WALKING FREE IN OUR OWN MIND

It is fruitless to expect to forever walk free in our own head...we can only walk free in our heads right now. Right this very minute. It is our own self-discipline of denying our future wants that sets us on the right road, and meditation is the starting point. The discipline of making ourselves available to meditate...imperfectly, bass-ackward, two minutes today, three tomorrow...just do it.

We begin to learn how to pull back, detach from, let go of our own thoughts. Those thoughts which are the very things that deprive us of freedom in our own heads.

Those thoughts that are usually some form of judgment. Walking free in our own head requires us to give up judgments of others. Or, more to the point, resistance to others. That is, of course, in the nature of being a human being...to judge, to resist.

We find, however, that the older we get, the less we can excuse our uglies by claiming, "I'm only human."

If our goal is still more spiritual growth, that very claim of I'm only human must be embraced and refused. We embrace it for the comfort it gives when we once again sit in judgment of another, and we refuse its comfort by seeking to remember where and when we acted and/or reacted in the exact same way as the person we are judging so harshly now. For it is there...it is there.

Interestingly, I do not judge harshly (that is, personally) murderers, pedophiles, rapists and their kind. I am so personally sickened by their acts that I can only react in prayer for them, their minds, their victims...just blanket prayers.

However, you scratch me, wrong my ego wants...you are in trouble. In my mind. Which means, of course, I'm in trouble. My reprieve comes in having learned to say "Thank You" p.d.q. Which today I do...except when I forget. Again, the self-discipline...embrace, refuse and look within.

The reason so few of us realize the gold in this exercise is we never follow all the way through. It is in the doing, the continuing to do, and still doing that God perfects our actions, our reactions.

At some point we realize: Wow, I haven't had a busy mind in a long time. I haven't seriously sat in judgment of anyone in I can't remember when. And I've had this mindless feeling of comfort, peace, one-derment. I'm walking free in my own mind! Ah,  there's God's gold.

Thank You.