“As we start to practice mindfulness, present moment awareness, we soon discover how much of our lives we spend dreaming. Normally, we have no problem noticing our night dreams or those vivid excursions into fantasy that we call daydreams. What we usually don’t notice is that we are dreaming most of the time, caught up in the movies of our mind. These mini-dreams or mini-dramas may only last 10 or 20 seconds. Our mind is constantly imagining reality, and substituting that imagination for direct perception. The practice of mindfulness helps us distinguish between thoughts and awareness, thinking and being.
“”Thoughts, images and moods are not necessarily connected with reality, with what is actually happening in the present moment. There is a big difference between thinking and actually believing that “life is hell”, and having the awareness that we are just having thoughts that life is hell. Only thinking, thinking, thinking. Through paying closer attention to our experience, we begin to make a subtle yet crucial distinction between our shifting judgments, ideas, views and opinions about reality and the vivid, ineffable qualities of immediate experience itself.
“Without awareness, we are easily deluded and confused by mental activity, by too much thinking. In the moment we become aware that our thoughts are just thoughts rather than reality itself, we wake up from their spell and can return to presence. It is empowering to discover that we are not enslaved by our thoughts, by how our mind interprets reality. This sudden taste of freedom provides a glimpse of ordinary magic. It takes practice to wake up, to emerge from our mind-created worlds and delusions, fears and anxieties.”
~ Jon Kabat-Zinn
