Treading lightly on ice?
It is common to walk in such careless manner, that is without care for ourselves rather than carelessly into other people. Though which one of us has not been distracted for moment, I have certainly done a pretty good impression of an elephant learning to ice-skate at times. What I am concerned about is taking the time to consider your walk, as a reflection of how we care for ourselves even in the quiet seemingly unimportant moments, like when you are walking from one place to another because these small moments make up a huge and dominant part of our lives. If you are happy in those moments you will be happy for most of your
life, though I am not saying that the unexamined walk is not worth taking. It is just valuable to consider how we operate in those moments or we could skate over valuable opportunities to be happy.
As in my experience, it turns out that the joy and happiness that I have been trying to think my way towards is a natural by-product of taking full ownership of your body and sensory experience. Which seems annoyingly ironic to have a mind that thinks it can figure out everything to then find out that thinking blots out the experience of joy. It is almost like someone had a sense of humour when they were writing our technical user manual, especially as thinking is so important for many aspects of our life, it plans, executes and learns, but what it lacks is the ability to experience things.
It is only when we stop thinking and engage our awareness into tasks, that the ability to truly experience life emerges, it is when we literally forget ourselves and it even feels amazing as you are doing it. The flow experience emerges whenever you engage wholly in a task that is difficult but within your skills. Where ever you get people, you get a culture that works together to have this experience of doing and being, every civilisation have had alcohol, drugs, music, meditation, religion, they all create the circumstances where the self melts away, and you experience flow, you are wholly consumed by what you are doing, whatever the sensory experience might be, you are in the moment. It is the basis of dangerous sports like climbing, where you are wholly focused on the task and you balance between difficulty and your skill, when your life depends you paying full attention to what you are doing, there is in the room for thoughts or sense of self, our distant ancestors were optimised for hunting, failure meant starvation, so being focused was a matter of life and death, that's why we are so good at it.
However it is only available to us if we use it, it has to be engaged for reason, it is hugely energy consuming state for the body to maintain, and the body is lazy or super-efficient depending on how positive you are, it will
always choose to use the least amount of energy it can. You have to deliberately use your focusing muscles, you have to make the conscious choice with your mind to stop using your mind and instead fully focus on what is happening by taking an objective view. If we feel afraid, if we sensed danger, it happens naturally,
you become hyper-vigilant and alert, even the suggestion of me asking you to listen for the snake which is behind you (probably in the dark corner), might be enough to give you a dose of that experience, you can also just try and remember a time when you were frightened, should be enough that you can visualise it, and that is the experience we are trying to recreate.
It is what underpins the mindfulness approach to meditation, by taking a walk and fully focusing on what is happening when you are walking, you are trying to have the experience of being fully focused on your
external senses which shuts down your experience of self. That is the oscillation between having thoughts and being aware of the self having those thoughts, which together forms a sense of self. We are the story of a string of thoughts that linked together over time, and every time we experience self it is when we realise that we are part of a conscious being that has witnessed all these thought, the mistake we make is thinking that we are the thoughts and not the witness. The witness does not have a story, it does not talk in thoughts, thoughts are mere suggestions of what might be true, they are generated by every possibility that could be plausible if not likely.
Thoughts are rather wonderful things and incredibly useful, they make planning possible, learning valuable and imagination limitless. However they are not who we are, we are the witness of everything we experience,
and thoughts are one way that we experience, they are incredibly important to how we experience, positive and negative thoughts are really only differentiated by whether we enjoy the experience of them. Positive thoughts feel good, they generate good emotions, and negative thoughts have the opposite effect. Our thoughts are the prisms through which we experience reality, advanced meditation is about removing that prism and experiencing pure reality.
However there is a tremendous advantage for everyone, in just being able to experience a little more reality, because when we do so we feel joy. Just experiencing the sensations in the body without a running commentary from our thoughts, means we are able to just witness them, and the default emotion of the witness is joy, which means when we take a walk and focus on the feeling in our feet, the motion of our
stomach muscles, our breathing, the weather, other people, we become immersed in the experience of walking, we become focused like a hunter of observing the world for prey and indeed if it helps you
pretend you are, please make it into a game, everything is fair game in getting to the experience of flow. If it helps visualise doing it, decide you are going to become the sort of person who regularly has this experience, and visualise that plausible version of yourself (and it only has to be plausible to you).
Even more importantly, like any habit you want to form, and I hope you will want to form the habit of experiencing yourself, even if it is just to feel joy, start with the smallest habit you can, three conscious breaths whilst walking to work for two weeks is far better than just doing it for ten minutes once every two weeks. It is about just bringing a little bit of consciousness at a time into your life, is getting used to the experience, having the experience so you have something to return to, it is far easier to re-experience something rather than experiencing it for the first time, so that you can remember and want to return to that joyful place.
