Last Week of Class & Beyond

By now the last class is a blur in my memory.  I remember thinking at the time that there was nothing significant that occurred to write about that was different from the previous classes. Then I was off the next day to a restful and relaxing vacation in sunny Mexico for twelve days.  In Mexico I did not do any formal type of meditation practice.  Instead, I chose to be mindful of being mindful as often as I could.

Now that I’m back home and meditating each day, here’s my report regarding the value I’ve gained from practicing up until now: 1) It’s ever present on my mind to be aware of what’s happening in the present moment;  and 2) I’m becoming better at working the process of detaching from being sucked into being my emotional state.  For example: when I feel sad, I can more easily detach myself from the feeling by recognizing that I feel sad, let my thoughts, including judgments about the feeling float away, and then simply be in the present moment  Then sadness becomes a word with no energetic charge. I realize that I was not sad; I was merely thinking thoughts that caused the emotion of sadness to arise in me.  I find it helps to change my language to I had thoughts that made me feel sad  instead of  I am sad.  [This process of detaching from any emotion requires – first of all - that I desire to feel better. I’ve learned that there’s a part of me that likes the sadness, as melancholy as it might be. Soooo, part of why I have the experience of sadness at all is that, at some level, I enjoy it.]