nov17

I've been finding lately that it's gotten easier to choose to feel more relaxed and happy/contented. I've just been remembering to periodically throughout the days, essentially disengaging slightly from my interpretations and feelings about the apparent conditions of the moment and relaxing within myself. So whatever I'm doing, whatever's happening and however it seems/appears, ever-so-slightly shifting my energy towards a less serious and more lighthearted and playful tone. I can do this even if I'm in the middle of experiencing emotions like anger or grief, just shifting towards smiling internally at even that. The shift feels subtle but also quite stark.

Eventually it's how I'd like to approach the entirety of this life experience, or at least as seamlessly and often as possible. Not being uptight, rigid and serious about it, but relaxed and playful even in the midst of uptightness, rigidity and seriousness. Enjoying it more like the passing dream it is, rather than as something oh-so-important that simply must go my way and if not then oh goodness isn't it all so upsetting and awful.

In the end, I'm just passing through. Or put another way, this life's just passing through my awareness. Everything I encounter is coming and going, coming and going. Gain and loss, success and failure, triumph and defeat, inflation and deflation, creation and destruction, praise and blame, confidence and insecurity, love and hate, understanding and confusion, certainty and doubt, peace and conflict, satiety and hunger, company and solitude, meeting and parting, embodiment and oblivion. Back and forth, back and forth. From beginning to end, the pendulum continues its ceaseless swinging. How long until I finally come to rest in the center and let it all come and go as it will? Preferably sooner rather than later.

Let it all come, let it all go. It's all ultimately out of my hands. All I can reasonably do is lean towards and invite that which resonates and lean away from and repel that which doesn't, knowing that even these will shift in time. What'll indulging in more fear and worry and plotting than necessary really accomplish? Not much. Just the mind playing its scenarios as surface conditions swing back and forth, back and forth.

Lately I've been focusing more on disengaging from the stories and images in the mind and focusing directly upon the sensations in the body that manifest in the mind as fearful, angry, worrisome, needy, etc thoughts and scenarios. It seems far more effective in "solving the problems" (or rather dissolving them) than engagement with the majority of the apparent causes and solutions. In most cases attention upon the bodily/energetic sensations seems to dissolve the root emotions that generate the more compulsive and compelling thoughts and scenarios in the mind, though the decision to act and engage in various ways continues to arise at times. Beyond these, what's the ultimate use in all this unpleasant optional activity? Trying to control or accomplish what exactly? One event will follow the other, until the dream goes poof and it all vanishes back into nothing. Might as well wait the uncomfortable feelings out and see.