I am grateful everyday for my meditation practice. I might sit for five minutes just being quiet and still, or I sit on my mat for up to an hour noticing my breath and baring witness to my myriad thoughts passing by into eventual stillness and hearing the quiet voice of my inner guide.
I felt extra grateful for my path of practising stillness while on my morning journey from Highbury to Peckham this week on the Overground line. At one moment in my travels that day I felt a physical experience of feeling like I was being dragged into the swell of the autopilot-survival mode-frenzied energy of rush hour. I haven’t had to travel on the tube in the early mornings for a number of months, and this has been a true blessing, so this new change to my routine has come as rather shock to my system…the cliche’ is real!
It was like I suddenly became observer of two things happening, I noticed that my body felt hot, with a sensation of being pulled, while also becoming aware that I too was an autopilot. I was going from A to B to C, blindly and would have probably gone all the way through to Z, passing by the rest because of how non present I was being.
Travelling on our autopilot in rush hour is a common symptom of London life. It is common but it does not have to be the norm. However, it woke me up once more to noticing that super busy is the new ‘thing’. It’s totally a thing.
A friend made a passing comment this week that it is good to be busy, but then he went on to complain that he does not have time to do what’s he loves, he resents this and he feels “unsatisfied and unhappy” much of the time. In Western Culture we have bought into a myth that life is hard, we have to struggle (aka feel stressed) while achieving these goals, but these goals will make us happy. It is a lie and it is an ego trap. It appears trendy to be busy, almost too trendy to complain about how much we have on and how stressed we are by these very growing ‘to do’ lists.
Let’s slow down people. Drop the striving and enjoy the journey to our aspirations instead of forcefully beating down the doors to our goals. OR even more controversially, carve out time for ourselves to just BE. The outside circumstances of our world right now are not pretty ones. It is up to us to put our emotional and spiritual well being first above everything, so that we can shine our lights brightly to illuminate the dark we all too often see around us. By sitting in quiet and becoming present we can also open up our capacity to receive guidance from the Universe to guide us on our paths, so we can find the next tight action for us to take. In stillness we can listen to our inner wisdom being delivered to us hot off the press from Spirit! Put down the Metro newspaper and your smart phone, and give your brain a rest from information overload and breathe. Enjoy.