When you feel like you’re hitting a wall of problems, the solution is to spread your wings to fly over it and change your gaze. It’s simple and it can change everything.
Faced with the splendor of Earth seen from space, several astronauts returned transformed. The beauty of the planet, so small, isolated and fragile, provoked in them a definitive ecological awareness. This upheaval, called the “overview effect”, we can produce individually when nothing is going well and we lack the visibility to change the situation.
Everything that surrounds us, and that we ignore most of the time, invites us to operate this inner movement, philosopher and founder of the Western School of Meditation.
I start by stopping!
Since we must move forward at all costs to be effective, we believe, when an obstacle intervenes, we conclude that we have not walked fast enough. So we go for it even more. My child can’t hear me when I tell him to work at school? I just didn’t scream enough. So I scream louder, but nothing is unlocked. But if I let it go, I quit …
In practice: In repetition, our experience dulls. Instead of questioning the axis and the method, we go around in circles, we lose our creativity. To get out of the stick, movement is necessary. But, paradoxically, it is sometimes useful to stop moving to see another path. Otherwise, as in quicksand, the more you go, the more you sink.
I put myself in tourist mode!
If a drone were to film our daily journeys, it would not notice any runway excursion since, most of the time, we tirelessly retrace our steps. Our neighborhood or that of our company, we walk them like an automaton, absorbed by our utilitarian concerns (being on time, shopping, preparing for the next professional meeting, etc.), our problems and our internal dialogues for them. solve.
In practice: we venture out … around the corner. All you have to do is step over the imaginary frame in which we are confined to stroll across these deceptively familiar neighborhoods. Walking in and around its street, imagining being a tourist, taking two or three photos with your smartphone, it “moves” us. We live there, and suddenly, we become a tourist, new-eyed, curious, enthusiastic.
I come out of the “mirror effects”!
Our loved ones, we tend to lock them up in a definitive register (“it doesn’t surprise me about you!” “I was sure you would say that!”), While in their eyes, we are just as predictable. . This rigidity creates tensions and arguments. We answer each other “in mirror”: “You saw yourself! It suits you to blame me for that! Well, well me too, I’m going to sulk… etc”.
In practice: To rediscover the other, our spouse for example, we can observe him from a distance, without his knowledge; when he sleeps, works, cooks, for example. Imagine seeing him for the first time and thus rediscovering this intimate stranger whom we have lost sight of by always looking at him from the same angle. By changing our gaze, we change ourselves, restore to those around us, their otherness.
I get off my pedestal!
Faced with multiple requests and injunctions, we feel fragmented. Weakened, we compensate by developing a hypertrophied ego to plug our faults and strengthen our illusory desire to control everything.
In practice: We are interested in what we are used to ignoring because of our prejudices and our fears: nothing more subversive, today, than the great literature that makes us think and think about it. new emotions; and animals of course, even insects with sublime patterns (the greatest designers have all been inspired by them to create their fabrics), all that, in its strangeness, has the capacity to upset us and allows us to access another dimension of ourselves.
A movement that also engages the body!
Walking, climbing a mountain, dancing… Coming back to a bodily experience is obviously beneficial, bodily sclerosis makes us spin in a loop in our head. Internal physical movement, breathing, positively promotes brain activity and the deployment of resources.
This is the object of meditation which invites us to maintain a simpler and more lively relationship with the life that is in us. And thus gain height in our society which only reasons in terms of performance and profitability and pushes us to be constantly agitated to give ourselves the illusion of being alive.
Reference: https://www.bevjanisch.com/cultivate-inner-peace-and-greater-joy/
