Welcome to the Buddhist Boot Camp Podcast. Our intention is to awaken, enlighten, enrich, and inspire a simple and uncomplicated life. Discover the benefits of mindful living with your host, Timber Hawkeye. Worrying... We do it all the time without even realizing it. And as the saying goes, "Worrying is like sitting in a rocking chair: "It gives you something to do, but it doesn't get you anywhere."
A friend of mine recently fell down some stairs in her home, which completely changed the trajectory of her life, but in a good way, at least in part, because up until she fell, she spent her life worrying about things like having her identity stolen from shopping online, forgetting the stove turned on and burning down the house, boarding international flights lest they crash, and so on, but she never worried about the stairs in her home, which actually turned out to be the only clear
and present danger to her wellbeing. More honestly, the stairs themselves aren't necessarily as dangerous as mindlessly descending them turned out to be. We worry about our appearance, missing deadlines, and things like quicksand, of all things, shark attacks, killer spiders, and getting mugged. I think we watch too much TV. It makes me think of the quote: "I have lived through "some terrible things in my life, some of them actually happened."
While I don't know if we can ever completely stop worrying, I do know we can let go of our worries the moment they come up. You've heard me define mindfulness as the gap between impulse and action, but it can also be a gap between thoughts.
This way, thinking you may have forgotten to close the garage door when you left for work in the morning doesn't lead to worrying you'll be robbed of all your belongings, return to a gutted house, and worrying your insurance company would deny your imaginary claim because there was no sign of breaking and entering, so you would end up bankrupt, homeless, and alone, all because one thought spiraled out of control.
There is a distinction between worry and concern. One has to do with things we have absolutely no control over, and the other is a call to action. We have grown so uncomfortable with the unknown that we worry about every possible case scenario until we're under the illusion of control. To combat this, I'm not suggesting we meditate to control our thoughts, we can meditate until our thoughts don't control us.
Failing to do this means we would continue spending precious time and energy entertaining delusions until we have no energy with which to actually enjoy the present moment. It's like we rob ourselves of our own joy.
When our mind is focused on anything but the present moment, we not only run the risk of falling down some stairs or cutting our finger in the kitchen, we also run the risk of getting stuck in the past, believing negative thoughts as if they were real, feeding our unreasonable fears, and fanning the flames of our ever-growing anxieties.
Even if you only meditate for five minutes a day, choosing to focus on, say, your breath or a mantra, a prayer, or nothing at all, you essentially commit to watching your mind like you would a movie, and as soon as your mind starts to wander, you bring it back to the breath or whatnot.
The benefit of this practice isn't the five minutes of focus, but rather later in the day, when you start having negative thoughts, for example, you catch yourself the same way you did during meditation, and bring your awareness back to the present moment. It's like having a steering wheel for your state of mind. Sure, I could have just said, "Don't worry, be happy." But then you would ask, How?
Well, I think that's how you do it: by choosing where to focus our thoughts on a moment-by-moment basis. My friend, the one who fell down the stairs, now uses a guardrail between floors, and a spiritual guardrail to steady her thoughts so she doesn't worry about delusions. As Carlos Castaneda said, "We can make ourselves happy or we can make ourselves "miserable, the amount of work is the same." Our worries stem from an attachment we have to an end result. It is the opposite of
faith and trust. I find that I enjoy the journey a whole lot more when I stay in the present moment and keep an open mind about the destination. So, trust yourself. Many situations and people will try to rob you of your joy, don't rob yourself of it by worrying. The more confident you are about your decisions, the less you need them validated or approved by others.
"If you can solve a problem, then there's no need to worry. If you can't solve "the problem, then what is the use of worrying?" —Shantideva. Timber Hawkeye is the bestselling author of Faithfully Religionless and Buddhist Boot Camp. For additional information, please visit BuddhistBootCamp.com, where you can order autographed books to support the Prison Library Project, watch Timber's inspiring TED Talk, and join our monthly mailing list.
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