*yawn* ever since day light savings time, it's been a struggle for me to get enough sleep. I'm getting an ok amount (it's not like I'm not sleeping) but I wake up in the morning wishing I could drift back to sleep for another hour or so... ah well, like anything else, this too shall pass.
I've been meditating all week long and I'm grateful for it because it's been a full and busy week. meditating is helping me to remember to stay present to what is real in this moment instead of day dreaming or having fantasies about some future point, worrying about some future point, reliving some past moment or the worst which is just the negative mind stream thinking that gets caught up in cant's and shoulds and all that other really not fun stuff.
Sometimes I choose to go into a mind stream of thinking and I'm purposely choosing to do it. I notice, for example, that my idealist mind really enjoys visualizing and fantasizing about dreams that I have - about scenes and scenarios that I'd like to see played out in real life one day. I notice, too, that when I have these kinds of thoughts (that I'm choosing to have) that I can still understand the suffering that can arise from them. What I mean by that is that I can find a kind of suffering when I notice that I'm "not there yet." I'll give an example. I can walk into a room and see a vision of possibility for it - the colors, the way the furniture can be. I can see what I'd like to do to the room to change it and make it function better for have some character or whatever. This is a blessing and a gift and I'm grateful for it. The "curse" part is that until I see that the room looks the way I see it in my head, I can find myself in a place of frustration at times because I want to do work to make it happen. That's not bad, honestly, because I think it's motivating. The part that becomes suffering is if I spend a lot of time wishing that it was there. I have to remind myself that things take time. Making a baby takes 40 weeks so getting some renovation done takes whatever time it takes. It also depends on things like ability to do construction or money to hire someone to do it.
I am honest when I say that sometimes it is frustrating, for example, to walk around this old old house that I live in and see it in the state that it is in and compare it with the dream of how I see it in my head. It is frustrating ONLY when I tell myself that it is somehow not happening fast enough. That, I believe, is the "wanting mind" that these wise people talk about. That is when meditation and mindfulness is really helpful to stop the wanting part of the mind in mid-thought and go, "Oh there you are again! Hello! I see you." And then accept it and bow to it. Resistance is futile.
These books that I'm reading for class say that it doesn't matter how many thoughts we spin out to having, it's the moments of waking up to realize that is what we are doing that is the nugget of meditational insight. Each time we wake up and go, "OH! I just did it again! I just found myself worrying about a what if over this house plan that I have," we are doing just that: waking up.