It’s Not Fair, Says Our Minds

I love what I call the pause that refreshes. These are the times when life brings you out of the forward momentum of doing and invites you to reconnect with this moment, exactly as it is, whether you are waiting for the doctor, standing in a long line or even watching your toast toasting.

An experience I had a few days ago highlights the gifts that these pauses bring. As I was waiting for my groceries at the pickup center at my local store, I was breathing myself into this moment, recognizing that this is the only moment that matters in my whole life and I was open to life exactly as it is. The same is true for you, in this moment, while you are reading these words, this is the only place where life is truly happening.

Sitting in my car, there was no past nor future, just the recognition that all the millions of moments of my life brought me to this parking lot, to the cars that were coming and going and the people moving around.  Such deep peace comes from directly participating in life exactly as it is.

But then my mind noticed that two cars came in after me and had their groceries delivered and drove away.  My attention immediately left this living moment and attached onto my mind’s newest and latest struggle. “What’s going on here?” it said. “I was here first!!” It is a startling realization, when you see that the, “it’s not fair” voice that you knew so well when you were young (ie: “Her cookie is bigger than mine!!”) – still operates in our adult minds.

So now my mind had a problem to chew upon and when I called the people who were in charge of delivering my order to ask what was going on, they immediately said, “Sorry for the delay but your order is on its way.” I wish there were a sound option for this blog so you could hear me laughing as I write what my mind did next. Rather than just graciously accepting that there was a delay it had to say, “But there were two cars that came and left after I arrived!”

When I initially recognized what I was saying, there was some self-judgment. But then I remembered that our minds have been trained to struggle and, instead of contracting, I began to laugh. As I hung up the phone, I grounded my attention again in this moment and brought the ‘it’s not fair’ part of my story back to my heart.

One of the most powerful realizations you can come across on this journey of awakening out of the dream of struggle is to realize that the foundations of the storyteller in your head were created in the first six years of your life. And it is this storyteller that puts a filter between you and being fully present for life. So, there are moments in your adult life that you can be irrationally jealous or intensely judgmental of others or self-shaming or seduced by doubt or caught in a web of despair.

But the more you learn how to relate to your mind rather than from it, the more you don’t take your mind’s stories personally. There is absolutely nothing that your mind does that you need to judge. You also don’t need to control it, fix it, or make it think better thoughts. When you see it for what it is, just stories flowing through your head, then you can more and more pull your attention out of the stories and bring it right here into life. You can then use your mind for the exquisite tool it is rather than being lost in its stories.