Heart Reading … Day 54

Beyond trying to learn lessons from life.

Could there be a state of being where one stops trying to learn from the discomforts and pains and sufferings of life?

I’m asking myself this question right now because I caught myself saying the following words to a family member: “you can’t make someone listen who doesn’t want to.” I said this immediately after suggesting that they sit this other person down so they can communicate how a particular situation made them feel. We can express our feelings all day long to no avail, till we are “blue in the face,” but until those hearing our words really want to listen to them, we could very well be wasting our breath.

Breath is precious. How much of it do we waste?

I can regret so many years — decades even — of wasted breath. But I am choosing to appreciate the fact that I’m practicing breathing and speaking mindfully. It certainly helps that most of the people I work with are themselves actively trying to speak mindfully, and it helps that I have wanted to speak mindfully for years. It’s all about practice.

Objectively speaking it would seem that practicing something as basic as breathing and putting a lot of effort into something called “mindful speaking” is the epitome of trying to learn lessons from every annoying little aspect of life and not in the very least the state of being “beyond trying to learn lessons from life.” But the way this statement currently feels has a lot to do with a new — a better — way of making sense of things that aren’t particularly logical.

Trauma is a big deal for all of us; whatever experiences we have had that felt or still feel traumatic, still live inside of us, lead us to try to make sense of the world in whatever way that makes it possible to keep getting up each day, to keep doing our best to be a good parent, to keep going to work, and to keep adulting. I was always quite relieved each time I would find a new metaphysical approach to divining answers to my big questions that emerged from trying to figure life out. And I still believe that any tool or technique which brings ease to the heart is a good one.

But the shift I am making — to bring the experience of life into my body-mind as a steady state rather than a lucky confluence of time and space that I can only really experience during “time off” or when the universe aligns a particular way — leads me to feel deeply healthy. I don’t want to strive or to expend great amounts of energy spinning in circles trying to figure things out. I only want to listen to this energetic body experience sensation in relation to others — which is my sovereign domain — and let it inform the ways in which I respond. It feels f*@%#ng revolutionary.