If your body were a house, your head would be the attic. Millions of people are living in their attics at the moment, heads filled with fear and anxiety about the Coronavirus and what the world is coming to.
If you spend all your time in there, what are the consequences? You walk round and round the same familiar stored objects and furniture that have been in there for years. Your own small, unlit space, where no one else can enter, shut off from those closest to you like a recluse, and disconnected from the larger part of who you are deep down.
You can look through the window, but it’s very small and on a particular slant, so the view is very limited, and you’ve seen it all before anyway. After a while, living in this way, you start to feel stuck, believing there is nothing else but your attic, nowhere else to go.
Unless… you ‘walk downstairs’ into another part of your house, moving your attention down into the body and focusing your attention there. Try this – it’s an interesting little exercise advocated by Eckhart Tolle (master of presence) to cease all useless mental activity.
Close your eyes. Ask yourself: ‘How do I know my hands are there without looking’? Now feel the energy in your hands. After a short while you can feel the aliveness in your hands, and you become aware of your breathing too.
The part of you that senses your hands and your breathing is the deeper, unchanging essence of you. And just for those few brief moments, you can escape the madness of the attic and feel at peace. No mind activity whatsoever. No mind, no problem.