Spend Your Days. . .

The time we spend living our life is not as often as we think. In fact, life is experienced most intimately exactly in those times when we don’t think. This may be a difficult fact to grasp – think of this as not “checking out” but “checking in.” To get an idea what it is like to experience life directly without the filters and to experience the richness of life, you can try this exercise. You may need to do it a few times or in different settings for it to work. Whilst doing this activity, see if you can feel the difference between the two experiences. Firstly, find a spot on your body that is touching another surface, such as your legs or back. Try and describe that experience to yourself. Can you feel hardness, pressure, heat, etc? Secondly, drop the descriptions and just feel the experience as a whole. Do you notice a difference? Try this at different moments throughout your day. When you’re on the train, when you have a moment to take in the last rays of sunshine, when you are out walking. Do you notice a difference in the moments when you are in thought, and the moments when you open yourself to the experience as it is? For me, when I first opened myself to the experience of walking as it is, it was like walking for the first time. Since then, these moments of direct experience of life fills my heart with a joy that is so extraordinary for the most seemingly ordinary things. I wish you a joy that surpasses the worldly joys, and a life that is made up of moments that string together to make this life a most meaningful one.