Joy Programming

Now is the only time. How we relate to it creates the future. If we're going to be more cheerful in the future, its because of our aspiration and exertion to be cheerful in the present. -Pema Chodron

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It hit me even faster than the wind, a different kind of mutagenic mechanism, an ad on the MSN home page about ensuing disaster. After looking at the pictures for a moment, a thought popped into my head: “I can’t believe people believe this stuff!” This thought was followed by a kaleidoscope of movie scenes, glam destruction, and big screen screaming. I mused for just a minute on how we can believe anything the media shows us these days.

A few days later I felt a change in the atmosphere, an ambient anxiety bouncing in the silence that wasn’t there just a week ago. Miillions of people were watching, gearing up for survival, witnessing suffering, shrinking in the face of death. Here in central Mexico, news paper pictures and talk of a toxic wind blowing across the ocean. Well seems to me anxiety is faster than the wind.

Now I have no doubt that this is a real disaster, and that my initial reaction was not a full-bodied truth. Yet remaining with it for a moment got me to see it in another way, to really observe the ads and what programs they are attempting to imprint in my neurological system. The rise of emotion provoking imagery followed by pictures of delicious food and beauty products. A little suspicious, when read like a sentence. Disaster and consumerism may be playing on the same team; fear for survival brings out the hording in most beings.

Do we need pills of Iodine? Or do we need calm minds? Perhaps both, but which is more important to health...

What took the most toll on my health in this life: Anxiety. Feelings of helplessness and fear were capable of disarming my life-force, my clear headedness, my open-heartedness. My capacity for higher thinking becomes restricted. If anything can make my immune system crash it is an overload of stress and restlessness. When I am feeling my best I don’t care if I die tomorrow, I don’t fear toxins, I don’t fear for the life of the planet. And it might seem contradictory but this is when I grow and learn and do my best work; help planet and speak more truth.

Our minds and hearts are incredibly powerful, we don’t even know what we are capable of. Every thought and feeling is creating. I recently went through a tough time in which a few of my troubled friends began to imprint me with feelings of worthlessness and fear for my life. They had been through much trauma and related to me in the way they were accustomed. I did not realize at the time I was mentaly taking on the patterns of their processes. Now I know better. To recover myself I had to take the responsibility and the focused effort of witnessing every thought, of choosing the gymnastics of my mind, navigating toward a joyful peaceful attitude. It was so easy and almost subconscious to sink gently into loops that tangled up my energy and dissipated my focus. Not to mention create unhappiness in those around me.

I am very grateful for finding this video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cD5Ms4Hxn7c

It’s a talk on how emotions program thoughts, and was enormously helpful in clearing the clouds from my being. What we are feeding ourselves emotionally and mentally programs the neurons to crave more of the previous.

Maybe we are addicted to the thrills of cataclysm. Do our minds cry out for the neurological food that exists in terror, the motivation of trauma?

We are constantly changing, as is the Earth, constantly sending and receiving signals with our living DNA, forever together in a dance with our mental/emotional environment. Let’s shake the trauma out of our bones, strong in awareness. It’s not about ideas or issues, rioting or demanding. Joy programming, it’s good, it brings the mind to create its full potential on the back of a happy animal; you just have to feed it!