Wherever you go there you are!

Picture "The Golden Path II" kindly provided by h.koppdelaney

I am up to the chapter "Wherever you go there you are" in the book with the same name by Jon Kabat-Zinn. I love this book, as he talks about mindfulness, meditation, karma in plain simple English, no need to de-crypt scriptures or poems, just straight up, sort of like a spiritual espresso, except it wakes your soul up!

One of the things about mindfulness and meditation is that it is pretty much opposite to our normal patterns of thinking:
- Instead of doing , there is non-doing
- Instead of thinking, there is emphasis on not thinking, just paying full attention without judgement
- Instead of thinking time, you let go of time, focus on the present, time loses all meaning
- Instead of changing outside, you change inside

You work on yourself, you listen, you pay attention. There is no point running away from anything, it just follows you, until you address your own mental conditions.  Real change only comes when you change your mentality.  This the mirror effect! you look to the world, and over time the world reflects back yourself, crystallizing material things around your thought patterns everywhere you go.

Real change only comes once you change your mentality.

Einstein said something like "Problems cannot be solved at the same level of thinking that created them"

The following is the extract from the chapter which emphasizes the importance of acceptance, facing the current challenges whatever it is, softening to it, learning from it ...

"If this job is no good, change jobs, If this wife is no good, change wives. If this town is no good, change towns ... The underlying thinking is that the reasons for these troubles is outside of you - in the location, in others, in circumstances ...This way of thinking and seeing is an all-too-prevalent trap.  There is no successful escaping from yourself in the long run, only transformation ... There can be no resolution leading to growth until the present situation is faced completely and you have opened to it with mindfulness, allowing the roughness of the situation itself to sand down your own rough edges.  In other words, you must be willing to let life itself become our teacher"  Jon Kabat-Zinn

There can be no resolution leading to growth until the present situation is faced completely and you have opened to it with mindfulness, allowing the roughness of the situation itself to sand down your own rough edges. Jon Kabat-Zinn

No-one can run from oneself, no-one can change oneself except oneself
No-one cannot change one's circumstances unless one changes one's thinking
No-one can change one's thinking until one stops thinking temporarily, allowing deeper contemplation (non-thinking) to guide the response and establish more thoughtful patterns of thinking....

No-one can change one's thinking until one stops thinking temporarily, allowing deeper contemplation (non-thinking) to guide the response and establish more thoughtful patterns of thinking....

Peace,

Kirpal