Blessed are the Opinionated

I often write about our main challenge as human beings in terms of small-self, big-self; false-self, true-self; closed-self, open-self. I guess that's because it's been so helpful to me to have been challenged to notice how often my small self keeps me stuck in small life. Opening to God has given me enough glimpses to know and trust that life can be SO much bigger than I often allow it to be. Mindfulness practices have given me a glimpse of how we ordinary humans can effectively participate in letting go of 'small' and opening up to BIG.

Below are a few paragraphs from Pema Chodron's book, When Things Fall Apart. She's writing about one of these kinds of participations. It's mostly an on-the-hoof kind of practice--we get to do it in little mini-bursts of inspiration during the day--stumbling again and again into sacred ground (almost by accident).

It's an ironic kind of practice fueled by something we have plenty of--Opinions. Read it. Give it a try. It'll either work for you or not. If it does, consider yourself 'lucky.'

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In meditation we allow a lot of space, and then we begin to see whatever comes up with increasing clarity, with increasing vividness. Then we begin to be attuned to our habitual patterns and see what we do and who we are at the level of holding ourselves together with opinions and ideas about things.

One of the best practices for everyday living when we don’t have much time for meditation is to notice our opinions. When we are doing sitting meditation, part of the technique is to become aware of our thoughts. Then, without judgment, without calling them right or wrong, we simply acknowledge that we are thinking.

When we’re not in meditation, we could begin to notice our opinions just as we notice that we’re thinking when we’re meditating. This is an extremely helpful practice, because we have a lot of opinions, and we tend to take them as truth. We have a lot of emotional backup for these opinions. They are often judgmental or critical; they’re sometimes about how nice or perfect something is. In any case, we have a lot of opinions.

To have even a few seconds of doubt about the solidity and absolute truth of our own opinions, just to begin to see that we do have opinions, introduces us to the possibility of egolessness. We don’t have to make these opinions go away, and we don’t have to criticize ourselves for having them. We can just let those opinions go, and come back to the immediacy of our experience.

 If we can see our opinions as opinions and even for a moment let them go, and then come back to the immediacy of our experience, we may discover that we are in a brand-new world, that we have new eyes and new ears. 

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Blessed are the Opinionated--who learn to take their opinions with a grain of salt!