Paying Attention

We can’t afford to not Pay Attention!

We fall prey to unconscious habits when we continuously repeat them day after day and year after year. Although our very being thirsts for something more, many of us spend our lives wandering aimlessly in a mental desert. The chance of ever quenching the insatiable thirst that keeps us going is null, because all we have at our disposal is the sand of habit.

Some of us get frustrated and exhausted enough to ask why this continues to happen. We have a sense of emptiness, a lack of fulfillment and a desire for peace, but we don’t know how to stop. The good news is…there is a way out of this mental desert, and it doesn’t require struggle or prayer or thousands of dollars. It’s an inside job that simply begins with a willingness to pay attention. Paying attention costs nothing but allows us to change our lives by challenging the old habits which created the desert in the first place.

We give ourselves permission to stop right where we are and rest. We stop looking through the sand scratched lens of the desert of mental habits out there and consider another path for ourselves. When we ever so gently and lovingly turn our attention inward, a small, almost imperceptible shift can happen. We realize we are “in there”. The self, no, the Self, that has been waiting to be realized all our lives. It’s not mysterious or religious it’s just the simple truth of Reality. We haven’t heard the true Self patiently calling, because She’s been silently choking on the sandstorms we’ve created with every repeated old mental habit.

Bottom line…we have a choice.

Option 1: We can start where we are today and practice paying attention.

Option 2: We can continue to wander; creating more sand and being blinded with every breeze that comes along; knees deep in the sand, trudging the familiar path of the known and grasping at mirages we imagine to be the answer, somewhere in the distance.  

 By the way, the cost of option 2 is our life itself, from womb to tomb.

Are you willing to pay that price?

Shift or Drift…

MaryAnn