Changes to Expect

Calmness is simply you on a good day – thoroughly caught up in living your life, not having to question  – which becomes the norm.   That will include:

A Simpler Existence

Everyone spends an hour or more in total a day between actual action. You find yourself being at rest during those frequent opportunities, and using these natural breaks to maximum advantage, thereby pacing your life fully in touch with all you experience. That essential feature of a calm life follows on spontaneously from your daily calm aware resting practice.

You do not have to contrive that. Checking being at rest in order to be calm during such pauses in the course of your day will definitely not be indicated. You simply find that you are, and enjoy being so. Your sure possession of calmness re-affirmed once a day quite suffices to integrate it into your life at large and is all that is needed.

 

Enhanced Normal Living

A major feature of a calmly paced life is much diminished physical and emotional disquiet. A great deal of unwarranted personal discomfort fades or is more easily to bear. You are healthily tired rather than exhausted after a long or difficult day, and less plagued by life’s aches and pains. Such signals of stress you more and more head-off in the course of continuing with your daily calm aware contemplation.

Just as important as symptom reduction, a continuous flow of positive sensation and feelings that are natural concomitants of a healthy body properly exercised (or a less than completely healthy one best managed) becomes accessible. That deep satisfaction in itself is the maintaining flux of your existence that energizes you.

The hackneyed phrase “smelling the flowers” will have renewed meaning as you discover enduring satisfaction in the formerly mundane. Routine activities that before might have been chores come now to even joyfully sustain you. Thus enjoying the journey as much as the destination, you robustly ride the ups and downs calm and collected along the way.

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Steadier Competence

As your actual actions more and more are initiated out of full restfulness, transitions between them feel right. You endorse that each day in sensing the facilitation of ordinary movement buoying you forward out of each resting calm aware initiation to your day.

Expect, therefore, to notice greater active physical ease and confidence in a whole range of situations.  Some of the possibilities are: much greater aplomb in public, the cafeteria tray that steadies as you pause and fully sense your tremulousness in place of tensing which offsets self-conscious shaking; asking and answering questions much more easily as you fully experience both doubt and certainty, and of equal importance comfort in not speaking when commanding silence is wiser; a more legible flow as you feel the page under your hand in being observed at writing which used to make you unsteady; or the word that comes to mind by being properly subjectively paced when you speak whereas before you might have blocked.

Many significant improved fluencies major and minor emerge : a large pill slipping down effortlessly with the natural prefacing minute pause that accesses fully sensed swallowing and enables it – would be another example, the source of which you might not have recognized but now will.

At the outset of each day, optimizing your prime reason for being aware sets up optimal action selection and implementation and gains the height of competence that you “can do it on a bad day,” or if you not have yet learned how, enables a move in that direction. Thus you determine the necessary source of any success, which is to keep on cheerfully showing up, to mounting good effect.

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Greater Perceptiveness

That you can truly pause makes you a reliable observer - fully in touch and never in doubt you are on task when you need to be.  Your heightened acuity will in part result from a better fix on its inevitable limitations. That in turn will allow you to accept uncertainty – which best said, is the only ultimate certainty. In short, you work flexibly with provisional conclusions by still acting decisively.

You pick up on minor unease way ahead of cause for alarm and more readily avert potential difficulties, very often way before they could be labeled as such. As a result you more promptly see opportunity in the unexpected.

Something similar holds for your calm practice on an off day. You will be able to come to rest with whatever you currently face - finding strength in being able to take full stock, and then biding easefully if needs be for as long as necessary, while at the same time poised for timely action.

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New Insights

These will, small and large, arise whenever an experience-rejecting habit is decisively reversed as a result of your enhanced predisposition to decisively pause in any testing situation, where former you focused on countering adverse sensation and feeling.  As I illustrate in Step Six such reorientations are game-changing.

The following, confided in my by a colleague, is an additional illustration of clearer insight extending from a sustained calm aware practice. At the conclusion of a stimulating presentation, he indicated his wish to ask a question and right away received the chairperson’s nod, leaving not a moment for his customary rehearsal. He described panicking to the extent of being unable to freely breathe, let alone collect his thoughts or hope to voice them. This major recurrence of an old problem, he thought long gone, looked like being particularly humiliating in someone presumed to have insider information on anxiety management.

But being practiced at resting, he knew to allow for that – with however, no benefit. This might have been doubly alarming except that its entire absence struck him as odd as he was accustomed to something along these lines helping. In getting curious and wondering why, he truly paused on realizing he was attempting to rest away the sensed block to his breathing which was contradicting his meaning to rest and he immediately knew he should just stop. At once, he instead put his intending to rest to the purpose of maximally feeling the prevailing difficulty in breathing – which automatically follows anyway with fully resting. With that, resolution was instant, leaving him happily astonished at getting something he thought he knew well, so wrong.  The part I observed had an amusing aspect: after his turn to speak was signaled he seemed to be totally unable to response for an uncomfortable few moments - for the audience that is - while actually he sat delighted with the epiphany. They evidenced enormous relief, greater than his own almost, when smiling he easefully rose to his feet, warmly thanked the speaker and improved on his original question, which he did recall.

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Better Judgment

Out of the fog of fighting inner experience, clarity emerges. Most of what you can expect to learn will immediately reassure. My colleague, for instance, in the cheering light of the pretty certain final removal of rank fearfulness on his feet, might also have reviewed the sobering contradiction there all along. Posing a question implies some degree of ignorance or at least perplexity, and framing one in any other than a halting fashion could not be genuine.  His over-concern in expressing himself had to indicate the remnant of an entirely superfluous need to impress.

Fortunately, the like of such redundant, unbecoming hang-ups once admitted, are easily corrected. The opportunity for restful reflection provided by having in place a resting practice habit both directs and then allows the self-acceptance that will enable you to fix on better intentions.

The need to constantly counter adverse sensation and feeling becomes outmoded; occurrences that might “give you pause” do exactly that, and you are safely guided by full experience itself. As a result, formerly over-complex situations unpick themselves out of the equipoise that comes from being open to even cascading experience that in the past used to threaten inundating you.

No longer having to be in general guarded will allow coherence. Included will be admitting the implications of down moods and not getting stuck in them. In place of striving against being “down”, you will tune in early to what matters, allowing you to address the source of such feelings, that imperfectly received could have mislead rather than informed you.  The tenor of your moods then stabilize.

 

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