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      <h3>Hitting a Home Run</h3>
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      <i>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;By: Robert Steinman<br>
      Posted: 2006-12-08 23:45:46</i>
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      "Hitting a Home Run"The purpose of life is to discover True Love; The secret is to discover the Present Moment.~Simon HeighwayaOften the attempt to develop mindfulness can be discouraging. The excellent idea above can seem like being told that the way to become a successful baseball player is to hit a home run when you go up to bat."Fine", you say, "Now tell me how to hit a home run."There are some great "coaches" out there, Jon Kabat-Zinn, Richard Carlson, Ken Keyes .. to name but a few, But still we find ourselves striking out.<br>Our conscious thoughts can still easily steal us away to zones of negativity and so can the people we meet. And sometimes we find ourselves releasing the "alpha-gorilla" into the petting zoo.Let me digress for a moment.As a child I played Little League baseball . My hitting was totally dismal and my only satisfaction came from occasionally drawing a walk. One day, a grown-up approached me and showed me how to use the tip of my outer elbow to line up the path of the ball. It worked! I still, after many decades, remember the moment of my bat actually making solid and satisfying contact with the ball. True, it wasn't a home run as I wished, but it was, in fact, a hit. And while I never became a consistent hitter, after a while my occasional hits were no longer considered to be freakish anomalies.In other words, there are some tips and tricks out there which can provide breakthroughs. Looking for them is a good thing. And sometimes they will just come to you all by themselves if you let them.Want a tip? It's not about "staying" in the moment. I don't believe that there are many people alive who can stay in the moment 100% of the time or even something close to that. It's really about making contact.To increase this ability, It's good to start becoming aware of how our minds, apparently through a process of association, will continually divert us from what's actually out there. We need to develop awareness of how our minds will impose evaluation --- a "good, bad, happy, sad" label on our immediate experience.If we observe even further we will see how the evaluation imposed will tie in with the thoughts we entertain about ourselves and who we actually are.At the highest level our minds have created some mega concepts relating to time, space, causality etc. All these thoughts are related in a fascinating mosaic which you can start to apprehend and appreciate if you're very, very quiet.Your thoughts and your breathing do not require voluntary control. If your thoughts interfere with focusing on your breathing (or on whatever you wish to focus), this is part of the process, you can learn the appropriate mind-set to allow them to integrate properly with the moment. It's a matter of balance.
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