It's been a long time since I've written.
During that time, my aspirations to become a mindfulness ninja slowly deflated into a limp plastic mass that I would trip over every once in awhile. I immediately started missing office hours for my Mindful Schools training, fell behind in reading and weekly video viewing, and most discouraging, couldn't find the strength to get up and sit in the morning. While I started the year sitting with my eighth grade class twice a week, and found some buy in, as the semester wore one it was pushed out by the intensive high school search process, until it became a footnote we would squeeze in every now and then. I began to wonder if I had put too much faith in this practice. If I had overhyped it in my mind into something it could never be, in reality. There was too much life getting in the way.
It is amazing how easy it is to feel like life is happening to you. Like we don't create it for ourselves, but someone else is making us do it. In my last post from October, I reflected on how caught up in education crisis culture I felt, and I vowed to make more time to do the things that I wanted to do. But even that was doing. I did run, and have dinner with friends, and go to the gym, and take parkour classes, and climb. I did get away on weekends. All of that making space for myself filled my life with goodness, but also left me feeling perpetually on the verge of crashing and burning. I can't just balance out too much work by adding too much play.
Indeed, it wasn't until Christmas break when everything ground to a halt that I could even start digging back into the annals of fascinating video chats with neuroscientists and useful teaching methods. It wasn't until then that I reset and recommitted to my seated meditation each morning. It wasn't until then that I remembered, if not for the first time, that I am the creator of my own life.
For the past 28 days (according to my mindfulness timer app), I have restarted my sitting and gratitude practice. I made time for them because I need them to appreciate the rest of my life. These practices of awareness and reflection seem to actually change my experience of each day. To slow it all down. To experience moments within the busy-ness.
My students are studying world religion right now, and we just covered Buddhism. The Buddha spent six years on his quest to obtain enlightenment, and vowed to continue that process of retreat throughout his life, taking 3 months of the year, and a 3 times throughout the day, to withdraw into himself. To know. It is all too easy to get swept up in every day life. The good and the challenges. No matter how many minutes I logged in August, if I don't make space in January, I am operating at a deficit. I need the moments throughout the day, and the longer moments throughout the year, to withdraw.
Not only do we need space to turn inward, in order to connect outwardly, but we need to cultivate the sweetness in life. Just recently Chris McKenna, one of my mindfulness teachers, reminded me of this. Because of our negativity bias, we perceive everything as a threat, a vestigial response to a formerly oft-threatening environment filled with predators. Basically, we are wired to not get dead, and are hypervigilant about anything that might lead us to that fate. Conversely, the good things in our life didn't require this fine attunement, because they didn't require reflexive responses in order to get them. So, in order to soak in a brilliant sunset, a good meal, a luxurious bath, or a moment of quiet, we need to enhance the experience on purpose. We need to bring our attention to that moment and grow it.
I begin the process again. Of re-remembering the things I've had to continually relearn. Because what's the point of living if I'm not there to appreciate it?
