Sitting on grass, with your back against a tree, a blue sky overhead and a view of nature spread in front of you. Perhaps a grassy field, a mountain backdrop, a lake or the ocean. Relaxing into nature, the tree has your back, your breath comes full and deep, your heart is open and something is singing inside. Your mind drifts like a small cloud far away and you are just present in the world, alive and joyful.
You have lost your mind, It has wandered off, or gone to sleep, leaving you to experience the rest of your being and for the moment you are living from your heart, resting in your soul.
This seems like a good thing. In fact we may go to some effort for this sort of experience. How much of spiritual practice is about transcending the mind, finding Samadhi, losing the ego? All many ways this has been said. However to say someone has “lost their mind” has a different feel to it, in fact a different meaning. Language can be confusing. Perhaps this is something that holds us back? Considering this recently, walking in the woods, it came to me that in fact the people who are said to have lost their minds (“gone crazy”) were, rather, “lost in their minds”. They were lost in hallucinations, delusions, mental constructs and fantasies. They were stuck in emotions, memories, lost in an internal maze.
These people may be said to have too much mind, rather than too little.
How often in everyday life do we have too much mind? Worries of all sorts that we seem to have no choice but to play over and over. Work, relationships, health. We may even tell our friends, “I’m loosing my mind here”. But actually it is far from lost, in fact we can’t escape it. What we are losing is our Self.
Sitting against the tree,we stay for a while, before returning to the life in which our mind is engaged for us. You have conversations with loved ones, remember how to fix your favorite food, or how to find a great restaurant.
There are different levels of mind and they can serve us, or enslave us. Learning to “loose your mind” is about developing that choice, to work with the right tool at the right time, to be aware of the levels of awareness that are other than “mental”, are of the body or the spirit. It is about learning how to find your Self, to cease to be lost in the maya of your egoic mind. It is about becoming sane, not crazy; free of any old fears and labels.
Cultivating the loss of mind: where do you really need it, and when does it get in the way, or distract you from being present with life? The next time you are worrying, remember the tree and the field or the sea: step out of the maze, experience your Self with a heart full of joy. Lose a little more mind and gain a little more soul.
(© 10/2010)
