The other day I wrote something about spending some enforced time in a scanner, which I used as an opportunity watch my thoughts. It was a fascinating exercise, and not the first time.
In fact it’s easy to do, any time really – like when doing something as basic as eating a piece of fruit 👇🏻
Giles P Croft
That post served as a bit of an eye-opener for a reader, because it helped them to realise just how much of their everyday activities are accompanied by mind-commentary (which, for us humans, is often quite judgemental).
I started off by empathising, replying with an “All the time, yeah!” before catching myself and realising – hang on, that’s nonsense, isn’t it?
It’s not “all the time” at all! It’s just that those are the bits we notice.
Syd Banks once defined the present moment as:
“Any moment of awareness that’s free of the contamination of the conceptual mind”
…which means that there’ll be loads of times during every day where we’re just batting away at life—talking, working, reading, moving, writing, exercising, cooking, listening—but is happening without any judgement, or even noticing, per se.
That is presence, and we do it a lot more than we notice (because ‘noticing’ is a mind-thing).
So when it comes to being a bit up in our heads at times, this little exchange just made me wonder:
🤷🏻♂️
Giles
Related
Giles P Croft