Discipline #mindful52

Mindful52 Week 3: Take a look at the goals and intentions you had in mind as you began this mindfulness practice. What intentions are happening for you? Which ones are getting left by the wayside? How are you wasting time? What distractions creep in that detract you from doing the things you really want to do . . . or need to do? What thoughts limit you from reaching your true potential?

I've been MIA for a week or two. The relentless gloom, cold and dark of January, this particular January, took hold of me by the throat and tried to squeeze the life out of me. Nothing is wrong and yet everything is wrong. I'm a drama queen today, but that's got to be a better place than the one I have found myself in over most of the past two weeks, when all I have wanted to do is to crawl away and hide somewhere dark.

When I read the #mindful52 prompt for week 3 last Friday, I realised what was happening. I couldn't even remember my chosen tools. I wasn't making time for them. My own rhythm that I so wanted to be able to listen to, had been drowned out by PANIC, GRIEF and SORROW. Those three were gaining more of my attention. I was allowing myself to be pulled down into the dark waters again and had for a few days just stopped swimming, I was hardly treading water and that can't happen. I had a sneaking fear that I had stopped caring.Or maybe I had never cared about anything in my life and it was all just an illusion.

I knew I would return to this prompt about discipline. If what we need is to retreat for a while, then there is nothing wrong with that. A retreat is different than a giving up however. A retreat still needs to have the rhythm of a daily practice. The world feels very chaotic right now and not just for me. The rhythm of everything we know appears to be changing. Somedays my heart just doesn't feel "in" it anymore!

I know my "heart" is still there somewhere, though it doesn't feel that strong and so I have to mechanically go through those small steps of a daily practice that I identified back on the 4th January. I started to do that yesterday, when I blogged and wrote in my journal, posted some photographs and reached out to connect with others.

Today I am identifying the things I am grateful for and the moments that have brought peace and joy in the past week or two - there have been quite a few really. It's time to press on with creating more of those moments here in my everyday life. I am walking today and meditating. I am reminding myself of the abundance around me and that my actions can make a difference, however small, to the world around me. I can bring my own rhythm to the hurt that is going on right now.

I am reminding myself not to be so hard on myself too, I am working hard to break those chains and this is where I am just now.