The mindfulness challenge this week is to pay particular and mindful attention to a most important organ of your body––your stomach.
Pay attention to how your stomach feels before you eat anything.
Pay attention while you are eating something.
Pay attention after you have finished eating.
How does your stomach feel across those three points in time? Before you begin eating, how does your stomach really feel? Are you really hungry before you eat?
As you eat, pay mindful attention to how your stomach actually feels. What are the sensations?
Are you eating until you are completely bloated and full?
Are you eating only a little and not satisfying that hunger need which resides within your stomach?
How does your stomach actually feel as you eat?
Afterward – just few minutes afterward – how does your stomach feel? What are the sensations that you connect in with after you finish eating?
Be mindful. Focus on that most important digestive organ. See what valuable information comes through. Most of us are habitually ignorant of how our stomach sends signals that we need to eat or do not need to eat.
What information are you missing? You’ll get it when you become mindful of precisely how your stomach is feeling in the moment.
Have a magnificent week as you pay close attention to the process of eating and ingesting food which resides happily inside your body.
What is the deeper meaning behind situations where we find that we are impatient with what is happening, whatever the situation might be. There is a good chance that underneath impatience is a thought form. That thought form is,
“There is not enough time. There is not enough time in the day for me to be able to do what it is that I need to do and that I want to do.
I call your attention to the reality that is simply your own thought form. There is plenty enough time to do whatever it is that we set our intention to do. If we think that there is not enough time – if that is the thought form that we hold near and dear to our hearts – then of course, guess what? There won’t be enough time to do what it is that we would like to do and we want to do.
There is a companion issue associated with being impatient. If you are impatient with a particular task or many tasks during the day, it is often the case that we think to ourselves,
“I’m ready to be done with this because I have something much more fun and much more interesting that I want to do right now. I don’t want to run out of time so that I can’t enjoy the task I really want to do.”
For example, let’s say that as you are washing the dishes after dinner you find yourself rushing through because there is a video that you are craving to watch. You have been thinking about watching this video all day long. You want to get the dishes finished quickly because you want to be sure you have enough time to watch that exciting video. The thought is,
“Washing dishes really isn’t very much fun.”
In other words, you are not present to the chore of washing dishes.
The reality is, everything we do can be a fascinating experience even if we have done a task 1,150 times (which would be washing the dishes for most of us!). Each task is an occasion to have a new experience. If the chore involves – as in my example – washing the dishes, then,
Feeling the water of over our hands.
Feeling the texture of the soap.
Watching the dishes change as the soiling clears.
Placing the dishes in the dish drain as they form a unique mosaic.
Listening to the sounds that surround us as we wash the dishes.
Smelling the dish soap.
Watching the bubbles.
Feeling the texture of being present in the moment as we feel our clothes nestle against skin.
Enjoying each and every moment of that experience means that each time we wash the dishes it winds up being a totally new experience which keeps us endlessly interested, attentive and mindful.
There are no experiences that are boring in themselves. We only make them so with our attitudes and with our thoughts. We impose a static label of boredom.
If we’re rushing to get through an activity because we want to go to another, we are living in the future. We are projecting out on something that is about to happen. You know as well as I that when you get to the next activity oftentimes it does not meet our wonderful expectations of how interesting, how pleasurable and how engaging it will be.
If we actually reflect back on that previous activity that we had declared to be routine and boring – something we have to do because we have to do it – chances are we might actually recognize that doing that previous activity was actually interesting. We just didn’t spend enough time on it.
It is easy to be impatient when chronic symptoms present themselves; impatient that they vanish, impatient that those symptoms resolve quickly. When we’re in the moment, all of that rattletrap in our minds suddenly vanishes. We occupy our thoughts, our emotions and our feelings to what it is that we are experiencing now.
As you have observed the extent to which you have been impatient over the past several days, have you found you are impatient more frequently than you had acknowledged previously (as was my case)? What was your answer to the question,
“Now when I get through with this, what next?”
How many times did you find yourself asking the question,
“What next?”
You know and I know that the ultimate final answer to that question is death. Are you really rushing then as fast as you can to that end state of death? Is that what this is all about?
Slow down! Be present in the moment.
I can assure you that as you monitor the degree to which you find you are impatient, you will be able to more mindfully be present to each and every moment. Stress will be reduced. When stress is reduced, symptoms will dissolve like a snowball in the summertime.
The invitation this week is to be totally mindful of your thoughts regarding getting something done quickly. Become aware in the moment of any and all situations when you become impatient; when you want to get whatever you are doing in the moment over with quickly.
For example, when you’re driving, notice if there are situations where you say to yourself (or even out loud):
“Can’t that driver ahead of me go a little faster?”
Or situations where you are waiting for a friend to return a phone call or return an email and you say to yourself in your thoughts over and over again,
“Why doesn’t he return my call? Why doesn’t she return my email? I’m ready to hear from them now.”
Or, perhaps you are out in the yard doing a little yard work. Your thoughts are,
“I can’t wait for this task and this chore to be done so I do the fourth chore on my list. I will never be done with all my chores if I don’t finish this one in 10 minutes.”
Now I have another suggestion for you. Each time during the day when you are able to acknowledge, recognize and observe there is a situation where you are impatient, when you want something to get over quickly for whatever reason, I have a very simple two-word question that I’d like to suggest you ask yourself:
“Then what?”
In other words, when I am done doing what I am doing right now, when I have finished this task,
“Then what?”
Enjoy your opportunity this week to observe any and all situations when you find that you have become impatient. I have been doing this task myself all week and am surprised by how many times I find myself being impatient. I would have told you last week that I am a very patient person, but this week?
