It’s vacation season and a client recently sent me a photograph while he was in Florida. It included a view of the ocean, a few people playing in the water, sand, his tanned ankles and feet, and closer to the camera, some pages of an article I’d given him to read about the 3 Principles understanding.
When he returned, we laughed about the photo (I was jealous!) and then he told me that he’d gotten ‘so much more’ out of the article when he read it on vacation than the first time he’d read it several weeks ago when I first gave it to him. What’s the difference? Why did the article strike him so much more deeply while he was on vacation than when he was living his usual life here in the corn-and-bean-strewn heartland? Was it the ocean? The sand? The sun? His tan? I’d suggest to you that it was none of those. It was ‘Vacation Mind’.
Anyone who has ever been fortunate enough to take a week-long (or more) vacation might know the feeling: everything just seems to slow down. You relax. You breathe easier. Rushing drops away.
The trick for us is to realize that it isn’t vacation that is causing that wonderful, easy, warm, relaxed feeling that we experience. It has nothing to do with the surf, the sand, the mountains, skiing, great shopping, uninterrupted time with our significant others – it has to do with Thought. Your thinking (hopefully!) takes a vacation, too. Thought on vacation is a lovely thing – it thins-out and slows down; thoughts just don’t feel important. Have you ever had that feeling on vacation where thinking feels like too much effort so you just let your thoughts drop like heavy rocks? That is Vacation Mind at its finest!
So, what is really happening? It’s really pretty simple: when our thoughts settle, there is more room for new thought to ‘get in’. New ideas, new creation, insights into problems at work or at home – all of these can come rushing forward in Vacation Mind. Heck – they can even come rushing forward in the shower because the same dynamic is at work – we are leaving our stale, habitual, old-version-of-life, stuck-in-a-rut thinking alone and that leaves room for the nice, relaxed, easy feeling that always lives just under our thinking to come bubbling to the surface. Aaaahhhhh…
George Pransky, the man who introduced me to this approach, has a great metaphor for what’s happening. Remember when you were a kid and had a fan in your room? Maybe you, like George, would play the game of attempting to throw playing cards through the blades. If you did, you undoubtedly noticed that when the fan was moving at high speed, it was virtually impossible to get a card to go through. But, when you slowed the fan down, more ‘space’ appeared between the blades and your were able to flick some cards through to the other side. When the fan really slowed down – as in on its way to stopping – there was a lot more room and you could get lots of card through.
The very same thing is happening with our thinking all the time. The slower the ‘blades’ of our thinking spin, the more new ideas and insights about life can get through. Those new thoughts and ways of seeing life are always waiting to get through to us – that’s our wisdom and it’s always present. It’s the speed of our thinking that gets in the way. A slow ‘fan’ is Vacation Mind!
So, if our thinking slowing down leads us to Vacation Mind, the obvious question I usually hear from clients is ’what in the world do I need to do to get my thinking to settle (because I want to live in Vacation Mind all the time!)?
Well, I have good news and I have bad news. The bad news is that there is nothing you can do to get your thinking to settle! Aaaarrggghhhh! What?! You’re leading me on a wild goose chase!?
No. While there isn’t anything you can doto get your thinking to settle, the good news is that there is nothing you needto doto get your thinking to settle. Wait, wait – let me finish…
When we leave our thinking alone (stop jumping into the middle of it and thinking more or harder and stop attempting to change, modify, or adjust our thinking) it naturally slows down. Get that? It naturallyslows down! This happens all the time. You have never thought the same thing forever.
Huh? I know that is a little awkward to read (and write!), but it’s telling you that not a single thought you have ever had has lasted forever. All of our thinking changes and fades over time – usually a very short time. I’ll bet that you aren’t thinking the same thoughts right now that you were when you started reading this article.
While it’s completely natural for our thinking to get stirred up, it is just as natural for it to settle down. We drop our thinking all the time – in fact, we don’t drop our thinking at all – our thinking just drops away on its own (thank goodness). And, if you’re one of those people (like me) who is thinking ‘sure, but some thinking just can’t be dropped because it’s too big or too important’, then it might help to realize that’s just a thought, too, and it will fade away like all of the rest of the thinking you’ve ever had.
Consider this. Have you ever seen kids playing in a pool and trying to get the waves on the top of the pool to stop ‘waving’? I have. I saw a little boy trying to ‘push down’ all the waves as they were appearing. You know what happened. The more he walked around trying to push down the waves, the more waves he created. We’d probably laugh if we saw that happening, but we are doing the very same thing in trying to ‘settle’ the ‘waves’ of our own thoughts.
You can see clearly that the little boy just needed to stop everything! He just needed to stay still and the waves would settle on their own. You’d know that he doesn’t need any special ‘wave settling’ techniques; he wouldn’t need to ‘deal with’ all of his ‘past waves’ before the waves would settle down, or ‘work through and process’ his future wave concerns. All he needs to do is…NOTHING!
What you can see from this perspective is that the fastest way to allow the waves to settle is to do absolutely nothingto settle the waves. You know that the natural inclination of waves is to settle on their own. You can see that the ‘natural state’ of the water in the pool is calmness and clarity. The same is true of our own thinking – just under the surface of the waves, our natural state is calmness, clarity, and ease.
The more we allow the waves of our thinking to settle without attempting to do anything to make them settle, the more we find ourselves living in a nice feeling. Our wisdom and guidance is there in that nicer feeling; and it’s the same feeling we might have experienced on vacation. It can be ours anytime we allow our thinking to settle and it doesn’t require sand, surf, sun, or loads of free-time. It just requires awareness to feel when the water is stirred up and willingness to do nothing. Do nothing and drop easily and effortlessly into your own Vacation Mind.
If you are interested in this approach and want to learn how to live in Vacation Mind in the middle of board meetings, screaming kids, bills, and dish-filled sinks, that’s why I’m here. Email me or give me a call to set up a time to talk.
Vince Flammini 