Life in Real Time: What We Are Doing

Hello,

I don’t usually self-promote on my blog posts but today I would like to share this description of the practice I have developed called Mindful Reality and encourage anyone interested to read one or both of the books I have written (they are short), which you can find under the Book section of this blog!

Mindful Reality helps with inner validation by showing us that in each moment we are doing all we can do. It helps us feel OK about how we spend our time. It addresses the constant nagging that tells us we don’t do things the right way, we don’t do the right things, or we don’t do enough. With this practice we are affirmed of the falsity of these beliefs through the recognition of our relationship to time as experienced in our physical actions all day long.

We are doing something every second of the day. In these moments what we are doing is truly the only thing physically possible. So even if we feel like we can or want to improve our behavior, i.e., how we spend our time, we can only if we do. In each consecutive moment, if we aren’t doing what we wish, it is still the only thing physically possible for that time. Our minds try to talk us out of this reality.

Mindful Reality is about acknowledging reality over thought; how things actually go is absolute and therefore a stronger truth than how we think things should go. From this perspective we see that action overrides thought. It does not matter how each person thinks they get to where they are. When we view our current activity (which we can do by looking down at our body) what we find is unchangeable (once it is happening), despite how disappointing it may be, because our physical activity is liquid and always changing with the movement of time.

This work helps with self-judgment and the inner voice that tells us we are not managing our lives correctly. It is specifically based on the clarification and understanding that what we are doing is actually what our body is doing, because our “doings” are just our physical actions in space and time. Our thoughts make us feel like doing is something that somehow occurs outside of our body, or only with our thoughts, when in fact it is always just us moving in real time through our physical activities.

This awareness is a hard look at our life in real time. Our body is continually transforming from one activity into another as we never disappear, even if we feel like we skip in and out of our day, or our awareness. We are truly always present in space and time despite how we feel.

It may be frustrating to acknowledge that we cannot do the things we wish we were doing, if we are not. But this knowledge relieves us of the pressure that we could act differently, or the guilt that we could have acted differently, and tells us that we are not a failure because we are always doing exactly what we should be doing. We can never do anything more or other than what our body does, no matter how hard our thoughts try to convince us otherwise.