A nice little creek ran behind the houses on the block where I grew up. We neighborhood kids loved to play in and around it. One of the things we liked to do was build dams. It wasn't easy to build a good dam--especially when the only tools we used were hands and feet and sticks.
We had good materials, though--lots of rocks, almost limitless sand, sticky clay--sometimes red, sometimes almost white.
The first part of the dam was never a problem. Line up a row of big stones, put little ones in the holes, great handfuls of sand behind on the upstream side.
But as soon as we'd got the first two thirds working okay, that meant all the water started flowing through the one third of the stream bed that was not yet dammed. The flow was three times stronger there. It was harder to get rocks to stay put!
We figured out that we had to use bigger rocks on the last third. And we had to work faster.
But then, once we finally got our rocks and sand and clay to hold, the water would start flowing over the top somewhere and start eroding those spill-over places from the top down.
Oh, well. In the meantime we had fun splashing around in the little reservoirs we'd created behind our dams.
At some point somebody brought a piece of an old pipe and 'installed' it at one end near the top of our newest dam. Worked pretty well. The water could collect behind the dam and then could flow out without washing big chunks of the dam away. At least for a while.
In the end, our lovely dams always collapsed. But as kids we were just about as happy to jump over to the downstream side and feel the rush of let-go water as we'd been to play in the pent-up water the moment before.
About three decades later, I remembered those dams, and the memories were sacramental. I had developed a strange intolerance for tight clothes. Couldn't bear tight collars, tight waist bands, tight shoes.
Long story told short--I saw a good therapist, got wise and gentle counsel, and this strange irritation from tight places began to ease. Too much had been dammed up in me. My psyche had gotten too good at bottling stuff up.
I've had a lot of good therapy since, learned to recognize better what damming the flow feels like--and what it does to my life, inside and out.
One of the reasons I like mindfulness practice so much is because it can be such good therapy.
Mindfulness is simply the practice of paying kind attention to our lives, inside and out. Noticing how our lives flow, noticing what's dammed, what's eroding, what's leaking, and what's working.
In many ways mindful people, over time and with practice and good teaching, become their own therapists. We bring honest, nonjudgmental Presence to our woundedness, our confusion, and our wholeness.
As a God person, I think of this process as incarnational: welcoming God's wise and loving Presence so regularly that it begins to be palpably embodied.
One more thing about mindfulness--sometimes it helps us experience our lives like kids again. As we keep bringing curiosity to more and more moments, something in us remembers what it once was like to be really good at being curious, adventurous, experimental, and playful.
