“Old habits die hard”, and training out of habituation and our reactionary capacity requires that we start from where we already are… in this moment. Through genuine and sincere self-examination, and rejoicing in the presence of appreciative awareness, we may be freed to become different. To work with what we already have, the seeds of a good, brave, and noble heart, we can become readied with inquisitive courage and fresh directedness to fall out of the seduction of our patterned existence. This is the Mindful Way.

To dissolve our storyline barriers and the preconceived assumptions we carry about who and what we are, we need to know and to trust our own experience. Our motivation to change- to fall out of habituation, unlike how we fell in- is to adopt and foster the right attitude coupled with clear intention & instruction to embrace our mindfulness training, and to invite our natural state to be compassionately wakeful. It is through our training that we deepen and stabilize our compassionate resolve. As in its absence, we cannot wish for others what we don’t value for ourselves.

Seeing, sensing, and feeling our experience through the veil of our habits only leads to a confused state of mind. This is why we must sit and connect with our whole field of being. We meditate as it is our instrument for observation- of mind, body, and experience. It is through our sitting and abiding with open (nonjudgmental) awareness that we become fully capable of bringing all that is clean and unclean in our lives to realization. One truly has to embrace and contemplate their state of confusion to give birth to an awakened state of stable & clear sanity. Ultimately, how we frame what we see and perceive determines how we act or react.

Examining our habitual tendencies and patterns can be a relatively painful process as they are often entrenched deeply in our personality complexes. In reality, our moment of truth to transform is often in the midst of our own pain. One who may become truly awakened embraces and accepts his or her experience along with any arisings- whether painful or joyful- as a teacher to their Way.  To wake up to know the nature of what truly is, we cannot water the seed of truth with aversion or suppression, it can only be realized when we are able to provide the right conditions for it to manifest- and this is true for states of mind energized with what may either grow us or hold us back…

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