Remember & You Win

Did Anyone Else Play “The Game” Growing Up?

Did you ever play “The Game” as a kid? The one where if you remember that you’re playing it… you lose! You announce that you lose and everyone around you remembers that they’re playing and they lose too. (Maybe it was just a Canadian kid thing?!)

Anyway the REAL game is remembering that you’re playing… and you WIN. 🏆

Remembering that you’re the Witness. Not the thoughts.

Remembering that you’re in the driver seat. Life isn’t “happening to you”.

My friend said something that stood out to me, this week over dinner. She was talking about how she was trying to practice meditating (specifically being aware of her breathing) while she was doing a task more. (like listening to music, cooking, cleaning, etc.) This way she was practicing meditating even when she wasn’t “meditating” (as in – sitting motionless and then trying to focus on the breath).

In order to build my meditation practice over the years, I would have moments of “meditation” throughout the day. Meditation evolved past a cross legged seat for me, and I began my lifelong practice of returning to the “seat of awareness“. It’s the practice of coming back to this present moment, that is profound.

There’s no such thing as being “bad at meditating”. Meditation is a practice for the sake of it. It’s not a race to the end of something.

Alan Watts said something I love deeply:

In music, though, one doesn’t make the end of the composition the point of the composition.

If that were so, the best conductors would be those who played fastest; and there would be composers who only wrote finales. People [would] go to concerts only to hear one crashing chord—because that’s the end.

Same way in dancing—you don’t aim at a particular spot in the room; that’s where you should arrive. The whole point of the dancing is the dance…

We thought [that] life by analogy was a journey, was a pilgrimage, which had a serious purpose at the end. And the thing was to get to that end. Success, or whatever it is, or maybe heaven after you’re dead.

But we missed the point the whole way along. It was a musical thing, and you were supposed to sing, or to dance, while the music was being played.

Thank you for capturing this Alec Nevala-Lee

It’s the same for meditation, where the point of it is to keep coming back:

• Coming back to building a mental friendship with yourself.
• Coming back to tune in to the body and take an honest assessment of your emotional and physical being.
• Coming back to give yourself time & space to process thoughts, emotions, complications.
• Coming back to a “witness” mindset, so you can step back to see the big picture.

Thank you for joining me for another blog post and Happy December to you.

With Love,

Esta