No Matter Where you go… There you are.

“Mindfulness is the art of mastering your life, not running away from it”

Shelly once complained about the sound of her neighbor’s sprinkler system going off in the middle of the night. The neighbor pointed out, "it only comes on one time per week and there is only one sprinkler by your house".  Shelly replied, “But you don’t know what I go through waiting for it to come on.”

Shelly assumed she could resolve this issue by sleeping in another room on the other side of the house. The first night was great! However, it didn’t take long before she began to noticed the neighbor’s air condition unit turning on and off.

The moral to this story is that you can move to a different room, house, city, or state, but no matter where you go, there you are. Most times, left undiscerned, our emotions interfere with our ability to use logic and reason.

The events (water sprinkler, a/c unit) that Shelly was anxious about are nothing more than events that occur in most neighborhoods. What is different is our perception about the events. If you resist or hyper focus on the “sprinklers”, you will make yourself anxious about the “sprinklers”. The resistance/hyper-focus on the sprinklers creates anticipatory anxiety…this guarantees ones thoughts about a certain event are precisely what bring about the anxiety of the event.

The solution isn’t avoiding/resisting the thoughts about the event…the solution involves something known as the R.A.I.N. Method.

Recognize

Allow

Investigate

Non-identify (Look at the situation as if it’s not you…what would you recommend to a friend with this problem?)

In the beginning, the method of facing rather than fleeing may be uncomfortable.  However, by changing one meaningful attachment to the situation by “allowing” rather than “resisting” creates a cognitive shift in perception that allows you to live a life unfettered by  the smallest annoyances. (It’s not about what happened…it’s what we “think” about what happened)

Things don’t change…we change.