and alone.

Source: robert zunicoff/unsplash

And then something miraculous happened, perhaps because I couldn’t bear another moment of being so afraid, or perhaps just because. Grace appeared and I heard the following: Your mind is inflicting violence on you!  And what followed from there was simply, Stop! Stop! Stop! Something in me stood up for me.  I knew that probability was still on my side and the fear I was living might well be false evidence appearing as real.

As a result of this realization, I was able to halt my mind’s projections into the future, to stop re-inventing and re-experiencing a reality that didn’t and might never exist.  I recognized that I knew nothing other than three facts and didn’t need to go one day or even five minutes into the future. I could decide to live right here, now, and construct no storyline at all.  Discomfort remained, a mild anxiety, but without the narrative connecting the dots, I was remarkably okay. With the sudden awareness of how I was torturing myself, believing my thoughts, I was able to disembark from my mind’s terror train.  I refused to participate in terrifying myself; I chose the freedom and self-compassion that comes with saying, and believing, I simply don’t know. That’s the truth.

For organizing and generating ideas, there’s no match for the human mind.  And simultaneously, for whipping up fear and creating frightening storylines that appear indisputable, there’s also no match for the human mind.  The tragic part is that by creating its narratives of terror, the mind is at some level trying to calm us down, to make sense of and know the unknown, solidify the impermanent.  The mind tries to protect us from the fear of what could happen by creating a certainty of what will happen, which paradoxically can feel less frightening.

In this recent episode, my mind was desperately searching to find proof for its wrongness, evidence that showed its thoughts were mistaken. And yet, the more my imagined storyline was confirmed, the more frantically I searched to find something else to explain the unknown.

Our mind is often the perpetrator of unimaginable violence—on ourselves.  Our thoughts are the great instigator of terror, yelling fire over and over again when a hint of smoke is detected.  At some point, the suffering that we self-inflict can become too much and an act of grace or self-compassion occurs, when we say, Stop, stop torturing me.  Stop creating stories of terror… The truth is I don’t know, that’s all.  Life is challenging enough without adding any of our own terrifying storyline to it.  We can in fact choose to live in the questions, to not know, and not fill in the blanks.  When we leave the dots not-connected and sit with the fear that may or may not exist with what is, we feel a great relief.  Not only a relief from the self-inflicted violence of the terrifying storyline, but also from the need to close up reality and know—everything—even if it’s nothing we want to know.

The post FEAR: False Evidence Appearing Real: When Our Thoughts Scare Us appeared first on Nancy Colier.

Mindfulness means paying attention to the present moment, on purpose, and without judgment, according to Jon Kabat Zinn, a leader and teacher in the mindfulness movement. While we can easily define it, it seems that being it is not so easy. Despite all our talk of mindfulness, studies indicate that most people are only here, paying attention in the present moment, 50% of the time.  That said we miss out on half our life, with our attention somewhere other than where we are.

Rather than take the usual, culturally-accepted model and suggest another thing to go out and become, get, do, study, buy, or otherwise accomplish in order to attain mindfulness, perhaps it’s wiser to turn our attention into ourselves and investigate what gets in the way of our being present.  What are the obstacles to being here now?

The first and most obvious obstacle to being present is distraction. We’re in a constant state of motion, busyness, and getting to somewhere else—using our devices, substances, entertainment, chatter, and anything else we can find to avoid here, now.  Doing is our first line of defense against being present.

The most treacherous impediment to mindful attention however, even more than busyness and activity, is thought. The mind, maker of thoughts, is forever chattering, distracting us, telling us stories, beckoning us to not be where we are, but rather get involved in the tickertape of plot twists it’s creating.

When it comes to avoiding the present moment, we tend to employ a handful of habitual thinking patterns.  First, we keep ourselves safe from now by narrating our experience as it’s happening. We follow ourselves around, perpetually commenting on our own experience.  “Oh look, I’m having a good time here, this is going well, they seem to like me” and so it goes, the voice over of now—soundtrack to our life.  All day and night we tell ourselves the story of ourselves, story of our life.  Sadly, we live the voice over but not the life itself.

So too, we disappear from the now by continually packaging our experience as it’s happening, preparing the story that will later tell the tale of our current experience.  As our present moment is unfolding we’re preoccupied with transcribing the now into a summary or narrative, ever-readying the now for some future explanation or presentation for others or perhaps just ourselves.

And then come the big three: the thought patterns that are always running in the background of mind, subtly or actively pulling our attention away from here.

How Thoughts Block Us From Being Fully Present

Boots on the ground mindfulness: removing the obstacles to being here now.

Posted Aug 11, 2018

Source: Val Toch/Unsplash

If just one word were to go in a time capsule to represent our society right now, the word would have to be “mindfulness.” Mindfulness is in every book title, workshop, conversation, idea, and everything else we now encounter.  We’re a society obsessed with mindfulness.  So what is this thing we’re all talking about and presumably trying to create? And how do we do it—become mindful?

Mindfulness means paying attention to the present moment, on purpose, and without judgment, according to Jon Kabat Zinn, a leader and teacher in the mindfulness movement. While we can easily define it, it seems that being it is not so easy. Despite all our talk of mindfulness, studies indicate that most people are only here, paying attention in the present moment, 50% of the time.  That said we miss out on half our life, with our attention somewhere other than where we are.

Rather than take the usual, culturally-accepted model and suggest another thing to go out and become, get, do, study, buy, or otherwise accomplish in order to attain mindfulness, perhaps it’s wiser to turn our attention into ourselves and investigate what gets in the way of our being present.  What are the obstacles to being here now?

The first and most obvious obstacle to being present is distraction. We’re in a constant state of motion, busyness, and getting to somewhere else—using our devices, substances, entertainment, chatter, and anything else we can find to avoid here, now.  Doing is our first line of defense against being present.

The most treacherous impediment to mindful attention however, even more than busyness and activity, is thought. The mind, maker of thoughts, is forever chattering, distracting us, telling us stories, beckoning us to not be where we are, but rather get involved in the tickertape of plot twists it’s creating.

When it comes to avoiding the present moment, we tend to employ a handful of habitual thinking patterns.  First, we keep ourselves safe from now by narrating our experience as it’s happening. We follow ourselves around, perpetually commenting on our own experience.  “Oh look, I’m having a good time here, this is going well, they seem to like me” and so it goes, the voice over of now—soundtrack to our life.  All day and night we tell ourselves the story of ourselves, story of our life.  Sadly, we live the voice over but not the life itself.

So too, we disappear from the now by continually packaging our experience as it’s happening, preparing the story that will later tell the tale of our current experience.  As our present moment is unfolding we’re preoccupied with transcribing the now into a summary or narrative, ever-readying the now for some future explanation or presentation for others or perhaps just ourselves.

And then come the big three: the thought patterns that are always running in the background of mind, subtly or actively pulling our attention away from here.

-Why is this present moment happening?

-What does this now say about me and my life?

-What do I need to do about this now?

Our tendency is to experience the present moment through at least one and usually more than one of these thoughts.  Rather than being where we are, we busily attend to the who, what, where, when and why of where we are.

And then there’s fear.  Thoughts are a way the mind tries to manage its fear of and lack of trust in the present moment.  Rather than risk diving into now, into the river of life, we stay on the shore, using our mind to manage, control and make linear sense of our present experience, in the hopes of steering now in a direction we design. The mind doesn’t believe that we can relax into the unknown of the present moment, show up fully where we are, experience now without controlling where it’s headed. It doesn’t trust life to take care of us, but instead imagines that it must make life happen, and direct our path at all times.

In reality, the present moment doesn’t need the mind to make it happen; now is unfolding without the mind’s help.  When we live the present moment without thinking it, the mind is left without a task, without something to do, figure out, or solve.  It has no bone to chew on.  For this reason, the mind vehemently rejects the now, using this moment to generate ideas and issues that will require its own attention and input.

Furthermore, the mind subsists on the past and future; it alternates between turning now into a projection into the future and a narrative on the past. The now, however, is a space poised between the two locations or concepts, past and future. The present moment is a gap between the two.  In truth, it’s always now–now offers a vertical eternity. When we dive fully into the present moment, we step out of the linear timeline altogether. We are liberated from the shackles of time.  In response and rebellion, the mind grabs hold of now, through thought, and places it back into a timeline, thereby re-orienting itself in a way it can understand.

It’s often said that we avoid the present moment to avoid ourselves.  But in fact, when we dive fully into the present moment, are fully engaged in our experience, as in the flow state, what we discover, paradoxically, is that we lose ourselves.  We disappear, and that’s precisely what makes it so delicious and makes us want to return again and again.  In full presence or flow state, we don’t experience ourselves as separate, as the one living the experience; there is only the experience of which we are a part.

We’re always running from the present moment, not to escape ourselves, but to escape the absence of ourselves.  The battle with the present moment is an existential battle for the mind; the flight from now is its fight to exist.

Living the now, without a narrative, requires a death or at least temporary letting go of mind. When the mind stops talking to us, there’s nothing there to remind us of our own existence, we’re left unaware of ourselves, in a state of void.  That said, the mind abhors the present moment just as natureabhors a vacuum.

But in fact, when we have the courage to drop out of mind and into the present moment, what we find is the opposite of a void.  We find wholeness, an experience without an experiencer.  We encounter ourselves as presence inseparable from life, rather than a person who is living, directing, managing, and controlling this thing called life.  In the process, we discover liberation and something as close as I’ve ever found to the end of suffering.

To begin practicing this paradigm shift, start small.  Every now and again, glance around your surroundings and just look, see what’s there without going to thought or language to understand or name what you’re seeing.  Experience your environment without using mind to translate what your senses are taking in.  Simply allow your awareness to be aware without interpretation.  So too, if you ever meditate or spend time focusing on your breath, try paying attention to the spaces between breaths as well. Feel the sensations occurring in the gaps between the inhalation and the exhalation. This simple practice can offer a direct taste of the present moment without the interruption of thought. And finally, every now and again, invite yourself to stop and drop. Deliberately unhook from the storyline going on in your head and shift your attention down below your neck into the silence and presence in your own body.  Experience being as its own place, without thought.

These and other simple pointers can escort us into a radically new experience of living; they can be used as portals to a serenity that the mind, no matter how much it wants to be involved, cannot figure out or create.  When we’re fully present, living now directly rather than the mind’s interpretation of it, a palpable peace unfolds—a peace that surpasses all the mind’s understanding.

The post How Thoughts Get in the Way of Being Present appeared first on Nancy Colier.

It’s an odd thing really: as we’re having an experience, the little voice in our head is simultaneously describing, explaining, and commentating on the experience, providing a summary of it before, during and after its unfolding.

Often, the narration of our experience is so integral to the experience itself, so uninterrupted and merged with it as to make us wonder if there could even be an experience without the accompanying report. If an experience happens without simultaneous inner acknowledgment, thinking about, and commentary, does it actually happen?

It’s also interesting to notice that the little voice in our head is not without its own characteristics.  It has a certain language, style, and tone; it does its storytelling and commentary with a certain thematic and textural consistency. Like a Hollywood screenwriter, our inner voice tends to write in a particular genre, for example, tragedy, comedy, drama, film noir etc. Our commentator is a character with an identity of its own.

Did you ever wonder why our mind is telling us what we’re doing while we’re doing it, as if we didn’t already know? And, why our mind is so adamant about getting the story of our life figured out, written and packaged?  And finally, why we need to rehearse the tale of our life before we actually need or want to convey it to another person?

The mind believes that we are made of mind and mind alone, and that without its felt presence, we and all else would cease to be. If the narration were to stop and the mind was not experiencing itself through the act of thinking, then there would be nothing—oblivion.  A mind off duty, experience without the thinking about it, is tantamount to non-existence. The mind creates the story of an I; it creates an I as an object in our consciousness.  In so doing, it maintains both the experience of a self and the experiencer of a self, which it believes are needed to ensure survival.

In relentlessly narrating the story of ourselves (to ourselves), the mind is also attempting to make life, and us, into something solid, knowable, and constant.  By creating a main character called me (played by mind) who’s living something called my life, the mind attempts to transform the ephemeral, groundless, ever-changing nature of being into something that can be understood, managed, and in theory, controlled.  It takes what is really one unified process, life, from which we are inseparable, and splits it into two different things, a me and a life.  We then become the liver of this thing called life, and in the process, seemingly distinct and real.  We literally think our self into existence.

And so, the questions beg: first, is there a downside to living with this inner narrator, and second, do we have to live this way, is it part and parcel of the human condition? Is there no alternative to a second-hand version of life, knowing experience only through the mind’s description and commentary? The answer is a resounding yes, and no.

Yes, there is a downside and no, we are not condemned to live this way forever.

The small downside to living with the play by play of your life ceaselessly running in your ear is that it can be intensely agitating and distracting. There exists constant noise in the background and foreground of your life, no silence to be heard, like having a mosquito (or buzz saw) resounding in your ear, one that you can’t silence and can’t ignore.

But on a more profound level, the downside to the inner narrator is that it stands in the way of your actually getting to experience life first hand, in all its richness. You’re relegated to living through your narrator’s description, which is really just a mental representation of the real thing, like getting a postcard of the Grand Canyon in place of being there, or a description of chocolate instead of a taste. The little voice goes on then to offer commentary on the narration, which is a representation of a representation, and you are now two layers away from the direct experience of living.

You might also notice that the voice in your head presents its version of your life as a truth. It reports your life story as if it were the actual reality existing in the objective world. It’s liberating, however, to realize that the narrator’s account of what’s happening is all going on inside your own mind and only in your mind. It’s not real in some objective sense, but rather another story about a story which begins and ends inside your own consciousness.

The good news is that you don’t have to live this way, with your inner narrator acting as a middle manager between you and life. If you’ve ever been deeply involved in an activity, you might have experienced what’s referred to as flow state.  In flow, we’re so engaged in what we’re doing that we cease to be aware of our self. We’re no longer the one doing the activity, but literally absorbed into the experience itself. We become the experience; we become life rather than the one who’s living it, and all notion of time and a separate Idisappears. And, while the mind has convinced us otherwise, what we discover is that when the mind is not there self-referencing, reminding us of our self, we still exist. We do not in fact disappear; the mind might temporarily, but we do not, which suggests that we are indeed more than mind. Awareness remains even when we lose the felt sense of our self as the one doing our life. And, interestingly, such experiences, the ones in which awareness of our self disappears, when there is only experience but no I doing it, are the ones that we later describe as wholly satisfying, blissful, and even divine.  The experiences in which we are gone are the ones that we most crave.

The remedy for the little voice in our head is three-fold. First, we have to exhaust of it and become so fed up with the play by play as to decide that we’re not willing to listen or live by it anymore. Once that’s happened, we must start noticing our narrator and become aware of its voice as an object appearing in our awareness. And finally, we set a clear and fierce intention and desire to experience life directly, through our senses, now, and not just receive a report on it. We commit to diving deeply and directly into the ocean of life.

Listening to the little voice in your head is a habit, granted a habit with deep roots, survival instincts, and lots of practice time, but nonetheless, a habit. With desire, willingness and intention, a habit, any habit, can be changed. Each time you catch the voice in your head describing or commentating on your life, practice a new habit, the habit of directly experiencing your actual experience. Each time you hear your little voice, first pause and celebrate a moment of awareness; the fact that you’re hearing it means that there’s another part of you, which is not merged with the narrator, who’s awakening—the you whom the narrator is narrating to. Next, intentionally shift your attention from your head (which is where our energy is usually focused) down into your body.  Invite your body to consciously relax. Take and feel a deep breath. From there, run a sense loop: see what you’re seeing, hear what you’re hearing, feel what you’re feeling, smell what you’re smelling, and taste what you’re tasting. Experience each, one at a time. And finally, sense your own physical presence, the feeling of aliveness in your body (not your mind). With this practice, the little voice in your head will grow quieter and less relentless, and the living will become more vivid, satisfying, immediate, and ultimately, real.

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There is a story I once heard of a five year old whose mommy had just given birth to a new baby. The little boy kept asking to spend some time alone with his new sister. When his parents asked him why he wanted this alone time with the new baby, the five year old said that he needed it because he was starting to forget God.

It seems that we come into this world with an innate wisdom and knowing of our infinite and spiritual nature, but through our conditioning and just life as it unfolds, we forget who and how magnificent we really are. You could say that we get smaller, and begin believing that who we are or what we are made of is just a resume of the roles we play, our successes and failures, the opinions we hold, and the problems we need to solve.

So what gets in the way of our knowing who we really are? What untethers us from our truly infinite and spiritual nature? The long answer to such questions is complex and multi-layered. But since this is a blog, I’ll go with the short answer. The number one thing that makes us forget our true nature as spiritual beings is thought, or more specifically, our fascination with our thoughts. From the time we are very young, we devote most of our life’s energy and attention to our thoughts. And truth be told, most of them are not that interesting, or helpful.

Because a thought appears in our awareness, we assume that must believe it. Because we are conditioned to believe that we are our thoughts, we assume that we must pay attention to every thought that occurs. But this is a false assumption. Thoughts appear and we can choose to believe them—or not. Thoughts just happen; we don’t actually choose to think them. Rather, we are the witness of our thoughts. It is up to us how we want to be in relationship with the thoughts that vie for our attention. This fixation with thoughts causes us to be lost in a trance most of our lives—not actually where we are. Put another way, it causes us to abandon our bodies. With our attention focused on the stream of thoughts we are always hearing, we become disconnected from our senses. This is important because it is the senses that are the portal to our own presence, our basic being, our spirit.

Coming into the body, feeling the breath, the sensations that are happening right now—this is our gateway into now, and it is only through this present moment, now—sensed directly—that we can remember ourselves as the infinite and spacious presence that we intuitively know (but forget) that we really are. The mind turns “now” into a bundle of thoughts, a concept, something to talk about, a place we need to get “to.” But in truth, “now” can’t be talked about, can’t be a destination. “Now” can only be something we are, something we melt into. As soon as we talk about or think about “now,” it becomes something separate from us, a possession, a notion, and a goal. “Now” can only be experienced directly through the body, the heart, the senses. While thoughts have tremendous value for many aspects of life, if what we want is to know ourselves as spiritual beings on a human journey, thought is not the path.

We can’t know our true and infinite nature through thought. In fact, our fixation with thoughts obscures us from this knowing, this timeless wisdom. The body holds this intelligence, this memory, deep in its cellular structure, as if the body itself remembers from whence it comes, the stardust out of which it is made.

Right now, in this moment, invite your body to feel itself, from the inside out. Right now, in this moment, allow your body to arrive—here, where you are. Don’t consult your mind for what it thinks of here. Don’t send your mind down into your body to notice what’s happening now and come back up and tell you. Simply tune into the sounds reaching your ears, feel the sensations happening inside you, experience the breath as it enters and exits, and the gaps in between. Allow yourself to land inside, and to fill up your whole body with your own presence, to sense your being. Feel what it feels like simply to exist.

When we feel the moment directly, through the body, who we are as thought, ego, a “person,” disappears. Our individual “me” agendas fade and we are just now, life—not separate from life, from our spirit, or our true nature. Check it out for yourself; don’t just take it as an idea from me. Use your senses as your portal, experience the boundlessness that your body contains, and you will come to remember yourself as the spiritual being on a human journey that you truly are.

The post Spiritual Beings On a Human Journey: How to Remember Our Stardust appeared first on Nancy Colier.

Still, we believe that we are the thinker of our thoughts. Despite all evidence to the contrary, we think that we decide our thoughts, and as a result, that we are responsible for their content. Because they are “our” thoughts, and we “did” the thinking, our identity is determined by their content. We are a good person if we have “good” thoughts and a bad person if we have “bad” thoughts. We spend a lot of time trying to control our thoughts and create order out of the chaos that the mind delivers.

In truth, thoughts happen — on their own. We are not in charge of what our thoughts are about. We are the recipient — the “hearer” of thoughts, the screen upon which they are projected, but certainly not the one doing the thinking.

If you are like most people, the majority of what your mind tells you, you have already heard before — many times. So too, many of the thoughts you receive are useless or boring. Only a small percentage might actually be of interest to “you.” While it is true that we can direct our attention to a particular topic and thus encourage certain kinds of thoughts, still, most of what we hear in our heads is useless chatter that we would not miss if it were not heard.

When you walk by a crazy person on the street and they yell out wild, non-sensical things at you, do you take the comments personally? Do you feel responsible for their content? Probably not. The mind is not much different than that crazy person on the street. The main difference however is that your mind lives inside your head and thus you can’t walk away from it. And more importantly, that you believe that crazy mind to be “you”!

What if we didn’t have to take credit or responsibility for our thoughts? What if we could use thought but without taking ownership of it? What if we didn’t have to do anything about or with the thought-racket that the mind makes? Indeed, all of these are possible! And how liberating and relieving to be given permission to let the mind do its thing without having to get involved or be responsible for it.

Try it for a day: Let your mind fire off like the out-of-order computer that it is. Don’t get involved in the contents of what it fires — don’t feed its firings, or build a storyline from its random fragments. Starve the mind. (Be careful however, not to turn “starve the mind” into another thought that interests you.) If you are lucky enough to hear a thought that is genuinely interesting, you can move toward it, engage with it, and build something with it. But otherwise, you can get on with your life and let the thoughts simply pass through, like weather, without much ado. Imagine yourself inside a giant mosquito net with hundreds of mosquitos buzzing just outside the net, unable to get through. You can ignore the mosquitos and go about your business without getting bitten. After a while, you may not even hear the buzzing anymore. And when not paid attention to, the mosquitos often take off to find someone else to bug. The same is true for thoughts — without your energy, your juice (in the form of attention) — they lose their power. You can make use of thoughts, but don’t believe them to be “yours” in some fundamental, identity-defining way.

We cannot stop thought but we can stop being interested in thought.

The “you” who is hearing the thoughts is the real you. You are the space within which the thoughts appear (and disappear). Practice turning away from thought — not feeding the thoughts with your attention. And then, notice what’s there — the silence behind the noise, the stillness behind the mind’s movement. Indeed, you may find that starving the mind can deliver a most profound form of nourishment. Remember, the mind is not yours to control. Let the mind do its thing — and you do yours!

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