Appreciate Your Life

With palms together,
Good Morning Everyone,

When we appreciate our lives our lives assume meaning. Appreciation requires us to stop, open, and experience. We stop our self talk, that constant chatter going on in our mind by directing our attention to something outside of ourselves, then we experience that something. We can experience with all of our sense organs: our eyes, ears, nose, tongue, skin, and mind. These organs become gates and we should practice to keep them open, not closed.

Our sense organs are conduits, not containers. We should not hold onto our experiences, try to possess them, retain, them, or even treasure them. In holding on to an experience, we deny new experience by a constant comparative process. We discriminate. We hoard. We suffer. We fail to truly appreciate.

Often we try to experience. We set out with great deliberation to have an experience. Our mind becomes charged with anticipation. And while anticipatory joy can be nice and can actually extend our experience, it can also be a cause of not actually being able to experience the thing we really set out to experience. Our anticipatory thoughts become a sort of litmus test: is this the real thing? The thing we imagined?

We experience this often when we read a new book or watch a new film. But sometimes we experience it with far more devastating consequences, such as having a baby or getting married or adopting a pet. The imagining does not meet our expectations. We suffer. Our children can suffer. Our pets become disposable.

To avoid this, we should try to keep the conduits open and selfless. We are anticipating only to experience the anticipation, not to retain it and call upon it later to test reality.

Live your life to be a blessing.

Be well.