Mary O’Malley – It is said that we have 65,000 thoughts a day. Doesn’t that make you tired just thinking about the profusion of your thoughts? If you had a little door on your forehead that you could open to watch the ticker-tape of your thoughts, you would see how busy they are – how they are always controlling and trying and figuring out and analyzing and judging and wanting and resisting, feeling that if things were different than what they are, then everything would be okay.
Busy, busy, busy mind. Your mind is so full that you rarely, if ever, notice life as it is; so busy that Truth can hardly get a word in edge wise! Your mind constantly tries to figure everything out and thus you seldom allow yourself moments to just rest here and now. I’m not saying the mind is bad. It is a wonderful and necessary tool for maneuvering through reality. But it is not reality! No matter how busy your mind is, you secretly long to relax into simply being.
What you don’t see is that your ideas about life and life itself are usually two different things. Most of the time you don’t see that your thinking and your identification with it as who you are cuts you off from fully being here in this moment, the place where you connect with what is real and lasting. In other words, you live a second-hand life.
I would like to offer you two small but powerful words that can help you unhook from your busy mind: Don’t know. Take a moment and bring your attention to your breath and say these words on your out-breath. Don’t know. Allow each word to be long and slow and round.
These words allow the cramp of trying in your mind to let go a bit. As they begin to penetrate your mind and body, you may have a few moments where you realize the spaciousness and ease that arises when you don’t need to control anything, push anything away, figure anything out or be anybody special. Instead, you can open to the truth of this moment as it is!
Instead of experiencing life just through your thoughts, these words soften you enough so you can be here for your life – not with just your ideas about it, but the living experience. Allow Don’t know to open you up. In this moment, be with your life as it is. Be with what is real. When your mind is not so full, the beauty, intelligence and wisdom of life can reveal itself to you.
If you are willing, add these two words to your life. Write them on sticky notes that you put on the refrigerator, on the ceiling above your bed, on the dash of your car. Or record your voice saying Don’t know and play it at the beginning of a meditation or use it as background music when you are driving or working. The more you allow these words into your mind and heart, the more you can see your addiction to controlling life. Then the safety of relaxing into your life exactly as it is. can begin to make sense to you.
SF Source Mary O’Malley Aug 2018