a mind that inclines to abandoning

I read that line in "Mindfulness, Bliss and Beyond," by Ajahn Brahm. It's an exquisite idea if you look at it from a meditative standpoint.

My mother was a person who suffered a lot of disappointment in her life. She was pretty neurotic and fearful, but she also conveyed to me something very important that has served me well. She taught me to avoid doing what she called "getting my hopes up."

Perhaps she didn't mean it the way I interpreted it, but I took it in the best possible way. I, like all of us incarnated in human bodies, have desires and hopes and plans and dreams. They arise naturally and I invest some of them with energy and others I let fall by the wayside.

The ones I invest with energy.... the ones I imagine and dream of and endow with a sense of happy expectation, are also the ones I know to abandon.

By abandon, I don't necessarily mean "give up on" but I know that when we want something too much what winds up happening is an inadvertent focusing upon the state of not having it. What you focus upon, you create. This is the magic of our minds. Yet the word "want" connotes a state of lack, and that connotation often reverberates more strongly in consciousness than its object and winds up being the reason that despite all your hopes and affirmations and focusing, things in your life don't get better.

So when I want something a lot, I imagine having it, and then I let it go. I go from a state of imagining having what I want, to a state of contentment with the way things are. It's pretty great. The pleasure of imagining followed by the peace of contentment.

The important thing is to notice how wanting something makes you feel in the present moment. Are you sacrificing the quality of the present moment to your dream? Is the dream making the present moment deeper and more wonderful to be in, or is it creating within the moment-point a sense of dissatisfaction with "the way things are right now." It should do the former, not the latter, if you want to change your circumstances.

When we are children and pretend-playing, the very act of imagining is wonderful, transporting. We don't compare the imagined situation with reality, saying, "but I'm not really a superhero," or "I'm not really a world famous ballet dancer," we just enjoy the experience of it and then abandon it when it's over.

In order to focus your intention upon creating a wonderful future in which you will experience a sense of deep value-fulfillment, you need to imagine that sense of fulfillment right now, in this present moment, and enjoy it. Bring the contentment home to "this." In truth, "this" is everything.

Comments

[Aileen]

Marian, your post reminds me of how my very young mother used to sit me on her lap and together we looked out the window of our apartment, which was part of a low-income development, and imagined ourselves driving in a car and having a house with a pool. It was such a joyful exercise and didn't emphasize that at the time we had very little. Within a few years we had everything: the house, the pool, the car, but what I learned from her was to always be satisfied with what you have and it's that contentment that opens the door to abundance.