The Year Ahead

It's a Saturday morning. I've just completed a two hour meditation. I feel connected to the magnetic energy of mild happiness. The now energy that is always available to me.  The energy I want to set as my new default mode.
My friend Jeff Warren wrote a fascinating article in Psychology Tomorrow about a man who after several decades of meditation discovered one day that his self-referential self had just disappeared.  Got up and just walked away.  He was no longer in the default mode that the vast majority of people live in, that place where our minds wander around bumping into the past and future, rarely settled in the present. He was now just present all the time.
 It was great.  Problems got solved effortlessly. He was free of all self created suffering. There seems to have really been a happily everafter.
 I've been accepting this all day. Revelling in it.  But the minute I write it down, skepticism sets in.  How can we be happily ever after. We can't. He didn't stop solving problems, which means he didn't stop having problems to solve.  But the problems weren't coming from him anymore. They weren't coming from this "self."  His whole "I" just disappeared.
I want to live that way.  I'm sick of the constant "I."  I love the energy of the now. I love the stillness of life without all this restless, anxious energy leading me around like a dog on a leash.
So, it's decided.  My year ahead is living from this energy.  This now energy, which I'm going to program into my life as my default state. When I don't know what to do, I just rest in this state of being.  Once I've decided on the next task, I do it from this place of quiet attention. My mind is no longer a self propelling machine.  It is my tool, and I use this tool to bring me to this place of being outside the mind. This place right at the cusp of awareness.

The Change to Green

Today I changed the background of my post. It's part of an effort to re design my mental environment according to the advice of Dr. Rick Hanson's Greater Good blog.

Hanson has a good tip for dialing down the stress. Go from red to green.

A lot of red in my life right now, with the court case and my financial tight spot. At the same time I'm feeling a lot of growth. I'm very happy with an article I've been writing since the beginning of the year. I wrote a blog about my three months learning how to code, and got some encouraging response.

These are transitional times. I get it.

So time to change the background