The first thought
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Ever meet someone and instantly dislike them? A few years ago, I did a bike tour in Napa Valley. The guide was grumpy. Short answers. No smiles. Zero enthusiasm. I was annoyed. I thought, why take the job if you don’t want to be here? Then at lunch I found out his son had just died. Twenty-five years old. He wasn’t guiding us because he loved it. He was guiding us because grief left him nowhere else to go. Here’s the thing about our mind: We don’t control our first thought it’s just conditioning, shaped by past experiences.But we do control the second one. And that second thought is where compassion begins. Because behind every face you see is a story you don’t know. |
Josh Braun
I was at Starbucks and overheard a guy approach a girl. Here’s how it went down. “Hi, my name is Mike. I’m new to the area and was wondering if I could ask you a question?” She said, “Sure.” “What’s your go-to spot for lunch around here?” Her face lit up. “You gotta try Pura Vida. It’s amazing.” Here’s what struck me about what happened next. Instead of jumping in with his own thoughts, he stayed with hers: “What is it about that place?”“What do you get?”“What other places do you like?” She...
I got a biopsy. Now I wait nine days for the results. The hard part isn’t the procedure. It’s the waiting. The mind races. What if it’s cancer? What does this mean? What if, what if, what if…Buddhism talks about two arrows. The first arrow is what happens. The second arrow is the story we tell ourselves about what happens. I can’t control the first arrow. But I can notice when I’m firing the second one. That’s the practice right now. When my mind spins out, I bring it back to the present....
When I was 3, my brother and I loved running around the house naked. Total freedom. Zero shame. Just two little streakers living their best life. Then one weekend, my parents dropped us off at grandma’s. We kept the tradition alive, sprinted through her living room in all our toddler glory. She was not impressed. “What are you doing? Put some clothes on! You should be ashamed of yourself!” Boom. Shame downloaded. And just like that, joy turned into a self-consciousness program running on...