I think of my childhood as pleasant, and my adult life has been filled with many happy moments with my family and friends. Life seemed good, and yet I gradually felt weighed down by a heavy burden – the burden of an accumulation of troubling thoughts and emotions, which Eckhart Tolle calls “the clutter of thought and the turmoil of emotion.” For me, this clutter and turmoil consisted of regret, anger, envy, resentment, sadness, anxiety, and so on.
When my life veered off the successful path that I had envisioned for myself, I realized that the way I viewed my life had become conditioned by all my past thoughts, emotions, habits, and mistakes. My past mistakes saddened me, and I viewed my future with anxiety.
After years of wandering, I found this Fellowship and the Mindfulness and Meditation group. Here I have learned how to drop my heavy burden of past and perceive the present moment with calm, alert attention; I began to see the here and now more clearly. I could still recall my past and learn from it, but I no longer felt imprisoned in my past. After I calmly accepted my past and present, the future seemed to me less intimidating.
Gradually and with practice, I learned how to quiet my mind through meditation and how to become, so to speak, the watcher of my mind. It’s like being outside, watching the clouds. By practicing meditation and mindfulness, I began to think of thoughts and emotions being like clouds. Thoughts and emotions come into my mind, they stay for a while, I deal with them, and then I can let them go.
I’m still on this journey of practicing mindfulness, a journey of becoming the watcher of my mind. There’s a song, written years ago, in which Johnny Nash sings these words:
“I can see clearly now, the rain is gone.
I can see all obstacles in my way.
Gone are the dark clouds that had me blind.
It’s gonna be a bright, bright, bright, sun-shiny day.”
The leaders and others in the Mindfulness & Meditation group have helped me in finding a happier and more peaceful life, and for that I am thankful.