This will be my third post about mental clarity since the inception of the blog. I like to think that if I come back to a topic, it’s not to be redundant, but rather to elaborate on another aspect of it that has come the forefront of my mind. And so mental clarity has preoccupied my thoughts since I woke up the morning after election day.
No shock there.
I’ve talked over and over about how the skill of entering into a Qigong state repeatedly calms our minds down and centers us in an extraordinarily powerful way. We learn to shed the excess chatter that doesn’t serve us and see it just for this. Practiced consistently and repeatedly over time, our mind learns to go to this centered state automatically. Rather than merely trying to be this way, we actually become this way. From here we make better decisions, we analyze from a higher level, and reap the benefits that come with it.
When I refer to mental clarity, this is what I am talking about- not completely eliminating emotions, but detaching from them so that they do not blow you over as easily. Not being completely without thought, but to separate from our inner monologue to see when it’s just plain not helping us- and to realize when other people are suffering from the lack of mental clarity that you may possess.
And so it was that I observed the news, the talk on social media, the fear expressed to me by my patients over the past several days. And while my own emotions about it all certainly didn’t go away, instead I found myself thinking more critically about all the clickbait headlines- ‘this policy was bandied about before and never came to fruition’, ‘this matter is administered by local governments, not federal and this just a sensationalist headline’, ‘this is not likely to incur a federal ban because it’s big business that is filling campaign coffers’, and the like.
The irony is that the more we let our boats be blown over by all of the stormy headlines, the less likely we are to actually be able to analyze them critically AND to be able to remember that critical analysis when you find yourself in a similar storm again. After all, we’ve been here before, and a lot of the fear and the rhetoric is the same. Mind you, mental clarity doesn’t take away the very concerning realities of our world today and this is most definitely NOT a toxic positivity post imploring you to just meditate and it will all be okay. What this is however, is a call to all of you to lean on your skills, now more than ever, practice Zen, and see reality for what it truly is.
The beauty of mental clarity is that it helps us distinguish between useful information and information that just distracts us from meaningful action. When we’re able to make these distinctions, we’re able to act in better ways. When we act in better ways, we grow as a people, and when we grow as a people, there’s no limit to who we can become.
Peace
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