With mindfulness, we learn to monitor how we feel, and recognize this as a constantly changing energy, flowing through. When we lightly hold anything in spacious awareness, we are no longer stuck in it or identified with it - it is no longer who we are, and it no longer, or at least less strongly, distorts our perception of reality. We are spacious awareness, not the ever-changing energies passing by.
Self-concern (egocentricity) seems to be a step on the path to developing a healthy sense of self. Then concern for one's immediate family's welfare, then one's ethnicity, religion, country, etc. are only expansions on this same egocentric theme. Ideally, by one's 60s, one is progressively letting go of egocentricity / tribalism, and is developing a wise, grandparent-like nurturing attitude toward all of humanity, nature, the cosmos.
Having a grandchild helps promote this allocentric / ecocentric shift. A grandchild brings joy that helps keep open the heart-mind, that can hold everything in spacious awareness.
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| McFrost69 www.dpreview.com |
