The immutable power of your life is choice.
From second to second, you are selecting one option from another. More often than not, this based on your operating system. Your brain’s Windows 7 (or OS X, for you Mac users) handles a large percentage—some say 96%—of your daily operations.
Built up over years, your “neurological software” filters information to limit your brain’s conscious awareness to a handful of items.
On your computer, the updates you receive from Microsoft or Apple are the culmination of months of work. A problem is identified, then several fixes are attempted by rewriting line after line of code until the best solution is agreed upon. This correction is usually made with a quick download (and occasionally a restart), so the process of change is largely hidden from you. The hours and hours of typing and testing, then retyping and retesting done by a team of well-trained and experienced indivivuals saves you the effort.
Not so when it comes to your life.
If you’ve spent your life taking insults to heart and ignoring praise based on the source—or even your own valuation of your quality or worthiness—you’ve made a decision. Granted, in our youth, our parents and guardians have a large influence on our minds and things were shaped without our conscious control.
You’re an adult now.
Exercise your right to choose what you internalize and pursue, what you accept and discard. You may have to update your software and evaluate all the commands deep in your brain. It’s necessary. Shifting line after line of these calculations will give you different results.
It’s necessary. Do the work. Take the time.
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Your brain is always working.
Whether interpreting the millions upon millions of sensations affecting you every second or controlling the movement of your digestive system or contemplating the positions of galaxies, it is impossible to shut off. Death is the only event that will completely close down operations.
You can slow it down.
Sit quietly for a few minutes. Close your eyes. Feel the breath passing in and out your nostrils. Keep at it as long as you can. Even as you do your best to silence everything, your brain still chatters, doesn’t it? It comments on the room temperature, it speaks about the strangeness of your current activity, it meanders into future errands or past happenings.
You’re waiting for nothing.
Doing this exercise, shifting your brain into another gear, is how you get “there.” It’s a silent meadow, where thoughts flutter in like butterflies, only to flit away without any judgment whatsoever. This place and time is really neither. The absence of “good” or “bad” yields the presence of is. Each idea is. Each feeling is. Each moment is.
This is how things change.
Like an old damn giving way, history breaks through. It is seen differently, with more compassion and even reverence. It is a root experience that, when necessary, is tilled from the garden. Anger last minutes instead of hours. Disappointments fade in hours instead of days.
This is the power of nothing.
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