5 Qualities Worth Cultivating
What we pay attention to and HOW we pay attention to it is essential to our wellbeing.
We can infuse our attention with different attitudes (think of them as lenses). Imagine you’re paying attention to a person with a quality of friendliness vs. impatience vs. judgment - your experience of that persons same words and actions is likely to be quite different.
I try to invite these 5 qualities into my daily practice (often reminding myself it’s a practice and not something we can perfect) 🫶
• PATIENCE •
In my experience, when we always let the mind lead we will automatically fall into a pattern of rushing to achieve things and striving for that moment around the corner, not realising that this is shifting our focus away from enjoying the present and sucking the joy out of the journey from a to b.
• TRUST•
It’s so easy to get stuck in searching for ‘the truth’ from authority figures in a field and hamstering knowledge, and whilst I think this is great inspiration, the key part of the process of change is to learn to listen to our own inner guidance and begin to trust what we hear. In a sense, we are all our own best teachers.
• ACCEPTANCE •
What we resist persists. Only once we truly acknowledge how things are - can we take conscious action and free ourselves from the grip of the situation and emotions involved. Acceptance does not mean relinquishing our power to create change, rather, it’s the necessary first step to see a situation clearly so we can take skillful action.
• BEGINNER’S MIND •
We all have a tendency to glance over the familiar and everyday-ness of our life, which largely happens on autopilot. But it’s the everyday stuff that make up our life, so the magic happens when we bring awareness and curiosity to what we normally overlook.
• COMPASSION •
If we open up to our own and others vulnerability and reveal our wounds to one another. The usual tendency to strongly identify with and elevate “my” pain or “my” problem is slowly dissolved in the recognition of our collective condition and replaced with a sense of connection.
