Trusting your Good Heart and Common Sense is what Meditation and Mindfulness is all about
Have you ever said to yourself that you knew better, but didn’t listen to yourself?
Have you ever been really critical or hard on yourself because you didn’t trust yourself to do the right thing?
Does anxiety and worry ever make it difficult for you to feel loving and free?
Have you ever gone into a negative spiral where one foolish choice led to another?
Meditation and Mindfulness
Meditation and mindfulness practices help us to trust in our common sense and good heart. Our common sense sees what is useful and not useful. Whereas our conditioned habitual mind when running the show can keep making the same mistakes over and over hoping for a better result. Our conditioned mind would often like to believe it is right even though we are not happy with how things are going––it doesn’t like to admit mistakes. Our common sense would rather help us be happy than right. And helps us have the humility to see what we are doing that isn’t useful and make a change.
Common Sense
Common sense is based on sensory data––what we can perceive directly. When people recover from an episode of insanity we say they have come back to their senses. Our common sense is our intuitive ability digest all the information we have taken in through our senses and see how it practically applies to our life. Our common sense allows us to easily change when presented with feedback that our approach is not working. The conditioned mind believes that holding onto beliefs is most important and would even die for those beliefs. The most obvious example being a suicide bomber.
Your Good Heart
Our good heart knows that we are all connected and interdependent on one another. The better we can all get along with one another the better life becomes. Our good heart recognises their are two basic choices. Choices based on fear and choices based on love. Our good heart chooses love. Our good heart blesses people rather than judging or cursing them. Because our heart hurts when we judge and it feels good when we love.
Compassion and Wisdom
For 2600 years the Buddhists have been saying that meditation and mindfulness help us realise our potential for compassion and wisdom. Compassion and wisdom are just fancy words for good-heartedness and common sense. Meditation and mindfulness help us come to our senses and free our minds from the automatic conditioned responses that are unloving to ourselves and others and keep us going around and around in vicious circles. Instead with an open mind and heart we experiment with more useful and kinder ways of doing things. Meditation is the practice of noticing what helps us keep our good hearts open and what keeps our minds open to learning and changing.
Wouldn’t you like to trust your common sense and good heart more fully?
