Choosing What Goes in Your Cart

The funny thing about meditating is that when you begin to pay attention to your thoughts, you see them in all their shapes and colors and sizes and flavors. At first it’s a bit unnerving since, as Joseph Goldstein says, “The mind has no shame”. Over time, though, it becomes a more neutral, if not amusing experience; more like walking through the supermarket. Without mindfulness, all sorts of stuff might end up in our shopping cart without us even realizing it, and boy do we pay for it at the checkout! With emotional energy, self esteem, physical strain, strained relationships….

With mindfulness we notice thoughts and reactions, as if we’re passing them as we move down the grocery store aisle. They’re all there on the shelf - the ones that support our well-being and the ones that don’t do us any good - but we choose which ones to engage with and which ones to leave behind. If a mental gremlin mischievously chucks an unnecessary box of self-aggression, a bag of unwarranted angst or a bottle of judgement into our cart, we can spot it, and nonchalantly place it back on the shelf with a knowing smile and a, “No thank you…. Not on the list today”.

In real life terms, we might realize that we’re frustrated by the paper jam in the printer. We might find that our shopping cart suddenly holds a pound of resistance and a case of blame. Unchecked, we might throw in a tale of insensitive hardware monoliths and the belief that the world is against us and all hope lost.

But we don’t have to keep that stuff in the cart. When we acknowledge the presence of our reactivity, we can take a nice deep breath. With the added space and distance between us and our reactions, we have room to offer ourselves some compassion, “Ok this is frustrating”, and some perspective, “but it’s nothing personal”. True, the printer is still jammed, but the anger, blame and frustration lose their grip a bit. And we loosen our grip on them. We can put them back on the shelf, and proceed down the aisle of life with compassion and perspective in the cart instead. Over time, the unhealthful items don’t make it into the cart in the first place; we reach right past them for the responses that support us.