I talked this morning with my friend Joanne about the insights and lessons I experienced yesterday, and she offered a valuable way for me to look at it. The key is surrender. Yesterday, I didn’t judge the movie as bad and I didn’t judge my choice of how to spend my time because I surrendered completely to the experience.
Today I explored that with mixed success. I surrendered in my writing and teleclass promotion tasks. I needed to re-surrender several times as my mind took me out of what I was doing to what else I could be doing. But all in all it was effective.
Later in the day I worked on recording a song I wrote for my girlfriend. I was struggle with some vocal parts and not making much progress. Surrender became difficult as the mind jumped in with its judgment: “You’re not good at this and it’s going to take a long time. You should be doing something else instead, something where you could be more productive.” In fact, it took a good 30 minutes to recover from feeling like I’d completely wasted my time.
So as with anything, there will varying degrees of difficulty with this surrendering practice.
Two other colors in this rainbow: Joy and outcome. I’m also learning to see how many of my actions are in fact born of judgment–in other words, motivated by “I should.” Most of those lack both a sense of joy in the doing of them, and a clear outcome. So those two factors will also be a guide for me:
- What is my desired outcome with this action?
- And how can I experience joy in the process?
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