The life that’s here

“drop the story”-Gangaji

“what is it you plan to do/with your one wild and precious life”-Mary Oliver

Hooked on the past, hooked on the future

We have the gift of a very tricky human mind. We would prefer our minds to be more rational, balanced and insightful, yet we are often beset by rancorous thoughts and emotions that plunge us headlong into regrets, low mood and ruminations about the past, or worries and anxious anticipations about the future, mourning for what could have been or what was, fearful of what could or might be coming. Or we spend time daydreaming, lost in fantasy. It’s a wonder we ever get anything done, being so hooked, as we are, on distraction.

Distraction can be appear in the stories we live, stories about the past that we often believe determine the person we have to be now and in the future, stories of loss, rejection, hurt and wounding. These stories can go way back to our childhood, and at times we can never know the truth of these stories, but stories win not through truth but through repetition until we identify with them as if they feel like and are, cold hard facts. These stories, perhaps meant to be of help at first can, over time, actually diminish our growth, keeping us small. Who might best be served by your story staying small and wounded? Is this your real story? Does the hooking take you towards or away from the life that’s here?

This hooking; in Tibet they have the word shenpa, which points towards the involutory way we tense and stick to emotional distractions not just of the past and future but alcohol, drugs, sex, work; we’re taken away from the life that’s here and into a life that’s not here at all but a construction of our tricky minds

Hooked onto attention

The poet T.S. Eliot said Time past and time future/Allow but a little consciousness. But we can open out to a more vast consciousness, which in turn opens up our lives. For in reality, our whole world expresses itself in the life that’s here, not the life we had or the life we hope to get, but the life that’s here and now.

How do we get to the life that’s here?

The Tibetan for the opposite of shenpa is shenlock, which is recognising when we get hooked into distraction, stories of past or future, behaviours that seem to bring us pleasure but are in reality deeply unfulfilling and only serve to remind us our unresolved issues or woundings.

Shenlock is as much to do with attention as anything else. Our whole life could be said to be the result of where we put our attention to, for this focusses our lives; we can bring our attention to the past, to the future, old wounds or bitter stories, or we can bring our attention to the life that’s here.

Hooked into your senses

It’s often our mind that keep us in shenpa; using our mind is often akin to using gasoline to put out a fire. But if we place our attention onto our senses another world unfolds, a world not of the past, not of the future or any form of distraction or story but of here, what we smell, taste, hear, see and touch. It also opens us up the feeling of our being, our embodied selves.

This is the life that’s here.

So, this requires what mindfulness calls practice. This is a wonderful idea; it’s not about achievement or outcome, but practice, there is no failure or success, but there is finding your embodied self in the here and now, rich in its sensory awakening, charged with potential.

Then we might find that we’re not really going anywhere: we’ve already arrived and living the life that’s here.