You're in your room having a moment of peace in the morning. You look on it as a meditative experience. You hear a motorbike in the distance. The motorbike comes closer, roars past and then takes some time to disappear into the distance again.
This happens the next morning and the next and the next. You settle into your meditative moment and then roarrrrr!
You start to resent the motorbike. Soon you are getting upset by the motorbike long before it appears and long after it disappears.
From the mindfulness prospective, you need to become willing to experience the world as it is. The world as it is includes both the silence and the sound of that motorbike coming up the road and disappearing again. When you include the motorbike in your morning with acceptance you will, with luck, make your peace with it. But at the very least you should find that you will no longer obsess about it at other times.
If you were a dictator you could perhaps pass a law to forbid motorbikes from passing your window at certain times of the morning. What are you to do, though, about planes passing overhead? Trains in the distance? Crows singing raucously in the trees? By the time you have sorted all that out your peace will be shredded.
In mindfulness you do not struggle with the reality of how things are. Yes, if you can find a sensible, workable way to change them you will most likely do that (a change of room or of time in this case perhaps). But very often no such workable way exists. For that reason, changing your relationship from rejection towards acceptance can make a major difference to your sense of well-being in your daily life.
Using a smartphone? Click here to learn about my online, two hour and six week mindfulness courses.
