Getting Unstuck: First You Have to Know Where You Are

If you don’t know where you are, how can you know where you’re going?

Every mall indicates, “YOU ARE HERE.” Yet, sometimes that’s the hardest part: finding the arrow that indicates the precise location of your body in that place. Our lives have us running from thing to thing. Our brains are doing, problem-solving organs. But knowing exactly where you are requires deep awareness, an ability to stop even in the midst of action — especially in the midst of action — to experience where you are right now. This is rarely accomplished by simply willing yourself to “be here now.” Being present to now is a practice, a discipline that requires, first and foremost, that you see it as a discipline worth instilling.

Why is mindfulness worth instilling? Especially if the present is unpleasant? Especially if you are experiencing the symptoms of burnout? There is something powerful and essential about being with exactly what’s happening — even if it’s unpleasant. This radical acceptance is where true change begins. It’s how you get off the hamster wheel and figure out a better way.

Just like lifting weights at the gym, you become mentally stronger — able to be quiet amidst the storm of the clinic or hospital — by doing repetitions of the exercise. In this case, the exercise is being. By learning to quiet your mind, simply breathing, even for just five breaths, actually changes your brain in the same way you change your biceps by doing dumbbell curls. After just six weeks of regular mindfulness meditation practice, changes can be observed on MRI. Developing a daily mindfulness practice does not require that go off to a mountaintop, but it does demand that you visit the quiet cave within yourself on a regular basis, daily if possible. For it is there, in this sanctuary beneath your own bones that you will find You, where you really are right now. With regular visits to your inner being, possibilities you never imagined become visible.