You Can't Take the B.E. Out Of aBundancE.

You don’t have to be a Zen master to realize that there is power in just being in the moment - yet so many of us go day to day without ever standing outside ourselves and looking in on our lives.   It’s so easy to continue on day to day, trudging through work, following blind the daily schedules and  to-do lists. Now I’m not saying that’s a bad thing.  Things need to be done.  The more efficient we are, the more efficiently the machine of our lives operates.  And that is the whole point, right?    The more things we can check off our list, the more satisfied with ourselves and with life we are.  The problem is: external appearances rule our reality, and material pleasure drives our desire.  Over time and the heightened need to consume more and more, we begin to exchange the true identity that hides behind the external mask for perceived physical gratification.  It takes more and more to make us feel filled up.  We are constantly reaching for more or struggling to hold on to what we have.  In the process, we forget that there is a whole internal microcosm that has no check list.  We sometimes neglect even taking the inventory.  This makes the simple act of being in the moment increasingly more difficult.    But how does being in the moment relate to living in abundance?    Directly and intrinsically.   It’s the access point to all feelings of true abundance. Now I’m not the kind of person who’s going to go all guru on you and start telling you to adopt meditation, or build a rock garden, or join a cult that resembles the sixties and it’s free love mentality – but I will say that until you are able to connect with what lays bare underneath it all, you will miss the opportunity to use that personal power to feel and share a true sense of contentment with those you love.   I have directly experienced the power in taking the time to just be, and it’s exponential.  It compounds with interest even.  Over time, it infuses life with a higher threshold for joy and appreciation.  It’s where our personal power lives.    Of course, there are hurdles to overcome before we give ourselves the permission to direct the focus inward. How does one find the time to stop everything and just sit with themselves?  Our minds, hyperactive in the frenetic pace we are required to live at in our day to day lives, dismiss this practice as well - impractical.  The misconception is that it’s this arduous thing to clear the mind of all the responsibility and stress each day brings.  It has to be a production, or you have to buy into the spiritual belief behind it, or we even go as far as to believe that meditation is for those who have too much time on their hands – and if one has that kind of time, they’re surely not part of our ilk.    In fact, that’s not the case at all.    You don’t have to cling to one belief system, set aside time, or project your personal power onto another person or entity to just be.  It is far simpler than that.  Something I call being in the sacred mundane. By that I mean those tasks we have to chunk through to keep life moving; those mindless machinations that we drudge through day after day.  Think of all the times you may be going along with your routine that are moments you can steal for yourself.    You can use this time to focus your mind on nothing but your surroundings.  Pay attention to what your body is feeling.  Smell the smells, notice the landscape just outside your window; the way the light falls and dapples in the trees, the cars rushing by and the faces inside. How do they look in their haste and hurried and harried anxiety?    Indulge in the time you spend driving to work.  Turn the radio off and just feel the silence against your ears. Totally engage with washing the dishes; the way the suds roll around your fingers, as if a child again playing in the bubbles. Feel the softness and warmth when folding the clothes; the deliciousness of not needing to do anything else at that moment.    Close your eyes as your lunch dances around your palette and fills your mouth with goodness, and breathe in the way the smell of your morning coffee fills the air with delicious anticipation. All of these seemingly trite observations lend more meaning to our lives and teach a sense of reverence for life and in the living it. In effect, we awaken the and retrain them to experience the world as we once did before our pursuit for the world and all its shiny things took over. It’s time to celebrate it all and throw the past and the present into the great void that it is.  It’s time to stop wasting the moment that is here right now, by actually connecting with it in a way that will lend strength and clarity to the ones to follow.    In our instinct to survive we spend our time trying to smooth out the tide and trying to numb the crashes, but life, by its very nature is ebb and flow.  Seems the longer we live and the more we have thrown ourselves at the mercy of life’s turbulence, the easier it becomes to ride the waves.  It becomes less of a process of conquering or surviving and more about taking advantage of each vantage point, remaining relaxed and becoming fluid through both the ebb and the flow.    Truth is, most of us we spend so much time in the survive and conquer mode, we miss the chance to feel our connectedness to the process itself.  Just as the tides have their ebb and flow, the seasons too have a rhythm that beats on the door of our sterile and anesthetic world.  It is no longer part of our mainstream tradition to rejoice over a plentiful harvest, or celebrate the return of spring in a deliberate way.  We have been removed from the natural process – from our source.    We have forgotten the seasons and our ties to the earth, as if somehow in our evolution we have been able to separate ourselves from that which we came.  The tribal dance of our ancestors and the customs that lay deep rooted in all of us have been abandoned. To begin to tap into that simple and profound part of our human history, we start by getting connected with the sacred mundane and all the pleasure that comes from simply noticing the full view of what our senses our experiencing.   Once we are able to do this we can access the very real prospect that, in fact; our lives are already full of abundance.  After all, our senses don’t lie.