Cold Tea, Anyone?

Do you sometimes find yourself learning the same lessons from different directions - and not realising it until you get there? I had one of those this morning.

Beavering away at my desk, I let my tea get cold. I picked it up and took a sip. YUCK. COLD TEA! Then I realisesd that my response was almost a learned reflex. I was taught long ago that cold tea was a Bad Thing, and that lesson was embodied in my YUCK-reflex - I had no conscious role to play.

I'm getting better at "watching my thinking" - I advocate it for my clients and I've done it for myself for years, yet still I'm catching myself out not doing it quite a lot.

So, recognising my YUCK-reflex for what it was, I chose to park it and re-examine the sensations available to me. Cool liquid on lips and tongue; the feint smell of oil of bergamott, a vague milkiness, the cool mug itself. All intrinsically not yucky. All available for the extraction of pleasure, should I decide that that might be a better way to process this event.

Closed-mindedness and quasi-consciousness are with us most of our waking lives, and of course - when asleep we don't even have that level of access to reality.

I talk more about being available for pleasure here, and this incident is me re-discovering the lessons embodied in that article again this morning. There are so many ways to forget the progress we make, but this is one worth working hard to remember. Listen to reality - not your assumptions about it, and not society's teachings about it.

Dumber is Better.