Loving where you are?
To be happy you have to love where you are, happiness does not exist in the future, it is not over the hill or around the corner, it is not a promissory note that you get to exchange for hard work, it can only be experienced in the present moment, and to be happy now that you have to love where you are now even with it's imperfections (especially with it's imperfections). We do not get to control what the world is doing, we only get to control our reaction to it, how we hold ourselves in regards to it, and all we know for certain is that the world changes constantly, there are no fixed moments of perfection, just changing imperfections, and how can we expect the world to be the same for any length of time, when our minds are in such a flux, a changing mess of worries and moods, what alternatives are there, other than to love where we are, when who we are and where we are changes in every moment.
Every time I go to sleep it is a roll of the dice as to what state of mind that I am going to wake up in, it does not matter how good a mood I am in the night before, it seems to be blind luck as to how I feel in the morning, it is not something that I am in control of and it can effect the rest of the day. It helps to have eight hours sleep, having less is like playing with loaded dice where I always lose but that is predictable and understandable, intense dreams can rock your reality, concentrate the mind on things I do not want my attention on, they can start a cycle of overthinking and emotional thinking where what I feel must be true, which whilst a distortion in thinking is convincing in the moment (it is either a distortion or every feeling would have to be true, and your feeling change constantly and in opposite directions). What really puzzles me is where the emotion and physical landscape has randomly completely changed, it is like going to sleep in New York and waking up in Paris, the contrast is day and night, what was true is now false, my experience of the moment has transformed beyond recognition, a hang over from a high that has now hit rock bottom.
Some mornings it can be difficult to even to keep my eyes open, there is a heaviness to my presence, an ill-defined feeling of sickness and imbalance, I am not the person I was the night before where I was enthusiastic for what I could achieve in the morning, empowered to create and then it is gone, I am just left with this weight of an opportunity lost. I have routine to deal with this, stretch, drink water, meditate, drink coffee, read, move, dressing, walking, doing, being without thinking, get a little momentum turn it into a small win, movement and process that comes from good habits that just happen because that is what happens and not doing them take more active thinking and decision making than just doing them. Often this is enough to lift me out of the moment of low energy especially the walking (nothing changes my emotional landscape more than this activity, but even with this knowledge it can take everything I have got to get out that door and into the world), however there are times when even this does not help, my mind is still sticky, unlubricated, it keeps on knocking into painful areas of my consciousness, a wall of self-judgement and doubt that surrounds me until I sleep again.
That is the time for the big guns and the last stand, do or die, it is the time to be more present, to be more aware, to bring your full steady attention to what is going on, sometimes it is as simple as making the connection to the fact that I did not have a good night sleep and now I am tired and that is why my mind is so out of my control today, that is why I am down, have low energy and darker thoughts. Sometimes you just have to surrender to what you are feeling and despite the ridiculousness of the idea, you have to love exactly where you are and not in a reverse psychology kind of a way where you are tricking yourself, but actually loving the fact that you are having an uniquely human experience, that it is something that is in it's way a peak experience like going on a roller coaster and scaring yourself half to death. It is of course just as dangerous (if not more than a real funfair ride) we can do real damage to ourselves when we are in dark moods, but if you can observe in real time with love, by loving the experience that you are having, no matter how awful it is, which as you do not have a choice, you could say that I am making the best of a bad situation, and that is true, but it is not truthful.
When you decide to love where you are no matter what it gives you the chance to truly love it, not pretend or faking it, but to love the experience you are having is to change the quality and content of the moment. Instead of just sitting with the singular unpleasant feeling of heaviness, fatigue or insert your own unpleasantness into this equation, you can experience the wholeness of the situation and it is never singular despite the sharpness of your attention in that moment, and it is sharpness that you are experiencing even when you are feeling dullness. It is like a toothache when you have it, you do not notice anything else, there is just the pain and nothing else and it feels overwhelming because of that wholeness, it is everywhere in your consciousness no matter where you turn. That is what happens to a lesser degree with any pain, it fills you up with consciousness of the pain, however everyday unpleasantness might consist of several sources of pain that you rotate through in a continuous loop so you do not even sit with a single enemy and are confused on top of being pained, a kind of seasickness produced by the turbulence of the mind.
However there is also a mirror side to the ever present imperfections and unpleasantness, there is also permanent love and joy, it does not capture our attention like pain does, our guard dog of attention is there to protect us from harm, but joy can be in our awareness whenever we are open to it. It is always in our spiritual heart (where a child would say their heart is, in the centre of our chest), pay it some attention now, look for joy, keep looking and it is there, forever, we just do not pay it much attention because our attention does not rest unless we teach ourselves to do so. Meditation trains us to hold stable attention and peripheral awareness in balance for this very reason, so that we can enjoy meditation as we are doing it, by loving where we are, by holding that joy in our awareness we have the strength to keep our attention in a stable manner, and without it the work would be miserable.
That is the power of loving where you are, you are no longer fighting with this confusion, you are able to sit up, take that walk, face things with attention and curious awareness because you are no longer adding in the drama of being in a crisis, instead you are opening up your awareness of what is actually happening, you are holding your presence with love (literally, it is in your heart) and you are loving the experience no matter what. It is only with these bad times that you get to contrast the good times when everything feels wonderful in the world and your place in it, but it is more than that it opens up your capacity to love, by loving that which is unlovable you have more love to give, love generates more love, it is a muscle that you exercise, it is infectious, it spreads in the best kind of way and when you love where you are in the end everywhere and everyone will be loved.
