shake-up-your-chaos

Say what - Shake up my chaos?

I was a bit baffled when my boyfriend posted that as his Facebook status the other day. But after inquiring what the heck he was talking about, I was inspired to write a blog post suggesting everyone who reads this do just that.

Prior to his status update, he'd just finished watching a television program on the Kabbalah, the Jewish book of mysticism, wherein the rabbi interviewed was offering his commentary about the unfortunate reality that many people are complacent regarding the various chaotic stressors in their lives, so much so that they aren't even noticing how anxiety and stress have become their status quo existence. The rabbi recommended that we actively shake up those stressors into our conscious awareness to a level where we actually do something about them.

A kindred spirit, this rabbi is. Sounds to me like he's a proactive mindfulness teacher, whether he'd consciously agree with that or not.

With mindfulness in the spotlight these days, most people are taught that it comes from Buddhist philosophy. And while that may be true, the fact is that mindfulness has been taught in many religious/spiritual/philosophical traditions for eons, Judaism being one of them - and many renowned Western Buddhist teachers are Jewish by birth.

Recently I have been in heated online discussions with a few Buddhists who are so rigid (and at times elitist and separatist in their stance) they denounce my secular teaching approach to mindfulness, and cringe at the fact that I have playfully referred to myself as a "mongrel" because I incorporate everything I have found to be of universal human value since beginning to explore spiritual and religious studies at the age of nine.

However, one of my favorite mindfulness books is Radical Acceptance: Embracing Your Life with the Heart of a Buddha, written by Tara Brach (who was raised in the Jewish tradition) - and she said: "The more mature and wise a spiritual teacher is, the more they’re not rigidly fixated. They’re comfortable enough in their own skins to draw from different traditions."

Cheers to that!

"One doesn’t need to be a Buddhist to practice mindfulness," says Rabbi Sheila Weinberg, director of outreach and community development for the Institute for Jewish Spirituality. "Judaism has always been in relationship with other traditions and is constantly incorporating other cultural practices."

Nor does one have to be Jewish to embrace the traditions of Judaism they find meaningful to their own contemplative practices. I am a living example of that. There are many aspects of Judaism that I feel are akin to mindfulness practice, kavanah being one of them. Kavanah means intention, or, more literally, "pointing" the mind when practicing Jewish prayers or meditations – but it also extends to moment-by-moment conscious living.

Rabbi Jeffrey Summit, Chief Executive Officer of Tufts Hillel on the Tufts University campus in Medford, Massachusetts, wrote this in his 2004 piece for Rosh Hashanah titled "Intention (Kavanah) and Time" :

In the Jewish tradition, intention, kavanah, is an essential part of meaningful action. The term kavanah comes from the Hebrew root meaning to direct, intend, focus. The rabbis were very clear that living a meaningful Jewish life involves combining both the actions we do and the intention we bring to those actions. For example, the rabbis stressed that prayer was not just about the act of reading or saying the words of a prayer. If you did not pray with kavanah, actively thinking about the words you were saying, you have not fulfilled your obligation to pray. So too, in the Mishna, there's a wonderful passage about the commandment to hear the shofar blown on Rosh Hashanah. The rabbis ask an interesting question: What if you were outside walking to shul and you heard the shofar being blown and then you realized it was a shofar and not, say, a fog horn? They pose the question: have you fulfilled your obligation to hear the shofar? The answer that they give is an emphatic "No!" In order to fulfill your obligation to hear the shofar, you have to actually intend to hear it before you hear it. That is, meaningful action is not just something that happens haphazardly. Meaningful action is the confluence of a thoughtful decision about what you want to do coupled with the action of doing it.

That's proactive, deliberate, applied mindfulness if you ask me!

By pointing our minds via the process of mindful, radically honest, meditative self-inquiry and paying attention to what is going on within and without us, we can literally crack through the heart of our stress-induced chaos, and shake it up to where it lifts us out of the anxiety-mired fog so many are bumping around in, grab hold of it with present-mind attention and do something about it - yet without merely being reactive to it with volatile emotions, unproductive thought patterns, and harmful (to self and others) comfortably-numbing behaviors. We can choose to drop the old mindset and lifestyle that has us spinning in a stressful, disempowering, auto-pilot status quo and upgrade our internal operating system.

So, as Winter ends here in the Northern Hemisphere, I invite you to shake up your chaos as a means of spring cleaning your awareness, and to adopt more empowering and meaningful thoughts, choices, actions and behaviors that will improve your experience of Life.

Of course, I suggest this be undertaken with my equation for lasting change: consistency + repetition x time – but losing even some of the chaos that has become a status quo of your existence is well worth the benefits you will receive from a disciplined, yet joyful and adventuresome mindfulness practice, that can be a compliment to any religious, spiritual or philosophical tradition you align with.

Suzanne Matthiessen C.Ht.: The Mind-Body Coach Mind-Body Wellness Awareness Educator/Coach/Writer eMindful.com Educator/Online Mindfulness Meditation Guide My Website: TheMind-BodyCoach.com My Mind-Body Wellness Awareness Blog My Mind-Body Wellness Awareness Facebook Page