One of the most valuable things you can get from meditation practice is strong awareness that what you think and feel is just thoughts and feelings. Without that basic tool, it is easy to lose the distinction between your thoughts and feelings and outside facts. The facts can be the thoughts and feelings of others that don't match your own and they can be facts of truth outside of anyone's thoughts and feelings.
If you have a feeling that the black horse is going to win and I have a feeling the white horse will, when the black horse comes in first, we both tend to say,"You were right" and "I was right". If your prediction matches the outcomes enough times, especially consecutive times, I might feel that there is something about your judgment of horse races that is superior. Of course, if you are right enough times, I may begin to suspect you are drugging the horses or are in cahoots with someone who is.
When we say "you were right", we mean you made a prediction and that prediction matches the outcome but the words sound rather like there is something in you that makes you correct, a property or element. Our thoughts and the feelings behind them are so powerful, so useful and are present so continuously that we can pay less attention to the fact that they reside inside our heads. Good heads but still just heads.
Bessel van der Kolk makes clear in "The Body Keeps the Score" that the first decade of life is spent more or less learning that our parents say what is and what is rather depends on what they say. If Mom says I can't play with Johnny, that may be a fact of my world, which now contains no Johnny. I may have to spend my whole adolescent decade untying to connections that nourished me but now turned out to be less powerful and ultimate than they were.
Two tools that help me focus on the larger world beyond my own thoughts and feelings are the pause and the NOW. The pause enables me to stop a second and think again. Do I really need an 80 inch tv, even if it is now on sale for only $999.99? The NOW, in capital letters or small, is actually right this minute where I am right now. Three deep breaths are more than enough to give me a pause and the time to check my posture, feelings in my legs and feet and other current facts about my present body. Slowing and deepening my breath helps me to focus my attention on my actual place and this actual time, always worth visiting and enjoying.
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Bill
Main blog: Fear, Fun and Filoz
Main web site: Kirbyvariety
