appreciation

Appreciation is a fantastic tool you can use to help yourself if you are suffering. Even when the mind is caught up in circular, tormenting thought patterns, you can use appreciation to slow down and shift your focus, little by little. But you have to be willing to do it—to go through the process.

Even if you are in pain, try to notice something right here and now in your experience that you are glad about. Maybe it's the bed you are lying on. Imagine if you couldn't lie in a bed and had to lie on the floor. Feel how the bed is supporting you.

If you are lying on the floor, and the floor is dry, feel how wonderful it is that the floor is dry and not wet. Just being dry is a great thing. Notice how you resist doing this and how deeply you want to cling to your suffering. Then do it anyway.

You get the idea. Find something. The most mundane thing. Be happy that you can brush your teeth, or that you don't have a headache. Be happy that at least you can walk or that you can see the color blue, or that you just heard a bird sing. Listen and look. Find something you'd miss if it disappeared right this instant. Just notice.

It doesn't have to be any big splashy feeling. Just some small sense of appreciation is what you're after. This isn't something meant to make you feel guilty. It's not a way of achieving anything. It's a way of extracting your attention from the trap it's in. You may even find yourself capable of appreciating pain.

Freeing your attention from where it gets trapped is a continual moment-to-moment necessity in this life. It's constantly getting snagged and trapped by one mental story or another.

Appreciation is one way to bring yourself back here. Bring yourself back out of thought, out of the seeming problem, to the homely, humorous and completely mysterious comforts of the present moment.

Comments

[Leslie]

Hi Marian,
Thank you for these last two posts (as well as the many others). The empowering words of ‘…just relax into this, here, right now. This here right now, without exception. This plain old now, right here’ may very well have saved my life. I have no idea what will happen but this was good. It even produced the appreciation that you spoke of in this post. That is a miracle given what appears to be appearing. May I, by the One power of all these words, rise above all appearances.
Love,
-Leslie

[marian]

Hi Leslie, Yes that's the paradoxical nature of it. Just this here... this plain old now. Nothing else. Right here. You are where you should be.

[Leslie]

One big hug to you Dear Marian.