Mindfulness at Home

Out of my latest batch from Better World Books, I found a gem that surprisingly validated a new approach I’ve taken to embrace appreciation in my life. I had little more to go on than the title when I was perusing the BWB web site. But upon later review, the book opened up a whole new approach to thoughtful analysis of one’s daily life.

The Mindful Home is a book that embraces approaching life mindfully and extends it to the home environment. “The home is not grand, nor decorated by the latest trends.” Instead, the book discusses the home as an oasis for mindful exploration. It is a place that is restful, that reminds us of things beautiful and edifying, and one that is welcoming for visitors.”

Even before stumbling upon this plethora of new ideas, I’d been striving to embrace the good things happening in my life and learning to appreciate the simpler things all around me. Along with the miles traveled, I’ve seen, heard and experienced enough to know there is goodness in the air if one makes the effort to find it.

It can be a casual conversation with family. It could be my early morning sequester on the porch or pack patio which a friend has labeled as my ‘quiet time.’ It could be any opportunity just to ‘chill out’ and ‘smell the roses.’ I think my friend got that description of ‘quiet time’ spot on. It ties in nicely with my interest in yoga, meditation and other thought-fulfilling exercises.

Over the years, I’ve tried the yoga approach but never put on enough mat time to really feel I understood its benefits. Back in the mid-Sixties, I toyed with the idea of trying the newest craze among the hippie set; Transcendental Meditation but that didn’t work either. There was always some recommended pathway ahead of me but it was usually choked with self-doubt and confusion.

Those wondering / wandering meanders into the subconscious led to a lot of poetry and song lyrics being written during that period. Bookended between high school graduation and marriage, I had ten years of inspection and introspection. In retrospect, I think it was an attempt for me to capture in the vernacular, those thoughts, ideas, concepts, dreams, illusions and aspirations that escaped an easy explanation. Somehow, putting it on paper seemed to lift the fog of mystery and doubt.

As the years rolled by, those cerebral explorations of the unknown continued in a variety of locations, all of them, in one way or another, very conducive to grasping the questions still banging around in my head. The location was less important than the serenity that enveloped it as a conducive conduit for thought.

In the last couple of years, this cerebral exercise in Salon gymnastics as led to what I label as my ‘Coffee and Chat’ sessions, it’s really just a comfortable meeting among friends over coffee.

The conversation always takes on a life of its own and we just follow it along. Two old men (and a couple of women) sharing, caring and opening themselves up to one another. No subject untouched or uncovered if the moment is right. No regrets, no apologies, just an honest exchange of one self. Each of us feeling lucky we’re still around for such an honest discourse.

It’s reflective discourse we all can learn from. Mindfulness that is comforting and enlightening at the same time.

Journeys Inside My Head

I guess I’ve always been a dreamer; wondering what if and why not? It’s been a lifelong journey outside the fringes of consciousness, usually spurred on by vapid aspirations and free-flowing thoughts inside my head.

Transcendental meditation and chemical enhancements never appealed to me. I’ve always abhorred drugs and the idea of putting strange substances into my body was an absolute no-go. So, grass, gummies, magic mushrooms, chemical cocktails and the like all stopped before getting close to my lips. Alcohol, for instance, has been absent from my body for more than half a century.

While stationed at the Presidio of San Francisco, I decided one brilliant Friday night to get a little drunk along with my army buddies. After some Malt Liquor, a little wine, beer and who knows what else, I was totally wasted and gone from this world. Two days of recuperation and my body rejected any future ingestion of alcohol. Future partying went as far a couple of light beers and that was that. I haven’t touched hard liquor for the last fifty-five years and counting.

So where does that leave me if I want to venture forth into the world of esoteric thoughts, ideas, concepts, assumptions, reflections, and other soulful ventures into the unknown or cloudy past? Mindful exploring of the great unknown seems to be the answer. Yoga and meditation come first to mind.

Some claim that our mind is the ultimate filter. The newest cliché in a long list of ‘feel good’ labels is mindfulness. It comes after a long list of mind-altering techniques, with or without chemical enhancement, to see more clearly the world around us and thought patterns inside our head. One approach is to go someplace to meditate and not medicate. It can be a mountaintop surrounding the Coachella Valley, hanging off a cliff in Machu Picchu, or just reading about it in a book.

Starting in high school, I was curious about how to see the world in a different perspective. I wanted to journey inside my head sans chemical enhancements. After I stumbled upon Carlos Castaneda I was hooked. Granted, his approach to cerebral Valhalla was with magic mushrooms but the journey mesmerized me nevertheless.

Later on, despite my own divorce from organized religion after the eighth grade, I was mesmerized by a hip, chain-smoking priest named Malcom Boyd. Malcom’s approach to life wasn’t your semi-hippie ‘transcendental meditation’ so popular at the time. Rather, it was his attention to detail. Malcom spoke openly and honestly about real feelings, real emotions and real consequences in my own world. Following in Malcom’s footsteps, another group of truth seekers took up the lead that Napoleon Hill had created years earlier.

Napoleon Hill, Robert Pursig, Zig Zigler, and Brian Tracy all began preaching their own version of the gospel of success and self-enlightenment; the original ‘American Dream.’  Perhaps taking their cues from the original bible of self-determination, the ‘McGuffey’s Reader, first published in 1843, they adhered to the principles that ‘the road to wealth, to honor, to usefulness, and happiness, is open to all, and all who will, may enter upon it with the almost certain prospect of success.’ I’m sure if they were selling audio tapes of that book, they’d have made a million dollars by now.

Down through the decades, we’ve been introduced to a myriad of new-age dynamics that are guaranteed to change our lives. A recent trip to the library introduced me to this years ‘best seller’ and finally it seemed to make some sense. Without audiotape box sets, podcasts, U-Tube lecture series or in-person seminars, there seemed to be a rather simple approach to getting inside one’s head.

A quote from a book I recently read said it best: ‘Until we look directly at our minds we don’t really know ‘what our lives are about. Everything we experience in life goes through just one filter – our minds – and we spend very little time bothering to see just how it works.’

I would suggest that once people get a taste of it - it’s so completely fascinating, because really our life is a clear manifestation of what our minds are telling us.’ Good, bad, right or wrong, it’s all there for our perception, acceptance, denial, rejection or embracing.

Coupled up with these mind relaxing techniques are steps to facing our anxieties and learning to live with them. Almost all of the books refer to nature as an all-encompassing, all around us, every day, every time, kind of therapy.

Whether we venture to the top of a mountain, seek a quiet secluded spot among the oranges, or just rock in a chair listening to the birds, we ultimately end up in the same place; inside our head. It’s there, amid the distractions, outside noises, and nagging thoughts that our mind can slowly come clean to the honesty of our lives, our world, and what direction our heart is telling us to go.

Spot Bowling as a Metaphor for Life

Back in August, I published a blog entitled: ‘The Ultimate Filter.’ It garnered a number of comments and reactions from friends and some of my ‘coffee and chat’ salon compatriots. One of those friends responding commented that he had written a book a while back that seemed to encapsulate some of the same recognitions of life’s intricacies. His book was on spot bowling,

I had never thought of spot bowling as a metaphor for life. My coffee companion began telling me about a book he had written on wheelchair bowling years earlier. During the course of our conversation, I realized that my friend was right; that ‘spot bowling’ could be seen as a unique way of living one’s life.

I observed in my blog that our mind is the ultimate filter. It’s the newest cliché in a long list of ‘feel good’ labels is mindfulness. It comes after a long list of mind-altering techniques, with or without chemical enhancement, to see more clearly the world around us and thought patterns inside our head.

Starting in high school, I was always intrigued and curious about how to see the world in a different perspective. Back in the day, I wanted to journey inside my head sans chemical enhancements.

I had stumbled upon Carlos Castaneda and I was hooked. Granted, his approach to cerebral Valhalla was with magic mushrooms but the journey mesmerized me nevertheless. I was also mesmerized by a hip, chain-smoking priest named Malcom Boyd. Father Boyd’s approach to life wasn’t your semi-hippie ‘transcendental meditation’ approach that held my attention. Rather, it was his attention to detail. He spoke openly and honestly about real feelings, real emotions and real consequences in my own very real world.

Down through the decades, we’ve been introduced to a myriad of new-age dynamics that are guaranteed to change our lives. A quote from a book I recently read said it best: ‘Until we look directly at our minds we don’t really know ‘what our lives are about. Everything we experience in life goes through just one filter – our minds – and we spend very little time bothering to see just how it works.’

I would suggest that once people get a taste of it - it’s so completely fascinating, because really our life is a clear manifestation of what our minds are telling us.’ Good, bad, right or wrong, it’s all there for our perception, acceptance, denial, rejection or embracing.

I’m going to quote frequently and liberally from my friend and his book ‘Spot Bowling.’ So, let’s begin:

‘The important thing to realize from the very beginning is that there is only one score that matters in bowling. That score is the one you keep inside yourself. The one that says how good you really are.’ In our own little world, that truism can be applied to almost every aspect of life. Be it our job, our parenting skills, our hobbies, our relationships, or our aspersions in life.

Dick goes on to say: ‘Maybe the best bowler you can be is an 80-average bowler. So what? If 80 is the measure of how good you should be, when you shoot 90 you have won against the important opponent you will ever have to face – the one you see in the mirror every morning.’

I was never a good runner. To be honest, my jog-run-shuffle could best be described as covering a certain number of miles in any fashion fathomable to get to the finish line. I desperately wanted to run ultra-marathons. The closest I got was twenty-two miles in a 50 miler. I did run three marathons and surprised even myself by not dying on that asphalt journey to hell and back.

Dick continues: ‘Bowling is a mental game first, a scoring game second. What you are up against on the foul line is your ability to concentrate: to be aggressive, to be patient, to be consistent. Whether you have bowled up, as we refer to walking bowlers, or never in your life before wheeling out to the foul line, in a chair, there are only two significant differences between walking bowling and wheelchair bowling.

‘First, a walking bowler has an approach: the four or five steps he takes toward the foul line before releasing the ball. From a wheelchair, you do not have an approach in this sense. While that costs you something in speed and leverage on the ball, it can also be an advantage. Why? You can position yourself to deliver each ball you throw from the same spot. A wheelchair bowler can be far more deliberate and, as a result, potentially far more consistent.

‘The second difference is one you have probably long since adjusted to simply by being in a wheelchair. To be a good wheelchair bowler, you will have to depend on finesse, not force; smarts, not sheer strength. That is why I say bowling is a mental game first.’

I tried to touch on this subject in one of my blogs about my ‘secret garden’ and other quiets spots around my home. Each area provides a very peaceful daily dash of zest to my life. The journey inside one’s head is a life-long affair. Most of us don’t even know it in our lifetime. A few of us made that discovery a long time ago and are still exploring where that pathway might take us.

Carry on, fellow traveler, carry on.

The Ultimate Filter

Our mind is the ultimate filter. The newest cliché in a long list of ‘feel good’ labels is mindfulness. It comes after a long list of mind-altering techniques, with or without chemical enhancement, to see more clearly the world around us and thought patterns inside our head.

Starting in high school, I was always intrigued and curious about how to see the world in a different perspective. Back in the day, that would have included fueling up with Mary Jane, (marijuana), magic mushrooms and LSD. Mixed media concoctions made me uneasy. I wanted to journey inside my head sans chemical enhancements.

Then I stumbled upon Carlos Castaneda and I was hooked. Granted, his approach to cerebral Valhalla was with magic mushrooms but the journey mesmerized me nevertheless. Reading western novels introduced me to the concept of the ‘vision quest’ used by many indigenous people to find clarity in their ancient world.’

Despite my own divorce from organized religion in the early-sixties, I was mesmerized by a hip, chain-smoking priest who really caught my attention. Malcom Boyd was ordained an Episcopal priest after a successful career in advertising and television. Malcom’s approach to life wasn’t your semi-hippie ‘transcendental meditation’ approach that held my attention. Rather, it was his attention to detail. Malcom spoke openly and honestly about real feelings, real emotions and real consequences in my own very real world. A world that most nuns, priests, and adult councilors up until that point didn’t seem to know existed.

Time Magazine dubbed him “the coffeehouse priest” when he read his prayers accompanied by some of America’s best-known musicians. He long served the cause of civil rights, commencing with the Freedom Ride in 1961.

About the same time that Malcom was telling it like it was, another book told us we could lighten up a bit and be our best supporter. The Beatles made a splash when they went to visit the Dali Lama and practiced meditation and yoga. Then the ancient practice of sitting cross-legged and contemplating one’s naval became in vogue.

Down through the decades, we’ve been introduced to a myriad of new-age dynamics that are guaranteed to change our lives. A recent trip to the library introduced me to this years ‘best seller’ and finally it seemed to make some sense. Without audiotape box sets, podcasts, U-Tube lecture series or in-person seminars, there seemed to be a rather simple approach to getting inside one’s head.

A quote from a book I recently read said it best: ‘Until we look directly at our minds we don’t really know ‘what our lives are about. Everything we experience in life goes through just one filter – our minds – and we spend very little time bothering to see just how it works.’

I would suggest that once people get a taste of it - it’s so completely fascinating, because really our life is a clear manifestation of what our minds are telling us.’ Good, bad, right or wrong, it’s all there for our perception, acceptance, denial, rejection or embracing.

Coupled up with these mind relaxing techniques are steps to facing our anxieties and learning to live with them. Almost all of the books refer to nature as an all-encompassing, all around us, every day, every time, kind of therapy.

I tried to touch on this subject in one of my blogs about my ‘secret garden’ and other quiets spots around my home. Each area provides a very peaceful daily dash of zest to my life. The journey inside one’s head is a life-long affair. Most of us don’t even know it in our lifetime. A few of us made that discovery a long time ago and are still exploring where that pathway might take us. Carry on, fellow traveler, carry on.